How would I write it now?

An author considers his own book.

Many authors never re-read their own books. One can understand why. Some must feel that it’s not necessary as it can’t change anything (unless the book is about to have an ‘improved’ edition). Others, like George Orwell apparently, simply don’t want to. They see themselves as having completed the book and moved on. The very process of writing the book has changed them, so they will inevitably be seeing their work with different eyes, and they don’t want that fuzzy experience, that time-wobble if you like. What’s the point?

I have dipped with increasing regularity into George Calderon: Edwardian Genius since it was published in 2018, in order to check facts in it that I could no longer remember, but I have only just re-read it in its entirety. I’m glad I left it until now, as four years after publication the book genuinely seems as though it was written by someone else!

Whereas in 2018 I proofread it too fast because it was still so fresh in my memory (and therefore missed egregious errors and typos), this time I could manage only about 70 pages a day. I could not read it fast, I had to read slowly and take in every word. However, I’m glad to say this wasn’t hard work, I wanted to keep reading it, and I was more impressed than I was expecting. But after each 70 pages, I was still amazed at how many pages there were left. There’s no getting round it, it’s a long book! Readers will chuckle: they know this, yet I hadn’t really grasped it.

Naturally, if I could write the book now I would be able to tell readers exactly who Professor Rose and Mrs Shapta were, which would be significant additions, and I would have to devote pages to an examination of the manuscript of George’s and William Caine’s 1914 pantomime The Brave Little Tailor, which came to light in the last stages of writing my book. This could reveal a lot about George’s perception of Time. I think I would also, with the help of the best college historian in Oxford, delve more deeply into George’s undergraduate life there, as I have become more aware of the importance of Oxford networks in his political and theatrical lives. I would explore his love of mathematics more, as well as his surprising interest in ‘nature’ and his pathways deep into Edwardian journalism. I might well be tempted to introduce footnotes, as (like some reviewers) I found it annoying at times that no specific archival or bibliographic reference was given and I could no longer remember some sources myself…

Above all, if I were writing the book now I think I would slim it by at least a third. I was surprised by how long it takes to get to George’s birth (p. 95) and how many pages there still are after his death (fifty-two). I would contemplate cutting everything about Earlham and Kittie’s relationships before meeting George, and everything about the rest of Kittie’s life after she had secured his literary legacy in 1924. Perhaps I was over-influenced by the fact that my predecessor, Percy Lubbock, had begun his George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory with Earlham and Kittie’s first marriage? Perhaps I was subconsciously drawn into telling the whole of Kittie’s life post-George by the discovery that she died on my second birthday, i.e. inside my own life, and knew local Kentish figures, very likely my own great-aunt and great-uncle at Ashford?

But I was a very different person when I wrote the book between 2011 and 2018. George and Kittie previously had no public profile, I had discovered their entire extant archive, and I think it’s understandable that I wanted to get everything in because they might never have another chance. Also, I was gripped by the excitement of discovering their lives in greater and greater detail; so I wanted to tell their story rather than write an academic biography. And I wanted to explore Edwardian Life and contrast it with Victorian Life, which meant a more expansive approach embracing Earlham and the Corbet family. I now find it unsettling and disconcerting that the ‘present’ of the War takes over on p. 367 as though the book were a novel, but again it was what I wanted in that great centenary. Today I might say the book was ‘too ambitious’… Equally, however, I see more clearly than before that it could never have been comparably produced by a commercial publisher, and I feel completely vindicated in having brought it out myself.

One day, fifty or a hundred years hence, a shorter, more honed, very differently focussed, more deeply considered biography of George Calderon will be written (i.e. not of George and Kittie together). Because I used no footnotes, the author will have to research the primary sources from scratch at the Houghton Library, Harvard, which I think will be healthy. I am sure she will make a very good job of it, and find a commercial publisher.

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.