From the diary of a writer-publisher: 18

8 August
I introduced this summer’s ‘Edwardian Return’ series of posts on 4 June, but it really kicked in with Alison’s guest post ‘Edwardian grandmothers’, which as I write has been up for a week and has another to go. It’s culled many emails from followers who have similar memories, raising the perennial question of why people won’t commit to a Comment on the blog, and what one could do to encourage them! Well, here is an attempt at the latter. The object imaged below is an example, from my own family, of the kind of thing our Edwardian forebears brought back from their ‘colonial’ travels and that have decorated family homes ever since, as Alison describes. My question to followers is: what is it? Contemplating it on my grandparents’ mantelpiece when I was a small boy, I thought it was a model crib (but it isn’t). Offers, please, via Comments. Clue: it is four inches across and the writing just visible on the front is Chinese.

By the time you read this, John Pym’s guest post ‘Games Ancient and Modern’ will have come, but not ‘gone’ as a post is always there, of course, even when it is not in pole position. ‘Games Ancient and Modern’ is the most poetic of all Johnnie’s posts for us, blending Foxwold’s Edwardian past with recent memories of that blessed home. It will be followed by a guest post from our resident prosopographer (look it up), Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, and one about D.H. Lawrence’s story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1909) by our resident Lawrentian Damian Grant.

15 August
It is impossible to say what is about to happen in the Ukrainian war. We are led to believe, by both the Ukrainians and western sources, that a decisive Ukrainian counter-offensive is going to be unleashed. The central Russian offensive, we are told, has run out of steam, a large Russian force made the mistake of pushing on westwards over the Dnepro and is potentially trapped there, and the Ukrainians are poised to retake Kherson… But a decisive Ukrainian attack along the whole front has to be very, very carefully timed. The Russian forces’ capability and morale must reach a critical nadir first, and presumably western weapons, particularly missiles and howitzers, have to exceed a critical tipping point.

Meanwhile, Gary Kasparov asks why the Ukrainians don’t destroy the Russian Black Sea Fleet, since they were able spectacularly to sink its flagship, the Moskva. It’s a good question. The Black Sea Fleet seems to have played very little part in the war since that sinking and the unpersoning of the Fleet’s admiral. We know that the Moskva was sunk by the Ukrainians but with precision assistance from the U.S., so perhaps Putin threatened to escalate the conflict nuclearly if that continued, and an agreement was made over the Ukrainians’ heads not to destroy more Russian ships in return for the latter ceasing hostilities. Snake Island was retaken, after all, and a grain corridor has been opened. Meanwhile, Russia is waging nuclear warfare by shelling the nuclear power station at Zaporizhzhia and threatening another Chernobyl.

22 August
Oh dear. I’ve done it. After pulling the postcard below out of my drawer or card rack for nearly fifty years, poising to address and send it, then putting it back with a sigh, but content with the cathartic effect of my threat, I have finally despatched it — to Bloodaxe Books, the Northumberland publishers of poetry collections, and most notably Basil Bunting’s masterpiece Briggflatts.

One does not, of course, send a collection of poems (The New Dark Blue Cowboys: Verse and Poems of Russia) to respected publishers without weeks of researching them, drafting the letter, and engraving their terms of submission on one’s brain (even though I have known Bloodaxe’s publications for thirty years). A slip of paper a week or so later bearing the immaculately printed words ‘We are sorry we cannot help you publish your collection’, is just not good enough. It’s hopelessly unliterary and rude. Of course I know how many collections they (claim they) receive a week, I know that, but my covering letter was nothing if not informative and carefully crafted, and the terms of their submissions were impeccably observed, including the fact that well over half of my book’s contents have been published in magazines. Working part time, a script reader in the 1970s at the National Theatre under John Russell Brown could read up to forty plays a week, write a report on each one, and John would write the playwright a proper letter. If the best publishers of poetry in the country, Faber & Faber, can run to a civilised, handwritten letter, Bloodaxe (not the most friendly of names) can too. Even if Bloodaxe thought my collection bloody awful, they still had no excuse for their inane rejection slip. Out came the card, on went their address and a single line, ‘With all best wishes, [signature]’, on went the First Class stamp, and…I sent it. Yes yes yes, ‘Don’t let rip, get a grip’, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa, but sometimes you owe it to yourself — and others.

30 August
Mikhail Gorbachev has died. I am sure he was gagged by Putin, or self-gagged, in recent years. Having operated under Communist censorship, he always was given to indirect statement and euphemism anyway. I thought it salutary in about 1991 to show my students a fresh copy of Nezavisimaia gazeta (the Independent Newspaper) in which Gorbachev said emphatically that ‘there will never be multi-party democracy in Russia’. At the time, since he was still General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, we interpreted what he said as meaning ‘over my dead body will there be’. Now I tend to regard the words as simply a wise prophecy that came true.

3 September
Decades ago, I acquired a bad ante-cruciate ligament injury in my right knee. If it gets wrenched the wrong way, it flares up again (I call it my ex-cruciate ligament injury). I treat it with a Comfrey imbrocation made up from the recipe in this book, and find that much more effective than bought products. Nevertheless, it always takes a few months to sort it out, during which I tend to limp. The other day, I heard a little boy with a very clear voice call across the road to his father, about thirty yards behind me: ‘Daddy, that man is walking slightly like a penguin.’ It was the word ‘slightly’ that I thought was so good!

10 September
Without exaggeration, within days of the result of the EU referendum it was difficult to find European newspapers in Cambridge, especially German ones. In W.H. Smith recently I bought a copy of Die Zeit for 7 July 2022 and was stunned by this picture on p. 62:

The full-page article accompanying it explains that it has been painted by Michael Triegel to replace the centre panel of an altarpiece painted by Lucas Cranach in 1519 for Naumburg Cathedral and destroyed by Reformation fanatics in 1541. All that is known of Cranach’s panel is that it was of the Virgin Mary with child and saints.

Triegel saw Mary as ‘a simple girl of perhaps sixteen who has become pregnant but not by her husband’, and his own daughter sat for the picture. The black person at extreme left represents St Mauritius and was modelled on someone he spotted in a religious procession in Italy. The man with glasses is Dietrich Bonhoeffer, ‘a Protestant saint if ever there was one’. The woman to the right of Mary’s head, representing her mother Anna, is Triegel’s wife. The bearded man in a red baseball cap represents St Peter and was modelled on a man begging on church steps in Rome. The figure extreme right is St Paul, drawn from a rabbi Triegel met at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. There is a long European tradition of doing this sort of thing, of course. Triegel says in his interview: ‘I portrayed them like this because for me the saints are of this world; the divine and the human spheres, the eternal and the earthly, should interpenetrate in the picture’. Formally, the picture isn’t an icon, but Triegel’s last statement isn’t a bad definition of one.

Speaking personally, almost the last figure I noticed was the baby Christ. But when you do, you are amazed and held still. This is Christ as a completely naked and vulnerable child. His expression at first strikes you as a Child of Sorrows. Moreover, Triegel says ‘the way Mary is holding him so that he is spreading his arms out, is almost the pose of the crucifixion’. Yet the eyes of this baby look right at you and into you. They, I think, are the eyes in this picture that you can’t forget once you have seen them. As Bakhtin wrote somewhere, ‘Christ is pure subjectivity directed outwards to all others’. Christ, then, is utter empathy for all others, the whole world; basically, that is what christianity is. ‘I wanted to paint a picture that is alive and gives hope’, Triegel says.

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.