‘O, fallacem hominum spem!’

This tag from Cicero, meaning ‘Oh how deceptive is men’s hope!’, may be heard on the lips of Chekhov buffs when disappointed about something, followed sotto voce by Kulygin’s line: ‘Accusative with exclamation…’ (Act 2, Three Sisters).

It is certainly appropriate for me to exclaim it now. In my post of 23 June, entitled ‘Progress’, I announced that I was going into printing out the typescript of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius and ‘giving it its final hoover’. I said I did not know how many weeks this would take, and alas it has taken five. But that isn’t the worst of it. I began to check quotations at random — because they had all been checked once before when I was revising the manuscript — and I found to my incredulity that nearly every other quotation had an error in it. There was no alternative, of course, but to go back to the beginning of the typescript and check every quotation, date, figure, fact, very carefully. Even this cannot be the ‘final’ operation. Having completed this five-week deep-pile hoover, I have decided I must immediately go back to the beginning and read the text fluently as originally planned, checking just a few quotes and figures at random.

I must be frank, it is more than disappointing, it’s almost depressing (but these are the ‘Dog Days’). For the first time, I think, in the whole of this project, I have wobbled over whether I am really up to the challenge of it.

There are well over a thousand changes I now have to introduce to the computer version of the whole book. Admittedly, half of them are changes involving tightening up punctuation or syntax, improving expression, or having second thoughts about things (e.g. how far George got towards the Turkish trenches before he was killed), but that leaves far, far, far more mistakes of quotation or digital fact than I remotely expected. What is the explanation? I have spent many an idle minute in the last three weeks staring into space and speculating on that, in a state of some shock.

I have two and a half theories. First, that creating the book in tiny but legible handwriting, in pencil, which then is checked and revised in manuscript before being typed up, is a disaster. When I come to revise the first typescript (in hard copy) I can spot typos, of course, and obvious errors of transcription, and in any case I made changes on screen as I transcribed the manuscript, but the only way to eliminate every error of transcription would be for me to read the manuscript back word for word to someone following the typescript on screen and for them to spot the errors. This would be asking a bit much of them, but it could not be done the other way round, with one of us reading from the screen, as they would not be able to read my writing efficiently enough and even I would find it more difficult than reading the manuscript aloud. When I translate plays (first in pencil), I always ask someone to read the translation back to me from the screen whilst I follow in the original language, but somehow I did not think a similar process would be necessary in the case of one’s own writing. Oh how deceptive is men’s self-confidence! In fact, of course, it is probably more necessary to go through this read-back process when you are both the author and the typist.

Long-term followers may feel that my second explanation is a case of ‘blame the brain again’, but now that I have been made painfully aware of the errors of transcription I committed when writing the manuscript and the errors of transcription I committed when typing it up, I do see a common trend. In about 80% of cases, what I have done is drop words that I would not have considered necessary myself, and I have not been conscious of doing this. It is eery how consistent the pattern is; and the words elided really aren’t missed, there is no appreciable loss to the sentence. I conclude, therefore, that fifty years of striving to use the least number of words in translations and my own writing have programmed my brain to make this reduction automatically, without my conscious mind being aware of it. But, whether these words are redundant or not, they have, of course, to go back in for the quotation of someone else’s writing to be accurate.

The most egregious example of my rewriting quotations is so extraordinary that I still can hardly believe it. Possibly the most famous quote from George’s 1912 Introduction to Two Plays by Anton Tchekhof is: ‘His plays are tragedies with the texture of comedy.’ I have known this aphorism since at least 1968. In manuscript, I managed to render it as ‘His plays are comedies with the texture of tragedies’. I managed to type it up without noticing anything; it was only the word-by-word checking of the redesigned hoover that brought it to light. But as I see it, this is an extreme example of the brain seeing what it wants to see rather than actually reading. The error I made is, I suppose, ‘Freudian’: without being aware of it, I wrote down what I subconsciously believe (‘comedies with the texture of tragedies’) rather than what George wrote. And this has had an interesting and not unproductive repercussion: I am no longer sure of what George meant, or whether this whole ‘texture’ business means anything at all!

Obviously, it is also tempting to conclude that such fallibility is the result of anno domini (or as people charmingly put it these days, ‘dementia’). That is my ‘half theory’. The basic problem, I feel, lies in the cunningly trained reflex of the brain to project its own preferences on things irrespective of the reality fed it by the senses. I think we all suffer from this, but I am prepared to admit it has been exacerbated (honed) by age.

To cap it all, I said in my ‘Progress’ post that the sixth draft of my Introduction had gone off to a very experienced writer-biographer friend to have the surplus moisture mangled out of it and then I hoped to ‘iron it to a state of crispness’, but O, fallacem… It has come back not mangled, but cut into pieces. I’m reminded of a friend who, when he asked Matron at his boarding school what had happened to one of his vests, was told: ‘I cut up your vest to mend your pants!’ It is not at all clear to me how, after this treatment, the pieces of my Introduction could be sewn together again to make a credible garment.

Of course, after the initial shock one should be wary of taking such things too seriously. There must always be the suspicion that your critic hasn’t really understood where you were going with what you have written; why you have composed it the way you have. However, in this case my reader is definitely 28.53% right. I won’t go into the details; they concern the opening sentence, paragraphs, page and ‘selling the book’ to publishers’ readers. But then we are not all as lucky as Ruth Scurr and can start with a sentence that contains the name of a famous writer plus two of the most powerful words in the English language: ‘John Aubrey loved England’!

All I can say is, ‘watch this space’…