From the diary of a writer-publisher: 30

15 August 2024
I have seriously to consider binning Twitter (‘X’). I recently started receiving Tweets from Elon Musk, which I either skimmed or did not read at all. This was a mistake, because the bots decided that my ‘tolerance’ of Musk’s political statements qualified me to receive a swarm of racist, violent, extreme R/L-wing, vulgar and pornographic Tweets as well. I therefore blocked Musk, but it took me three quarters of an hour to block all the sources of the junk that came in his train. My feed is now 90% acceptable to me. Basically, I am interested in Tweets about Russia and the Ukrainian War, especially Zelenskyy’s daily communications, CWGC Tweets, and ones about literary culture. Incidentally, it’s a great pity that since Elon Musk acquired Twitter I can’t display my occasional Retweets on Calderonia down right of this screen, only my own extremely rare Tweets.

But do I actually want to continue supporting something that is not only owned by Musk but used by him personally to air his Trumpworthy ravings? People argue in the name of free speech that Musk has as much right as anyone to air his views on Twitter. Certainly he has, if he didn’t own it in the first place. I would not read The Times if Rupert Murdoch personally wrote in it every day and brazenly used it as the tool of his personal politics. I can choose not to buy it. The equivalent to that in Twitter’s case is to unsubscribe from it. Is blocking Musk and all the other extremism, but continuing to use Twitter to one’s own satisfaction, therefore hypocritical? I fear it is; but at the moment I need all that real-time Ukrainian news. Watch this space.

22 August
We are in Orkney. Today we were able to visit the weathered red, utterly magnificent 900-year-old St Magnus Cathedral in Kirkwall, which dominates the skyline. Wherever we had been in Orkney previously (visiting the revelatory complex of Neolithic sites), we encountered the story of St Magnus, for whom I have come to feel a peculiar affection.

St Magnus Cathedral, Kirkwall, and a 14th century icon of Saints Boris and Gleb

In the early 1100s Magnus was co-Earl of Orkney (then owned by Norway) with his cousin Hakon. The two were due to meet to discuss their differences, but Hakon broke the agreement to bring two ships of unarmed men each, he brought eight full of armed henchmen, and it was clear his intent was to kill the unarmed Magnus. He ordered his cook Litolf to do it, whereupon Magnus knelt down praying and was killed by a blow to his head. The photograph of Magnus’ skull is entirely convincing. His bones are now buried in a pillar within the cathedral’s choir and I couldn’t help stroking the pillar when no-one was looking. The copy of the Bible open on a lectern in the transept was in Norwegian.

The Penguin Dictionary of Saints says of Magnus ‘he was honoured because of his repute for virtue and piety, but there appears no reason why he should have been called a martyr’. Maybe not, but to anyone knowing the Orthodox tradition he is as clear a case of a strastoterpets as the young princes Boris and Gleb, who were murdered in 1015 for dynastic-political reasons and became the first saints created in Kievan Rus’ after its conversion to christianity. A strastoterpets is a saint who was not martyred because of his faith, but who accepted death as the innocent Christ did — the word means ‘an endurer of the Passion’, ‘non-resister and sufferer of evil for Christ’s sake’. The early Orthodox church regarded them as a uniquely Russian class of saint. There seems to be such a resemblance between the stories of Magnus and Boris-and-Gleb (the latter also executed by a cook under orders), that I just feel the Orcadians canonised Magnus for the same reason — he meekly accepted his political murder as Christ did.

24 August
The train we are on leaves Newcastle six minutes later than it should have, with no explanation, but then comes the announcement: ‘We have gained six minutes departing Newcastle and our expected time of arrival in York is now…’ Gained?

30 August
I have been so embroiled in choosing from all my past haiku since 1970 and editing them into a collection, that I have not written one ‘in the moment’, as haikus should be written, for about a year. When you come home from somewhere far away and entirely different, however, you see the most familiar things in your back yard afresh:

Twenty years on,
the cat’s paws just visible
in concrete.

(Don’t believe anything they say about haikus having to have 5-7-5 syllables.)

19 September
Hallelujah! The locksmith called early today and I could get back into my summer house, aka writing shed. Seventeen days ago its lock failed and I had to wire the door closed for local security reasons. This meant I could not go down there to make the final edit of my latest story (27,000 words) and simultaneously smoke a cigar.

The forensic reader of Calderonia will know that publication of my book of twenty short stories is now running nearly a year late. I am used to meeting deadlines, but in the writing game one must always expect the unpredictable: I started researching this science fiction story in April 2023, when I was sure it would be only 10,000 words long…

So by the end of today all 78 pages of ‘The Retiral’ were read, checked, tweaked and the changes installed from the defaced printout. But I have also been thinking for about seven months of how I am going to write the last story in the book. I have always known it would be entirely different from the sixteen central stories, ‘Ghoune’, because they are about a certain ‘laminated’ world, as Damian Grant rightly called it, and therefore written in a somewhat satirical, at arm’s length style. The last story will not be set in Ghoune Land, it will be about a complex person. Somehow, I knew that I had to read some of our women writers of short stories to learn (perhaps) how to write this last story.

I’ve recently read collections by Penelope Lively, Tessa Hadley, and Lucy Caldwell (who has a masterpiece called ‘Bibi’). Come to think of it, I have read them all twice and some stories four times. I am happiest in Tessa Hadley’s latest collection, where I could re-read forever the title story, or ‘My Mother’s Wedding’, ‘Funny Little Snake’ and ‘Coda’:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

When I started reading the stories in these collections, I instantly knew they were written by women. Why? (I wouldn’t say the same about Katherine Mansfield’s stories.) There is a mass of reasons, a world of reasons in fact, a whole world of difference. If I try to sum it up, I can’t. There is an intimacy with their characters, a familiarity, but not over-familiarity (although, worryingly for me at least, half of Caldwell’s stories are written in the first person). If you like, these stories are never written at arm’s length but the authors are not in their characters’ pockets either. The familiarity is natural; I doubt whether these writers are aware of it. It’s a beguiling quality, so difficult for me to put my finger on, but they all have it, so I assume it goes with being a woman. (It’s not empathy as such.) Then there is a sort of haziness at the edges of/within their stories which convinces you they are organic with the real world, whereas the worlds of men’s stories tend to seem hard edged (and never, surely, so relaxed, even D.H. Lawrence’s short stories). These women’s stories all have that organicity, elasticity, space, at times almost chaoticity. I need some of this…

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.