7/5/16. The good news is that I have finished my fundamental revision of the biography. It can rest for a few weeks until I give it the final slow, close read. I turn now to writing the Introduction. These things are fantastically important, of course, and I have never been good at them. Over the last four years I have written two versions and binned both. There is a tendency to use the Introduction to witter with tightly clenched teeth about the things that bug the writer, rather than addressing the reader’s overwhelming question: ‘Why should I read your book?’ However, I go into it now with hope and some relish: there are nuggets from the earlier versions that are transferrable, and I have the extended written views of Clare Hopkins, Alison Miles, James Muckle, Harvey Pitcher, Karen Spink and Graeme Wright about what the Introduction should say. Thank you all, and if anyone else would like to advise me on this subject, please leave a Comment.
The results of my visit to the British Library last Wednesday may fairly be described as dramatic.
This is the cover of William Caine’s version of The Brave Little Tailor published in 1923 and dedicated to Kittie Calderon, with Caine’s explanation of the book’s provenance:
Click the image to enlarge.
Unfortunately, I have never liked this book since a particularly histrionic master tried to read it to us at school. I not only do not find it funny, I find it squirmingly unfunny. But why do I, I asked myself during the writing of the biography. This is the question I have to address, because the book’s humour is typically Edwardian and, to a disarming extent, typically Calderonian. I had decided to analyse the problem in the Afterword, where I discuss George as an Edwardian and who the Edwardians were. I did not have to tangle with it in the body of the biography, I thought, because the book is not the work that George wrote and the latter had not survived…
But the manuscript I ‘discovered’ at the British Library is of the entire original three-act pantomime. Of this, 196 pages are in George’s hand, about fifteen in William Caine’s hand, and there are two complete typed copies. This is not only the sole dramatic manuscript of George Calderon known to exist, it is by far the longest extant manuscript of anything by him. Almost certainly, I should think, I am the first person to have read it since the project was cut short by the War in 1914.
As I read George’s beautifully fluent and legible hand, the mind-boggling task loomed of examining the script in detail, even comparing it line by line with Caine’s 1923 confection, writing several pages about it in the appropriate place in the body of the biography, and delaying the completion of the book by at least another two months. Dare I say it, this is a ‘discovery’ I could have done without at this stage.
But not so fast. The fact that over 90% of the manuscript is in George’s hand does not mean that all of that is by him. If what Caine says about his own contribution is true, the manuscript is probably just the fair copy made by George of the whole work after he had ‘cut and polished’ Caine’s ‘great many scenes’ (and there are five or so pages of revisions in Caine’s hand on this fair copy). In other words, it is still not possible to say what was created by George and what by Caine, so I am sticking to discussing the posthumous work in my Afterword. The manuscript and typescript raise many interesting questions, though. For instance, the ‘pantomime’ is renamed ‘A Musical Play’, and even ‘A Comic Opera’, in the typescript. It is wearisomely wordy and long, yet George gives its running time (without interval) as ‘2 hrs 7 mins’. This would be unbelievably short for such a word-monster in the theatre today, and confirms the impression from Pinero’s and Shaw’s plays, for instance, that Edwardian actors must have gabbled.
Among the four, undated letters from Kittie to Laurence Binyon conserved in the British Library, the most dramatic for me was a six-page one that I was able to date as 31 August 1920. It contains Kittie’s response to the first draft of Binyon’s ode in George’s memory. She particularly loved the last stanza: through ‘the whole of it […] he is there […] standing before one’. This letter contains a frank discussion of George’s character, from which I hope to be permitted to quote in my Afterword.
The final drama of my visit to the British Library was that I walked into a kind of brick curlicue as I was looking for a quick way out of its piazza. On analysis, I think the reason I was in a hurry is that I was desperate to flee the piazza’s terrible feng shui, by which I probably mean ‘pretentious all-brick architecture’. The medical results of my encounter explain the lateness of this and, probably, next week’s post, but I will be back!
This is the most recent ‘Watch this Space’ post. For the archive of ‘Watch this Space’, please click here.
Related
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George Calderon c.1901
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon, 1912
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Captain of the 11
The Brave Little Tailor
7/5/16. The good news is that I have finished my fundamental revision of the biography. It can rest for a few weeks until I give it the final slow, close read. I turn now to writing the Introduction. These things are fantastically important, of course, and I have never been good at them. Over the last four years I have written two versions and binned both. There is a tendency to use the Introduction to witter with tightly clenched teeth about the things that bug the writer, rather than addressing the reader’s overwhelming question: ‘Why should I read your book?’ However, I go into it now with hope and some relish: there are nuggets from the earlier versions that are transferrable, and I have the extended written views of Clare Hopkins, Alison Miles, James Muckle, Harvey Pitcher, Karen Spink and Graeme Wright about what the Introduction should say. Thank you all, and if anyone else would like to advise me on this subject, please leave a Comment.
The results of my visit to the British Library last Wednesday may fairly be described as dramatic.
This is the cover of William Caine’s version of The Brave Little Tailor published in 1923 and dedicated to Kittie Calderon, with Caine’s explanation of the book’s provenance:
Click the image to enlarge.
Unfortunately, I have never liked this book since a particularly histrionic master tried to read it to us at school. I not only do not find it funny, I find it squirmingly unfunny. But why do I, I asked myself during the writing of the biography. This is the question I have to address, because the book’s humour is typically Edwardian and, to a disarming extent, typically Calderonian. I had decided to analyse the problem in the Afterword, where I discuss George as an Edwardian and who the Edwardians were. I did not have to tangle with it in the body of the biography, I thought, because the book is not the work that George wrote and the latter had not survived…
But the manuscript I ‘discovered’ at the British Library is of the entire original three-act pantomime. Of this, 196 pages are in George’s hand, about fifteen in William Caine’s hand, and there are two complete typed copies. This is not only the sole dramatic manuscript of George Calderon known to exist, it is by far the longest extant manuscript of anything by him. Almost certainly, I should think, I am the first person to have read it since the project was cut short by the War in 1914.
As I read George’s beautifully fluent and legible hand, the mind-boggling task loomed of examining the script in detail, even comparing it line by line with Caine’s 1923 confection, writing several pages about it in the appropriate place in the body of the biography, and delaying the completion of the book by at least another two months. Dare I say it, this is a ‘discovery’ I could have done without at this stage.
But not so fast. The fact that over 90% of the manuscript is in George’s hand does not mean that all of that is by him. If what Caine says about his own contribution is true, the manuscript is probably just the fair copy made by George of the whole work after he had ‘cut and polished’ Caine’s ‘great many scenes’ (and there are five or so pages of revisions in Caine’s hand on this fair copy). In other words, it is still not possible to say what was created by George and what by Caine, so I am sticking to discussing the posthumous work in my Afterword. The manuscript and typescript raise many interesting questions, though. For instance, the ‘pantomime’ is renamed ‘A Musical Play’, and even ‘A Comic Opera’, in the typescript. It is wearisomely wordy and long, yet George gives its running time (without interval) as ‘2 hrs 7 mins’. This would be unbelievably short for such a word-monster in the theatre today, and confirms the impression from Pinero’s and Shaw’s plays, for instance, that Edwardian actors must have gabbled.
Among the four, undated letters from Kittie to Laurence Binyon conserved in the British Library, the most dramatic for me was a six-page one that I was able to date as 31 August 1920. It contains Kittie’s response to the first draft of Binyon’s ode in George’s memory. She particularly loved the last stanza: through ‘the whole of it […] he is there […] standing before one’. This letter contains a frank discussion of George’s character, from which I hope to be permitted to quote in my Afterword.
The final drama of my visit to the British Library was that I walked into a kind of brick curlicue as I was looking for a quick way out of its piazza. On analysis, I think the reason I was in a hurry is that I was desperate to flee the piazza’s terrible feng shui, by which I probably mean ‘pretentious all-brick architecture’. The medical results of my encounter explain the lateness of this and, probably, next week’s post, but I will be back!
This is the most recent ‘Watch this Space’ post. For the archive of ‘Watch this Space’, please click here.
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