George Calderon was public-school, Oxford, backed by his wife’s unearned income, rather patriotic, perceived as conservative; D.H. Lawrence was a miner’s son, self-supporting and often penurious, rather oikophobic, perceived as revolutionary. What could they possibly have had in common?
They were both Edwardians.
Admittedly George was seventeen years older than Lawrence, who was only sixteen when Edward VII came to the throne, but if one accepts (as I do) Lawrence’s view that the Edwardian period ended in 1916 with the Battle of the Somme, then it’s Lawrence who lived through the whole of that period, not George.
Of course, we regard Lawrence as far more modern than George, but there are plenty of people who prefer the ‘early’ Lawrence as a writer, say before 1919. As well as being a Late Victorian, George could be described as an Early Edwardian, and Lawrence as a Late Edwardian. One might argue that it was the very ferment of discourse, society, politics and science under the Edwardians that could produce a Lawrence. George and Lawrence share the quintessential versatility, polymathery and self-belief of the Edwardians.
In chapter 8 of Women in Love, ‘Breadalby’, which relates a summer lunch party at a country house similar to Garsington or Far End, we are told:
There had been some discussion, on the whole quite intellectual and artificial, about a new state, a new world of man. Supposing this old social state were broken and destroyed, then, out of the chaos, what then?
If the Breadalby symposium took place in 1912 (as Catherine Brown’s Comment of 6 March would suggest), we can say that these are precisely the subjects that George himself was debating in public at that time (see chapter 12, ‘The Trouble with Trade Unionism’, in my biography), including even the creation of a Centre Party.
In his satirical science fiction novel of 1904, Dwala (highly original cover featured above), George had depicted the collapse of the Edwardian state and suggested the country could be saved only by an atavistic leader with a popular mandate. I suspect Lawrence had something far more revolutionary and socialistic in mind. But we know from William Rothenstein’s memoirs that George, drawing on his knowledge and experience of Russia, deplored the ‘disintegrating menace of revolutionary tendencies’ anywhere.
* * *
Another topical theme touched on in ‘Breadalby’, and which would have amused George, is the popularity of Russian literature and the uneven quality of its English translations.
After lunch, the company take coffee outdoors — ‘in lounge chairs’. The Contessa suddenly looks up from her reading and says: ‘There is a most beautiful thing in my book. It says the man came to the door and threw his eyes down the street.’ Everyone laughs. The book, it transpires, is ‘Fathers and Sons, by Turgenev’ (correct translation Fathers and [their] Children), and the ‘man’ is Bazarov, its Nihilist hero.
It is some decades since I lectured and supervised on Turgenev’s novel, so perhaps my memory deceives me. But two pretty close scans of the Russian text have also failed to retrieve such a phrase. It would be interesting to hear from Calderonia’s follower Michael Pursglove, the eminent recent translator of Fathers and Children, whether a Russian original for the sentence ‘Bazarov came to the door and threw his eyes hurriedly down the street’ occurs in it, and if so how he translated it himself!
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
The cause of hilarity in the quoted sentence is the concreteness of the clause ‘threw his eyes’. I would have thought that to cast one’s eyes down a street was just about possible then in English, though ‘cast a glance’ would surely have been more natural (and a closer translation of the Russian brosat’ vzgliad).
Knowall Rupert Birkin, without even looking at the title page, declares that the Contessa’s book is ‘an old American edition’, and this piece of mansplaining is trumped by Hermione Roddice’s brother:
‘Ha! — of course — translated from the French,’ said Alexander, with a fine declamatory voice. ‘Bazarov ouvra la porte et jeta les yeux dans la rue.’
He looked brightly round the company.
However, the editors of the CUP edition of the novel, I am kindly informed by Damian Grant, annotate this passage thus:
The sentence does not appear in any extant edition [Presumably they mean English-language] of Fathers and Sons (1862) […]; the American edition of 1867 was translated directly from the Russian, and had no connection with the first French edition of 1863.
It seems, then, that the sentence is a spoof by Lawrence, and given George’s views on English translations of Russian literature before Constance Garnett (see pages 22 and 157 of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius) one could be sure he would have enjoyed it.
But this masterly little dialogue does not end there. Immediately after Alexander has ‘looked brightly round the company’ for appreciation of his cleverness, Ursula puts her finger on the really interesting word in the ‘American translation from the French’:
‘I wonder what the “hurriedly” was,’ said Ursula.
They all began to guess.
And then, to the amazement of everybody, the maid came hurrying with a large tea-tray. The afternoon had passed so swiftly.
‘Hurriedly’ is hilariously redundant as an adverb with ‘threw’, although I suppose ‘cast a hurried glance’ is just about possible in English (‘quick’ would be better) and there are equivalent Russian adverbs to ‘hurriedly’ that could go with the straight Russian verbs for ‘look’ and ‘glance’. But this passage is not really about translation or the popularity of Russian literature amongst the Edwardian intelligentsia. The point is that as usual no-one notices Ursula’s intelligence and superior ability to provoke dialogue…
* * *
Could George Calderon have read, or even met D.H. Lawrence, before he (George) left for Flanders in October 1914 and Gallipoli in May 1915?
Certainly; but there is no evidence that he did. As a regular reader of the English Review, edited by Ford Hueffer, whom George had entertained at Heathland Lodge, George must have seen Lawrence’s poems appearing in it, and especially the story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1911). But I have never seen George’s name amongst those Hampstead writers to whom Hueffer introduced Lawrence around that time.
Truth to tell, most of these writers were well on the left politically, and (however highly he thought of Constance’s translations) George particularly did not mix with Lawrence’s friends the Garnetts and Fanny Stepniak, who flirted with Russian terrorism. Lawrence himself briefly took up residence in Hampstead, with his wife Frieda, at 1 Byron Villas, but only after George’s death in June 1915:
The intriguing possibility exists, however, that George and Kittie met Frieda, then Frieda Weekley, sometime in 1912. For her parents-in-law lived at 40 Well Walk, next to the Calderons’ new house, 42, which George and Kittie bought in 1912 and moved into in December, as the Weekleys were moving out of 40 to make way for the Sturge Moores, whom George already knew. Kittie certainly visited 42 Well Walk several times before they moved in. A mention of the Weekleys in one of George’s letters to Kittie suggests that he had met them. Their daughter-in-law visited them at 40 Well Walk, finally leaving her two daughters with them when she eloped with Lawrence from Charing Cross on 3 May 1912. The least one can say is that by December 1912 George and Kittie must have heard of the scandalous end to the Weekleys’ son’s marriage.
The definitive account of Hampstead’s connections with D.H. Lawrence is by John Worthen and our follower Professor Catherine Brown at https://catherinebrown.org/lawrences-hampstead-a-walking-tour/
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Thank you Patrick for your intriguing reflections on Calderon and Lawrence as both Edwardians – of a rather different colour. Or stripe. I guess there would be material here for an Imaginary Conversation between the two of them; though this might well become truculent, on both sides. I don’t have the resources to do it, but who knows; someone better informed may pick up on the idea.
Meanwhile, a tiny grammatical point about the conversation you quote from Women in Love, on translations from Turgenev. My wife Madeleine points out (what I, along with the Cambridge editors, hadn’t noticed) that Hermione’s brother Alexander makes a blundering error in his reconstruction of a French intermediary between Russian and English: ‘Bazarov ouvra la porte…’ This should of course be ‘ouvrit la porte’. We may have to wait for the Pléiade Lawrence for the lapse to be properly recorded.
Wonderful! Thank you, Madeleine, and Damian! Don’t you think this could be another mischievous, intended Lawrentian nail in bighead Alexander’s coffin?
I wonder if this is some mangled version of the words which conclude this paragraph on the first page of the novel: I can’t find Bazarov throwing/casting eyes/looks or anything else!
Слуга, в котором все: и бирюзовая сережка в ухе, и напомаженные разноцветные волосы, и учтивые телодвижения, словом, все изобличало человека новейшего, усовершенствованного поколения, посмотрел снисходительно вдоль дороги и ответствовал: «Никак нет-с, не видать».
Mike, many many thanks for picking this up! Yes, I think you are right, the so-called quotation in ‘Breadalby’ could be an echo mischievously mangled by Lawrence from the very first page of the novel. There, in your translation, for the benefit of non-Russian readers, the sentence you have quoted reads: ‘The servant, in whom everything, from the turquoise ring in his ear, to the pomaded, dyed hair and deferential body language, marked him out as a member of the newest, most advanced generation, cast a supercilious look along the road and replied: “Nothing at all, sir. Not a sign.”‘ I remember there is a reference to ‘Bazarof’ in Lawrence’s The Trespasser (1912); presumably he had read Fathers and Children in Constance Garnett’s translation of 1895. Does anyone out there have more details about his reading of Turgenev?
Fascinating. The Breadalby discussion of translation is indeed a spoof, but I’m pretty sure that it’s not at all a spoof of English translations of Russian literature, but solely of the ‘quite intellectual and artificial’ kind of talk that went on at Garsington etc. — elsewhere described as ‘The talk went on like a rattle of small artillery, always slightly sententious, with a sententiousness that was only emphasised by the continual crackling of a witticism, the continual spatter of verbal jest, designed to give a tone of flippancy to a stream of conversation that was all critical and general, a canal of conversation rather than a stream. The attitude was mental and very wearying. Only the elderly sociologist [based on Bertrand Russell], whose mental fibre was so tough as to be insentient, seemed to be thoroughly happy’. Ursula is therefore not elevated, on the novel’s terms, by her contribution to the discussion; she is just — unusually for her — swept along by it.
There are two particular reasons for thinking this:
a) Lawrence cared very little about translation. He scarcely ever comments on whose translation of anything he reads, and — despite practising translation himself — has remarkably little to say about it. The conversation illustrates his distance from, rather than proximity to, its subject.
b) Lawrence was highly irritated by the Russian Craze, and Women in Love was written during its height. Therefore a discussion of translations of Russian literature was an obvious target for his satire (which is however, by his standards, extremely mild here).
Thanks for the further Hampstead details!
Patrick: as a dilatory footnote to the link between Lawrence and Blake touched on in the pieces on Women in Love, back in April, may I express my perplexity with the fact that despite the evident overlap between not only their ideas but in the very structuring of their ideas — the dynamic oppositions — there is so little reference to Blake in Lawrence’s writings; or, from what I can remember of the biographies I’ve read, in his recorded conversation. I have not trawled the novels in search; but there is no essay on Blake, and there are only a dozen references in the eight volumes of letters. Most of these refer to Blake’s paintings, in the context of the seizure of Lawrence’s own in 1928; only once does Lawrence refer to Blake’s written work, writing (to the Brewsters, in December 1925) ‘I am never very fond of abstract poetry, not even Blake’ (V, 356). This at least implies he’d read Blake, but doesn’t give much away. And Lawrence goes on to say here, about Brewster’s own poems, that what is strange and mysterious ‘can’t be put…in a brief, rhyming poem’; a judgement surely contradicted by Blake’s ‘Auguries of Innocence’ and indeed the Songs of Innocence and Experience.
I would be delighted to be better informed on this subject by one of your more erudite readers; or indeed, to have another viewpoint on the overlap itself. It has even occurred to me, in a weak moment, to suspect that Lawrence deliberately avoided such references, because he didn’t want to be caught up in Blake’s wake, in the slipstream; the similarities being too close for his intellectual comfort. But I don’t really believe this kind of critical plot-theory. Is there a simpler solution: that the omnivorous Lawrence had not read as much Blake as one assumes he must have done? Though ‘The Lemon Gardens’ chapter from Twilight in Italy seems struck from the same flint as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell…
Dear Damian and Catherine,
Thank you for so finely swirling up the theme ‘Lawrence and Blake’; we all obviously feel it hadn’t settled the first time round…
Where Lawrence’s reading of Blake is concerned, the Lawrence scholar John Worthen writes in an email: ‘Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience were the only works we can be certain Lawrence had read.’
But does this matter? It is the notorious problem of literary ‘influence’ (‘dialogue’ I would prefer to call it). As Catherine implies, reference by writer B to writer A who preceded him/her might be in inverse proportion to how much of writer A s/he has read and how consonant their situations are. This was true, for instance, of Mikhail Bulgakov’s sparing (and often ironic) references to Chekhov.
Equally, of course, the comparison of features of B and A in the abstract, outside any ‘causal nexus’ as it were, is entirely legitimate. I am not sure, but it seems to me that the subject ‘Lawrence and Blake’ owes most to Leavis’s attention in Nor Shall My Sword (1972) and The Living Principle (1975) — and in neither of those books does he discuss Lawrence’s actual, documented familiarity with Blake’s works.
Where the ‘overlap’, as Damian rightly puts it, between not only their ideas but the ‘dynamic oppositions’ of their ideas is concerned, it seems to me they differ fundamentally in their placing of Christ. As Catherine has explained, Lawrence’s relationship with Christ was a central one throughout his life. ‘The Man Who Died’ is a magnificent tribute to it. Blake, it seems to me, despite his life-practice of christian values, tried to incorporate Christ into his polytheistic personal cosmology, rather as Hölderlin tried in poems like ‘Bread and Wine’, ‘Patmos’ and ‘The Only One’; and both failed, because Christ is ‘too unique’.
Finally — and I hope I don’t shock you — there can surely be very little overlap between Blake’s paintings and Lawrence’s, as the latter are dire!
‘It has even occurred to me, in a weak moment, to suspect that Lawrence deliberately avoided such references, because he didn’t want to be caught up in Blake’s wake, in the slipstream; the similarities being too close for his intellectual comfort.’ I’ve certainly had very much the same feeling — in what I don’t think was a weak moment — about the fact that L’s comments on Anna Karenina are exclusively about Anna and her plot, and not at all about Levin and his, despite — perhaps because of — the similarities between Lawrence and Levin, as therefore also between Lawrence and Tolstoy. Certainly, he explicitly attacked writers that he felt a bit too close to, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky included. But it seems a reasonable (if not provable) hypothesis that when he didn’t do that, he instead chose silence.
I thank you, Catherine, for providing a bit more substance to my suspicion that Lawrence preferred not to look some writers, whom he found were too close to him, straight in the eyes. And I thank you, Patrick, for forwarding John Worthen’s observation about how little of Blake’s work we can be certain Lawrence read. No doubt (to pursue the same argument) it is possible to ‘look away’ self-protectively even before reading, if you fear that your toes might get trodden on.
The other way is to do as Lawrence did in the case of Hardy: read all (the novels), praise to the skies for some things, but with a bracing counterweight of adverse criticism. And Lawrence was always pretty good at that.
And yes Patrick to your distinguishing between the place of Christ in their different systems. Lawrence I think loved his Christ as a somewhat unruly disciple; whereas for Blake, Jesus is treated with less respect, made to fall in line with the Blakeian menagerie…sometimes appearing more like one of those Hindu gods of infinite metamorphosis.