From the diary of a writer-publisher: 16

17 November 2021
Today at 9.54 a.m. I emailed my 408-line poem Making Icons to the excellent Long Poem Magazine, the only organ in Britain that publishes poems at least 75 lines long. The magazine appears twice a year and November is the submission window for the Spring issue. After taking twelve years to write the poem, I suppose I should not be surprised that I spent almost a week getting it into the exact format needed for submission, with a short preamble and detailed notes, and that the whole process was rather emotional.

Frankly, I don’t expect them to take it, as it’s too ‘forthright’ for the younger modern taste. In consideration of that, I suggested that the words ‘tear off your Tar-Baby’ in stanza 4, line 11, could be replaced by ‘tear through your thornbush’ (I trust the reason is clear). I found the required preamble (113 words) took almost as much effort to write as a stanza of the poem, and thought it wise to begin with: ‘This is not a religious poem.’

26 November
The ‘late’ chrysanths in the garden are coming to an end, to be replaced next month by Christmas-flowering ones, but there are still enough to help fill a vase…

The spotted laurel leaves come from a seven-foot high bush that I grew from a cutting I was given in 1970 by the warden of Chekhov’s house in Yalta from a laurel planted in the garden by the great man himself.

3 December
I am reading the third set of proofs of my Anton Chekhov: A Short Life, which Sam&Sam are publishing at the end of next month. As I read, I stop to check facts for which I can’t remember the source off the top of my head (I wrote the first edition, published by Hesperus Press, in 2007). I’m glad to say there aren’t many such, but this afternoon I had to verify my statement in chapter 11, ‘Chekhov, Anti-Semitism, and Democracy’, that ‘It was probably between 1897 and 1899 that the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion were fabricated in France by the Tsarist secret police, with incalculable consequences for Russian and European Jews in the twentieth century’. I knew that there is a recent school of thought that the Russian secret police (Okhranka) was not involved in the fabrication. However, after consulting Sam1’s Russian translation of Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Scholars Press, 1981) I concluded as before that the Okhranka was.

On page 117 my eye was caught by Hitler’s statement (1924) that ‘Jesus was not, of course, a Jew, but an Aryan’. A bell rang. At the Third International Congress for the History of Religions, held at Oxford in September 1908, a German professor read a ‘sensational’ paper ‘The Ethnology of Galilee; or, Was Jesus a Jew by race?’. Clearly, in restrospect this was part of the campaign of anti-semitism that gathered head across Europe following the Dreyfus Affair and helped make Nazism possible. For some reason, I felt a flush of ‘pride’ in George Calderon, when I recalled that he stood up after the German paper and according to the Manchester Guardian stated that ‘there was no Aryan race, and Jesus was undoubtedly a Jew by religion and nationality’.

15 December
Today calls for a double celebration! Jim (Sam2) brilliantly completes my series of posts on Japan — from the point of view of someone who has actually lived there — and we have met our deadline of submitting the text and cover of Anton Chekhov: A Short Life to Amazon. We might receive the first proof from Amazon by Christmas, but I doubt it. It won’t matter, because there should still be plenty of time to receive two proofs in the New Year and get the book out there by publication day, 29 January, Chekhov’s birthday. Here’s a preview of the back cover:

Click to enlarge.

21 December
‘Getting in the holy and the ivy’. I am clearing the bottom of the garden in order to sow it with the mixture of grasses that the caterpillars of the Speckled Wood, Hedge Brown, Meadow Brown and Ringlet butterflies feed on. They have bred in other, small areas of wild grass in the garden, but need encouraging. This project enables me to cut back a large branch of ivy for decorating the house together with sprigs from a holly:

We live in what a postgraduate student of mine called ‘suburbia’, twenty minutes walk from the centre of Cambridge, yet holly and ivy can spring up here in any part of the garden if you leave it long enough. It’s almost mysterious. As though the quintessentials of a medieval English Christmas will always reassert themselves. With the inevitable robin, of course — where does that bird always spring from?

6 January 2022
Twelfth Night, as we reckon it at least. It always feels more definitely the end of a year than 31 December itself. Not only do I now resume the years-long quest through Lent to reduce my weight to a healthier 12 stone, but we have completed a Kon-Tiki of projects and there is to be a real break.

First, Sam&Sam will be publishing no more books for at least a year. (By 29 January we shall have published two in seven months.) I shall be concentrating on marketing and selling all our English- and Russian-language books.

As part of that, between now and the end of March I shall be working on the preparations for our appearance at the annual conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) 8-10 April at Robinson College, Cambridge. There’s not really any way of telling, but I hope we shall sell a lot of books, and especially copies of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius at the reduced price for delegates of £20.

I am also trying something new on the blog. Between 15 January and 14 March I shall be posting four ‘Cambridge Tales’. They come from the book of twenty short stories I am working on (slowly) at the moment, to be entitled Ghoune/White Bow. I don’t think it would be reasonable to post any story longer than about five pages. After the Conference, I shall probably post another four. They all derive from notes and drafts from the late 1970s/early 1980s…but most were only ‘written down’ last year, thanks to Black Crow. I shall be interested in any response. It will be rapidly apparent that they are set in an academic world that has gone forever; but I don’t think the essence has changed.

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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.