From the diary of a writer-publisher: 32

9 February 2025
I have unsubscribed from Twitter after ten years or so. It was useful for marketing Sam&Sam books, especially George Calderon: Edwardian Genius in 2018, but I think the quality of Tweets and even images was far higher back then. I first considered ditching it when Musk became owner and started ploughing his own political furrow on Twitter/X. I stayed on, however, because the real-time Tweets about the war were so informative. Now, even they are less useful and the fake news content (about everything) is higher. TBH, it has become boring and not worth the time it takes to flick through and read it.

21 February
Well if I hadn’t finished with Twitter twelve days ago, I would now:

Musk communicated these disgusting falsehoods on ‘his’ social media platform X/Twitter. They well match Trump’s preceding calumnies that Ukraine ‘started’ the war and could have ‘ended it three years ago’. The only way in which Ukraine could have achieved the latter was by promptly capitulating to the aggressor! Is this what Trump had in mind? He never once mentions the concepts ‘democracy’, ‘freedom’, or ‘sovereignty’, which for Ukrainians and Europeans are what the war is about, only ‘debt’, minerals and money.

I said before the American election that I would not comment on Trump’s plan to end the war until we could see what it actually is, and I am sticking to that. However, we have heard enough this week from Trump and Musk to be able to say that their barefaced mendacity is indistinguishable from Putin’s own Russian brand, vran’e (compulsive lying). Is blatant lying just a Trump ploy? If so, the Russians have certainly fallen for it…but such travesties of the truth cannot bode well for an honest, fair and trustworthy peace.

1 March
The funeral of my ever-young friend Keith Dewhurst takes place next Friday, 7th, on the Isle of Wight, and to my chagrin I am unable to be there, even though I had written a tribute to Keith immediately after he passed ‘mildly away’, as Donne puts it, on 11 January after celebrating his ninety-third birthday on Christmas Eve. I was thoroughly expecting to read it in person in February, but it seems it is quite ‘normal’ these days for funerals to take up to two months to be ‘facilitated’… Well, at least it provides plenty of time to organise them, and in the case of Keith this means, I am sure, that it will be a performance of the highest theatrical order. I will post my shortened tribute here at the end of March.

It’s a fact that I got to know Keith well only in the last four years of his life. We talked about everything under the sun — both in the flesh and in long letters, as he still preferred writing by hand — and I had the honour of contributing the introduction to his last four plays. I had previously known him only in 1990, when his adaptation of Bulgakov’s short novel A Theatre Romance had a glorious run at the National Theatre as Black Snow, directed by Bill Gaskill. Keith commissioned me to do a literal translation of the novel and I introduced him to Julie Curtis, a Bulgakov scholar then working in Cambridge, who gave him consultancy on the novel/play that he remembered for the rest of his life.

The cast of Keith Dewhurst’s play Lark Rise after Flora Thompson, directed by Bill Bryden and Sebastian Graham-Jones at the National Theatre, 1978

There are three incidents I remember from working with Keith on Black Snow that I couldn’t allude to in my Word for him, because the last four years greatly outweigh them; so let me mention them here. First, when he received my literal translation, he rang me up to thank me for it and its ‘freshness’ from the opening line (which he kept speaking). No-one had ever done this before, although I had produced half a dozen literals for the NT by then. Second, I was at a meal with him, his wife the theatre agent Alexandra Cann, and a well known theatre director, and the conversation concerned where the latter’s career was going. After saying nothing for half an hour, Keith came out with: ‘You stayed too long in that [named theatre company] job.’ No-one responded. We all knew it was true! His one-liners always hit the bullseye. During an interval at the Cottesloe Theatre bar, discussing Geoffrey Archer’s libel case, Keith simply said: ‘Well, he’s only got to take his vest off to prove her wrong!’ (the prostitute whom Archer denied he had used said she recalled that his back was spotty). Incredibly, Keith finished a new play only days before his passing.

3 March
A moment of existential free fall: Sam2 and I were updating my website when I suddenly saw that I had, apparently, not published anything in the whole of 2023. It was difficult to believe, but research proved it. So what on earth was I doing? Did I do nothing that year?! This even deeper existential hole seemed to open beneath me…

An accurately cutaneous inspection of manuscripts showed that in fact I had written two stories that year, East of the Rhine and My First Communist, which were published, if that is the correct word, on this blog. From Spring 2023 to March 2024 I was merely researching the next story, which is a science fiction tale entitled ‘The Retiral of C.B.F. Warrington’. I then started writing it in April 2024, it grew and grew to 27,000 words, and I finished it only in November 2024. I will feature the first two chapters of this SF story here on Calderonia in April and May. But meanwhile, what of the book of short stories?

Well, Sam2 and I have recently had a business lunch at the Polish restaurant to discuss this matter:

The roast knuckle of pork, with of course Polish mustard and horseradish, a wee Bison Grass vodka and pint of unpasteurized beer, was more beautifully done than ever…

The upshot of this three-hour meeting is that I have a final story to write (I have started it and it should be only 6000 words long), whilst I proofread the typescripts of the other nineteen, and we intend starting the typesetting at the beginning of June. As is the way, the order of the stories has been completely changed four or five times and the two groups of stories reversed, so the book’s title now is White Bow/Ghoune.

I continue to read short stories by women. I’ve recently been reading and re-reading Helen Dunmore, Rose Tremaine and Lucy Caldwell. I know that I badly need to learn certain things from them for the final, ‘feminine’ story I’m writing, and I hope I have. But I’ve also become more and more convinced that I could never actually write normally like those women virtuosi as my brain isn’t wired that way… I mean it.

16 March
The disgraceful scene in the Oval Office on 28 February was quite obviously staged, i.e. prearranged, by Trump and Vance. It was an attempted ‘frame up’ of Zelensky — what’s known in Russian as a provokatsiia. Zelensky knows all about provokatsiias, as they are a stock in trade KGB technique, but why should he expect one from his own ally?

Zelensky quickly changed gear, and won hands down even though he was not speaking in his native language (making the effort to speak imperfect English was too respectful — he should always have an interpreter). He, the democratically elected president of the second largest country in Europe, crushed vice president Vance, but was entirely respectful in his argument and body language with president Trump. Zelensky even landed a blistering joke. When Trump told him ‘If you didn’t have our military equipment, this war would have been over in two weeks’, Zelensky countered: ‘In three days. I heard that from Putin: three days’ (meaning ‘Putin told us all himself that it was only going to take three days to conquer Ukraine’). This was the blackest humour and most devastating irony. It was completely over the heads of Trump and Vance. The whole episode was a nadir of American honour and intelligence.

We still do not know, of course, what conditions Trump and the Ukrainians are going to set Putin for peace, although we can be certain Putin will try not to keep them. Putin has lost the war and desperately needs peace, but he doesn’t want it. This conflict between manifest disaster (Russian casualties now approaching 900,000) and his psychotic determination to defeat and enslave Ukraine, could cost him his job, even life.

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.