From the diary of a writer-publisher: 25

27 September 2023
There can be no surer sign of age than picking up litter on the way to buy the daily newspaper… I have done this for the last four mornings, including a banana skin.

2 October

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41): not a friend of dictatorship

I have just read in the New York Times of 20 September an interview with Sauli Niinistö, President of Finland, who has met Putin ‘numerous times’. Niinistö says that

In their meetings before the invasion in February 2022, Mr. Putin was focussed, aggressive and well informed, even obsessive, about Russian culture. Niinistö decided to test Mr. Putin by asking him about Mikhail Lermontov’s poem on the death of Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet. Mr. Putin spoke for more than half an hour. “He knew everything about that — for him it’s Russia, Russia overall,” Mr Niinistö said.

Putin explained about the Russian odic tradition, comparing the general resemblances between Lermontov’s ‘Death of a Poet’ and Pushkin’s own ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, then examining in detail the madrigal form of each and Lermontov’s use of alexandrines, pentameter, tetrameter and even trimeter. He commented perceptively on Lermontov’s rhetorical devices. He pointed to Lermontov’s incomparable use of adjectives, especially in the inverted position. With evident admiration, he drew Niinistö’s attention to Lermontov’s subtle transformation of Pushkin’s ‘bays’ into a ‘crown of thorns’. Lermontov’s excoriation of the chern’ (corrupt oligarchs) — ‘You stranglers of Freedom, Genius and Fame,/A horde of reavers standing round the throne!’ — drew Putin’s particular praise, and he concluded with an analysis of Lermontov’s impure rhymes.

No, he didn’t, of course. He did none of this. Putin didn’t ‘know everything’ about Lermontov’s poem, he just ‘knows everything’ about ‘Russia’. The event of Lermontov’s famous poem was a trigger for Putin to rant for half an hour about ‘Russia overall’, i.e. his, Putin’s, vision of a Russian empire. I have read several personal accounts of him doing this and he becomes as possessed as Hitler. Angela Merkel rightly said after meeting Putin, ‘He lives in a world of his own.’ That world has nothing to do with Russian culture.

9 October
As long-term followers of this blog know, Percy Lubbock (1879-1965), who was Kittie Calderon’s nephew by marriage, played a significant role in both her life and George’s. He wrote the first biography of George Calderon. I thought I knew all Percy’s books, but our stalwart follower Mr John Pym, who is Percy’s great-nephew, has generously lent me these two small volumes (17.5 x 12 cms) which I had never seen before:

They are in prime condition, beautifully designed and printed. The latter is not surprising, I suppose, as the verso to the title page tells us that the Manager of Cambridge University Press in 1913 was C.F. Clay and the verso to Percy’s Prefatory Note that the Printer was John Clay, M.A. — brothers both to Richard Clay II, who in 1877 founded Clays of Bungay, printers of my biography of George and today arguably the best in Britain!

As for the contents, knowing the period and its schools I was expecting a high imperial canon — say, Malory, Elizabeth I, Francis Drake, Southey’s ‘Death of Nelson’, Carlyle, Lord Macaulay, perhaps George’s friend Henry Newbolt, some ‘charming’ writers, and none of the visceral, more anti-establishment writers from our past. Not a bit of it. Percy’s selection of over seventy writers includes Malory etc but also Bunyan, Milton’s ‘The Danger of interfering with the Liberty of the Press’, Hobbes, Defoe (twice), Swift (twice), Sterne, Dickens (twice), Ruskin, as well as a good national diversity and excellent representation of women writers from Lady Mary Wortley Montague to Charlotte Brontë (twice). I never expected actually to read these two books, but I have devoured them both. The first volume was ‘Arranged for Preparatory and Elementary Schools’ and is 140 pages long, the second was ‘Arranged for Secondary and High Schools’ and is 181 pages. Percy’s notes are brilliant. It may sound strange of a school text book, but it is a masterpiece, to set beside Percy’s Earlham, The Letters of Henry James, or The Craft of Fiction.

And there is a very interesting proof that the quality of his chrestomathy has been recognised. Search as I might, I could not find any copies of the 1913 first edition for sale on the Web, or any printed later in the twentieth century, so I assumed that, mangled by use, they were all binned by schools and it was never reprinted, especially as taste would have changed radically. But in 2007 the book started being reprinted! The process culminated in Cambridge University Press producing a quality edition at £29.99 each volume in 2012, almost a century after the first. Extraordinarily (to my mind), the title pages of the new CUP edition still refer to Preparatory, Elementary, Secondary and High Schools, as though nothing has changed in our education system since 1913. Evidently the need for a really good reader in English prose has not changed and Percy’s is unmatched.

14 October
I’ve been agonising over whether to post my last surviving Very Old Cambridge Tale, to go with the other three. It is called ‘First Love’ and could be construed as dodgy. Actually, it is almost an imitation of Chekhov’s early comic stories, which I was researching, indeed translating, at the time. The influence, I see now, extends to its punctuation, punchline ending, and possibly salacious element (for which the young Chekhov was well known). I have a sentimental attachment to ‘First Love’, however, because (a) it was inspired by two real events (no spoilers, but I am willing to say what they were afterwards if requested), and (b) I ended up framing the beginning and ending with something entirely my own. So I haven’t changed anything in it since 1982 and will be posting it on 30 October. But I promise that the next two stories I post will have been written in the last two years. The first will be a Cambridge Tale proper, the second just a Short Story. They will be quite long, posted in two instalments, and take us up to Christmas… I hope we shall be bringing out the book of twenty stories, entitled The White Bow/Ghoune, in the Spring.

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.