From the diary of a writer-publisher: 24

29 July 2023
As followers may recall, I always believed that the Russian Army was less than enthusiastic about Putin’s war — which is one reason he and Shoigu had to use private armies — and that eventually military opposition would break out which would have to depose Putin or be crushed by him. But I draw no hope whatsoever from Prigozhin’s so-called rebellion or the purge of military figures who have criticised the conduct of the war, since all of them are even more fascistic than Putin and his military cronies. These critics vocalise their scorn for the lack of a Russian advance, and call either for greater competence from Shoigu and Gerasimov or more brutal methods of winning the war. If there is a silent majority in the Army who are opposed to the whole campaign and Putin’s entrapment of them in it, where are they? Well, they can’t of course vocalise fundamental opposition of that kind, or they would be rounded up. But in my opinion they do exist. How long will it take before they act? What military developments would drive them to act?

3 August
For the last couple of months, I have been reconditioning old entomological storage cases (one probably Edwardian), and sorting out a set of 417 butterflies caught sixty years ago in British North Borneo (today Sabah, Malaysia) by a friend who was a licensed naturalist for Singapore’s Raffles Museum (today Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum). I relaxed 180 of them when, aged fifteen, I was given them, I set those on special boards, and stored the rest carefully, but I feel now is the time to put the whole collection in order and place it in an appropriate institution. For one thing, it could be very revealing to compare this butterfly snapshot of the area taken in 1962-63 with the situation there today. I should mention that at the time not much detailed work had been done on butterflies in this part of Borneo, which is why my friend was sampling them, but he did not have time to conserve them himself as his main brief was to study the birds and reptiles.

Parthenos sylvia lilacinus Butler, ‘The Clipper’

Identification is sometimes fiendishly difficult, because butterflies in this part of the world are evolution in action, they create sub-species before your eyes, as it were. My friend was convinced when he gave me the collection that he had discovered one or two new sub-species, and I think he was right. The professionals will have to decide. What is wonderful to me is to open one of the folded papers in which the dead butterflies were preserved in the field, and to discover (see above) that the insect is still, sixty years later, in pristine condition including its antennae. Live butterflies are considered synonymous with ephemerality, yet dead butterflies when they are kept in darkness do not even fade.

14 August
Another day in the campaign to put my correspondence since the 1960s in order. I am on archive box 6 and have sorted about 7000 letters up to 2010. They are arranged by decade alphabetically by correspondent and chronologically within each correspondent’s file. I am hoping there will be far fewer letters for the last decade, because of email.

It’s slow work, which is why I can only do it for a day every so often. The letters were already filed by writer in suitcases etc, but there is a lot of official and teaching stuff, which I laboriously weed out. What slows me down with the other files is the need/temptation to read them; and some of them become, one might say, too absorbing. I made the decision years ago not to destroy any letter, however embarassing or painful, but even so…

I am constantly reminded of Pushkin’s short poem in iambic alexandrines and tetrameter entitled ‘Memory’, the last two lines of which I translated back in 1968 as: ‘I bitterly complain, and bitter tears I shed,/Yet do not smudge those lines of sorrow.’ (The verb for ‘smudge’ here, smyvat’, is almost always rendered in English as ‘wash away’, but the image is surely of Pushkin’s tears falling on the writing, which it would therefore be so easy for him to smudge out with his hand or sleeve; the Russian verb is the one used in such expressions as ‘the rain smudged her eye shadow’, not ‘washed her eye shadow away’.)

Reading one’s own past can be excruciating. In the programme for the RSC’s current production of As You Like It, however, Charles Fernyough has a stimulating essay on the subject that concludes:

It turns out that this relationship with our own remembered pasts is central to a journey we are all embarked upon. Researchers are starting to understand how looking back at one’s own past from the vantage point of later life — what is known as ‘life review’ — is an essential part of gaining acceptance of one’s own self and its voyage. Those who are happiest in their autumnal years are not those who judge their past actions from the viewpoint of hindsight, where all too often the only possible response is regret. Healthy ageing seems to be about re-experiencing past moments of crisis and decision in a flexible, creative, imaginative way, testing out those decisions again and understanding how they were made […] at the time.

Pushkin was right: one must never deny one’s often toe-curling past.

21 August
I write off to another publisher putting the case for them to bring out a book of our stalwart follower and contributor Damian Grant’s shaiku — strict 5-7-5 haiku versions of all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets. This time it’s the publisher of:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Like the above, a book of Damian’s shaiku should be small, though not too thin. I have already tackled several publishers, and doubtless will submit the idea to more, as I passionately believe in what Damian has achieved here. He has spent about twenty years playing creatively with his modern, miniature expressions of the sonnets, and the results are witty, moving, emotionally intense, always surprising. A third have now been published in prestigious British poetry mags and it is certainly time to bring them all out as a book. Here is a sample published in this year’s May issue of Long Poem Magazine.

I felt that the publishers of all the small, but good compilations of Shakespeare on sale in the RSC shop at Stratford should be tackled first as a matter of course, but the point has been made by one of them that they would have to print the sonnet itself verso and the shaiku recto, as a two-page spread, making a very long book. Or if you printed two sonnets to a verso and two shaiku to a recto, you would have to use a too-small font. I had hoped that the Shakespeare publishers could rely on their readers to refer to their own copies of the sonnets as they read the shaiku, but evidently not. Personally I think it would be best to print two shaiku to a page and set them out as in Long Poem Magazine — prefaced by the opening line of the sonnet. That, however, presupposes a poetry publisher tout court. Very difficult. A poetry collection can take an eternity to find a not-self publisher.

In the meantime, both Damian and I feel the answer is simply to tell as many people as possible that his completed SHAIKU: Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Seventeen Syllables exists and seeks a publisher. Tell all your friends! Bruit it about!

25 August
Believe me, I hesitated over publishing the ‘unsophisticated’ stories written by me in the late 1970s/early 1980s that have been perpetrated on this blog — I hesitated for forty years! By the 1990s I regarded them as juvenilia and destroyed the manuscripts (except Crox, which was unfinished). Somehow, though, I couldn’t bring myself to destroy the typescripts; probably I felt sorry for all the effort I had put into bashing them out.

Looking at them a couple of years ago, when I was already writing new stories, I saw them differently. It seemed to me that their themes hadn’t dated, and that the lack of sophistication might have a certain charm. So my stories on Calderonia now fall into three categories: Cambridge Tales (written in the past three years from ideas going back to 1978), Very Old Cambridge Tales (written 1978-1982), and Short Stories (being written now). Warning: the next story to be published here will be a Very Old Cambridge Tale…

Meanwhile, our veteran subscriber and contributor John Pym was nudged by the story My First Communist into writing a sketch from memory of one of his own real first Communists and this will form our next post, to go out on 11 September. I assure you, it’s a mesmerising read.

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.