I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that biography is going through a particularly fertile and innovative time. I’m always interested, then, in biographies about new subjects and biographies that tell their stories in new ways.
Next week, blogmaster James Miles will give a guest post on a biography of the ‘Peanuts’ cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, and at the end of the month Alison Miles will present the fruits of her reading of the novels of Elizabeth Jane Howard and the new biography of Howard by Artemis Cooper, A Dangerous Innocence. Later still, I hope to read and review an extraordinary-sounding Cambridge biography with which I may have a connection, A Life Discarded, by Alexander Masters. If anyone would like to do a guest post on a recent biography that they found arresting and innovative, they are very welcome to contact me through my website, www.patrickmiles.co.uk . The standard limit is 1000 words and images are of course encouraged.
Meanwhile, after Easter we shall be very favoured indeed to carry a guest post by L.W.B. Brockliss, author of the monumental and highly entertaining The University of Oxford: A History (OUP, 2016). Professor Brockliss’s interests range from European medical education, the Enlightenment, childhood and violence, to celebrity, Horatio Nelson, and Irish clerics. For the last three years he has been leading a prosopographical study of the Victorian and Edwardian professions. As I understand it, prosopography is the investigation of the common characteristics of an historical group, and I am greatly looking forward to reading what Laurence makes of George Calderon in that framework.
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I have just received by Inter-Library Loan an image of what appears to be the only review of the production of The Fountain that was stage-managed by pancake-maker Philip Harben, produced by his father Hubert, starred his mother Mary Jerrold in the lead, and was performed at the Strand Theatre, London, on Sunday 13 December 1925 (see my post of 9 February). The review commences rather startlingly:
It is interesting to note that the Sunday evening meetings of the Independent Labour Party at the Strand (lent by Mr Arthur Bourchier) have led to the establishment of a national movement ‘to link Socialism with music, drama, and art’. The I.L.P. Arts Guild has already 150 dramatic societies, choirs, orchestras, and art circles connected with the Socialist movement affiliated […]
Sunday evening’s celebration, which drew a large audience to the Strand, took the form of an excellent performance of the late George Calderon’s three-act comedy ‘The Fountain’ […] Needless to say, its various Socialistic qualities and references to economics went like hot cakes among the audience […]
This can only be described, in the modern parlance, as ‘a bizzarity’. Did no-one remember, or know, that in the Great Unrest of 1912 George had been a ‘strikebreaker’ and a ‘blackleg’, that he rejected Socialism, did not like G.B. Shaw, and had written a famous preface to The Fountain in which he described its Fabian hero as ‘not a socialist at all, he only thinks he is a socialist’?! It is very difficult to believe George would have wanted it presented as an Independent Labour Party event, or that Kittie, who abominated the trade union shoguns and syndicalism, would have licenced this production.
Nevertheless, she did licence it, but probably only to please her and George’s friends the Harbens, further their acting careers, and promote George’s play at any cost. The Stage sang the praises of all the actors, especially Mrs Harben as the ‘charmingly impractical Chenda Wren, all heart and no brain’, and did exactly what the Harbens must have hoped for: recommended that The Fountain be given a London run. Incidentally, the review also contains the hitherto unknown fact that there was a production of the play ‘at the Hampstead Garden City a year or two ago’.
What can one say but ‘everything is in the eye of the beholder’? I seem to remember G.B. Shaw himself being vastly amused on a visit to Bolshevik Russia to discover that The Forsyte Saga was published in large numbers by the state. Knowing Galsworthy and his politics personally, Shaw thought the novelist would be bemused at his popularity in the Socialist Paradise. But Russians explained to him that The Forsyte Saga was the perfect deconstruction of bourgeois society… Similarly, in the USSR of the 1970s I was told that Brideshead Revisited was an unsurpassable portrayal of the decadence of the British upper classes.
Despite George having explained in his preface that The Fountain was not a political satire on slum landlords and ‘the Wicked Rich’, as he put it, the members of the Independent Labour Party were presumably determined to ‘read’ it in that Shavian manner at the performance on 13 December 1925. How George might have laughed!
Patrick: Barthes may be out of fashion, or vieux jeu, but there is nothing truer than his proposition that the meaning of a work lies with the reader rather than the author: for the simple reason that the reader is (temporarily) alive to call the tune, while the writer has decently departed the scene–or, left his text to fend for itself. It should not surprise us therefore that George Calderon’s play The Fountain was put on at the Strand Theatre in 1925 by members of the I.L.P. Arts Guild. If the Guild found something provocative in the play, so much the better for the play (and for them).
Remember Orwell’s Animal Farm, which has been turned inside out and back again by people in search of its ‘real’ political meaning; and even his currently chart-topping Nineteen Eighty-Four has been (and is being) dragged through a hedge backwards, to emerge ideologically bedraggled. Orwell may well have protested, in an essay, that everything he had ever written was ‘against totalitarianism, and in defence of democratic socialism’, but once he has floated off his raft of fiction, there is no way to predict what contradictory currents will take it where, and who may climb aboard to hoist the Jolly Roger.
If literal, monologic Lenin could venerate Chernyshevsky, and abominate Dostoevsky, what does this tell us about the relation between politics and literature? Political discourse ends with a vote (or a revolution), whereas, as Keats persuasively put it, poetry ‘ends in speculation’; speculation which Lenin and his like had no time for. One is reassured that the I.L.P. (one recalls, the only party of which Orwell was ever–briefly!–a member) did.
A soaring and scintillating sequoia of suasive and serendipitous semantics, Damian! Seriously, this is the work of a master rhetorician and I admire and thank you for it in equally profound measure. The counter-argument to my Meldrewesque shrugging over the I.L.P. needed making, and you have made it exemplarily. I am not convinced, however, that you yourself are wholly convinced! Can one simply throw the author out with the Barthes water? To take a random example, I would believe Chekhov any day when he said The Cherry Orchard is a comedy, rather than Stanislavsky’s ‘reading’ of it as a weeperama.