I was intending to post about this subject in February, but my attention wandered and the relevant newspaper cuttings got buried. I am very glad that I put it off, as I have now read this recently reprinted book, which startlingly addresses (answers?) many of the speculations I found myself making five months ago:
Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
The Times of 28 December 2016 carried a full-page article entitled ‘How Wodehouse answered his critics’. It reported that a copy of P.G. Wodehouse’s account of his wartime experiences had just been deposited in the British Library, and quoted from it his ‘detailed and spirited defence against accusations of being a Nazi sympathiser’.
For those unaware, Wodehouse (‘Plum’) was arrested by the Germans at Le Touquet in 1940, interned for nearly a year in Germany, and shortly after his release into the Reich gave a series of radio broadcasts from Berlin in which he portrayed his experiences of internment with his inimitable epigonic-Edwardian, public schoolboy humour. This provoked outrage in post-Blitz Britain and after the war Wodehouse was investigated by MI5, who concluded he was not a Nazi sympathiser, just ‘naive’. But I have to say, the quotations from the document printed in The Times are not so much a ‘defence’ as a lethally honed attack on some of his denigrators, e.g. A.A. Milne, and on this evidence Wodehouse was not naive in any usual sense of the word.
At the time, it was a cause célèbre (Wodehouse never returned to Britain). I had read George Orwell’s essay ‘In Defence of P.G. Wodehouse’ years ago, and sure enough next day The Times carried a reader’s letter referring to it. The reader called it ‘a well-informed analysis of why Wodehouse was slandered’, but I don’t think Orwell believed Wodehouse was slandered, simply that all kinds of people with their own agendas had generated a witch hunt that had gone on for far too long. Orwell’s essay is a complex masterpiece well worth reading. The Times reader rightly stressed that Orwell had defended Wodehouse’s art and called for the ‘incident’ to be ‘closed’, but he omitted to mention that Orwell believed Wodehouse had demonstrated ‘stupidity’ and that he, Orwell, thought ‘the really interesting question is how and why he could be so stupid’. Orwell was right: this is indeed the interesting question.
I have always found it surprising that Orwell exonerated Wodehouse from allowing himself to be a ‘useful idiot’ (Lenin’s phrase) for a homicidal political system. Of all people, Orwell was the least likely to accept Wodehouse’s defence that he was ‘never interested in politics’. Rather as Chekhov said in the nineteenth century that ‘writers must engage with politics to the extent that it is necessary to defend themselves from politics’, Orwell is renowned for believing every individual must ‘interest themselves’ in the politics of the totalitarian age or soon find themselves its victims. So why, apart from his own humanity and compassion, did Orwell forgive Wodehouse his ‘stupidity’?
Two days later The Times published another letter on the subject, which made me sit up. The reader quoted Evelyn Waugh’s belief that ‘Wodehouse’s world can never stale and he will release future generations from captivity that may be more irksome than our own’, adding from himself: ‘In Wodehouse’s exquisite descriptions of worlds that never really existed, the reader escapes beyond the often bleaker nature of those that do.’ It so happens that I know this to be literally true. In the leaden depths of the Soviet era I asked Muscovite expert on English literature Gabriel Yegorov how he could put up with queuing for hours for potatoes, say, or a pair of pants, and he replied: ‘I just dream of Blandings…’ He explained that he really meant it. He could stand there for hours imagining life in ‘Plum’s’ Blandings and himself taking part in it.
So, I reasoned, Wodehouse’s writing is escapist. Orwell gives a brilliant analysis of how closely it relates to the Edwardian world in which Wodehouse started publishing, but he also emphasises that it hardly developed, so that even in 1936 ‘Plum’ was still writing about the life of the Edwardian man-about-town, the ‘knut’. In any case for Orwell this innocent, sunlit pre-1914 world never really existed, and ‘Bertie Wooster, if he ever existed, was killed round about 1915’. The sheer length, unreality and stasis of Wodehouse’s oeuvre, then, make it not so much an idyll as a Utopia. It is pie in the sky.
This realisation alarmed me. I have never been able to get ‘into’ Wodehouse’s world. I have known so many highly intelligent people who are Wodehouse addicts that I have driven myself to read him several times, but I have never got further than a few pages. He is clever, often hilarious, but I simply cannot relate to his world; it leaves me cold. His language is very precise, but rather one-dimensional. The range of emotion and body language of his characters may not seem small, but it is limited. There is no sense whatever of a physical life outside what you are reading on the page. As Orwell put it, you can’t imagine a love affair in Wodehouse’s world being consummated; I would add that you can’t imagine any lavatories. ‘Plum’s’ world is not just a Utopia, it is a kind of system.
At this point I began to wonder whether Wodehouse was simply Aspergic. I don’t know how far the syndrome was recognised by the 1940s, but I do think it possible that Orwell intuited something clinical like this in Wodehouse and that is the only reason he absolved him from personal responsibility for being a useful idiot. ‘If my analysis of Wodehouse’s mentality is accepted’, wrote Orwell, the idea that Wodehouse consciously abetted the Nazi propaganda machine was ‘untenable and ridiculous’. Wodehouse was not ‘a person capable of understanding the nature of quislingism’ (my italics); he had a ‘complete lack of political awareness’ and seemed unable to acquire one.
Orwell had already investigated the psychopathic mutations of utopianism. In his 1940 essay ‘Inside the Whale’ he wrote that English intellectuals ‘can swallow totalitarianism because they have no experience of anything except liberalism’. Of a line in one of W.H. Auden’s fellow-traveller poems, he observed:
Notice the phrase ‘necessary murder’. It could only be used by someone to whom murder is at most a word. Personally I would not speak so lightly of murder. […] To me, murder is something to be avoided. So it is to any ordinary person. The Hitlers and Stalins find murder necessary, but they don’t advertise their callousness, and they don’t speak of it as murder; it is ‘liquidation’, ‘elimination’, or some other soothing phrase. Mr Auden’s amoralism is only possible if you are the kind of person who is always somewhere else when the trigger is pulled. So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.
But there is another way of looking at these (undoubted) facts. It is perfectly excusable for people to have ‘no experience of anything except liberalism’ or to not know that fire is hot, but it is not excusable for them to fail to exercise their imaginations, to fail to make the effort to understand, what genocidal totalitarianism or fire are. In fact their failure is so extraordinary that one is bound to ask, as with Wodehouse, whether such people are psychologically capable of it. Is the kind of lack of empathy that Orwell describes a symptom of psychopathy, or at least autism, or at least Asperger Syndrome?
At this point in my February meditations, I paused. Is it conceivable that imaginative literature, of all things, can be Aspergic? To write, I reasoned, you have got to experience feelings and you have got to extend yourself, for heaven’s sake, to other people’s feelings. In fact fiction is essentially about other people’s feelings, isn’t it? If as a writer you lacked empathy, how would you have anything to write about and why would readers, who we assume largely have empathy, want to read you?
A moment’s reflection, however, suggests that these assumptions are wrong. For a start, the autism spectrum is broad, and so many people lie somewhere on it, that it is highly likely some writers are Aspergic or autistic, can live with the fact, or may not even be aware of it. In any case, when you read a novel or short story, you know nothing about the author, whom you do not see, you only see and read his/her text. So what is it about the text that might be described as Aspergic or autistic?
I gave this some thought. I could not actually think of a creative text, a piece of fiction, that I would call ‘autistic’. In the late 1970s, I think it was, Norman Stone infamously described the voluminous historiography of E.H. Carr as ‘autistic’ because, in Stone’s view, it was a purely abstract account of Soviet history based on official statistics that Carr could not bring himself to accept were lies and it never mentioned the horrific sufferings of flesh and blood Russians; it had therefore lost contact with reality and was Utopian. Personally, I agreed with Stone. But Carr’s History of the Bolshevik Revolution is non-fiction.
However, I can say what it is about someone’s writing that I associate with the adjective ‘Aspergic’. The writing is in some way — perhaps some attractive or even beautiful way — etiolated, unreal, one-dimensional. The language lacks ‘thickness’, emotional allusiveness of any sort. It has, perhaps, a hugely impressive forward-driving ‘horizontality’, but no ‘vertical’ dimension. Similarly, characters have no imaginable life outside the work (within which they may well be lively enough), and there is no reality felt or imaginable outside the world of the work itself. This loss of contact with the real world (the world that readers are still living in) may go unnoticed, as the author’s world may be so vividly realised, but it is a very significant lack; it is bound to make the ‘Aspergic’ text’s world approximate to a detached utopia or dystopia. Writers who always produce a sense of their text being connected to a wider world (for example, I would say, Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Chekhov, Proust), have been described as practising ‘anacrusis’, i.e. instinctively leaving in extra bits and loose ends continuing ‘offstage’, away from the focus of the text into the world outside. If you stop to think of it whilst reading an ‘Aspergic’ text, you realise that it is totally self-contained; it is precise, even ‘exquisite’ as the Times reader put it, but there is no more to it than its literal meaning; it is low on reality’s dirt and roughage; it is remarkably ‘finished’; it is remarkably systemised.
Personally, I feel G.B. Shaw’s work is ‘Aspergic’. Its single-minded concern with ideas and argument does not correspond to my own experience of people or the world. Most of the time his characters’ speech is ‘head-speech’, not ‘art-speech’, to use D.H. Lawrence’s term. This is not to say, of course, that Shaw’s plays are not great and witty polemics, but with a few exceptions I do not feel they are continuous with mucky reality. They hardly move me. It does not surprise me that Shaw denied the Holocaust and the Stalinist purges, insisting that they were figments of British propaganda. And, of course, it is inevitable that comic worlds like Wodehouse’s, or the worlds of children’s literature like those of Ransome and Stevenson, should be reduced or simplified worlds without grime and blood. But I still find the world of Swallows and Amazons creepily unreal — unreadable as an adult — and I sense there may be a connection between that and Ransome’s eccentric belief in Russian communism. Gulliver’s Travels has several features that might be called ‘Aspergic’, but they are perfectly attuned to Swift’s purpose — incomparable satire. Ezra Pound would also be on my list of writers of ‘Aspergic’ texts, and the beautiful constructivist world of Bolshevik Evgenii Zamiatin (see my post of 5 July 2016) seems to me full of traits that match the syndrome. Perhaps it is significant that all these writers are male. I have never ever met a woman who liked Wodehouse.
But enough, I told myself back in February: these are all very good writers! It follows, then, that there can be nothing inherently negative about Asperger Syndrome, despite the fact that you overwhelmingly read about it being bad for you and others. Indeed, I thought, most of the best mathematicians, engineers, physicists and structuralists that I know are blatantly Aspergic, so where would we be without them? At that point I stopped thinking, as I felt I had already exceeded my qualifications in this area.
Simon Baron-Cohen addresses the issue of my last paragraph in his brilliant chapter ‘When Zero Degrees of Empathy is Positive’. The empathy difficulties of people with Asperger Syndrome are ‘associated with having a brain that processes information in ways that can lead to talent’. ‘People with Asperger Syndrome […] systemise to an extraordinary degree’, they have ‘a brain that is exquisitely tuned to notice patterns’, and ‘spotting such patterns is key to our ability to invent and improve’. Moreover, they are fascinated by timeless patterns (they do not like change). Their ‘systemizing mind steps out of time to seek truths that are not tied to the present’, and ‘at least among the natural patterns, the truths may be eternal ones’. Human society ‘owes a special debt to those who have innovated in the fields of technology, music, science, medicine, mathematics, history, philosophy, engineering and other systemizing fields. The fact that they may be challenged when it comes to empathy is all the more reason to make our society more Zero-Positive-friendly’. I recommend reading the book from cover to cover.
Like autism, like Asperger’s, like everything perhaps – is not enthusiasm for the works of P.G. Wodehouse on a spectrum? I wouldn’t go out of my way to read a Blandings novel, but if it was the only available book in a holiday cottage, say, I would find it acceptable enough. Despite being a woman!
Confronted by a choice of two, I would definitely pick Wodehouse over Ransome. (And not because the latter wrote for children. One of the guilty pleasures of holiday cottages, surely, is reading Enid Blyton.) The main defect of Wodehouse, I have always thought, is simply that all his novels are essentially the same. Whereas Swallows and Amazon – yes, you are exactly right that it feels creepy. But why? Could you elaborate on this? It can’t just be the lack of realism or the self-contained world; and I hope you don’t mean that, conversely, it is the class system that makes me able to empathise with the Famous Five!
This is as good a moment as any to bring out another deep literary question from the back of my mind – but with apologies if you have answered it somewhere on your blog already. What is it about Edwardian novels that makes them so very difficult to read? I don’t think I am alone in finding this to be true. I have had some professional engagement with Arthur Quiller-Couch and Margaret L. Woods, for example. Both were hugely popular in their day, but – dear me, what a struggle. Do you have any top tips – things to bear in mind perhaps, or allowances to be made – to make fiction of the period more palatable?
Dear Clare, it is good to have your extended views again! (I quite miss the days of the Great Commemoration Dialogues, 2014-15.) Thank you.
As usual, you make serious points and ask penetrating questions…so much so, that I doubt I can answer them at all satisfactorily. Let’s hope other followers pitch in?
I agree that enthusiasm for most writers seems to be on a spectrum. But in my experience enthusiasm for Wodehouse is bunched at either end of the spectrum; it’s polarised. People either seem to be wild about him or can’t stand him. Thus Waugh, Orwell and Yegorov were seriously admiring and I knew a Cambridge professor who read the Wodehouse canon once a year with undiminished delight. My own father, who was not a great reader, read almost entirely Wodehouse in the 1940s and 50s, as far as I can make out, but my mother was scathing about Wodehouse’s superficiality and in the 1960s she weaned him off ‘Plum’ onto D.H. Lawrence. English masters at school were equally scathing about Wodehouse’s work. I would agree with you that if the only available book in a holiday cottage was a Blandings novel, I would lap it up…but what kind of recommendation is that? I could say the same of Barbara Cartland!
Your invitation to me to say why Swallows and Amazons feels creepy is a humdinger. I think I would really need to do an Orwellian deep analysis job to get anywhere near the bottom of it. Make no mistake, I read all the Ransome books when I was about ten and couldn’t put them down. But even so there was something that I found weird about their world — fascinatingly weird, perhaps, but still other-planetary. It could be partly social; one was deeply aware these children came from another ‘drawer’. But I don’t think it was just that. Although I can’t say I knew anything about sex at that age, I think I felt deeply that this was a totally asexual or unerotic world (where, unlike the real world, you could seriously name a girl ‘Titty’), and my whole experience of the playground and classroom world was the opposite. Stevenson’s Black Arrow, a favourite at the time, was quite different: RLS hit just the right (low) level of innocent love and curiosity between boy and girl to seem of the real world. Then there were Ransome’s own illustrations. Dire! Some of them made the children look more like pieces of ectoplasm than humans. Profoundly alienating, even then. If this is how Ransome saw children, it’s surely worrying. On the other hand, remembering my enjoyment of his books at the time, perhaps the problem is simply that fifty years later one can’t re-enter that ‘Aspergic’ world, as it is genuinely childlike?
When I first visited Trinity’s archive an unbelievable six years ago, you said to me cheerfully that you found George’s Downy V. Green unreadable, and I knew where you were coming from! Most Edwardian fiction falls, I think, into this category. Partly, perhaps, the problem is typographical. They put too much white space between the lines, the font was too big, the font was too serif-y for us today. So their ‘beautifully’ printed books are literally more difficult for the brain to process, perhaps, than we are used to, and than Victorian books are, even. But I think the main reason we can’t get into them is that the vast majority ‘tell’ too much rather than ‘show’ and the language is too unremarkable and just informative. Otherwise, though, a factor must be that we, unlike Mrs Woods’s readers, can’t slip effortlessly into the context in which they were written…it doesn’t already mean anything to us.
I think my only advice would be to try and ignore the typography, or get a modern edition, and try to read the language slowly, concentrating on it as language. Eventually you might get hooked. This was certainly my own experience with George’s Downy and Dwala: when I just picked them up to read them, I quickly wilted, but reading his prose more slowly gave me much more. Even so, it seems to me, it’s more than likely an Edwardian novel isn’t worth reading if you can’t ‘get into it’…the future fate, I expect, of so many of our own!
Thank you, Patrick, for such detailed answers to my questions. I really am not qualified to engage in anything so grand as a dialogue on this, but here goes with a very tentative response.
Edwardian novels then. Your unappealing fonts theory sounds very plausible. The kindle store denied all knowledge of poor old Daisy Woods, but I have now downloaded ‘the Major Works of Arthur Quiller-Couch’ and will see how I get on absorbing his language in different sizes. The difference between ‘telling’ and ‘showing’ is also interesting, and I will try to keep an eye out for instances of this along the way.
I am shocked to learn that I was so memorably rude about George Calderon’s writing when you first visited the Trinity archive! But I am proud to say I have since read Downy V. Green not once but twice. Realising that the story was set in a barely-disguised Trinity College of circa 1890 was undoubtedly what made it readable for me. It is also very short. As I recall, there were two things in particular that I initially found off-putting. The misleading title was the first – it sounds like a sporting fixture, but V. is in fact the initial of the eponymous hero’s middle name. I still find it surprising that George engaged in this irritating verbal trickery – or at least, why did he not then develop the joke in the text? (To digress, was there ever a less engaging book title than John Buchan’s ‘thriller’ The Island of Sheep? I once yawned my way through that in a holiday cottage.) My second difficulty with Downy was his painful American accent. Am I alone in finding the phonetic spelling out of regional speech deeply tiresome and very little help at normal reading speed?
So, Swallows and Amazons. My experience of this is very different from yours. I’m afraid my opinion was entirely based on a distant memory of reading the series as a child. Unlike you, I didn’t love Ransome once upon a time; I read his stories because I read anything that I could get my hands on. There seemed to be never enough books in the world then. Swallows and Amazons is the only Ransome title I can remember in any detail – though not the illustrations as it turns out. Looking (online) at his drawings now, I don’t agree with you there – I think they are rather sweet! But you are dead right about the name Titty. That was embarrassing – and I wonder if this whole ‘weirdness’, or ‘creepiness’ thing is actually nothing more than that: embarrassment for the characters. These were children old enough to sail boats with remarkable skill and competence – so why were they still playing babyish make-believe games? They had real boats, tents and islands – but they chose to waste their long hours of freedom pretending to be pirates. (At least poor, damaged, friendless Christopher Robin had the excuse of being trapped in his nursery!)
You say that the world of Swallows and Amazons is ‘genuinely childlike’ – but this seems to contradict your earlier remark that your ‘whole experience of the playground and classroom world was the opposite.’ I wonder if my struggle to ‘get it’ was somehow tied in with the asexuality that you identify. Was I sensing the unreality of idealised children playing nicely (‘nicely’ being a synonym for ‘unnaturally’) in a late and subtle manifestation of that Victorian notion of childhood innocence and ‘purity’?
Then again, it may simply be that I was just not sufficiently interested in sailing. Oh dear. Sincerest apologies to all you enthusiasts at the other end of the Ransome spectrum. Do tell – which were the books that you didn’t much like as kids….?
There is a sense that EVERYONE out there likes Swallows and Amazons and possibly all Ransome’s other children’s books. If you DO, then please DEFEND HIM AND THEM against my and Clare’s doubts and aspersions!
Thank you very much indeed, Clare, for stirring up our brain cells further on the subject. I had not thought of it before, but I think you are right that at the time a lot of us devoured Ransome because at that age we read anything we could get our hands on (my parents could not afford such hardbacks, so I read them all from the local library). Closely questioning my memory, I also think you are right that there was a slight embarrassment for the characters, as you put it. But they were such obviously nice children amazingly more competent than oneself, that one couldn’t help but be drawn into their world and really like them, although one wasn’t ‘like’ them… It’s that unselfconsciousness of the characters of Swallows and Amazons and our acceptance of it then that I think is authentically childlike; one was instantly convinced at that age, but one can see so much missing now. Incidentally, on reflection I think it may not be the asexuality as such of Ransome’s world that threw one, but the rather polite English in which they addressed each other, which precluded any deeper interaction (even at that age) and seemed unreal. They didn’t communicate quite as we other children did.
Finally, may I emphasise that I could well understand in 2011 why you found Downy V. Green unreadable. The fact that you have read it and enjoyed it (?) twice since perhaps proves my point that over a hundred years later one has to make a conscious effort to understand the context of the Edwardian literature one is reading, which is often difficult, though in this case as Trinity’s archivist and author of the college’s history you are probably the best qualified reader alive! I can’t be sure, but I think Edwardians reading Downy V. Green would have assumed the forename plus initial format was American; Downy’s American in George’s rendering certainly wowed Edwardian readers (but American critics weren’t so impressed). For a longer exposition of George’s Bildungsnovelle (which is all of 40,000 words) you will have to read the biography!
Personally, I think Ransome’s illustrations are bizarrely varied in style and detail. As depictions of real children some of them are pretty unsettling, I find. It’s amazing to me that he rejected two other experienced illustrators and insisted on doing his own.
Finally, in my original post about writers who were possibly Aspergic, in addition to Simon Baron-Cohen’s chapter ‘When Zero Degrees of Empathy is Positive’ I should have mentioned that a recent study has strongly suggested that genes linked to autism have actually been selected by evolution because they are associated with intellectual and technological progress. However, these genetic variants come ‘at a cost — an increased risk of autism spectrum disorders’ (i, 28 February 2017).
Dear Patrick, I feel ready to report back on the challenge that I set myself a fortnight ago: I have now read 60% of an Edwardian novel, ahem! It has been a very thought-provoking experiment, and, against all expectations, I find that I have rather enjoyed it. I anticipate reading to the end with some pleasure. The novel that I chose was Arthur Quiller-Couch’s The Mayor of Troy. It was published in 1906, so falls bang in the middle of the period, and it is set in his native county of Cornwall. There is much interest these days in Q the professional Cornishman.
So what have I learned? You were absolutely right that reading an Edwardian novel in a modern format would make it more palatable. On the Kindle there were no distractions from the thickness, fragility or smell of the paper, nor from the size, spacing or serifs of the font. The characters are all much larger than life; strongly drawn, with detailed descriptions of their foibles and of various notable incidents in their lives. The plot turns around their typical plans and activities. The background and setting of the story are discrete and specific – Troy (based on Q’s home of Fowey) is a small town where the residents have smuggling in their blood, but are living in fear of a Napoleonic invasion. What the whole scenario most reminds me of, I realise, is situation comedy. Indeed, the book could almost be a forerunner of ‘Dad’s Army’! (Those poor Edwardians, with no telly to watch in the evenings…) It hasn’t yet made me laugh out loud – as Wodehouse might, pace your experiences – but yes, I have found it surprisingly entertaining.
I have also found myself comparing it to the only other Edwardian novel that I have read (so far) – George Calderon’s Downy V. Green. The characters are similarly exaggerated; the action (I hesitate to call it a plot) is episodic and dependent on their idiosyncrasies; and there is a distinct ‘situation’ in the self-contained Oxford college community. I can’t help wondering if George really intended it as satire at all – or just good old crowd-pleasing ROFL comedy.
Your point about telling not showing also holds good. The narrative of The Mayor of Troy has a very strong authorial voice – with frequent first-person asides addressed to the reader. I don’t recall that George does this. As I click through the pages, I can almost sense Q twinkling at me. It occurs to me to wonder if he knew George. They didn’t overlap at Trinity College, although they only missed each other by a year. Both were the first of their family to be ‘up’ at Oxford, and both had won academic awards but failed to take First Class Honours. Both lived extravagantly as undergraduates, and both went on to forge profitable careers as writers. Allegedly, Q wrote his first novel to pay off his student debts. Might he have inspired George in some way? The dons and older scholars must surely have talked about his success. Then again, the two men had very different views on the big stuff like religion, and there are no letters from George in Q’s archive. Have you encountered him at all in your research?
Goodness, Clare, I do admire your determination and stamina. What a challenge you set yourself, yet you saw it through staunchly: Edwardians would be proud of you! My warmest congratulations. Could this be the start of a new area of expertise for you? Will you soldier on into this territory?
I am particularly impressed because you started with Q’s novels, which I don’t think I would have been tempted to myself. Yet you give such a good account of The Mayor of Troy that it does sound entertaining (I’m a ‘Dad’s Army’ addict), so I may be tempted. Where I think you are absolutely right is to choose an Edwardian writer who approximates to typical. I mean, James’s The Golden Bowl, or Forster’s A Room with a View, or Wells’s Tono-Bungay, may historically be Edwardian, but they are wholly untypical. Mrs Woods, wife of your Trinity president, is far more typical of the Victorian-Edwardian novelist; will you try her, next? Archie Ripley owned a copy of her A Village Tragedy, by the way.
Yes, I think ‘exaggeration’ of characters is probably a feature that all Edwardian readers enjoyed and one that Q and Downy V. Green share. George’s friend Michael Furse’s word for it was ‘burlesque’. George’s Downy was an attempt to cash in on the public interest in Rhodes’s will and the Greek controversy at Oxford with a ROFL burlesque; I think it’s true that (unlike Dwala) George’s conception wasn’t satiric. Even so, there are some serious undercurrents to Downy, e.g. the thesis that Oxford might learn something from the Americans (motto of the book: ‘They who teach, learn’).
I have to confess that I looked up Q on Wikipedia because I only knew him, as it were, as a Cambridge professor of English literature and his relationship with Leavis. But I am extremely grateful to you for pointing me in his direction. He was almost as much of a polymath as George! I was amazed to discover that he was five years older than George, and I would have thought it very likely that they met in the literary world, but as you say, they were very different in character and views. Moreover, I hazard a guess that George would, unfortunately, have mocked Cornishism…he wrote an absolutely hilarious review of a Cornish novel in the TLS of 1908, which I might be persuaded one day to post on Calderonia. Yet if Q was so successful upon leaving Oxford — and with novels — his example could well have inspired George. If the latter hadn’t got obsessed by 1891 with Russian, he could have followed Q’s lead…
You’ve got me worried now: is there a single reference to Q in George’s extant correspondence, or is it a ‘phantom fly in amber’ (see Calderonia passim)?