Many followers will have realised, I think, that I kept my previous post in pole position for a month because I thought it might give my last batch of prospective publishers a good idea of the book’s scope and, dare I say it, novelty. I am aware that at least one follower is waiting with bated breath for an announcement on 30 September about the book’s future — and he shall have it, he shall have it.
Meanwhile, I thought it was about time that I posted a sample of George’s reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement, which was first appreciated by the novelist, critic, poet and Times naturalist Derwent May in his Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement (2001). Mention of the novels of Cornishman Arthur Quiller-Couch in two recent Comments by Clare Hopkins sent me straight to this by George, published in the TLS of 29 October 1908, pp. 376-77:
‘David Bran’
The people of Trescas, the Cornish village in which Mr Morley Roberts lays the scene of DAVID BRAN (Eveleigh Nash, 6s.), are not quite like the people of other villages. Their speech is full of dark sayings about wisdom and destiny and the heart of man; they pass their lives in a state of wonder at each other and at the ways of heaven. They are cast in heroic mould; the women all have strong hearts and strong hands; the men are giants; and, as for David himself, seven at a blow would be nothing to him. The old men in the blue jerseys, smashing their pipes by the shore, do not spin yarns and crack ribald jokes, as in other seaside places, but wag their beards continually over David and his love affairs. There is very little mental life in Trescas, except wondering about David and Lou and the white maiden with the shining golden hair and the eyes of blue. David had a wonderful way with the women; they used to waylay him in the dark and say, ‘Oh! be good to me; kiss me once, David’, but he never really cared about it. He loved but two. This is the story of how he wooed a dark maiden and a fair maiden at the same time, and could not possibly do with less. And when he married Kate he would still punch Isaac’s head if he so much as spoke to Lou. Mr Roberts has the courage of his opinions. He detects a bigamous instinct in man, and justifies those that give it active expression because they fulfil their nature. His heart bleeds also for the women who never marry; and he would like to kill both these birds with one stone. About the instinct of many men he is no doubt right, though the instinct is not universal; and, indeed, other men-novelists have often made the bigamous instinct the theme of their novels (women-writers never — each sex demands monogamy in the other); it is the basis of ‘Richard Feveral’ and ‘Harry Richmond’, of Tourgeniev’s ‘Smoke’ and ‘Spring Waters’. But Mr Roberts presents the theme in its most unconvincing aspect. In real life there is always parenthesis, or eclipse; in ‘David Bran’ both passions are present in equal force at the same moment. While David is kissing Lou on the cliff he is thinking about Kate, and on the eve of his wedding with Kate he is leaning against a wall and crying because he feels that it is a kind of separation from Lou. The book is interesting; but it moves slowly; there is really no more than material in it for a short story, and this is eked out with not very recondite moralizations by the author, couched in an archaic Trescas dialect, compounded out of Malory and Moses and Dr Gilbert Murray’s Euripedes.
This review is a good example of what Derwent May calls George’s ‘witty scepticism’, which ‘aligned him wholly with the younger group on the paper’ that included Virginia Woolf and Percy Lubbock. What made it possible for Mr May to write his fascinating history was the fact that the authorship of the unsigned reviews had been cracked by matching the number of lines in the review to the payments by line in the TLS account books. This revealed, for example, that George had written 54 reviews between 1905 and 1912, earning him a useful £13,160 at today’s prices. He was originally taken on to write about ‘serious’ subjects like folklore, Russia, the Balkans, psychical research, but the editor, Bruce Richmond, discovered by chance that George was most entertaining on novels, of which he reviewed fifteen in 1908 alone.
What intrigues me about George’s review is that it seems to display a Cornish novel that already contains features — one might say stereotypes — of other Cornish novels through Daphne du Maurier down to Poldark and Helen Dunmore’s Zennor in Darkness (1993). Was there already, in 1908, a recognisable Cornish equivalent to the ‘kailyard school’ of Scottish novels? Is the Cornish novel a purely literary genre that can be practised by anyone, whether Cornish or not, or is it strictly speaking a nationalist genre, in which case are its topos-es (‘stereotypes’) supposed to be genuine features of Cornishness? I look forward to someone telling us!
Related
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George Calderon, 1912
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Captain of the 11
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon c.1901
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Proto-Poldark?
Many followers will have realised, I think, that I kept my previous post in pole position for a month because I thought it might give my last batch of prospective publishers a good idea of the book’s scope and, dare I say it, novelty. I am aware that at least one follower is waiting with bated breath for an announcement on 30 September about the book’s future — and he shall have it, he shall have it.
Meanwhile, I thought it was about time that I posted a sample of George’s reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement, which was first appreciated by the novelist, critic, poet and Times naturalist Derwent May in his Critical Times: The History of the Times Literary Supplement (2001). Mention of the novels of Cornishman Arthur Quiller-Couch in two recent Comments by Clare Hopkins sent me straight to this by George, published in the TLS of 29 October 1908, pp. 376-77:
This review is a good example of what Derwent May calls George’s ‘witty scepticism’, which ‘aligned him wholly with the younger group on the paper’ that included Virginia Woolf and Percy Lubbock. What made it possible for Mr May to write his fascinating history was the fact that the authorship of the unsigned reviews had been cracked by matching the number of lines in the review to the payments by line in the TLS account books. This revealed, for example, that George had written 54 reviews between 1905 and 1912, earning him a useful £13,160 at today’s prices. He was originally taken on to write about ‘serious’ subjects like folklore, Russia, the Balkans, psychical research, but the editor, Bruce Richmond, discovered by chance that George was most entertaining on novels, of which he reviewed fifteen in 1908 alone.
What intrigues me about George’s review is that it seems to display a Cornish novel that already contains features — one might say stereotypes — of other Cornish novels through Daphne du Maurier down to Poldark and Helen Dunmore’s Zennor in Darkness (1993). Was there already, in 1908, a recognisable Cornish equivalent to the ‘kailyard school’ of Scottish novels? Is the Cornish novel a purely literary genre that can be practised by anyone, whether Cornish or not, or is it strictly speaking a nationalist genre, in which case are its topos-es (‘stereotypes’) supposed to be genuine features of Cornishness? I look forward to someone telling us!
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