23/11/15. I am now reading and digesting every item in Kittie’s archive that relates to the period 1923-50, and it’s immeasurably deepening my understanding of her life in that period, which spans Sheet in Hampshire (1923-34) and Kennington in Kent (1934-48).
The prime source is the 248 letters written to her and by her in that period which have survived in her archive.
The largest number (120) are those from Percy Lubbock to Kittie 1923-45, which took me four days to read and digest.
As one would expect of Percy Lubbock, they are beautifully written, with hardly a grammatical mistake. I am sure they will all be published one day. However, reading his letters from 1927-40 was sheer agony. In 1926 he married Sybil Scott/ Cutting, who was an extremely rich woman then on her third marriage and with a formidable reputation for neurosis. Percy’s letters to Kittie from this period are almost entirely given over to the exquisite variations in ‘Lady Sybil’s’ supposed condition. No sense of her as a person comes over, merely as a kind of medical and psychotic ganglion: she has ‘rheumatic eye-poisoning’, ‘intestinal parasites’, ‘an amoeba’, ‘nervous prostration’, ‘perpetual dysenteric attacks’, ‘internal collapse — digestive etc’, ‘an obstinate and vicious influenza’, ‘a revival of a germ (intestinal)’, ‘intestinal neuritis’, and so ad infinitem. She is borne downstairs and upstairs, European authorities in various opaque diseases visit her regularly, her ‘poor little bent legs’ have to be straightened out in Aix-les-Bain, she can consume nothing but her ‘poor little pâté jelly and a glass of champagne’ before subsiding again; but somehow she manages to control everyone around her. Lubbock is entirely at her beck and call and does not write anything for fifteen years…
Then (1940) the couple are stranded, with a few servants, at Montreux for five years, unable to return to their villas at Fiesole and Lerici because of the war. It concentrates both their minds. Percy’s letters to Kittie become a narrative at last, rather than a series of stand-alone stress-rep0rts. He follows the war as closely as he can from any newspapers he can get hold of and by listening to the BBC; the seasons and flowers become intimately important to him and Sybil; he depends utterly on Kittie (who writes about every ten days) for news of the Lubbock and Pym families, for her special ability in her letters to enable him to ‘see’ his nephews and nieces and interpret their characters and actions…
In 1937, at the height of his desperation about Sybil’s condition, Percy Lubbock made what he called a ‘pact’ with Kittie — that if he needed her by him, she would come to Italy. She replied by telegram: ‘of course, yes’. In 1945, after the war, after his wife had died in Switzerland and he was about to return to Italy, he thanked Kittie for ‘how much your letters have done for me and given me first and last, in my life abroad’.
A picture is emerging of Kittie rushing all over England to help family and friends in the 1920s and 30s, and (from her three extant diaries) of friends, family and godchildren constantly descending upon her at Sheet and Kennington. One of them in a Christmas card addressed her as ‘Dear Boon’, another thanked her in 1938 for ‘the love you have shown in a thousand ways to me and mine through the years too long to count’.
Without, I think, consciously willing it, the widow of George Calderon became something of a grande dame in the communities where she settled, and counsellor in matters emotional, psychological and practical amongst her friends and adopted family. Well, she did have enormous emotional experience and intelligence, and was as competent as any man at managing her own and others’ affairs. But not everyone liked it. Some thought her dominating and interfering.
* * *
If you haven’t read it already, please read Clare Hopkins’s latest Comment now. It is definitive, in my view, but still there is plenty that some might find contentious. If you do have a reaction, PLEASE comment in your turn! I have received some short emails about Clare’s Comment, but we would all much rather follow a debate on the website. Some issues might be:
— Recently, there have been cases reported in the press of people who were counselled towards ‘closure’ after bereavement, went with it, but were ‘hurried’ and in fact just repressed their mourning; and they feel this did them psychological damage. It has led them to question the whole concept of closure.
— An issue is, then, can we actually direct (‘manage’) bereavement and commemoration? Are Clare’s ‘stages’ prescriptive, or ex post facto, i.e. retrospective?
— I see that Cambridge history professor David Reynolds, who has written about the factual side of WW1 memorials and the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, is giving a public lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace With the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. In an interview, he says that WW1 is now ‘turning into a historical issue rather than one with a personal focus’, which reminds me of Clare’s ‘stage four’, when in her words ‘commemoration distils into History’. However, do we want our live emotions to be ‘historicised’? A recent German president said that for the German nation there can be ‘no moral closure’ on two world wars, so why should we expect our own empathic, existential closure on WW1? Even Reynolds admits ‘it will be hard to ever truly move on from the trauma of the conflict’. I shall be going to Prof. Reynolds’s lecture on 2 December and reporting about it afterwards.
— Will WW1 ever come to ‘exemplify important qualities in the English (or British) character’ the way Agincourt, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, or the Battle of Britain have? Was our part in WW1 tragic rather than heroic?
* * *
I have several approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please (lon’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!
Related
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon c.1901
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Captain of the 11
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
George Calderon, 1912
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
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
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Watch this Space
23/11/15. I am now reading and digesting every item in Kittie’s archive that relates to the period 1923-50, and it’s immeasurably deepening my understanding of her life in that period, which spans Sheet in Hampshire (1923-34) and Kennington in Kent (1934-48).
The prime source is the 248 letters written to her and by her in that period which have survived in her archive.
The largest number (120) are those from Percy Lubbock to Kittie 1923-45, which took me four days to read and digest.
As one would expect of Percy Lubbock, they are beautifully written, with hardly a grammatical mistake. I am sure they will all be published one day. However, reading his letters from 1927-40 was sheer agony. In 1926 he married Sybil Scott/ Cutting, who was an extremely rich woman then on her third marriage and with a formidable reputation for neurosis. Percy’s letters to Kittie from this period are almost entirely given over to the exquisite variations in ‘Lady Sybil’s’ supposed condition. No sense of her as a person comes over, merely as a kind of medical and psychotic ganglion: she has ‘rheumatic eye-poisoning’, ‘intestinal parasites’, ‘an amoeba’, ‘nervous prostration’, ‘perpetual dysenteric attacks’, ‘internal collapse — digestive etc’, ‘an obstinate and vicious influenza’, ‘a revival of a germ (intestinal)’, ‘intestinal neuritis’, and so ad infinitem. She is borne downstairs and upstairs, European authorities in various opaque diseases visit her regularly, her ‘poor little bent legs’ have to be straightened out in Aix-les-Bain, she can consume nothing but her ‘poor little pâté jelly and a glass of champagne’ before subsiding again; but somehow she manages to control everyone around her. Lubbock is entirely at her beck and call and does not write anything for fifteen years…
Then (1940) the couple are stranded, with a few servants, at Montreux for five years, unable to return to their villas at Fiesole and Lerici because of the war. It concentrates both their minds. Percy’s letters to Kittie become a narrative at last, rather than a series of stand-alone stress-rep0rts. He follows the war as closely as he can from any newspapers he can get hold of and by listening to the BBC; the seasons and flowers become intimately important to him and Sybil; he depends utterly on Kittie (who writes about every ten days) for news of the Lubbock and Pym families, for her special ability in her letters to enable him to ‘see’ his nephews and nieces and interpret their characters and actions…
In 1937, at the height of his desperation about Sybil’s condition, Percy Lubbock made what he called a ‘pact’ with Kittie — that if he needed her by him, she would come to Italy. She replied by telegram: ‘of course, yes’. In 1945, after the war, after his wife had died in Switzerland and he was about to return to Italy, he thanked Kittie for ‘how much your letters have done for me and given me first and last, in my life abroad’.
A picture is emerging of Kittie rushing all over England to help family and friends in the 1920s and 30s, and (from her three extant diaries) of friends, family and godchildren constantly descending upon her at Sheet and Kennington. One of them in a Christmas card addressed her as ‘Dear Boon’, another thanked her in 1938 for ‘the love you have shown in a thousand ways to me and mine through the years too long to count’.
Without, I think, consciously willing it, the widow of George Calderon became something of a grande dame in the communities where she settled, and counsellor in matters emotional, psychological and practical amongst her friends and adopted family. Well, she did have enormous emotional experience and intelligence, and was as competent as any man at managing her own and others’ affairs. But not everyone liked it. Some thought her dominating and interfering.
* * *
If you haven’t read it already, please read Clare Hopkins’s latest Comment now. It is definitive, in my view, but still there is plenty that some might find contentious. If you do have a reaction, PLEASE comment in your turn! I have received some short emails about Clare’s Comment, but we would all much rather follow a debate on the website. Some issues might be:
— Recently, there have been cases reported in the press of people who were counselled towards ‘closure’ after bereavement, went with it, but were ‘hurried’ and in fact just repressed their mourning; and they feel this did them psychological damage. It has led them to question the whole concept of closure.
— An issue is, then, can we actually direct (‘manage’) bereavement and commemoration? Are Clare’s ‘stages’ prescriptive, or ex post facto, i.e. retrospective?
— I see that Cambridge history professor David Reynolds, who has written about the factual side of WW1 memorials and the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, is giving a public lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace With the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. In an interview, he says that WW1 is now ‘turning into a historical issue rather than one with a personal focus’, which reminds me of Clare’s ‘stage four’, when in her words ‘commemoration distils into History’. However, do we want our live emotions to be ‘historicised’? A recent German president said that for the German nation there can be ‘no moral closure’ on two world wars, so why should we expect our own empathic, existential closure on WW1? Even Reynolds admits ‘it will be hard to ever truly move on from the trauma of the conflict’. I shall be going to Prof. Reynolds’s lecture on 2 December and reporting about it afterwards.
— Will WW1 ever come to ‘exemplify important qualities in the English (or British) character’ the way Agincourt, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, or the Battle of Britain have? Was our part in WW1 tragic rather than heroic?
* * *
I have several approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please (lon’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!
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