From the diary of a writer-publisher: 26

7 November 2023
Ukraine must win. There is no alternative, because Putin will never offer a true peace, only a breather before making another attempt to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign state then torture, murder, deport and imprison its people. Many people still have not understood that this is what the madman wants to do. ‘Stalemate’, a ‘frozen conflict’, would be a variant of the same: a not-peace. Despite the palpable wavering in American opinion, I agree with Garry Kasparov and other voices that the defence of Ukraine is the defence of the democratic West and its values, so the West must throw everything into it. Did we learn nothing from Hitler’s predations? It is the defence of ourselves, against both Russia and China, as the latter is undoubtedly awaiting the outcome of Putin’s ‘special military operation’ before unleashing its own on Taiwan. We know that at their recent summit Putin and Xi agreed that they were going to ‘change’ the post-1945 world order ‘utterly’, which means terrorize and totalitarianise it. Russia’s war has been disastrous for Russia so far, but reports from Ukrainian generals indicate that Ukraine is running out of troops below the age at which Calderon tried to sign up in 1914 and was considered too old (45). Yet only outright Russian defeat could remove Putin and give us true peace.

I realised today that my views on what we have to do to help Ukraine win would probably shock a lot of my friends, so I had better be careful how I express some of them publicly. First, if (God forbid) Trump wins the presidential election, Europe will have to go it alone in ensuring a Ukrainian victory; again there will be no alternative, and we shall all have to hike our defence spending far above the NATO minimum of 2% GDP. It would be war by any other name, but Europe could not look itself in the face again if it let Ukraine down. Second, I agree with the White House’s former Russia director, Matt Dimmick, that it is no good ‘drip-feeding weapons into Ukraine, allowing President Zelensky’s forces to defend territory but not giving them an advanced enough armoury to defeat Russia’: we must give them the most sophisticated weapons we have, and which Russia has not, in order to save Ukraine’s young blood and win the war as fast as possible. (Dimmick rightly said as well that ‘Ukraine would be in a much stronger position if all the weapons systems the US was providing now had been dispatched at the beginning of the war’.) Third, we must call Putin’s nuclear bluff (there would probably be a revolution in Russia if he used nuclear weapons, and he knows it). We have been far too frightened of him. You may remember me saying at the beginning of the war that we should have threatened him by bringing a serious NATO force up to the Kaliningrad Gap, and positioned another opposite Brest threatening the thug Lukashenka. We should do something similar now, without setting a boot on Russian territory (that is always a fatal mistake). We have not, militarily, been anywhere near resourceful, proactive and threatening enough. I won’t elaborate.

Meanwhile, communications with Russia have become more dangerous than ever. The other day a friend of over fifty years standing simply emailed me a beautiful recent photograph of Chekhov’s and Olga Leonardovna’s graves at Moscow’s Novodevichii Monastery, with no message, no caption, sans mots, but I knew what he meant. I emailed back this image that we took last month on the seafront at Ventnor (as usual, click on the image to magnify):

The juxtaposition of Scott’s Waverley and Turgenev’s Fathers and Children on the house front is felicitous. On the other hand, as Stephan Roman puts it in his book about the Isle of Wight and Russia (p. 126): ‘Turgenev feared the power and destructive nature of Bazarov [the novel’s Nihilist hero] from the moment that he had summoned him into existence.’ Turgenev was right: Bazarov is a quintessential force of Russian chaos.

12 November
Remembrance Sunday. Always the saddest day of the year. As Owen wrote: ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.’ Nothing approaches the sacrifice that they made for us. For our freedom. For our future. Men and women. Ukraine knows it well.

Recent subscribers may not know that between 2014 and 2018 we lived the First World War practically day to day with George Calderon and his set, and we often discussed the experience on this blog. The commemoration of the centenary was eviscerating, and I wonder whether those even closer to it than I was, for example Andrew Tatham and Clare Hopkins, feel that it has moulded their attitude to Remembrance today. For  myself, I can’t say that 2014-18 was a catharsis, but I somehow feel more at peace with the tragedy now. I simply feel that George and his fallen comrades will be ‘aways with me’.

At the same time, the terrifying, incomprehensible self-destructiveness of the human race, and the unrecoverable loss that wars inflict on us, slay me now worse than ever. During glasnost’ and perestroika many Russian intellectuals, scholars and commentators felt free at last to talk publicly of the ‘possibly irrreparable damage to the gene pool’ inflicted by the Civil War and Stalin’s genocide — literally, the loss in mental intelligence to subsequent generations of the Russian people. We can, perhaps, see some truth in that…

20 November
Another sign of age: picking up pristine GPO rubber bands from the pavement for one’s own use. When I was a boy, I used to think the old men I saw doing that sort of thing must be hopelessly demented. But I haven’t taken to wearing a flat cap yet.

26 November
The mention of Walter Scott above was not just felicitous, but fortuitous: we have been in Edinburgh this week and Scott was everywhere. In Princes Street Gardens a massive Christmas Market was in rude action right up to the plinth of the Scott Monument, but the remarkably good statue of Scott by John Steell in the base of the Monument was the still eye of the storm. ‘What would he think of it all?’ someone asked.

I decided to read my first unabridged Scott novel, Rob Roy. It has been an extremely slow read (380 pages), although in places the plot moves like lightning. The source of the slowness, it seems to me, is the very art of Scott’s long, syntactically sealed and rather heavily punctuated sentences, which I imagine are simply beyond the patience of readers to parse today, hence the decline in his popularity. But strain as you might, you couldn’t ever accuse these sentences of redundancy. Every word he uses seems the only right word. The impression is of a great rationalist — a Scottish Rationalist, presumably. His English is perhaps far too rational for us today. Yet that sense in his style of ‘what you see is all there can be, and that’s the highest function of language’, is offset by the sheer Gothic energy of his dialogue in Scots. The alternation of the Rational and the Gothic is irresistible, and often very funny. Scott’s writing seems to me the perfect foil to Jane Austen’s.

The ‘get-in’ at Nicolson Square Theatre, 1974, and the same site today

We also visited 21 Hill Place, which we occupied as Nicolson Square Theatre during the Edinburgh Fringe of 1974-76 with productions such as Ivanov and The Cherry Orchard. The improvement in the property as shown by the images above cannot be put down purely to colour photography. Unbeknown to us at the time, it was an old and distinguished building: https://www.edinburgharchitecture.co.uk/21-hill-place-royal-college-of-surgeons-edinburgh. The young company was wonderful, but standing outside the locked doors of the building today I found the memories of mounting eight productions in two years provoked not so much nostalgia as neuralgia!

4 December
As I announced in May, I wanted to give Calderonia followers a foretaste of my 2024 book of short stories, now called The White Bow/Ghoune, by posting some this year. The last story will be ‘Crox’, to go up on 18 December. To me, at least, it seems appropriately upbeat for Christmas. A couple of words of background may help. Like nearly everything in these stories, it is based on my own experience and observation. A boy in the Lower Sixth at the grammar school I attended fell in love with a ‘shop girl’, as she was then referred to, they married, she accompanied him to university, and they lived happily ever after. I did not know them personally, but it was the talk of the school and town.

A slightly worrying aspect of this story, however, is that, as the sheet from my 1978 notebook shows, and indeed the unfinished start of the story from 1979, I invented the brand of ‘Crox’ 45 years ago, but everyone now knows the shoes that are called Crocs, whose company, I gather from the Web, was founded in 2002 and is litigiously protective of its name. As far as I can see, my Crox have nothing whatsoever in common with their Crocs. But it will be interesting to see if at some point they snap at me. Everyone, of course, will assume I stole the name from the very successful American shoe company, but I have no intention of changing the story’s title, because (a) I can prove it predates Crocs by 24 years, and (b) I want Crox in my story on account of its similarity to crux.

The dedicatee of this story is a school friend who died four years ago. As fifteen/sixteen-year-olds we played Jonathan Routh-style pranks on a number of shoe shops in Canterbury and Margate by inquiring whether they sold ‘Berkers’ — an imaginary brand of heavy black shoe that made the wearer look a berk. This certainly taxed our powers of improvisation, but it also led to hilarity and meeting a number of nice ‘shop girls’.

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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.