Calderonia is an experiment in biography through a blog. It tells the story of George and Kittie Calderon’s lives from 30 July 1914 to 30 July 1915 from day to day as it happened, but exactly 100 years afterwards. It therefore feels like a biography in real time. When no facts were known for a particular day, the author posted on subjects ranging from the Edwardians, recently published biographies and his own problems as a biographer, to translating Chekhov and the Commemoration of World War I.
The blog-biography can be accessed in various ways. To read it from the beginning, go to the top of the column on the right and click the appropriate link. You can then read forward in time by clicking the link at the end of each post. If you wish to start at a particular month, scroll down the column on the right to Archive at the bottom. Posts can also be selected through Search Calderonia and the Tags on the right. An update on the complete biography of George Calderon always follows this introduction.
16/3/16. Segueing (I hope that is correct — I have never used the verb before) from last week’s post, I have to report three completely new developments that illustrate, I think, Jenny Hands’s thought-provoking Comment (see above right).
I had not heard the saying ‘you have to have a plan to be able to change it’ before, possibly because in writing, I find, you have not so much a plan as a conception, and that conception doesn’t live in your mind as a plan does, you live in the conception, which spontaneously grows till it’s ‘right’. However, I can well imagine that this saying is a truism in modern management, and in my experience the deadlines that form part of the project-plan of writing a book do operate as Jenny Hands suggests.
Last week I set myself the task of completing the revision of chapters 11 (‘Chekhov Is Such a Great Man…’) and 12 (The Trouble with Trade Unionism). The first task is to reread the entire file for the chapter, which leads to looking at some things from slightly different angles, revisiting some letters and documents, sometimes discovering entirely new, relevant things. I like to do it in a single, eight-hour or so sitting, so that I feel I’ve literally ‘got my head round it’, but it leaves the mind so tired you can’t start the actual revision until you have recovered, i.e. next morning.
The file for chapter 11 is particularly thick, but I managed to read half of it over the weekend, so that by last Monday morning I was ‘ahead’… Ah, but the revision of the beginning was particularly drastic and fiddly, because the discovery only last year of George’s 1907 diary threw wide open the question of whether George didn’t, perhaps, er, get the idea of translating The Seagull from Constance Garnett, whom he met for the first time that year and had problematical relations with later in the Stage Society. Even so, I finished that chapter (9119 words) by last Wednesday morning and went straight into chapter 12. That file is quite thin, because it is almost entirely factual rather than literary, and by the end of Thursday I had finished revising the chapter (5658 words) to my satisfaction. So I was a day ‘ahead’ of deadline!
Unfortunately:
1. I was so exhausted I knew it would be counter-productive to go straight into chapter 13, Wilder Shores of Translation (10,800 words and mesmerisingly literary). What you are after, of course, when you are revising a long work, is absolute consistency. It’s therefore vital to do the work on the same level of energy. You can sometimes spot — around the middle — when writers have begun to push themselves too hard with their revision/editing.
2. Followers may recall that the life-changing discovery last year that George had had a serious flirtation with philosophical Taoism led to my losing days and days in my rewriting of chapter 6 (26,896 words). I concluded the new section: ‘there are a number of small facts that suggest his interest in the Taoist view of life continued to at least 1912, and we shall note these in passing.’ When revising chapter 11, I pondered long the Taoist elements in two sections of George’s famous introduction to Chekhov’s plays, and settled for: ‘they both have distinct Taoist undertones.’ During Thursday night this began to niggle me, by Friday I had decided it was ridiculous — every reader would rightly be screaming ‘well what are they?!’ — so I spent the whole of this Monday reopening the Tao file, wrestling with these ‘undertones’, and explaining them in 300 words… Now, of course, I am behind schedule again. And I ought to add that on Friday I also came to the conclusion that in chapter 12 everyone would want to know what George’s party politics were, i.e. how he probably voted in elections, independently of his left of Centre personal political philosophy; so I would have to go back and grapple with that. But, fortunately, I decided it was better discussed in the Afterword…
3. As I contemplated revising chapter 13, Wilder Shores of Translation, I was suddenly struck by a dread of the one after that, covering 1914-15. This is because in its course chapter 13 focuses down on 1913. It returns the chronotope from four synchronic chapters (i.e. essentially thematic and covering the same period, 1907-12) to a linear timescale, i.e. traditional biography. Chapter 14 therefore begins with January 1914. Frankly, I slightly dread, even, starting work on 13. The dread is undoubtedly having a procrastinating effect. Working on 14, A New and Unknown Adventure, will be weird, as I not only had to live those draining events when I wrote it, I lived them from day to day when I was running Calderonia. I recall that I spoke about reliving the end in my post ‘The Dear Departed’ of 9 February 2015. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.
That is probably enough writerly introspection. Deadlines do get pushed all over the place. You never know in this game what is going to hit you next and put you ahead or days, weeks, months behind… But that’s right: it couldn’t happen unless you had a time-plan in the first place. Curiously, the very fact of writing this post about it may have changed the game and I shall tackle chapter 13 with fresh relish and even get ‘ahead’!
Note. There is a problem with double quotes in WordPress, hence only the title of chapter 11 above has been enclosed in inverted commas — the words here are George Calderon’s own.
This is the most recent ‘Watch this Space’ post. For the archive of ‘Watch this Space’, please click here.
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Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Captain of the 11
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon c.1901
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George Calderon, 1912
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Watch this Space
Calderonia is an experiment in biography through a blog. It tells the story of George and Kittie Calderon’s lives from 30 July 1914 to 30 July 1915 from day to day as it happened, but exactly 100 years afterwards. It therefore feels like a biography in real time. When no facts were known for a particular day, the author posted on subjects ranging from the Edwardians, recently published biographies and his own problems as a biographer, to translating Chekhov and the Commemoration of World War I.
The blog-biography can be accessed in various ways. To read it from the beginning, go to the top of the column on the right and click the appropriate link. You can then read forward in time by clicking the link at the end of each post. If you wish to start at a particular month, scroll down the column on the right to Archive at the bottom. Posts can also be selected through Search Calderonia and the Tags on the right. An update on the complete biography of George Calderon always follows this introduction.
16/3/16. Segueing (I hope that is correct — I have never used the verb before) from last week’s post, I have to report three completely new developments that illustrate, I think, Jenny Hands’s thought-provoking Comment (see above right).
I had not heard the saying ‘you have to have a plan to be able to change it’ before, possibly because in writing, I find, you have not so much a plan as a conception, and that conception doesn’t live in your mind as a plan does, you live in the conception, which spontaneously grows till it’s ‘right’. However, I can well imagine that this saying is a truism in modern management, and in my experience the deadlines that form part of the project-plan of writing a book do operate as Jenny Hands suggests.
Last week I set myself the task of completing the revision of chapters 11 (‘Chekhov Is Such a Great Man…’) and 12 (The Trouble with Trade Unionism). The first task is to reread the entire file for the chapter, which leads to looking at some things from slightly different angles, revisiting some letters and documents, sometimes discovering entirely new, relevant things. I like to do it in a single, eight-hour or so sitting, so that I feel I’ve literally ‘got my head round it’, but it leaves the mind so tired you can’t start the actual revision until you have recovered, i.e. next morning.
The file for chapter 11 is particularly thick, but I managed to read half of it over the weekend, so that by last Monday morning I was ‘ahead’… Ah, but the revision of the beginning was particularly drastic and fiddly, because the discovery only last year of George’s 1907 diary threw wide open the question of whether George didn’t, perhaps, er, get the idea of translating The Seagull from Constance Garnett, whom he met for the first time that year and had problematical relations with later in the Stage Society. Even so, I finished that chapter (9119 words) by last Wednesday morning and went straight into chapter 12. That file is quite thin, because it is almost entirely factual rather than literary, and by the end of Thursday I had finished revising the chapter (5658 words) to my satisfaction. So I was a day ‘ahead’ of deadline!
Unfortunately:
1. I was so exhausted I knew it would be counter-productive to go straight into chapter 13, Wilder Shores of Translation (10,800 words and mesmerisingly literary). What you are after, of course, when you are revising a long work, is absolute consistency. It’s therefore vital to do the work on the same level of energy. You can sometimes spot — around the middle — when writers have begun to push themselves too hard with their revision/editing.
2. Followers may recall that the life-changing discovery last year that George had had a serious flirtation with philosophical Taoism led to my losing days and days in my rewriting of chapter 6 (26,896 words). I concluded the new section: ‘there are a number of small facts that suggest his interest in the Taoist view of life continued to at least 1912, and we shall note these in passing.’ When revising chapter 11, I pondered long the Taoist elements in two sections of George’s famous introduction to Chekhov’s plays, and settled for: ‘they both have distinct Taoist undertones.’ During Thursday night this began to niggle me, by Friday I had decided it was ridiculous — every reader would rightly be screaming ‘well what are they?!’ — so I spent the whole of this Monday reopening the Tao file, wrestling with these ‘undertones’, and explaining them in 300 words… Now, of course, I am behind schedule again. And I ought to add that on Friday I also came to the conclusion that in chapter 12 everyone would want to know what George’s party politics were, i.e. how he probably voted in elections, independently of his left of Centre personal political philosophy; so I would have to go back and grapple with that. But, fortunately, I decided it was better discussed in the Afterword…
3. As I contemplated revising chapter 13, Wilder Shores of Translation, I was suddenly struck by a dread of the one after that, covering 1914-15. This is because in its course chapter 13 focuses down on 1913. It returns the chronotope from four synchronic chapters (i.e. essentially thematic and covering the same period, 1907-12) to a linear timescale, i.e. traditional biography. Chapter 14 therefore begins with January 1914. Frankly, I slightly dread, even, starting work on 13. The dread is undoubtedly having a procrastinating effect. Working on 14, A New and Unknown Adventure, will be weird, as I not only had to live those draining events when I wrote it, I lived them from day to day when I was running Calderonia. I recall that I spoke about reliving the end in my post ‘The Dear Departed’ of 9 February 2015. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.
That is probably enough writerly introspection. Deadlines do get pushed all over the place. You never know in this game what is going to hit you next and put you ahead or days, weeks, months behind… But that’s right: it couldn’t happen unless you had a time-plan in the first place. Curiously, the very fact of writing this post about it may have changed the game and I shall tackle chapter 13 with fresh relish and even get ‘ahead’!
Note. There is a problem with double quotes in WordPress, hence only the title of chapter 11 above has been enclosed in inverted commas — the words here are George Calderon’s own.
This is the most recent ‘Watch this Space’ post. For the archive of ‘Watch this Space’, please click here.
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