Left: George Calderon as Sherlock Holmes, c. 1912, Right: Basil Rathbone as George Calderon, 1939
Lest it be thought that my previous post expressed a scepticism towards or weariness with blogging, I hasten to reassure followers: the pleasures and benefits of running Calderonia have been a fantastic bonus to writing the actual book. I never remotely expected to write a separate, day-to-day biography of the last year of George’s life, but that is what happened between 2014 and 2015, I hugely enjoyed writing it (despite the problems of ‘chronotopia’), and am proud to have been one of the first in on the genre of blography. But consider the other benefits: manuscripts discovered by followers and bought for the archive, references supplied by followers to mentions of George in obscure publications that I would never have found myself, leads suggested for fruitful further research, and above all the comments, observations, suggestions of fresh other minds.
The latter, I think, is why I would always recommend to biographers running a blog about their work in progress. Of course you do the slog of research mainly yourself, of course you have your own closely guarded image of the biography’s subject, of course (as we said of Ruth Scurr’s ‘autobiography’ of Aubrey), you actually have absolute control over the result. But the more you go it alone, the greater the dangers of tunnel vision. A biographer needs those outsider views, that different angle of vision, because it is so difficult for oneself to stand outside and look in. I daresay some biographers would say they don’t want other people’s takes on their subject; that it is their image they are presenting of their subject. I consider that naive. Biography is not a solipsistic genre, it should aim to be empathetic and objective. You don’t have to accept other people’s views, of course, but you would be wise to assay them, as they may be gold. How many times between July 1914 and July 1915, for instance, did followers write in with their interpretations of George’s and Kittie’s thinking, feelings, motivations that modified my own interpretation?
A late, but outstanding example would be the dialogue started by Clare Hopkins, Archivist of George’s alma mater Trinity College, Oxford, about the Arnold Pienne portrait commissioned by Kittie and presented to the college in 1930. I had always known this portrait, because Kittie kept a facsimile of it and this eventually joined her archive. But I had subconsciously, I think, dismissed it because it was (a) done not from life but from Hollyer’s ‘iconic’ photo-portrait, and (b) it didn’t look (to me) remotely like George…
That was to miss the point, which Clare raised in her guest blog of 9 December 2016 and followers discussed in subsequent Comments, namely WHY Kittie commissioned such an aethereal version of the Hollyer photograph? For — I accept — the Pienne silverpoint is so different from the chiaroscuro Hollyer portrait that its differences can’t be put down to ineptitude, especially as Kittie herself said she found the Pienne portrait ‘beautiful’. This is such an interesting and profound point where Kittie‘s biography is concerned, that it has prompted me to write a few new sentences about it in the relevant chapter, linking up with my treatment of the Hollyer original in an earlier one. I am hugely grateful to Clare, Jenny Hands and Celia Bockmuehl for having discussed it. The book would be poorer without their contribution, but without the blog that contribution couldn’t have happened!
Iconography can be a very important factor in writing a biography. By ‘can’ I mean if you decide to let it be. The impact of images from the past is slippery…subjective…fraught with interpretative dangers. I don’t propose saying more about the subject generally than that. In George Calderon’s case, there are only about twenty-five known images and they are so different. I well remember the impact that the published ones had on me back in the 1970s when I started translating Chekhov’s plays and came across George for the first time. As I have said before, the pallid, lean, closely shaven, immaculately groomed, tight-lipped, snowy starched collared ones put me in mind of Henry Newbolt or Lord Curzon, and that mind said to itself: ‘another Edwardian bastard’. The Hollyer portrait directly put me in mind of Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.
This, of course, is but one of the dangers of iconography in biography: you don’t intimately know and recognise the semiotics of the period, so your brain reaches for comparison with what you do know. For me, Holmes has been and always will be Basil Rathbone, not Benedict Cumberbatch. And perhaps there is more to it after all? George admired the Sherlock Holmes stories. With his own severely rational, forensic and cryptographic mind he was something of a Sherlock himself. He too smoked like a chimney, though not a pipe… It is possible that Basil Rathbone, who was twenty-four years younger than George, had come across George in London theatre life, as Rathbone was just becoming known as an actor. Could he have observed George’s dark looks and manner? Unfortunately Guy Rathbone, whom George almost certainly knew from the Stage Society’s British premiere of Uncle Vanya in May 1914, in which this Rathbone played the lead, was no relation to Basil, who was born in South Africa. Guy was an intelligent and promising actor born in Liverpool in 1884 and killed in action in 1916.
* * *
Nothing much happens in publishing houses before the middle of January as they wrestle with their backlog. I am still tweaking the typescript, a totally different, alternative version of the Introduction has been written, and there is now a fuller title:
George Calderon: Edwardian Genius
The Man and his Times
I keep updating (improving) the Bibliography and Acknowledgements. None of this is an obstacle to tackling publishers, as the core text is finished. I will outline my general publishing strategy in my next post.
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K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
George Calderon c.1901
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George Calderon, 1912
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Captain of the 11
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
‘Iconography’
Left: George Calderon as Sherlock Holmes, c. 1912, Right: Basil Rathbone as George Calderon, 1939
Lest it be thought that my previous post expressed a scepticism towards or weariness with blogging, I hasten to reassure followers: the pleasures and benefits of running Calderonia have been a fantastic bonus to writing the actual book. I never remotely expected to write a separate, day-to-day biography of the last year of George’s life, but that is what happened between 2014 and 2015, I hugely enjoyed writing it (despite the problems of ‘chronotopia’), and am proud to have been one of the first in on the genre of blography. But consider the other benefits: manuscripts discovered by followers and bought for the archive, references supplied by followers to mentions of George in obscure publications that I would never have found myself, leads suggested for fruitful further research, and above all the comments, observations, suggestions of fresh other minds.
The latter, I think, is why I would always recommend to biographers running a blog about their work in progress. Of course you do the slog of research mainly yourself, of course you have your own closely guarded image of the biography’s subject, of course (as we said of Ruth Scurr’s ‘autobiography’ of Aubrey), you actually have absolute control over the result. But the more you go it alone, the greater the dangers of tunnel vision. A biographer needs those outsider views, that different angle of vision, because it is so difficult for oneself to stand outside and look in. I daresay some biographers would say they don’t want other people’s takes on their subject; that it is their image they are presenting of their subject. I consider that naive. Biography is not a solipsistic genre, it should aim to be empathetic and objective. You don’t have to accept other people’s views, of course, but you would be wise to assay them, as they may be gold. How many times between July 1914 and July 1915, for instance, did followers write in with their interpretations of George’s and Kittie’s thinking, feelings, motivations that modified my own interpretation?
A late, but outstanding example would be the dialogue started by Clare Hopkins, Archivist of George’s alma mater Trinity College, Oxford, about the Arnold Pienne portrait commissioned by Kittie and presented to the college in 1930. I had always known this portrait, because Kittie kept a facsimile of it and this eventually joined her archive. But I had subconsciously, I think, dismissed it because it was (a) done not from life but from Hollyer’s ‘iconic’ photo-portrait, and (b) it didn’t look (to me) remotely like George…
That was to miss the point, which Clare raised in her guest blog of 9 December 2016 and followers discussed in subsequent Comments, namely WHY Kittie commissioned such an aethereal version of the Hollyer photograph? For — I accept — the Pienne silverpoint is so different from the chiaroscuro Hollyer portrait that its differences can’t be put down to ineptitude, especially as Kittie herself said she found the Pienne portrait ‘beautiful’. This is such an interesting and profound point where Kittie‘s biography is concerned, that it has prompted me to write a few new sentences about it in the relevant chapter, linking up with my treatment of the Hollyer original in an earlier one. I am hugely grateful to Clare, Jenny Hands and Celia Bockmuehl for having discussed it. The book would be poorer without their contribution, but without the blog that contribution couldn’t have happened!
Iconography can be a very important factor in writing a biography. By ‘can’ I mean if you decide to let it be. The impact of images from the past is slippery…subjective…fraught with interpretative dangers. I don’t propose saying more about the subject generally than that. In George Calderon’s case, there are only about twenty-five known images and they are so different. I well remember the impact that the published ones had on me back in the 1970s when I started translating Chekhov’s plays and came across George for the first time. As I have said before, the pallid, lean, closely shaven, immaculately groomed, tight-lipped, snowy starched collared ones put me in mind of Henry Newbolt or Lord Curzon, and that mind said to itself: ‘another Edwardian bastard’. The Hollyer portrait directly put me in mind of Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.
This, of course, is but one of the dangers of iconography in biography: you don’t intimately know and recognise the semiotics of the period, so your brain reaches for comparison with what you do know. For me, Holmes has been and always will be Basil Rathbone, not Benedict Cumberbatch. And perhaps there is more to it after all? George admired the Sherlock Holmes stories. With his own severely rational, forensic and cryptographic mind he was something of a Sherlock himself. He too smoked like a chimney, though not a pipe… It is possible that Basil Rathbone, who was twenty-four years younger than George, had come across George in London theatre life, as Rathbone was just becoming known as an actor. Could he have observed George’s dark looks and manner? Unfortunately Guy Rathbone, whom George almost certainly knew from the Stage Society’s British premiere of Uncle Vanya in May 1914, in which this Rathbone played the lead, was no relation to Basil, who was born in South Africa. Guy was an intelligent and promising actor born in Liverpool in 1884 and killed in action in 1916.
* * *
Nothing much happens in publishing houses before the middle of January as they wrestle with their backlog. I am still tweaking the typescript, a totally different, alternative version of the Introduction has been written, and there is now a fuller title:
George Calderon: Edwardian Genius
The Man and his Times
I keep updating (improving) the Bibliography and Acknowledgements. None of this is an obstacle to tackling publishers, as the core text is finished. I will outline my general publishing strategy in my next post.
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