Archived ‘Watch this Space’

This page contains archived ‘Watch this Space’ posts, with the most recent first.

Watch this Space 19 May 2016

19/5/16. Putting them all together, the number of themes that my consultants (see previous post below) feel should be addressed in my Introduction is considerable; impractically so. I have spent some time, therefore, working out the overlap and identifying what they see as the core substance that must go in. I have completely recast the Introduction in my head, written what I think is a strong beginning, and words are beginning to present themselves for the rest. But I keep rearranging the themes mentally, dipping into the introductions of brilliant recent biographies, pursuing all kinds of ideas. I am determined to keep an open mind about this for a week or two longer. I am in no hurry with it, already have my doubts about the ‘strong beginning’, and know I shall have to let the new Introduction lie for a month or so after I have finished it… Perhaps it will then go the way of the first two drafts. But surely it will be an improvement on them?

It would be reasonable to ask why I don’t just write what I want to write. The answer is in what I said in my last post about things that ‘bug’ the writer rather than address and interest the reader. Examples of the former in my case would be (a) my obsession with all the people who over the years have said to me ‘George Calderon? Never heard of him!’ and frankly told me I was wasting my time, (b) the delicate question of the ‘tourbillions of time’ in my biography, i.e. the non-linear way I am telling it, and (c) the fact that it is a biography of Kittie and the whole Calderon set as well as principally of George.

I’m encouraged that several of my consultants — all of whom have read at least one chapter — feel I do have to tackle (a). None of them has mentioned (b) and (c). But I must at least touch on (b) and (c) in the Introduction, as they are aspects that readers need warning about; they are risks that I have taken in the book.

In that connection, I am encouraged by something that Ruth Scurr wrote in The Guardian on 6 February:

I decided to write Aubrey’s life in the form of a first-person diary. For a long time I didn’t tell anyone what I was doing in case they thought I had gone mad. I think good books result from taking risks. My advice to younger women is to write only about what most interests you, and if an agent or publisher tries to persuade you to write a safe book on a suitable topic, run as fast as you can from that poisoned apple.

Absolutely true, in my opinion, and I find my efforts strangely re-energised by thinking of myself as a ‘younger woman writer’!

Watch this Space 7 May 2016

7/5/16. The good news is that I have finished my fundamental revision of the biography. It can rest for a few weeks until I give it the final slow, close read. I turn now to writing the Introduction. These things are fantastically important, of course, and I have never been good at them. Over the last four years I have written two versions and binned both. There is a tendency to use the Introduction to witter with tightly clenched teeth about the things that bug the writer, rather than addressing the reader’s overwhelming question: ‘Why should I read your book?’ However, I go into it now with hope and some relish: there are nuggets from the earlier versions that are transferrable, and I have the extended written views of Clare Hopkins, Alison Miles, James Muckle, Harvey Pitcher, Karen Spink and Graeme Wright about what the Introduction should say. Thank you all, and if anyone else would like to advise me on this subject, please leave a Comment.

The results of my visit to the British Library last Wednesday may fairly be described as dramatic.

This is the cover of William Caine’s version of The Brave Little Tailor published in 1923 and dedicated to Kittie Calderon, with Caine’s explanation of the book’s provenance:

Unfortunately, I have never liked this book since a particularly histrionic master tried to read it to us at school. I not only do not find it funny, I find it squirmingly unfunny. But why do I, I asked myself during the writing of the biography. This is the question I have to address, because the book’s humour is typically Edwardian and, to a disarming extent, typically Calderonian. I had decided to analyse the problem in the Afterword, where I discuss George as an Edwardian and who the Edwardians were. I did not have to tangle with it in the body of the biography, I thought, because the book is not the work that George wrote and the latter had not survived…

But the manuscript I ‘discovered’ at the British Library is of the entire original three-act pantomime. Of this, 196 pages are in George’s hand, about fifteen in William Caine’s hand, and there are two complete typed copies. This is not only the sole dramatic manuscript of George Calderon known to exist, it is by far the longest extant manuscript of anything by him. Almost certainly, I should think, I am the first person to have read it since the project was cut short by the War in 1914.

As I read George’s beautifully fluent and legible hand, the mind-boggling task loomed of examining the script in detail, even comparing it line by line with Caine’s 1923 confection, writing several pages about it in the appropriate place in the body of the biography, and delaying the completion of the book by at least another two months. Dare I say it, this is a ‘discovery’ I could have done without at this stage.

But not so fast. The fact that over 90% of the manuscript is in George’s hand does not mean that all of that is by him. If what Caine says about his own contribution is true, the manuscript is probably just the fair copy made by George of the whole work after he had ‘cut and polished’ Caine’s ‘great many scenes’ (and there are five or so pages of revisions in Caine’s hand on this fair copy). In other words, it is still not possible to say what was created by George and what by Caine, so I am sticking to discussing the posthumous work in my Afterword. The manuscript and typescript raise many interesting questions, though. For instance, the ‘pantomime’ is renamed ‘A Musical Play’, and even ‘A Comic Opera’, in the typescript. It is wearisomely wordy and long, yet George gives its running time (without interval) as ‘2 hrs 7 mins’. This would be unbelievably short for such a word-monster in the theatre today, and confirms the impression from Pinero’s and Shaw’s plays, for instance, that Edwardian actors must have gabbled.

Among the four, undated letters from Kittie to Laurence Binyon conserved in the British Library, the most dramatic for me was a six-page one that I was able to date as 31 August 1920. It contains Kittie’s response to the first draft of Binyon’s ode in George’s memory. She particularly loved the last stanza: through ‘the whole of it […] he is there […] standing before one’. This letter contains a frank discussion of George’s character, from which I hope to be permitted to quote in my Afterword.

The final drama of my visit to the British Library was that I walked into a kind of brick curlicue as I was looking for a quick way out of its piazza. On analysis, I think the reason I was in a hurry is that I was desperate to flee the piazza’s terrible feng shui, by which I probably mean ‘pretentious all-brick architecture’. The medical results of my encounter explain the lateness of this and, probably, next week’s post, but I will be back!

Watch this Space 27 April 2016

27/4/16. By the time you read this, I shall either be poring over George Calderon’s uncatalogued manuscript (typescript?) of The Brave Little Tailor and Kittie’s letters to Laurence Binyon at the British Library, or I shall have done so, in which case I will be reporting on the results in next week’s post.

I have lost count of the number of archives I have worked in whilst researching this biography, but I have never worked in those at the British Library in Euston Road before. Frankly, I was rather relieved not to have had to, as some colleagues have found it a daunting experience. Either I have become Bewildered of Cambridge in my sixty-eighth year, or one has to be resigned to the website of a very large institution being complex; but I have been using computers for over thirty years and I do find the BL’s website labyrinthine and not very user-friendly. Again, I suppose a very large library has to cover every eventuality, but there are vast walls of words to get through. After taking well over an hour to pre-register as a Reader, receive email responses and register for a BL online account, I lost my way trying to pre-order my items and gave up.

But the staff are STELLAR! Once I had contacted PEOPLE in the Rare Books & Music Reference Service, and Western Manuscripts and Music Manuscripts, things moved at top speed. Not only did Andra Patterson, Curator of Music Manuscripts, find George’s manuscript in the voluminous uncatalogued Martin Shaw Collection — a feat in itself — and Zoe Stansell in the Manuscripts Reference Service clear my access to the Binyon Archive most unfustily, both immediately ordered the items for me on their own initiative and thus spared me the electronic quagmire. Bewildered of Cambridge cannot thank them enough for their fantastic service.

Since my last post, we have established from his military file that the first name of Onslow Ford, the fellow-officer of George’s in the 9th Ox & Bucks who knew Sir Ian Hamilton and wrote to him in July 1915 for news of George, was Wolfram. He was a portrait painter and moved in the highest social circles. I was able yesterday, then, to write a new paragraph for chapter 15, explaining that Hamilton was the source, or authority, for the idea that George might have been wounded, given first aid by the Turks, and become a prisoner.

Amongst Sir Ian Hamilton’s papers in the Liddell Hart Military Archives there are two letters pertaining to George’s fate. In the long one to Onslow Ford, Hamilton tells him that ‘one might fairly suggest there is quite a glimmer of hope still’ — and back in England Onslow Ford must have passed this on to Kittie. However, in the short letter that he wrote the same day to George’s commanding officer at the Third Battle of Krithia, Hamilton inadvertently refers to Kittie as George’s ‘widow’.

Meanwhile (see last week’s post) we are trying to trace descendants of the young man from Kennington, with a wife and children, who was killed by a landmine at Hythe in the year (1941) that Kittie stayed there, and whom Kittie probably knew…

I am fervently hoping that in the next seven days I shall be able to complete the penultimate revision of my typescript and proceed to writing the Introduction.

Watch this Space 20 April 2016

20/4/16. Several people have asked me about late photographs of Kittie. Here is the last one I know of. It was not easy to date. Triangulating from the probable year of Cairn terrier Bunty’s birth (1922), the dog’s known longevity, the garden furniture, the boundary hedge, and Kittie’s stouter appearance, I put it at 1936, possibly 1937.  It seems strange that there are none later, considering that Kittie lived another fourteen years.

As followers know, I am stuck with 4% of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius still to revise, namely the last two chapters, covering Kittie’s life 1915-50. However, I am not as frazzled by this as I have been about missing deadlines in the past, since it is caused by ‘events’ — events that, hopefully, can only improve the book.

The Net has truly revolutionised biographical research. I do trawls every so often for new mentions of George and especially for archival material (obviously, much of this would never have been found before computers). The last one I did on 16 March. I was not expecting anything new, but collections in public archives are going online all the time. This trawl produced three astonishing new hits:

1. The papers of Sir Ian Hamilton relating to his time in command of the Gallipoli campaign are held in the Liddell Hart Military Archives at King’s College London. A hit came up for an item catalogued as ‘1915 Jun 15-1915 Aug 8 Correspondence with relatives of soldiers relating to their requests for news of Lt George Calderon, 9 Bn Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, attached to King’s Own Scottish Borderers [and three others]’. Given the word ‘relatives’, I assumed this was a letter/letters from Kittie, especially as her maiden name was Hamilton and she could probably claim some relation. Wrong. Sir Ian had received a letter (which has not survived) from Onslow Ford, an officer who trained with George in the Ox and Bucks at Fort Brockhurst. Onslow Ford can be seen on the group photo I posted for 10 April 1915 and his name appears in a letter from Labouchere to Kittie that I quoted in my post for 15 July 1915. Labouchere told Kittie that Onslow Ford ‘knows Ian Hamilton and can write to him on the chances of [Edwardian expression] his being able to make special enquiries out there’. There was absolutely no evidence until now that Kittie took up Onslow Ford’s offer. On 8 August 1915 at GHQ, Mediterranean Expeditionary Force, Ian Hamilton dictated a substantial reply to Onslow Ford, which I cannot quote at length for copyright reasons but will summarise thus. Hamilton says that he has received nothing but ‘negative information’ about George’s whereabouts, but there have been ‘many cases’ of wounded officers being found with ‘first dressings’ put on them by the Turks, when trenches were retaken from the Turks after forward parties of British soldiers had occupied and lost them in the initial attack. Hamilton concludes, then, that there is ‘quite a glimmer of hope still’ that George Calderon will be found alive. So the idea that George was not killed outright, which Kittie clung to for another four years, originated with Sir Ian Hamilton himself. This is a rather sensational development and necessitates my re-writing part of chapter 15. There are several things I need to do, though, before I can proceed to that, e.g. discover the Christian name of Onslow Ford, which my indefatigable researcher Mike Welch is working on. Onslow Ford was one of the four sons of the Victorian sculptor Edward Onslow Ford, but we don’t know yet which one. Not the least intriguing thing, however, about the documents concerning George in this file is that Ian Hamilton dictated his reply to Onslow Ford on one of the very worst days for him, Hamilton, in the whole of the Gallipoli campaign. Hamilton had been despairingly watching offshore at Suvla the incompetence of his generals following the landings of the day before and had to intervene personally. He concludes his letter to Onslow Ford by apologising for its brevity, ‘but we are in the middle of a great battle’. Really, these Edwardians were extraordinary people…

2.  ‘An Introduction to Martin Shaw’ is an article that appeared on the Web following the           acquisition by the British Library of Shaw’s Archive from the firm of Quaritch, who               wrote the original text. It mentions that Shaw’s papers contain ‘a rare manuscript by             the young playwright George Calderon’. If true, it would not be rare, it would be                     unique! (George’s few extant dramatic relics are typescripts.) It is probably the text of           George’s contribution to a pantomime called The Brave Little Tailor which he wrote             with William Caine in 1913-14 and for which Shaw was writing the music. The                         pantomime text was completed, but not the music, because the War broke out and the         project was aborted as it was based on a German fairytale. I couldn’t write about                   George’s text before, because it appeared to have been lost. Now I must see it, but the           Shaw Archive at the British Library hasn’t been catalogued yet, so it will take curators a       while to find it for me.

3.  The papers of Laurence Binyon are on loan to the British Library (where, of course, he         had worked when it was called the British Museum). There is a working catalogue of             them online, but the BL search facility had not revealed any material relating to the               Calderons. However, one of Binyon’s grandsons, Mr Edmund Gray, very kindly pointed       out to me that ‘Calderon’ had been misspelt in the catalogue and there were in fact               some letters from Kittie in his grandfather’s archive. I am very desirous to see them.             They are probably from the period 1920-30 and may contain Kittie’s response to                   Laurence Binyon’s ode in George’s memory; in which case I will weave it into chapter           15 (Percy Lubbock’s response to it in a letter to Kittie was rather aspersive). The reason       the archive has nothing from George is probably that he and Laurence Binyon often             saw each other daily at the BM, and when they didn’t all that was needed was a note or         a phone call to arrange to meet. Since Binyon’s papers are only on loan to the BL, I               needed Mr Gray’s permission to access them, which he has most graciously given.

Finally, down at Kennington in Kent some very kind people contacted by local historian Robin Britcher (see ‘Watch this Space’ 24 February 2016) examined the records of St Mary’s Church for mentions of Kittie. (Understandably, there seems to be no-one alive there who remembers her.) They discovered that she was a founder member of the Friends of that church, who look after its fabric and pay for repairs/improvements. She was enrolled in 1941, paid her subscription for three years, and against her name was a full address in Hythe, twelve miles away. What was the significance of this? In 1941 Hythe was on the front line! Mike Welch established that the address had been a guest house in the 1920s, but it was impossible to discover from public records what it was during the war. Exercising his lateral thinking on the newly available information of the 1939 Register, however, Mike concluded that an unnamed child had been present in the house and might still be alive. He traced this child and I spoke to him, now aged eighty, on the phone. He confirmed that the house had been a popular guest house during the war, with many military families visiting, but in 1941 his grandparents decided to move inland as the shelling from across the Channel was hotting up. The guest house’s Visitors Book still exists, but stops in 1928. What was Kittie Calderon doing there in 1941 and how long did she stay? Could her visit be connected with the death of a young neighbour of hers, who was killed by a landmine on Hythe beach on 13 May 1941? The investigation continues, as does our search for a house in Torquay that Mrs Stewart, Nina Corbet’s mother, lived in for thirty years, and which Kittie visited for long periods after Nina’s death.

Altogether, an unexpected basinful…

Watch this Space 13 April 2016

13/4/16. The collective noun for emeritus professors is ‘a reticence’. It derives from the fact that although they still hold definite opinions, in retirement they are too shy to parade them before the world, e.g. in Comments that will appear on blogs. They prefer to communicate discreetly by email or word of mouth.

I have heard, then, from a reticence of professors emeriti in response to my post on 17 February 2016 about Laurence Binyon’s half-line ‘They shall grow not old’ and the controversy around Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce et decorum est’ (see ‘Archives’, bottom right, for February 2016, or click the link below and scroll down).

Half of the distinguished e.p.’s feel I ‘might have a point’ in suggesting that Binyon inverted the negative in his often misquoted line so that the ‘not’ seems to qualify the adjective ‘old’ as a luminous concept ‘not-old’, rather than adhering limply to the verb as ‘grow-not’. One former professor of English literature found my argument ‘utterly convincing’ and added that accepting the ‘simpler (and very banal) reading’ was ‘too easy’. Another said he ‘wished’ I was right, but felt that the public tendency to ‘correct’ the line to ‘They shall not grow old’ showed that Binyon had not succeeded in avoiding the impression that ‘he meant nothing subtler than to negate the verb’.

The same e.p. concluded: ‘It all depends on how you speak the line.’ Certainly it does. Personally, I find it nearly impossible to drop my voice enough to speak it as though it meant ‘grow-not old’, i.e. virtually elide the ‘not’ syllable or at least give the words three level stresses: ‘grōw nōt ōld’, as though ‘grow not’ was a spondee. Both seem to me totally unnatural to modern English. But perhaps that is the point: English, and English verse, are simply spoken differently from how they were in 1914.

One of the reasons the speaking of this half-line may have changed is that we expect poetry today to enact its meaning, rather than to be semantically coherent versified thoughts. Our way of reading poetry, I think, has been deeply influenced by today’s theatre, and particularly by the articulation of Shakespeare’s dramatic poetry since about the 1960s; not to mention by the poetry of G.M. Hopkins and Dylan Thomas. We aim not to declaim verse, but to create through the ear what is essentially a dramatic experience. Hence, in my view, we are not just telling that the fallen won’t grow old like the rest of us, we are showing it through the rising of ‘grow’ into the transfigured state ‘not-old’. The line is not just a statement, it has to get itself a life.

Of course, it may also be that an inverted negative — ‘grow not’ — is now so weird that we have simply forgotten how to speak it. Either way, the language has certainly moved on and in my view it has to take a poem like ‘For the Fallen’ with it. If it is really poetry, we cannot apply a purely historical, antiquarian approach to it and its reading.

One who would disagree with this, I fear, is the e.p. who told me, apropos of my attitude to ‘over-writing’ (Heaney’s phrase) in ‘Dulce et decorum est’: ‘It is not poetry’s job to be incoherent.’ I had never said it was. But I do not believe that poetry’s job is always to be coherent. One would be seriously misguided, I think, to expect unflagging coherence from poetry written by men like Wilfred Owen and Georg Trakl in the circumstances of which they were writing. I had suggested that the ‘incoherence’ of the ‘devil’s sick’ lines in Owen’s poem ‘perfectly enacts his horror’ in extremis. It enacts the breakdown of the man Owen in a place where, in his words, God seemed not to care. But I don’t think this particular e.p. would accept that enactive, dramatic view of poetry.

I recently found unexpected support for my take on incoherence in WW1 poetry in Drew Gilpin Faust’s superb book This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008). Faust explains that, contrary to Emily Dickinson’s image as a recluse, she was deeply engaged with the human cost of the Civil War. ‘She too sought to understand the meaning of war’s carnage, the price of victory and defeat, and the implications of Civil War slaughter for the Christian faith that shaped how most Americans lived their lives’ (pp. 205-06). ‘Marked by discontinuities’, Dickinson’s poems were posthumously assailed by ‘critics who deplored their travesties of grammar and syntax. But contemporary critics see in these attributes the embodiment of Dickinson’s doubts about the foundations of understanding and coherence’ (p. 208).

Some words of George Calderon’s come to mind, from a letter he wrote to Kittie on 11 April 1905 from Paris after an argument with Paul Boyer about anthropology: ‘He has the obedient professorial mind, which is ready to believe all manner of questions closed which are as open as hungry oysters.’

*                    *                    *

Next week I shall explain the archival and other issues that have been delaying my completion of the second typescript draft of my book George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. I am busy at the moment dealing with these and rewriting sections in the last two chapters, which deal with Kittie’s life 1915-50. I am also thinking a lot about the yet unwritten Introduction and Afterword.

Watch this Space 6 April 2016

6/4/16. I have now revised 96% of my book George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. The last chapter, covering Kittie’s life 1923-1950, feels too close still (I finished the second draft only two months ago) to tackle, so I am limiting myself to re-reading the very rich material that went into its making. Another reason for the delay is that I am waiting to view some new archival material that popped up only last month in the course of my regular trawls of the Web. I hope to post about that in two weeks time.

Meanwhile, it is still a rare pleasure to be able to draw followers’ attention to a commemoration that is not of those who ‘died as cattle’ in World War One, but of those who survived it and of the doctors, nurses and orderlies who enabled them to do so:

The First Eastern General Hospital (Territorial Force) was Cambridge’s outstanding contribution to the war effort, yet hardly anyone has heard of it today and there is nothing on its site to commemorate its existence.

It was a huge military hospital covering ten acres on the present-day sites of Clare College’s Memorial Court and Cambridge University Library. In a breathtakingly efficient act of collaboration between colleges, the War Office, Addenbrooke’s Hospital and local firms, work began in September 1914 on the construction of twelve 800-foot long huts comprising twenty-four wards with 1500 beds and the first patients were admitted on 17 October. The facility took in wounded, injured and sick from the B.E.F., the Mediterranean Force, the Home Force and Belgian casualties. It was a state of the art hospital (‘open-air’ for two years) and brilliantly run. Over 70,000 patients passed through it between 1914 and 1919 and it had an extraordinarily low death rate.

I heartily support the campaign to commemorate the doctors, nurses, VADS, orderlies, military personnel and teams of local people who created this amazing medical village, and the thousands of war victims whom they helped return to an active life. I commend the Appeal to followers of this blog. £25,000 is needed and at the time of writing  £11,388 has been raised. Full information can be obtained at:

http://www.firsteasterngeneralhospital.co.uk/index.html

The memorial will be a large inscription hand cut by Cambridge’s Kindersley Workshop into the stonework of the outer wall of Clare College Memorial Court (this college owned most of the land on which First Eastern General was erected). The text will read: HERE IN THE FIRST EASTERN GENERAL HOSPITAL 70,000 CASUALTIES WERE TREATED BETWEEN 1914 AND 1919.

It seems particularly appropriate that the inscription should be designed and executed by the Kindersley Workshop, as David Kindersley (1915-1995) trained under Eric Gill (1882-1940), who was a major contributor to the style adopted for war memorials after WW1 and cut many himself. Kittie Calderon knew Eric Gill and adopted his apprentice Joseph Cribb as a correspondent and recipient of parcels from her when he went to the Front.

The full story of the hospital is told in the above book. Its title refers to the fact that the site started as a cricket field and ended as a copyright library. Between 1920 and 1929 it also provided emergency accommodation for 200 families at a time — the beginning of Cambridge’s social housing.

Philomena Guillebaud’s book is another gem of British local history (see ‘Watch this Space’ 2 March 2016). Rigorously researched, it is also lively, witty, and tells a profoundly inspiring story. In historical terms I was most interested to discover how far in advance of war the ‘shadow’ Territorial Force hospitals began to be assembled (1908). As Guillebaud puts it, the opening of First Eastern for admissions within ten weeks of the declaration of war ‘was no miracle: it was a remarkable case of successful forward planning’. The leadership of the hospital, principally surgeon Lieutenant-Colonel Joseph Griffiths and matrons from Addenbrooke’s Hospital, was hugely impressive. Further proof, then, that the Edwardians were not the bumbling amateurs some may think.

This book may be obtained by sending a cheque for £14.00 (includes postage and packing) made out to Philomena Guillebaud at 26 Wilberforce Road, Cambridge CB3 0EQ.

Watch this Space 23 March 2016

23/3/16. I have now revised 92% of the typescript of my book. I shall tackle the last two chapters, which cover Kittie’s life 1915-50, after Easter. One reason for leaving them till then is that there are two pieces of new information that I am waiting for, which will probably have to go into the revision — there’s another kind of spanner that can affect one’s plans and deadlines! I will blog about these new items in a week or two.

The experience of revisiting chapter 14, which covers the last year of George’s life, was not so much dreadful (see last week’s post) as complex, and complex in an unexpected way. Yes, re-reading the extremely thick files on 1914 and 15 was draining, eviscerating at times; I was torn between not wanting to relive it and feeling I must relive it in order to ensure the revision was ‘fresh’. But actually I did not get caught by emotion more than two or three times whilst working on the chapter; I think what I was mainly experiencing was the brain remembering the pristine impact on me of these events in George’s life, and writing the first draft, rather than reliving them. I gather that that is how it works with injuries: you may appear to be struck down again by an injury you had years ago, but actually it is largely not the same, real pain but the brain being triggered by stress to ‘recall’ the pain. Anyhow the events as I revisited them were more at arm’s length, the revision was more dispassionate. This was a good thing, as when you are revising you really do need to stand further back from your text. Thus I spotted a number of things that I had skated over before, and was able (I think) to improve them.

The new thing that I found myself meditating as I revised the chapter was the extent to which, by singlemindedly propelling himself in 1914 and 1915 to the very most dangerous points in the war zones, George was consciously offering himself for ‘sacrifice’. Last year I considered the views that by signing up he was seeking ‘Adventure’, that he was suffering from Peter Pan Syndrome (‘to die will be an awfully big adventure’), that he was merely collecting material for a future book, or that he knew he was terminally ill and so his death was a kind of assisted suicide. But what if he believed that his highest duty was to sacrifice himself for ‘the cause of the free’, as Binyon puts it in ‘For the Fallen’?

In his classic work The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (CUP, 2008), Adrian Gregory writes (p. 156) that ‘the idea of redemptive sacrifice was second nature to the [British] population, whether they realised it or not. […] Patri-passionism, the redemption of the world through the blood of soldiers, was the informal civic religion of wartime Britain’. But I have to say, I have never had that impression. It has always seemed to me that, whether amongst war poets, soldiers or the general population, the belief that self-sacrifice was glorious because it was needed to win the war did not come glibly or easily, it was hard wrung, delayed, and never accepted by some.

There is an outstanding example of what it could mean, though, in a book I have read recently, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Knopf, 2008), by Drew Gilpin Faust. The American Civil War was in a way the first modern, ‘industrial’ war, and the effect of it on the American nation was similar at many points to that of the First World War on the British people. The young philosopher and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr volunteered to fight for the North out of certain moral beliefs, and went through the whole Civil War. Drew Gilpin Faust quotes intellectual historian Louis Menand to the effect that ‘the war did more than make Holmes lose those beliefs. It made him lose his belief in beliefs’. Obviously, it was exactly the same for many British soldiers, war poets, nurses and families. However, thirty years after the Civil War Holmes gave a speech entitled ‘Soldier’s Faith’ in which he said:

The faith is true and adorable which leads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty, in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which he has no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.

Drew Gilpin Faust (p. 270-71) paraphrases Holmes’s argument:

The very purposelessness of sacrifice created its purpose. In a world in which ‘commerce is the great power’ and the ‘man of wealth’ the great hero, the disinterestedness and selflessness of the soldier represented the highest ideal of a faith that depended on the actions not of God but of man. ‘War, when you are at it,’ Holmes admitted, ‘is horrible and dull. It is only when time has passed that you see that its message was divine.’

It was many years after his active service in WW1 that Stanley Spencer wrote of his altarpiece ‘The Resurrection of the Soldiers’ at Sandham Memorial Chapel: ‘The truth that the cross is supposed to symbolise in this picture is that nothing is lost where a sacrifice has been the result of a perfect understanding.’ Holmes’s and Spencer’s insight came with time. Like Owen’s uncharacteristic poem ‘Greater Love’, it was hard won. After surviving a WW1 battle you were unlikely to believe in ‘patri-passionism’.

I have never found a reference in George Calderon’s correspondence to ‘sacrificing’ himself for a cause or an end. There is no doubt that he insisted on being where the action was because he wanted Adventure, risk, a story to tell afterwards. He was prepared to drop all his considerable literary projects in 1914 for that.

But there is equally no doubt that he believed in what he was fighting for — freedom from brutal oppression. In my final chapter of his life I argue that he was also fighting for the new world order that he deeply believed would emerge from the war. Perhaps his own motivation did not go beyond that, but it is our Holmesian/Spencerian distance from events that makes it seem to us now that George was driven by self-sacrifice as an ideal.

A Happy Easter to all followers and visitors.

Watch this Space 16 March 2016

16/3/16. Segueing (I hope that is correct — I have never used the verb before) from last week’s post, I have to report three completely new developments that illustrate, I think, Jenny Hands’s thought-provoking Comment (see above right).

I had not heard the saying ‘you have to have a plan to be able to change it’ before, possibly because in writing, I find, you have not so much a plan as a conception, and that conception doesn’t live in your mind as a plan does, you live in the conception, which spontaneously grows till it’s ‘right’. However, I can well imagine that this saying is a truism in modern management, and in my experience the deadlines that form part of the project-plan of writing a book do operate as Jenny Hands suggests.

Last week I set myself the task of completing the revision of chapters 11 (‘Chekhov Is Such a Great Man…’) and 12 (The Trouble with Trade Unionism). The first task is to reread the entire file for the chapter, which leads to looking at some things from slightly different angles, revisiting some letters and documents, sometimes discovering entirely new, relevant things. I like to do it in a single, eight-hour or so sitting, so that I feel I’ve literally ‘got my head round it’, but it leaves the mind so tired you can’t start the actual revision until you have recovered, i.e. next morning.

The file for chapter 11 is particularly thick, but I managed to read half of it over the weekend, so that by last Monday morning I was ‘ahead’… Ah, but the revision of the beginning was particularly drastic and fiddly, because the discovery only last year of George’s 1907 diary threw wide open the question of whether George didn’t, perhaps, er, get the idea of translating The Seagull from Constance Garnett, whom he met for the first time that year and had problematical relations with later in the Stage Society. Even so, I finished that chapter (9119 words) by last Wednesday morning and went straight into chapter 12. That file is quite thin, because it is almost entirely factual rather than literary, and by the end of Thursday I had finished revising the chapter (5658 words) to my satisfaction. So I was a day ‘ahead’ of deadline!

Unfortunately:

1. I was so exhausted I knew it would be counter-productive to go straight into chapter 13, Wilder Shores of Translation (10,800 words and mesmerisingly literary). What you are after, of course, when you are revising a long work, is absolute consistency. It’s therefore vital to do the work on the same level of energy. You can sometimes spot — around the middle — when writers have begun to push themselves too hard with their revision/editing.

2. Followers may recall that the life-changing discovery last year that George had had a serious flirtation with philosophical Taoism led to my losing days and days in my rewriting of chapter 6 (26,896 words). I concluded the new section: ‘there are a number of small facts that suggest his interest in the Taoist view of life continued to at least 1912, and we shall note these in passing.’ When revising chapter 11, I pondered long the Taoist elements in two sections of George’s famous introduction to Chekhov’s plays, and settled for: ‘they both have distinct Taoist undertones.’ During Thursday night this began to niggle me, by Friday I had decided it was ridiculous — every reader would rightly be screaming ‘well what are they?!’ — so I spent the whole of this Monday reopening the Tao file, wrestling with these ‘undertones’, and explaining them in 300 words… Now, of course, I am behind schedule again. And I ought to add that on Friday I also came to the conclusion that in chapter 12 everyone would want to know what George’s party politics were, i.e. how he probably voted in elections, independently of his left of Centre personal political philosophy; so I would have to go back and grapple with that. But, fortunately, I decided it was better discussed in the Afterword…

3. As I contemplated revising chapter 13, Wilder Shores of Translation, I was suddenly struck by a dread of the one after that, covering 1914-15. This is because in its course chapter 13 focuses down on 1913. It returns the chronotope from four synchronic chapters (i.e. essentially thematic and covering the same period, 1907-12) to a linear timescale, i.e. traditional biography. Chapter 14 therefore begins with January 1914. Frankly, I slightly dread, even, starting work on 13. The dread is undoubtedly having a procrastinating effect. Working on 14, A New and Unknown Adventure, will be weird, as I not only had to live those draining events when I wrote it, I lived them from day to day when I was running Calderonia. I recall that I spoke about reliving the end in my post ‘The Dear Departed’ of 9 February 2015. It will be interesting to see how it turns out.

That is probably enough writerly introspection. Deadlines do get pushed all over the place. You never know in this game what is going to hit you next and put you ahead or days, weeks, months behind… But that’s right: it couldn’t happen unless you had a time-plan in the first place. Curiously, the very fact of writing this post about it may have changed the game and I shall tackle chapter 13 with fresh relish and even get ‘ahead’!

Note. There is a problem with double quotes in WordPress, hence only the title of chapter 11 above has been enclosed in inverted commas — the words here are George Calderon’s own.

Watch this Space 9 March 2016

9/3/16. At the time of writing, I have revised exactly two thirds of my typescript of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, which I finished writing on 25 January. This means I am x weeks behind schedule, where x is somewhere between one and three.

I don’t know the exact number of weeks I am behind, I could work it out, but I have something more important to do: revising chapter 12, ‘The Trouble with Trade Unionism’!

On the one hand, it is depressing that all through this blog I have had to record missing self-imposed deadlines by weeks and even months, but actually it isn’t, you just have to accept that this is how writing is. You have to set yourself deadlines — at least, I find that I need a deadline breathing down my neck in order to get on with it — but if I have to exceed the deadline because there is new material to go in, or re-focussing is needed, or there is far more to check, or basically I need to take more care than I was expecting, that has got to be a good thing. I long ago reached the point where if I easily met a deadline, I was suspicious about what I’d written; it couldn’t be good enough, could it?

A very experienced journalist rang me yesterday, asked me how the book was going, and when I told him I was exasperated by the slowness he mollified: ‘But there’s no real hurry, is there? You don’t have to get it out by a particular time.’ This was music to my ears, but it still surprised me, as he is as used to working to deadlines as I am, and of course I had always wanted to get the biography out for the centenary of George’s death at Gallipoli. My friend’s argument, however, was that the new material that has come to light since I started writing the book has to go in. He has got a point. I won’t have a second chance, and I assume there won’t be another biography of George for a while…

Meanwhile, my blogmaster is designing Calderonia‘s next metamorphosis. This will contain all the back-numbers of ‘Watch this Space’, most Comments will be archived but they will all be easily accessible, it will be made easier than ever to leave a Comment, the links will be updated, and a number of Categories — overarching general terms such as ‘Edwardian Character’, ‘Heroism’, ‘War Poets’, ‘Edwardian Marriage’ — will be introduced. The changeover will happen on 10 April.

Watch this Space 24 February 2016

24/2/16. Local historians are the salt of the earth. They know their specialist area intimately and utterly. When the subjects of biographies settle for significant periods of time in different places, as George did at Eastcote, George and Kittie did at Hampstead, then Kittie did at Sheet and Kennington, without the help of local historians biographers would only scratch the surface of their lives in these places.

In the case of Eastcote, I was unbelievably lucky, because Karen Spink had already researched and published a terrific article about George’s time there (1898-1900) for the 1999 issue of the Journal of Ruislip, Northwood and Eastcote Local History Society (RNELHS). Karen twice walked me through the mile and a half of footpaths and road that George would have taken on his bicycle to get from his digs at Eastcote to catch the train at Pinner station on his way to the British Museum. She also showed me all over historic Eastcote and arranged for me to visit the private property where George lived. This is not to mention the endless sources she sent me about the life of Eastcote in those years. If my very large chapter two, ‘Eastcote Man’, has any deep texture apart from George’s love letters written from Eastcote to Kittie, it is entirely thanks to Karen, who also independently undertook to research the Calderons’ property in Hampstead.

Sheila Ayres of Camden History Society then helped Karen and me arrange a visit to two of the three private properties that once made up George and Kittie’s house in Hampstead. This was fascinating, as we had Kittie’s photograph album of 1902 to accompany us. The present owners were most welcoming and enthusiastic about the project.

My point about these wonderful local historians is not that they have spared me months and months of researching Eastcote and Hampstead that I would, of course, have been obliged to do myself, it is that I could never match their knowledge of these places and they have allowed me access to it with truly humbling generosity.

At Sheet in Hampshire a chance encounter led me to Vaughan Clarke, an historian who through his local contacts was able to confirm that the house I thought was where Kittie had lived 1922-34 was indeed ‘Kay’s Crib’ until its name was changed seventy years ago. Mr Clarke was also able to enlighten me about the social stratification of Sheet in the 1920s; this proved critical for working out why Kittie failed to ‘settle’ there. Mr Clarke is now Chairman of Petersfield Museum, which is well worth a visit. Each year the gallery of the museum exhibits a different selection of the painter Flora Twort (1893-1985), whom Kittie probably knew and who moved from Hampstead to Petersfield before her.

I have visited Kennington several times, and four years ago I placed appeals in local papers for anyone who still remembered Kittie to contact me (no-one did). For my last chapter, completed a month ago, I needed to get a feel for — to know as much as possible about –the life going on in Kennington outside Kittie’s windows at ‘White Raven’, where she lived from 1934 to 1948. I had over a hundred letters that she received in that period, about a dozen of her own, and many documents, but I needed as much context as possible. Here, the Ashford Archaeological and Historical Society have come to the rescue. Not only have they put feelers out amongst the senior population of Kennington, they are writing a piece about Kittie themselves for the Kentish Express.  Amongst other things, this may settle the question of whether, as I think, The Cherry Orchard in George’s translation was performed at Ashford in 1940/41 as part of a campaign to raise money for the war effort.

But above all, Robin Britcher, a member of the Ashford Archaeological and Historical Society, has spent ten years researching life at Kennington during World War 2, the result of which is this superb little book, published last month:

This book has provided absolutely critical local context to Kittie’s and Elizabeth’s lives at ‘White Raven’ during the war. Kittie wrote to Percy Lubbock in Montreux about every ten days and it is possible she mentioned to him some of the drama that was going on around her at Kennington, but maybe wartime censorship prevented her, and in any case her letters have not survived. Without Robin Britcher’s book, then, I would never have known that Kittie’s next-door neighbours were interned as enemy aliens, their house became a military nerve centre, a Heinkel bomber came down only a few hundred yards from ‘White Raven’, seventeen residents of Kennington died on active service, and nine bombs were dropped on the village killing two people, injuring others and wrecking homes. Kittie’s polite refusal of offers to accommodate her for the duration in places as far afield as Fife and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, takes on an even grittier edge.

However, Robin Britcher’s book is not only a portrait of Kennington during the war, it is an in-depth portrait of the village’s life as such: there is so much in it about the workings and personalities of the village that its usefulness for me extends beyond the war years. It is also very attractively presented, with masses of illustrations and an extremely well written text. I warmly recommend it. It can be bought directly from Mr Britcher at 169 Faversham Road, Kennington, Ashford, Kent TN24 9AE, by sending a cheque for £6.50 (includes postage and packing) made out to Robin Britcher.

I cannot help thinking that this country may have the best local historians in the world.

By the end of this week I shall have revised/rewritten about 58% of my biography of George. I have ‘lost’ a week because of the need to write a few new sections, particularly in the light of the sensational discovery last year of George’s pocket diary for 1907 — the only diary of his known.

This is the most recent ‘Watch this Space’ post. For the archive of ‘Watch this Space’, please click here.

Watch this Space 17 February 2016

17/2/16. The weekly digests of events in World War 1 keep coming in from The Times, every day the media run items and features connected with it, the public debate about commemorating the fallen continues. Although I left the field of battle, as it were, on 7 June 1915, there is no chance of getting away from the War. It gets to you…

I have no desire to revive the debate about commemoration, ‘making peace with the Great War’, empathy/sentimentality, ‘war porn’, historicisation etc — new visitors can see from Recent Comments, the archive of ‘Watch this Space’, and a search on ‘Commemoration’, how much we thrashed these subjects out last year, and that by December some of us felt we had said our last word. But with the Battle of Loos and the collapse of the Russians’ Polish front last autumn, the evacuation from Gallipoli last month, the battle for Verdun this month, and the Somme coming soon, one inevitably continues to mull issues. Perhaps since December some followers have acquired new angles on previous themes. Personally, I want to address only a small poetical matter, but I know it ‘ramifies’.

It’s common knowledge that line 13 of Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’ is often recited as ‘They shall not grow old’, when it should be ‘They shall grow not old’. Is this done through mere forgetfulness or ignorance? I don’t think so.

If, as is natural, we assume that the words are expressing a plain negative, namely that the fallen, being dead, will not grow old, then we would expect the metrical, iambic stress to be on the negating word ‘not’: ‘They shall not grow old…’ In terms of subject and predicate, we could represent this as: ‘They shall not (grow old).’ However, that is not what Binyon has written. In his version the metrical stress is on ‘grow’: ‘They shall grow not old…’ The half-line therefore rises appropriately on ‘grow’. Grammatically, this might appear to be just an archaic inverted negative. But actually it makes ‘not’ an unstressed syllable, produces a slight pause after ‘grow’, and could be represented structurally as: ‘They shall grow (not old).’ In other words the movement of the line is towards making ‘not’ qualify ‘old’ rather than qualify ‘grow’. Growing into a state of not-oldness sounds odd, and I would suggest that it is this apparent non sequitur that causes readers to stumble and ‘correct’ the line to ‘They shall not grow old’.

However, if you read the line as Binyon wrote it, it seems to me inevitable that you visualise the fallen as growing into an affirmative new state of being ‘not-old’, and that this is what the poet intended. What could this state be? Well, transfiguration, immortality, glory. Glory is a very tricky word today, debased and even pejorative. I note that it is given fifteen different meanings in The Chambers Dictionary, ranging from ‘renown’ and ‘triumphant honour’ to ‘boastful or self-congratulatory spirit’ and ‘presence of God’. But the ‘not-old’ state of the fallen in Binyon’s poem reminds me of nothing so much as the lines from Henry Vaughan’s poem ‘They are all gone into the world of light’:

I see them walking in an air of glory,
Whose light doth trample on my days:
My days, which are at best but dull and hoary,
Mere glimmering and decays.

Most of Binyon’s poem is concrete and fastidious; but in ‘They shall grow not old’ I feel it approaches the transcendent dimension of Wilfred Owen’s ‘Greater Love’. The soldiers’ act of supreme love, namely their ‘ultimate sacrifice’ for others, has removed them to that place of transfiguration where ‘you may touch them not’ (Owen). By comparison, ‘we that are left’ live out days that are ‘but dull and hoary’, in Vaughan’s words.

Given that ‘For the Fallen’ is the most famous war poem in the English language, it is difficult to believe that this point has not been discussed, and analysed better than I can, many times before. However, I cannot find any discussion of it on the Web.

By contrast, you will find plenty of discussion on the Web of the second half of Wilfred Owen’s poem ‘Dulce et decorum est’, about a gas attack, and specifically of the line ‘His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin’. This discussion was possibly triggered by Seamus Heaney asking his students at Queen’s University whether the poem wasn’t ‘over-written’, ‘artistically bad’, and the lines in which ‘devil’s sick’ occurs weren’t ‘a bit insistent’, ‘a bit explicit’ (see his The Government of the Tongue, Faber & Faber, pp. xiv-xvi). Heaney seems to focus this into a conflict between ‘truth’ and ‘beauty’, ‘life’ and ‘art’, although his final take on the matter seems ambiguous; some might say specious.

The reason, in my view, that Owen’s words here are ‘over the top’ (‘If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,/Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues’) is that his reaction is naturally to use the strongest words he can find, this backfires on him, yet ultimately produces an incoherence that perfectly enacts his horror.

If you have read as many personal accounts of WW1 warfare as I have in the past year (Ypres and Gallipoli), you too become incoherent if you try to express your reaction to the horror and degradation of it. I cannot think that there has been another war in which the human savagery and sheer filth have reached these depths. We have to accept, which I think Heaney never really did, that ‘devil’s sick of sin’ etc is not an iota too strong for it.

The poles of our World War 1 poetry are ‘devil’s sick’ and ‘glory’. We are rightly being overwhelmed by the former in these anniversary years, but we must never forget the latter either. Apparently it was Lloyd George who proposed the words ‘The Glorious Dead’ on the sides of Lutyens’s Cenotaph. If so, he was a genius, but so many contemporaries were involved in the post-war memorialisation that I expect it was really a consensus. There is no ‘To’ in it, just the three words, as if to mean ‘This says all we can about them’. It is an age removed from Rupert Brooke’s understandably tawdry line of autumn 1914 ‘Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead!’. After our protracted, ‘wordy’ discussions of Commemoration last year, a follower of Calderonia emailed me that it was all very interesting but ‘The Glorious Dead’ remained; that was in a way all that could be said…

‘Lapidary verse’ is an interesting, classical art (Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes produced notable inscriptions for the Queen’s Silver Jubilee), and perhaps this recent anonymous example drives at what I have been trying to say:

        EPITAPH

Their uniforms of shit
their lives of shit
their deaths of shit
we live.
What means forget
THE GLORIOUS DEAD?

I should inform new visitors to the blog that Laurence Binyon was a lifetime friend of George Calderon’s and wrote an ode In Memory of George Calderon whose last verse bears a resemblance to the final lines of ‘For the Fallen’.

I am currently revising Chapter 6, ‘Russianist, Novelist, Cartoonist’, which at sixty-five printout-pages is by far the longest. It covers the years 1900-1905. I keep thinking I must split it, but it is really the backbone of the book, because it attempts to show from analysis of George’s essays and novels that he is a first-rate Russianist and a significant Edwardian writer… Unfortunately, following discoveries in the last year I have to add 500 words to it about George and Taoism. The research and evaluation have been done, but it’s still going to be difficult to know where to splice this subject in. I will then have edited/rewritten nearly half of the book.

Watch this Space 10 February 2016

10/6/16. In a recent article in The Times, Richard Morrison complained that the 14-18 NOW commemorations (‘Extraordinary art experiences connecting people with the First World War’) that have been unveiled for 2016 show a ‘pretty tenuous’ link with the realities of the War; one case, he suggested, was even ‘a spurious gimmick’. ‘It’s ironic’, he continued, ‘that the commemoration that has made most impact so far — five million visitors in four months — wasn’t even part of 14-18 NOW.’ He was referring, of course, to the installation by Paul Cummins and Tom Piper at the Tower of London called Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red.

Setting aside private and local commemorations, which Morrison thinks are best, I know only one artefact so far in the 1914-18 commemorations that is in the Cummins-Piper league, and that is the project by Andrew Tatham called A Group Photograph (which was also not funded by the Arts Council).

Ten years ago my wife and I were in Norfolk and decided to visit some local exhibitions in the ‘Open Studios’ scheme. At Andrew Tatham’s house he directed us to the bottom of his garden, where there was a very small, but light-proof shed. In there, completely alone, we watched an animated film. It is no exaggeration to say that we stumbled out into the light afterwards lost for words.

This film shows the family trees of all the soldiers in a 1915 photograph growing, in Andrew’s words,

over 136 years, mixed in with photos of their families and historical time markers and contemporary music for each year, as well as with cycles of the moon and the seasons. Each of their trees grows like a real tree, with a trunk for each man and branches appearing for children, grandchildren and so on down the generations. There is a baby’s cry for each birth, and a bell toll for each death. You can vividly see the immediate effect of the War on this group of men and get a view on the aftermath.

The film has developed since then, but always been at the heart of what I would call Tatham’s ‘whole-life commemorative installation’, which has gone on for more than twenty years in the form of presentations and talks all over Britain, exhibitions, notably in the Cloth Hall at Ypres in 2015, vibrant media interviews, and now the book:

I will say no more about the nature of this amazing project, but recommend to followers that they go to Andrew Tatham’s own explanation of it: http://www.groupphoto.co.uk/ .

The profundity of A Group Photograph comes from the fact that it evokes the lives and deaths not only of the forty-six members of the 8th Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment, whose commanding officer was Tatham’s great-grandfather, but of the families and friends around them, and their descendants to this day, scores of whom have been intimately involved in the project. It brings history and the present together in a supremely palpable way. It is both War and Peace — and the creation of this continuum is, ultimately, a source of hope to those who experience it through Tatham’s work.

The book, which is beautifully illustrated and very reasonably priced, is prefaced with a poem by Tatham that traces in brief images how he became drawn into the project. The last stanza reads: ‘And now I search/That picture of men in a war/I see today and yesterday/I cannot forget.’ The last two lines say it all.

At the time of writing, I have completed the ‘final edit’ of 17% of my biography of George Calderon. So I might finish the work in another three weeks… Engaging with chapter 2, which narrates from day to day his love affair with Katharine Ripley (i.e. Kittie), was exhausting. I had to get the letters out again to check quotations, and had forgotten how intense, claustrophobic and full of mood swings the relationship was.

Watch this Space 3 February 2016

3/2/16. Today I tackle the revision of chapter one, first written, revised and wordprocessed in June 2011. I have always known it was going to be a challenge, as it starts the biography at one remove (George hardly appears in it) and the first page and a half is too philosophical, airy-fairy and drawn out… It’s a terrible beginning if you want to grab the reader and never let them go again. At the time of writing I tried to get round this by keeping it very short (3500 words), but that was fudgery… There are things in it that are important (to me) to say, e.g. about Edwardian semantics and body language, not to mention Kittie’s first husband and George’s university friend Archie Ripley, but no publisher, I fear, will want it; or the last chapter. Chekhov’s advice is ringing in my ears: ‘when you have written a story, tear off the beginning and end of it, because that’s where we writers lie most’!

A number of followers have asked me what condition Kittie was suffering from in her years at ‘White Raven’ (1934-47) and whether it was this that carried her off (30 January 1950).

The latter is the easy question. On her death certificate the causes of death are given as: 1a Hypostatic Pneumonia, b Cardiac failure, c Arteriosclerosis. However, her hypostatic pneumonia (‘Old People’s Friend’) was just the result of prolonged confinement to bed (constant fluid collection at back of lungs), ‘cardiac failure’ refers presumably to her heart winding down, and ‘arteriosclerosis’ was a long-term condition, so it seems to me these amount to saying no more than that the cause of death was ‘old age’ and they tell us nothing about her chronic health problems 1934-47.

The most obvious reason for all her correspondence suddenly breaking off in 1946 is that she had a stroke and never recovered the ability to write. But there is no independent evidence for this and she does not seem to have entirely lost her powers of speech. I don’t favour this explanation, therefore. The ‘most obvious reason’ for no letters from or to Kittie having survived after 2 January 1946 is actually that they were lost or burned after her death! Given the large number of her correspondents, it is hardly likely that they all stopped writing to her at once. (On the other hand, if she did have an incapacitating stroke all her correspondence would have been taken over by her attorney, Louise Rosales, and Mrs Rosales was definitely a ‘burner’.)

Kittie’s known symptoms after moving into White Raven were problems with (close?) vision, suddenly falling asleep, and having to keep running to the ‘bathroom’. Not a single photograph of her wearing glasses is known, but we know she had them as she refers in a diary to her ‘spex’. But the problem was not just optometric. She visited a consultant in London, who it seems told her he could do nothing for her beyond a new lense prescription. This implies that the real problem was cataracts or something like macular degeneration. Her suddenly ‘falling asleep’ could have been just a hypothermic reaction to inactivity in the grossly underheated houses she lived in. Although Kittie says in a private letter that it is her ‘middle’ that plays her up, implying the problem is gastric, her spidery failing writing and blackouts could imply chronic urinary tract infection. She thought very highly of her G.P. in Ashford, a Dr Body (!), and he tried the latest medication for her gastric/urinary condition, but it didn’t work.

We shall probably never know what Kittie clinically had wrong with her. But the really interesting thing, in my view, is that nowhere does Kittie ever say what, clinically, she has been diagnosed as having. This, I think, is very characteristic of the Edwardians and, indeed, our recent forebears. You did not name your disease/complaint, because (a) medical terminology was for doctors, (b) you weren’t supposed to discuss illness openly, (c) your job was to keep a stiff upper lip through it all.

There is a graphic illustration of Kittie’s attitude to illness in her pocket diary for 1939 — and incidentally it shows that we must add the term ‘grip’ to ‘staunch’, ‘stalwart’ and ‘stout’ in our Edwardian vocabulary. She had had a fall in September or November 1938 (she is confused about which) and been badly concussed. This had aggravated her already existing proneness to falling asleep. But she was determined to battle on, and to write about it in her diary for 10 January 1939 even though this cost her great effort and her writing and self-expression were affected:

Returning from Foxwold tomorrow [=yesterday, 9 January]. I found E. [Elizabeth Ellis?] better but not quite well. Came as far as Maidstone with E. [Elizabeth Pym?] then fetched by [illegible name] Gar. [probably ‘Garage’ at which chauffeur worked, in Kennington, Ashford]. Frightfully tired seems absurd to be so tired suppose its still after Xmas tiredness in spite of doing nothing at Foxwold and never down till lunch[.] But difficulty getting to bed till small hrs as would fall asleep in chair and wake about three – seems as if sitting down to take off my stockings is the moment that sleep gets me like a descending lid on a box and I wake about 3 to 4. Sometimes it would be a letter I had to write – I’d only get a few wds written[.] The only safe time to catch a post at Foxwold is the early morning post man. I’ve no warning of feeling ‘sleepy’ – just as I say a sudden lid shuts down. When first this used to occasionally happen Dr Carver [Mrs Stewart’s doctor in Torquay] said it was a form of Exhaustion and I must regard it as heaven sent – but since this dunt on my head on Sept. 5^th it seems to be perpetually happening. Still I daresay heaven sent but difficult to deal with must try to do less somehow – but goodness knows how – I was really doing ‘nothing’ at Foxwold but yet so tired when I got to my room (not feeling tired) that apparently the lid would shut down with no warning and I went to sleep [f]or 3 or 4 hrs. […] I pray nightly for return of ‘grip’ after Prayer for Peace.

She had recovered by the beginning of March and was following political developments in Europe closely. Two months before war broke out she was able to revisit her birthplace, St Ernan’s Island Donegal, on a motoring holiday with Louise Rosales.

Watch this Space 25 January 2016

25/1/16. As many have said before me, the agony of ‘writing’ is the fight to the death between what you think you want to say and…the writing. It is draining, torturingly slow, and I’ve had weeks of it with ‘White Raven’, the sixteenth and last chapter of my biography of George Calderon. Now it’s over. Today I ‘finished’ the book. All that I have to do is revise it (164,000 words), add about 800 words, write the Introduction and Afterword, Acknowledgements and Bibliography, etc., which will probably take two months! Despite the nervous exhaustion, I cannot help but feel light-headed.

A blog-visitor asks me whether ‘completion’ will leave me feeling ‘as if you are missing something close to you’. I have thought about this and I believe the answer is no. I have been writing the biography sensu stricto for four and a half years, but one way and another I’ve been in a dialogue with George and Kittie for over thirty. They are locked in my heart and mind; the key is lost; they will be there for ever.

But I cannot pretend that I have said goodbye (in writing, at least) to Kittie today without a deep sadness — a malaise quite different from the terrible, senseless wrench of George’s death at Gallipoli two chapters before. Thanks to her three diaries and the far more extensive documentary material than in George’s case, I had been living and dreaming her life at White Raven — a house I know well — almost day by day between 1934 and 1944. It is sad that she gave herself so completely to other people in this period, some of whom appallingly exploited her, that she kept the ailing Elizabeth Ellis on as her housekeeper through thick and thin, took Elizabeth to Hove with her, even, where they died eighteen months apart in the same nursing home, that hardly anyone was present at Kittie’s funeral, and that we don’t even know where her ashes were scattered. Yet this is how she planned it. There can be no doubt that her last years were a determined kenosis.

During the war, when she could not sleep at night because of the air raids, she sat in an armchair by her bed ‘very tightly wrapped up in a travelling rug’ (Edward Hamilton), going through all her and George’s boxes of papers, dividing them into those to be burned and those to be saved for posterity. She captioned most of her 525 photographs and wrote explanations or comments on many of the 884 letters. These explanations are clearly addressed to someone unnamed who will be listening — someone in the future. Against all the odds (for by 1950 George was publicly almost forgotten) she believed someone would hear her. I feel endlessly honoured to be the first such person.

About fifteen times whilst writing this last chapter I considered heading it with a quotation from a letter of Percy Lubbock’s written in 1944. Percy had been exiled from Italy with his wife Sybil since 1940, Sybil died in Montreux at the end of 1943, and Percy was left alone there for the rest of the war. Kittie had sustained him with her regular letters evoking Lubbock family news and life at Foxwold more vividly, visually, he told her, than anyone else. He and she had a pact that if he could not cope as Sybil’s tropical disease worsened, Kittie would fly to Switzerland immediately; but in the event, this was militarily impossible. On 26 April 1944 he wrote to her: ‘I clearly see you from afar, but you are a long way off.’ This exactly expresses my own feeling as I was writing the end of the book. But epigraphs like this can be toxic. I decided against it.

After a break, I shall start ‘re-writing’ the book I have just ‘finished’, and I will be posting weekly on a wide range of topics.

Watch this Space 15 January 2016

15/1/16. One of the most difficult problems of researching Kittie Calderon’s life after George’s death is deciding how much she travelled abroad. After Percy Lubbock married Lady Sybil Cuffe in 1926, the couple lived in the fabulous Villa Medici at Fiesole and invited Kittie to stay with them at least six times between 1928 and 1930; but she seems to have gone only once (in November 1930). Similarly, she twice planned to visit Constantinople and Gallipoli, but the evidence is that she did not.

There is a fine leather suitcase emblazoned ‘Mrs. George Calderon’, which has the remains of a single foreign luggage label on it:

I cast an eye over this label twenty years ago and thought: ‘Hm, “Russie” down right, a minaret top left, must be from travelling to Constantinople by ship, which was also a route to Russia’. But last week, having concluded Kittie did not go to Gallipoli, I took a closer look at the label (with a magnifying glass). First, as the image above clearly shows, top left is not a minaret, but a dome topped with a cross. The only church it reminded me of from my own experience was the basilica of Le Sacré Coeur in Paris. Second, what could the letters RAND be a part of, if not a French place name? I assumed that the letter before the R was an E, then ran through the possibles. None was at all convincing. Then the penny dropped: it is much more likely to be a G before RAND — and grand must be the commonest word ending in -and in the French language. Googling about on ‘le grand‘, Paris and ‘Russie’, I eventually came up with the Grand Hôtel de Russie at the top of the Boulevard Montmartre in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. The Sacré Coeur basilica would tally with that, of course.

As far as is known, Kittie went to Paris only once, with George on their honeymoon in 1900. Both were keenly interested in contemporary French painting, which might explain why they stayed in Montmartre, and they may well have known that the famous series of paintings of Boulevard Montmartre by Impressionist Camille Pissarro was made from his balcony in the Grand Hôtel de Russie. The ‘suitcase’ is actually more like an attaché case of the period, i.e. hand luggage. The prominent words ‘Mrs. George Calderon’ on the front might be there because Kittie was going to Paris and wanted to make it clear she was (newly) married… At least, that is my hypothesis: that this case is her honeymoon case.

Other hypotheses that would explain this label are invited! Note that I am unable to explain the black, column-like shape on the right, or the bit of shield at bottom left that appears to say UNIT[É?].

Stop Press!

16/1/16. Within hours of the above post going up, John Pym emailed me with an image he had found on the Web of a luggage label that fitted Kittie’s exactly and demonstrates that the hotel was in Rome, not Paris. The only difference was that the image did not feature the UNIT[…] shield bottom left. However, it was conclusive proof that the label could not date from George and Kittie’s honeymoon to Paris in 1900. I had actually found the Grand Hôtel de Russie in Rome when I was trying to identify Kittie’s label, but rejected it as the nearest church had no high pinnacles on it, whereas the basilica of the Sacré Coeur in Montmartre has… I hadn’t considered the Vatican!

Well, by the evening Calderonia‘s indefatigable Web-Meisterin Katy George had found and sent me an even better image:

This contains the logo U.N.I.T.I. and even an extra line, again in French. If I had offered a bottle of champagne, Katy would definitely have won it! My sincere and humble thanks to her, to John Pym, and others who emailed me about this yesterday. My thanks are very humble, because I never expected so many people to give their time so generously to solving this one and my own hypothesis was up a gum-tree…

I have been asked when, then, did Kittie visit Rome? Most likely in 1930, when she stayed with Percy and Sybil Lubbock at Fiesole, whence it would be easy to reach Rome by train, but possibly the year before: a scrap of label on the side of her case says LUG, most likely standing for LUGANO, which might refer to a possible visit to Lesbia Corbet (married name Mylius) on Lake Como in 1929. Whereas the Grand Hôtel de Russie in Montmartre seems to have gone long ago, the one in Rome appears to have survived to this day — minus the ‘Grand’.

Thanks again to everyone who responded so splendidly.

Watch this Space 1 January 2016

1/1/16. A very happy new year to everyone. As you will gather from the above, we are now presenting Calderonia slightly differently. ‘Featured Comments’ will soon replace ‘Comments’, although all past Comments will still be accessible. Links will be introduced between past Comments and it will, of course, be possible to leave new ones. Previous ‘Watch this Space’ posts will be archived and made accessible. A number of over-arching categories that are not tagged, e.g. ‘Edwardian Character’, ‘Conduct of the War’, ‘War Poets’, will also be introduced. I shall leave up ‘Christmas at “White Raven” 1944’ for a little longer, as people have emailed me that they like it. Then it will be archived. I hope to carry on posting weekly until the biography is published, and I may feature some entries from Kittie’s diary for ninety years ago on the days for which she wrote them. Watch this space for completion of the last chapter of the biography very soon.

Watch this Space 24 December 2015
(Christmas at ‘White Raven’, 1944)

Faithful followers of this blog/website will recall twelve months ago the Christmas of 1914 at Foxwold, Brasted Chart, in Kent. The Pym, Lubbock and Calderon families all participated, as well as two refugees from German-occupied Belgium who were living with George and Kittie Calderon in Hampstead. None present ever forgot it, and Percy Lubbock wrote poignantly of it in his portrait of George published in 1921.

The only other Christmas in Kittie’s life after 1914 that we have as much information about is that of 1944, thirty years later when she was seventy-seven. That too was dramatic, but in a completely different way. I felt it would be appropriate, before the year in which my biography should be published and this blog ends, to describe from manuscript sources what happened at Christmas 1944.

*                     *                    *

My deeper research into Kittie’s life at Sheet, Petersfield, persuades me that she made the mistake in 1922 of coming in at the very top of local society. She was a relation by marriage and good friend to the biggest local landowner, Helen Bonham-Carter (then hyphenated); she was the widow of a war hero and literary man whose public profile was still quite high through the 1920s; she was the scion of a famous family (the Irish Hamiltons); and she had exalted friends (Astleys, Corbets, Ripleys etc) who visited her. Yet she lived in a relatively modest Victorian cottage, ‘Kay’s Crib’, outside the village proper. Much of the rest of Sheet society was composed of upper middle class retired folk, e.g. from the military, who rather fancied themselves. Understandably, when Kittie hove in she put these people’s backs up. She described Sheet in retrospect as ‘my prison’.

By about 1932, Kittie had decided to get out of Hampshire. Her nephew Edward Pakenham Hamilton (1893-1983) had become Estate Manager at Godinton Park, near Ashford in Kent, and his father, Kittie’s only brother John Pakenham Hamilton (1861-1946), had moved to Ashford with his wife to be close to their eldest son. This, and the desire to be nearer to the Pyms at Foxwold, persuaded Kittie to buy a plot of land north of Ashford and have a house built there according to her own specifications. She asked Violet and Evey Pym’s son, the architect John Pym (1908-93), to build it for her, and she moved into it in late 1934. John Pym’s brother, the artist Roland Pym (1910-2006), then painted the above white raven over the door, as that was to be the new house’s name.

‘White Raven’ was the sobriquet she had adopted in her relationship with Caroline (Nina) Corbet (1867-1921), who was ‘Black Raven’ because her first husband was Walter Corbet (1856-1910), descended from a henchman of William the Conqueror’s called ‘Le Corbeau’.

Unlike ‘Kay’s Crib’ in Sheet, Kittie settled into ‘White Raven’ extremely well. She designed a formal garden and took on a gardener called Grant. Although at that time ‘White Raven’ was in relatively open countryside, she was in easy distance of a church and village, and beyond that was Ashford with its fast line to London. The people who lived around her were far more middle class than at Sheet and she became something of a local treasure. She was visited by friends from her earlier life (probably including Sir Coote Hedley, the ‘Godfather in War’ (q.v.), who died in 1937) and often saw her brother John and nephew Edward. By April 1942, however, Edward Hamilton had had to move to a job at Retford.

Kittie and her housekeeper Elizabeth Ellis remained at ‘White Raven’ throughout the War. Dog fights and phalanxes of German bombers passed overhead, and as a major railway hub Ashford itself was targeted. The noise was so loud that on 24 October 1943 Kittie wrote to Percy Lubbock that, sitting in the kitchen, she and Elizabeth were ‘bounced into the air by the shocks overhead’. Friends all over the country tried to persuade Kittie to go and live with them, but for various reasons she would not budge. Then in June 1944 the flying bomb attacks began. Up to a hundred a day roared over and Ashford became the worst-hit area after London. Kittie called them ‘Boodlebugs’. In her words, the two women suffered ‘continuous long almost sleepless nights’, which began to grind them down.

On 25 October 1944 John Hamilton’s wife Sarah died. His sons were extremely worried about his ability to care for himself — not to mention the dangers of continuing to live in Ashford — so after the funeral they tried to persuade him to go to live with one of them at a time. But John would not budge either. Continuing in Kittie’s words to her god-daughter Lesbia Lambe (Nina Corbet’s sole surviving child):

the sons hated him being alone in this house, so it seemed obvious I should ask them if he would let me and Elizabeth come for a few days and he said he would agree to that… So here we both came on the Wednesday [1 November 1944] and for the first day in our mutual habitation of that little house [‘White Raven’] we were both out of it when the Boodler came along and left cards but he knocked in vain for admittance, and after a rather bad attack of temper departed — after laying all the tiles upon the lawn on the south side and knocking down nearly all the ceilings, especially choosing my bedroom and in it my bed..!

A flying bomb had landed in the back garden of ‘White Raven’ and there is little doubt that Kittie and Elizabeth would have been killed if they had been there. The explosion also caused severe damage to the houses around it. Now they had to stay with John Hamilton much longer, whilst ‘White Raven’ was made habitable. As Kittie wrote to Lesbia on 8 November: ‘John is bored stiff with us in our different ways — he does not even try to camouflage the fact — indeed goes so far as to be, I think, genuinely glad that he probably saved my life by acceding to those “tiresome” sons!’ Kittie herself believed that it was God who had used her brother to save her and Elizabeth’s lives. It seems that they finally departed for ‘White Raven’ on 18 December.

Kittie and Elizabeth Ellis now prepared to celebrate Christmas at ‘White Raven’. A major problem was finding something to eat on Christmas Day. Louise Rosales, Kittie’s friend in London, had tried to get a chicken from her own butcher, but ‘he can’t let me have any more till the war is over!!!! He offered me some ROOKS (!) for you […] to replace the non-existent chickens’. However, as Kittie wrote to Lesbia on 18 December, Elizabeth managed to ‘collect a clever little teeny weeney chicken for her and me without telling me’. At this point, Kittie learned that she was going to have three unexpected guests — ‘Brother John and his nice engineer son George and his nice wife Lily’. What were Kittie and Elizabeth to do, as the midget chicken would ‘never have fed four’?

The day was saved by Lesbia and her husband Charles Lambe, who sent a ‘beautiful St Fort chicken’ by post from Fife, which arrived on Christmas Eve. St Fort is the Stewart estate near St Andrews that had been inherited by Nina and where her daughter was now living. As Kittie reported to Lesbia, ‘Brother John had been quite moved on the Christmas Day occasion when I told him he was eating a St Fort Chicken! Your Great-Grandmother had given him many a good day’s shooting when a big Eton boy and later at Cambridge in his vacations when we were sometimes in Fife’.

After Christmas 1944, John Hamilton sold his house in Ashford. His eldest son, Edward, helped him to pack up. The two men then stayed a night at ‘White Raven’ and left for Nottinghamshire, where Edward was living with his family.

So Kittie’s plan of living out her life near relations in Ashford had been frustrated. Her closest relation (by marriage) in Kent was now Evey Pym, forty miles away.

*                    *                    *

The high point of researching Kittie’s life 1923-50 over the last few months has been discovering that Elizabeth Ellis did not die before Kittie left Kent for Brighton in January 1948 (or possibly late 1947). This is entirely thanks to my superb London researcher Mike Welch, who specialises in large institutional and genealogical databases. The truth that Mike uncovered about Elizabeth Ellis is both fascinating and revealing.

When I was doing the initial research on this period of Kittie’s life about a year ago, I asked Mike to look for Elizabeth Ellises who had died between 1945 and 1947. This was because there was no mention of Elizabeth in Kittie’s papers after 1945 and I knew that she had died before Kittie. But if she had retired because of illness before Kittie moved to Brighton, she could have lived and died anywhere. The name Elizabeth Ellis was so common that without a date of birth it was impossible to narrow down which one in the registers of deaths she might be.

However, last month the National Archive made available a new source of information, the 1939 residential register, and Mike saw the opportunity to discover Elizabeth Ellis’s date of birth (5 June 1869) from the entry for ‘White Raven’. Comparing this with a wider swathe in the register of deaths, Mike spotted an Elizabeth Ellis who died in BRIGHTON in 1948. Tracing this Elizabeth Ellis back through the 1911, 1901, 1891 and 1881 censuses, it became clear that she was indeed Kittie’s long-serving housekeeper.

She was born in Lincolnshire and in 1881 was living in a workhouse with her mother, a domestic servant. Elizabeth went into service herself and by 1911 was working for the family of one Wright Provost in Hampstead. The next year, when the Calderons moved to Well Walk in Hampstead, she became their housekeeper (a promotion). We now know that she moved with Kittie to Brighton in 1947/48. Staggeringly, Elizabeth Ellis was probably still living and working with Kittie at the age of seventy-eight.

Elizabeth Ellis had been, as Kittie expressed it, ‘my valued old servant’ for thirty-six years, but we know from the records that Kittie provided generously for her too. Elizabeth died on 3 September 1948 in the same Brighton nursing home that Kittie was to die in on 30 January 1950.

Watch this Space 16 December 2015

16/12/15. It seems to me in retrospect that every one of the fifteen chapters I have written of George Calderon’s biography is perilously different in length, form and style; but none is so different as the one I am writing at the moment — the last one of the book. It is the story of Kittie’s last twenty-eight years and George’s posthumous literary life, yet it will be the shortest (about 3000 words). The ‘deep chronology’ that I spent two months constructing proved only the beginning. I realise now that I have to evoke not only the key events in Kittie’s life 1922-50, but the ‘feel’ of her life through those years. I have, in fact, to evoke how it felt to be Kittie. Quite, quite different from the other chapters. And, I have to admit, a tall order. But that’s enough of a ‘spoiler’…

*                    *                    *

Cambridge Professor of International History David Reynolds’s lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’, was a virtuoso performance — restrained, relaxed, magisterial, deeply challenging. The audience of about a hundred and fifty gave him a long ovation.

Many of Reynolds’s points are made in his recent book (and TV series) The Long Shadow, which I was familiar with, but I was surprised to find myself taking three pages of notes. If I were to summarise and quote from the whole lecture it would take thousands of words. Personally, I hope the lecture is published in some form, as it is surely something of an historic turning-point itself in how we think of the First World War.

Reynolds is ‘not sure that the way we remember the War is conducive to making our peace with the War’. Poets like Owen and Sassoon are our ‘supreme interpreters of the War’, and he implied that they won’t lie down… There has been a revival in Remembrance Sunday and the two-minute silence. Our difficulty in making our peace with WW1 can be traced to disillusion after 1918 with the idea that it had been ‘the war to end all wars’ and therefore justified. We are troubled by the fact that it did not solve the ‘German Problem’, and the biggest loss of life in British military history was therefore wasted. Reynolds quoted Hannah Arendt to the effect that the great problem after WW1 was ‘coming to terms with sudden, random death’. He gave a harrowing example of this from Vera Brittain and could only compare it today with the devastating emotional impact of road deaths. He described his experience of the charity Road Peace, whose own act of remembrance is held the week after Armistice Day, and drew parallels between national attitudes to WW1 and grieving. By contrast, we have made our peace with the Second World War because it ‘ended by revealing the morality of the War…it was our Finest Hour’.

A particularly interesting section of Reynolds’s lecture was where he compared attitudes to both wars in the rest of Europe. The French have no difficulty with WW1 because it was a ‘war of national liberation that they won’, whereas WW2 was a disaster for them (‘capitulation and collaboration’) that traumatised French society. But, like the Germans themselves, they have been able to view both wars as a single agony that was laid to rest in 1945 — and even more so by the Treaty of Rome (founding the EU), which Reynolds described as ‘the Peace Treaty that didn’t happen after 1918’. The French and Germans have, Reynolds claimed, ‘moved on’ because they accept a common European destiny, whereas we have difficulty believing we ‘belong’ to Europe and our ancillary role in WW1 itself questions the fact.

Reynolds’s peroration was that ‘we need to remember but also understand’. We are now as far away from the Great War as its participants were from Waterloo (it amused me slightly that he seemed to be suggesting that Waterloo no longer meant anything to WW1 soldiers, when we know from George Calderon’s letters that even as the Orsova was taking him and fellow-officers to Gallipoli they were planning a celebration of it!). ‘We need to remember the men who marched away’, Reynolds concluded, but also:

1. ‘Clamber out of the Trenches’
2. ‘Escape from Poets Corner’
3. ‘Understand the Great War as history’

The latter, of course, is what you would expect an historian to say, but Reynolds meant specifically to understand it as a global war, as one that ‘reshapes the Middle East, and involved China and Japan’.

There was a fascinating range of questions afterwards, both from the audience and from Reynolds to the audience, but the very first participant asked forcefully ‘when?’ would we make our peace with WW1; he felt it would take ‘a long time’ because at the moment we plainly did not want to. At this point, I felt, Reynolds’s own attitude revealed itself as more nuanced. ‘I want to continue remembering these people’, he said, meaning the names all over our war memorials and Thiepval’s arches, and implied that he approved of the public acts of remembrance. But he also added, in a phrase that deeply struck home with me at least, that ‘we have to start letting go of the dead’.

Watch this Space 9 December 2015

9/12/15. Cambridge Professor of International History David Reynolds’s lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’, was a virtuoso performance — restrained, relaxed, magisterial, deeply challenging. The audience of about a hundred and fifty gave him a long ovation.

Many of Reynolds’s points are made in his recent book (and TV series) The Long Shadow, which I was familiar with, but I was surprised to find myself taking three pages of notes. If I were to summarise and quote from the whole lecture it would take thousands of words. Personally, I hope the lecture is published in some form, as it could itself be an historic turning-point in how we think of the First World War.

Reynolds is ‘not sure that the way we remember the War is conducive to making our peace with the War’. Poets like Owen and Sassoon are our ‘supreme interpreters of the War’, and he implied that they won’t lie down… There has been a revival in Remembrance Sunday and the two-minute silence. Our difficulty in making our peace with WW1 can be traced to disillusion after 1918 with the idea that it had been ‘the war to end all wars’ and therefore
justified. We are troubled by the fact that it did not solve the ‘German Problem’, and the biggest loss of life in British military history was therefore wasted. Reynolds quoted Hannah Arendt to the effect that the great problem after WW1 was ‘coming to terms with sudden, random death’. He gave a harrowing example of this from Vera Brittain and could only compare it today with the devastating impact of road deaths. He described his experience of the charity Road Peace, whose own act of remembrance is held the week after Armistice Day, and drew parallels between national attitudes to WW1 and grieving. By contrast, we have made our peace with the Second World War because it ‘ended by revealing the morality of the War…it was our Finest Hour’.

A particularly interesting section of Reynolds’s lecture was where he compared attitudes to both wars in the rest of Europe. The French have no difficulty with WW1 because it was a ‘war of national liberation that they won’, whereas WW2 was a disaster for them (‘capitulation and collaboration’) that traumatised French society. But, like the Germans themselves, they have been able to view both wars as a single agony that was laid to rest in 1945 — and even more so by the Treaty of Rome (founding the EU), which Reynolds described as ‘the Peace Treaty that didn’t happen after 1918’. The French and Germans have, Reynolds claimed, ‘moved on’ because they accept a common European destiny, whereas we have difficulty believing we ‘belong’ to Europe and our ancillary role in
WW1 itself questions the fact.

Reynolds’s peroration was that ‘we need to remember but also understand’. We are now as far away from the Great War as its participants were from Waterloo (it amused me slightly that he seemed to be suggesting that Waterloo no longer meant anything to WW1 soldiers, when we know from George Calderon’s letters that even as the Orsova was taking him and fellow—officers to Gallipoli they were planning a celebration of it!). ‘We need to remember the men who marched away’, Reynolds concluded, but also:

1. ‘Clamber out of the Trenches’
2. ‘Escape from Poets Corner’
3. ‘Understand the Great War as history’

The latter, of course, is what you would expect an historian to say, but Reynolds meant specifically to understand it as a global war, as one that ‘reshapes the Middle East, and involved China and Japan’.

There was a fascinating range of questions afterwards, both from the audience and from Reynolds to the audience, but the very first participant asked forcefully ‘when?’ would we make our peace with WW1; he felt it would take ‘a long time’ because at the moment we plainly did not want to. At this point, I felt, Reynolds’s own attitude became more nuanced. ‘I want to continue remembering these people’, he said, meaning the names all over our war memorials and Thiepval’s arches, and implied that he approved of the public acts of remembrance. But he also added, in a phrase that deeply struck home with me at least, that ‘we have to start letting go of the dead’.

* * *

I am coming to the end of my deeper research into Kittie Calderon’s life 1923-50, which is the subject of my last chapter. For this purpose I am doing something that I did not do for George’s life: I am transferring every known event (including letters) in this period of Kittie’s life to a chronology. At the moment, it covers twenty-eight pages and contains over 300 entries. I decided this was necessary in order to get a grip on the ‘shape’ of her last twenty-eight years. It wasn’t necessary for George, because there was far less known ‘data’, each chapter deals only with four or five years, and most chapters home into texts.

* * *

I have several approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 23 November 2015

23/11/15. I am now reading and digesting every item in Kittie’s archive that relates to the period 1923-50, and it’s immeasurably deepening my understanding of her life in that period, which spans Sheet in Hampshire (1923-34) and Kennington in Kent (1934-48).

The prime source is the 248 letters written to her and by her in that period which have survived in her archive.

The largest number (120) are those from Percy Lubbock to Kittie 1923-45, which took me four days to read and digest.

As one would expect of Percy Lubbock, they are beautifully written, with hardly a grammatical mistake. I am sure they will all be published one day. However, reading his letters from 1927-40 was sheer agony. In 1926 he married Sybil Scott/ Cutting, who was an extremely rich woman then on her third marriage and with a formidable reputation for neurosis. Percy’s letters to Kittie from this period are almost entirely given over to the exquisite variations in ‘Lady Sybil’s’ supposed condition. No sense of her as a person comes over, merely as a kind of medical and psychotic ganglion: she has ‘rheumatic eye-poisoning’, ‘intestinal parasites’, ‘an amoeba’, ‘nervous prostration’, ‘perpetual dysenteric attacks’, ‘internal collapse — digestive etc’, ‘an obstinate and vicious influenza’, ‘a revival of a germ (intestinal)’, ‘intestinal neuritis’, and so ad infinitem. She is borne downstairs and upstairs, European authorities in various opaque diseases visit her regularly, her ‘poor little bent legs’ have to be straightened out in Aix-les-Bain, she can consume nothing but her ‘poor little pâté jelly and a glass of champagne’ before subsiding again; but somehow she manages to control everyone around her. Lubbock is entirely at her beck and call and does not write anything for fifteen years…

Then (1940) the couple are stranded, with a few servants, at Montreux for five years, unable to return to their villas at Fiesole and Lerici because of the war. It concentrates both their minds. Percy’s letters to Kittie become a narrative at last, rather than a series of stand-alone stress-rep0rts. He follows the war as closely as he can from any newspapers he can get hold of and by listening to the BBC; the seasons and flowers become intimately important to him and Sybil; he depends utterly on Kittie (who writes about every ten days) for news of the Lubbock and Pym families, for her special ability in her letters to enable him to ‘see’ his nephews and nieces and interpret their characters and actions…

In 1937, at the height of his desperation about Sybil’s condition, Percy Lubbock made what he called a ‘pact’ with Kittie — that if he needed her by him, she would come to Italy. She replied by telegram: ‘of course, yes’. In 1945, after the war, after his wife had died in Switzerland and he was about to return to Italy, he thanked Kittie for ‘how much your letters have done for me and given me first and last, in my life abroad’.

A picture is emerging of Kittie rushing all over England to help family and friends in the 1920s and 30s, and (from her three extant diaries) of friends, family and godchildren constantly descending upon her at Sheet and Kennington. One of them in a Christmas card addressed her as ‘Dear Boon’, another thanked her in 1938 for ‘the love you have shown in a thousand ways to me and mine through the years too long to count’.

Without, I think, consciously willing it, the widow of George Calderon became something of a grande dame in the communities where she settled, and counsellor in matters emotional, psychological and practical amongst her friends and adopted family. Well, she did have enormous emotional experience and intelligence, and was as competent as any man at managing her own and others’ affairs. But not everyone liked it. Some thought her dominating and interfering.

*                    *                     *

If you haven’t read it already, please read Clare Hopkins’s latest Comment now. It is definitive, in my view, but still there is plenty that some might find contentious. If you do have a reaction, PLEASE comment in your turn! I have received some short emails about Clare’s Comment, but we would all much rather follow a debate on the website. Some issues might be:

— Recently, there have been cases reported in the press of people who were counselled towards ‘closure’ after bereavement, went with it, but were ‘hurried’ and in fact just repressed their mourning; and they feel this did them psychological damage. It has led them to question the whole concept of closure.

— An issue is, then, can we actually direct (‘manage’) bereavement and commemoration? Are Clare’s ‘stages’ prescriptive, or ex post facto, i.e. retrospective?

— I see that Cambridge history professor David Reynolds, who has written about the factual side of WW1 memorials and the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, is giving a public lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace With the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. In an interview, he says that WW1 is now ‘turning into a historical issue rather than one with a personal focus’, which reminds me of Clare’s ‘stage four’, when in her words ‘commemoration distils into History’. However, do we want our live emotions to be ‘historicised’? A recent German president said that for the German nation there can be ‘no moral closure’ on two world wars, so why should we expect our own empathic, existential closure on WW1? Even Reynolds admits ‘it will be hard to ever truly move on from the trauma of the conflict’. I shall be going to Prof. Reynolds’s lecture on 2 December and reporting about it afterwards.

— Will WW1 ever come to ‘exemplify important qualities in the English (or British) character’ the way Agincourt, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, or the Battle of Britain have? Was our part in WW1 tragic rather than heroic?

*                    *                     *

I have several approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please (lon’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 16 November 2015

16/11/15. I have been reading the copy of The Sayings of Lao Tsŭ (John Murray, 1905) that George Calderon gave his wife Kittie on her birthday, 5 March 1905. I had always known that George was interested in Taoism, but the signs had steadily been mounting that it was more than that. Since I knew nothing previously about Taoism, I thought I had better start by reading this short book translated by the famous Sinologist Lionel Giles, then branch out. There are no books about Taoism in the remains of George’s own library.

The documentary evidence of George’s reading and knowledge of Taoist texts falls in the years 1905-12. He thanks William Rothenstein in a letter provisionally dated 1905 for helping him find some of these texts. On Tahiti in 1906 he quotes Lao Tsu in a discussion about beauty. In a 1910 review of Chesterton’s What’s Wrong With the World? he accuses Chesterton of ‘not perceiving the virtues, the “identity”, or “tao” of the thing that he attacks’. George’s contention in his Preface to The Fountain (1911) that ‘all the Evil that matters is produced, not by evil intention, as is generally supposed, but by good intention working through the complicated channels of our social system’ could be interpreted as a plea to practise Taoist wu wei (active non-action). A 1912 note in his own shorthand also sounds distinctly in the spirit of the Sage: ‘Play. To show that pleasure is to be had only by
refraining from it. It is a thing of the imagination. It is too confused in reality. The mirage goes.’ Even George’s belief that there is a ‘profound philosophy’ behind Chekhov’s endeavour ‘to establish the true relation of Man to the surrounding universe’, and that ‘ever since we began to think in Europe, we have been wrong about Man’ because we have sought to ‘sever the individual, to abstract him in thought’ from his widest environment, could be taken to hint at the Tao.

The more one thinks about it, the more resemblances one sees between some of the precepts of Taoism and George’s personality in the last ten years of his life. Given that Taoism is not theistic (by the 1890s George was an agnostic/ atheist), and given some of the intriguing overlaps between Taoism and the kind of Christianity George did believe in, it is tempting to conclude he was a private Taoist. But this is an all too familiar trap for the
biographer. Nothing but empirical evidence will do. In the absence of it, one could construct a species of conspiracy theory that explained ‘everything’ about George Calderon — and was literally undisprovable.

I content myself at the moment by deeply internalising the Sage’s saying: ‘If people took as much care at the end as at the beginning, they would not fail in their enterprises.’

*                    *                     *

If you haven’t read it already, please read Clare Hopkins’s latest Comment now. It is definitive, in my view, but still there is plenty that some might find contentious. If you do have a reaction, PLEASE comment in your turn! I have received some short emails about Clare’s Comment, but we would all much rather follow a debate on the website. Some issues might be:

— Recently, there have been cases reported in the press of people who were counselled towards ‘closure’ after bereavement, went with it, but were ‘hurried’ and in fact just repressed their mourning; and they feel this did them psychological damage. It has led them to question the whole concept of closure.

— An issue is, then, can we actually direct (‘manage’) bereavement and commemoration? Are Clare’s ‘stages’ prescriptive, or ex post facto, i.e. retrospective?

— I see that Cambridge history professor David Reynolds, who has written about the factual side of WW1 memorials and the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, is giving a public lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace With the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. In an interview, he says that WW1 is now ‘turning into a historical issue rather than one with a personal focus’, which reminds me of Clare’s ‘stage four’, when in her words ‘commemoration distils into History’. However, do we want our live emotions to be ‘historicised’? A recent German president said that for the German nation there can be ‘no moral closure’ on two World wars, so why should we expect our own empathic, existential closure on WW1? Even Reynolds admits ‘it will be hard to ever truly move on from the trauma of the conflict’.

— Will WW1 ever come to ‘exemplify important qualities in the English (or British) character’ the way Agincourt, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, or the Battle of Britain have? Was our part in WW1 tragic rather than heroic?

*                    *                     *

Benedict Cumberbatch’s nightly outbursts about the Government’s policy towards Syrian refugees, delivered from the stage after the cast curtain-call for Hamlet, call to mind George Calderon’s after-performance oratory at the New Theatre, Oxford, in March 1912.

Liverpool Repertory Company, under Basil Dean, were touring their production of George’s The Fountain. As was the custom, the author was called onto the stage by the audience after the first night in Oxford, 4 March 1912. But the first national Coal Strike was in progress, slowly throttling the country. Instead of just taking his bow, George burst into a rousing appeal to the undergraduates present to form a body to go and work in the mines. ‘I was simply cold with terror’, wrote Kittie afterwards: ‘I had no notion this had been in his head.’ George invited volunteers to meet him outside Trinity College next morning, in the evening he led a mass debate in the college hall about what action to take, and by the end of the day an Oxford University Strike Emergency Committee with 300 members had been formed under George’s chairmanship. On 6 March he and Kittie left for London to coordinate with activists there…

One of the questions in my mind about Cumberbatch’s action is, what did the other actors think about being detained by it every evening and what was the management’s attitude? As it happens, subsequent events in George’s case may give us an intimation. On 7 March 1912 George travelled on his own to Cambridge for the first night there of The Fountain. The audience was small and the actors ‘livened things up’ with some anachronistic adlibbing about the Coal Strike, presumably partly aimed at George. When there were calls for the author afterwards, George was ‘prepared to take a call’, the Cambridge Daily News reported, but was prevented ‘possibly because Mr Basil Dean thought the time and the place were hardly suitable for propaganda’.

George was unable, then, to repeat his political theatre in Cambridge. But this did not prevent him from addressing a meeting of over two thousand students that had already been organised for the day after in Cambridge’s new Examination Hall.

*                    *                     *

I have several approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 9 November 2015

9/11/15. It is a huge relief to have ‘finished writing’ the penultimate chapter, ‘Aftermath and Masterpiece’, of my biography. Although it is only 9000 words long, it has taken me ten weeks to research and write (in pencil). It has been by far the most difficult of the fifteen I have written, and it’s not in a good state. It’s a patchwork held together by hiatuses. The reason it is so different is, of course, that George isn’t physically alive in it; it’s about Kittie’s life after George and her posthumous creation of his reputation. Hundreds of changes, some radical, will probably be made when I ‘type it up’, and then each time I read it on the screen. I expect I shall manage to knock it into shape. Meanwhile, on with researching the very last chapter, ‘White Raven’, which follows Kittie’s life to its end and George’s continuing afterlife. It will be short, but quite full of incident. I just hope the research does not take an unconscionable time…again.

*                    *                     *

If you haven’t read it already, please read Clare Hopkins’s latest Comment now. It is definitive, in my view, but still there is plenty that some might find contentious. If you do have a reaction, PLEASE comment in your turn! I have received some short emails about Clare’s Comment, but we would all much rather follow a debate on the website. Some issues might be:

— Recently, there have been cases reported in the press of people who were counselled towards ‘closure’ after bereavement, went with it, but were ‘hurried’ and in fact just repressed their mourning; and they feel this did them psychological damage. It has led them to question the whole concept of closure.

— An issue is, then, can we actually direct (‘manage’) bereavement and commemoration? Are Clare’s ‘stages’ prescriptive, or ex post facto, i.e. retrospective?

— I see that Cambridge history professor David Reynolds, who has written about the factual side of WW1 memorials and the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, is giving a public lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace With the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. In an interview, he says that WW1 is now ‘turning into a historical issue rather than one with a personal focus’, which reminds me of Clare’s ‘stage four’, when in her words ‘commemoration distils into History’ . However, do we want our live emotions to be ‘historicised’? A recent German president said that for the German nation there can be ‘no moral closure’ on two world wars, so why should we expect our own empathic, existential closure on WW1? Even Reynolds admits ‘it will be hard to ever truly move on from the trauma of the conflict’.

— Will WW 1 ever come to ‘exemplify important qualities in the English (or British) character’ the way Agincourt, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, or the Battle of Britain have? Was our part in WW1 tragic rather than heroic?

*                    *                     *

Benedict Cumberbatch’s nightly outbursts about the Government’s policy towards Syrian refugees, delivered from the stage after the cast curtain-call for Hamlet, bring to mind George Calderon’s after-performance oratory at the New Theatre, Oxford, in March 1912.

Liverpool Repertory Company, under Basil Dean, were touring their production of George’s The Fountain. As was the custom, the author was called onto the stage by the audience after the first night in Oxford, 4 March 1912. But the first national Coal Strike was in progress, slowly throttling the country. Instead of just taking his bow, George burst into a rousing appeal to the undergraduates present to form a body to go and work in the mines. ‘I was simply cold with terror’, wrote Kittie afterwards: ‘I had no notion this had been in his head.’ George invited volunteers to meet him outside Trinity College next morning, in the evening he led a mass debate in the college hall about what action to take, and by the end of the day an Oxford University Strike Emergency Committee with 300 members had been formed under George’s chairmanship. On 6 March he and Kittie left for London to coordinate with activists there…

One of the questions in my mind about Cumberbatch’s action is, what did the other actors think about being detained by it every evening and what was the management’s attitude? As it happens, subsequent events in George’s case may give us an intimation. On 7 March 1912 George travelled on his own to Cambridge for the first night there of The Fountain. The audience was small and the actors ‘livened things up’ with some anachronistic adlibbing about the Coal Strike, presumably partly aimed at George. When there were calls for the author afterwards, George was ‘prepared to take a call’, the Cambridge Daily News reported, but was prevented ‘possibly because Mr Basil Dean thought the time and the place were hardly suitable for propaganda’.

George was unable, then, to repeat his political theatre in Cambridge. But this did not prevent him from addressing a meeting of over two thousand students that had already been organised for the day after in Cambridge’s new Examination Hall.

*                    *                     *

I have several approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 2 November 2015

2/11/15. I have a hunch that the word ‘unconscionable’ features regularly in biographers’ conversations with themselves…

It has taken me an ‘unconscionable’ four and a half years to reach the endgame of writing George Calderon’s biography, when I thought it would take three…

I spent an ‘unconscionable’ length of time piecing together the sequence of George’s frequently undated love letters to Kittie over a mere five months in 1898-99, and when I came to present that story it turned into an ‘unconscionably’ long chapter…

Suddenly you discover you have to inform yourself about the whole of Edwardian theatre before you can talk about George Calderon’s place in it, or research in ‘unconscionable’ detail events in the suffragist movement 1909-10, or spend ‘unconscionable’ whole months educating yourself about a battle on the Gallipoli Peninsula…

Now I have spent an ‘unconscionable’ three weeks reading and re-reading George’s Tahiti, digging into other books about Tahiti, reading and re-reading dozens of reviews of George’s book, taking notes from them, photocopying some of them, checking numerous Latin quotations he has embedded in his text (mainly from Horace and Virgil, but two he appears to have made up), and ‘unconscionably’ fiddling with ‘unconscionably’ many other aspects, too… And all to write 800 words on Tahiti in the penultimate chapter!

I must say, though, that my predicament is one of the most difficult I’ve had to face whilst writing the book. Tahiti is George’s masterpiece. I could, probably should, write a whole chapter on its literary brilliance and thematic complexity. But I have to discuss that side of it in my penultimate chapter, which concerns George’s ‘afterlife’, because Tahiti is a posthumous work. The storyline of this chapter is Kittie’s, since she is its surviving protagonist, and I cannot ‘go on’ too long… I therefore have to compress the essence of the essence of what I want to say about Tahiti into no more than 800 words, before getting back to this most traumatic time in Kittie’s life. Hence the very long — ‘unconscionably’ long — run-up to writing the few paragraphs. I have to be absolutely sure of what I want to say. Although I have written many pages on all of George’s major literary works (so much so that in those chapters I will be accused of writing literary criticism rather than biography), these few paragraphs have to be in a class of their own.

Biographically speaking, George’s four months on Tahiti in 1906 are described in a separate chapter in their appropriate chronological place. They took an ‘unconscionable’ effort (with research assistants in the UK, New Zealand and Tahiti) to break down into an almost day-by-day sequence…

I have several approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 26 October 2015

26/10/15. It was remiss of me, in my last Comment, not to address the first paragraph of Clare Hopkins’s last Comment, which concerned commemoration. Clare began the paragraph by asking ‘Can there ever be a last word on the subject of commemoration?’ As new followers of the blog may ascertain by searching on ‘Commemoration’, we debated this subject over the year, with reference to World War I, a great deal.

I think it possible, therefore, that I subconsciously answered ‘no, there can’t be a last word on commemoration’, and moved on… Equally, back in August I was feeling ‘warred out’ and ‘commemorationed out’ and simply had nothing more to say. That situation has been changed by a visit that I made this weekend to the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in Hampshire, which was conceived and painted by Stanley Spencer.

In my own Comment of 6 August I said that the images and all that I know of Auschwitz and the Holocaust constrain me from visiting Auschwitz. I would he incoherent with emotion. The same is true for me of the Helles Memorial at Gallipoli or visiting the battlefield itself (to go to the spot where George Calderon was killed would be totally impossible). But Clare reasonably remarked that she saw ‘nothing wrong in being incoherent’ and that ‘to stand in numb or anguished silence’ at Helles or in Auschwitz ‘seems an entirely appropriate act of commemoration’.

Although I still know I couldn’t go to these places, I accept Clare’s View here. I have come to feel since August that the completely empathic response to such terrible events and individual sacrifice is ‘not enough’, in the sense that it’s only half of the act of commemoration. I’ve come round to this because of my personal experience that the subjective, holistic-empathic response reaches a limit where you have no more to give. Indeed you are exhausted, ‘gutted’ by it. Ceremony, ritual, more impersonal, rational and objective forms of commemoration, have to take over.

Another difficulty I have always had with memorials like Helles, Thiepval, or the daily ceremony at the Menin Gate, is their sheer scale. Certainly they create an awe-ful sense, but their size and architecture also seem uncomfortably ‘imperial’ — partaking even of the very gigantism and marmoreal impersonality that made World War I possible. Many people have said to me that the scale of and the silence at these memorials are what has
made the deepest impression on them. I can’t help feeling, though, that I wouldn’t be able to get that experience from them myself with so many hundreds of other people present. There is an undeniable element of tourism at these memorials, even Auschwitz, which I have no difficulty with but which I wouldn’t be able to stomach.

The reason I have no difficulty with this commemorative tourism, or even with what Clare Hopkins aptly termed in her Comment of 30 July ‘war porn’, is that it surely does not matter how people are brought to a realisation of the horror of these events and, dare I say it, the sanctity of the victims, as long as they are brought to it. Of course the simply ‘educational’ value of a visit to such places is gold. And, as I say, the monument, war grave, ceremony, service or ritual seem to complete (close?) somewhat unemotionally an act that untrammeled empathy cannot.

But I have to say that Spencer’s nineteen frescoes in the Sandham Memorial Chapel are the most satisfying commemoration of World War I that I know. There are no corpses, gunfire, attacks and carnage in them, very few discernible weapons even, but the horror of actual warfare is the great Unspoken at the back of your mind as you study them. What the panels draw you into (and you could spend all day discovering new things in them) is the
most basic human life of the war, from scrubbing floors in hospitals, sorting the laundry, setting out kit for inspection, to scraping dead skin off frostbitten feet, buttering sandwiches in a hospital ward, map-reading or making a military road. All of the scenes are collective ones. As the excellent National Trust brochure puts it, they celebrate the ‘human companionship of war’. The sheer positiveness of this companionship — the utter humanity of the paintings — triumphs.

At the same time, Spencer’s personal and wonderfully modern christianity (the small letter seems appropriate) shines through everything, especially the vast altarpiece ‘Resurrection of the Soldiers’. In the centre of it are two mules waking from death and craning their necks round to look at the almost unnoticeable white figure of Christ in the mid-distance, to whom the resurrected soldiers are bringing their crosses. Apparently, Spencer believed that animals have souls and that is why he wasn’t invited to the consecration of the chapel by an Anglican bishop. It also explains why a soldier waking far right from his grave is touching two hilarious tortoises (the scene recalls Spencer’s war service in Greece and Macedonia), who presumably have also been resurrected.

It will take me ages, I think, to get my head round Spencer’s masterpiece (surely it is one of the greatest works of art of the twentieth century), but at the moment I would say that the reason I find it such a satisfying commemoration is that its celebration of common life, its astounding evocation of ‘ordinary’ men and women, is empathetically totally engaging, whilst his personal religious conception of the work provides ‘meaning’, a tentative, almost indefinable rational closure to the empathic. Spencer wrote of the altarpiece: ‘The truth that the cross is supposed to symbolise in this picture is that nothing is lost where a sacrifice has been the result of a perfect understanding.’ Not an exclusively Christian, or religious, truth, then; all can accept it as a moral and humanistic one.

I have several approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 12 October 2015

12/10/15. There were dozens of books published by English and American visitors to Tahiti between about 1890 and 1930, and Rupert Brooke’s poems about the island became extremely well known. I have to admit that this literature is so large that I have scarcely dipped into it. Understandably (I hope) I have concentrated on reading, re-reading, and penetrating George Calderon’s posthumous Tahiti, which I regard as his masterpiece. However, without reading the other books it is difficult to know what the standard is. I was delighted, therefore, to be given recently a copy of Robert Keable’s Tahiti: Island of Dreams (1925), because it compares books on the island from Loti to George: compares them with each other, and with the author’s own experience of the island.

Keable devotes seven pages to Tahiti. He writes: ‘It is the best book on the island that has been written, and for that very reason, perhaps, is not popularly known. It is a sad hook, and in it George Calderon depicts, with simple truth, at once the beauty and the sorrows of the Isle of Dreams.’ That is gratifying, at least. But when Keable visited the island, he could find only one Tahitian still alive of those whose portraits George had drawn in his book. Similarly, Frederick O’Brien, author of Mystic Isles of the South Seas (1921), wrote to Kittie on 30 October 1921: ‘Many of the people in your husband’s book I knew in 1913, but most of them are dead. I was again in Tahiti a few months ago. The influenza and the prevalent tuberculosis had taken more than half of those who lived there in 1913.’

From this you may conclude that I have reached 1921 and have only about 2000 words to write in my first draft of Chapter 15, ‘Aftermath and Masterpiece’. More on the difficulties next week…

I always have four or five approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 25 September 2015

25/9/15. A natural consequence of turning the blog into a Website is that no-one (it seems!) wants to leave a Comment, because visitors who followed it every day last year no longer have a reason for looking in, and casual viewers now (of whom there are a decent number from all over the world) don’t, presumably, feel they know enough to ‘opinionate’. The casual viewers, incidentally, have usually just zoomed in for a post that has something

on their Google search term, e.g. Chekhov translations, Tahiti, Rabindranath Tagore, Michel Fokine or the Third Battle of Krithia.

I had hoped that by taking down my own brief response to Clare Hopkins’s superbly provocative last Comment top right I might encourage other people to weigh in. And everyone is still welcome and encouraged to do that! However, I appreciate that Clare’s Comment does draw on the whole gamut of last year’s posts — is very comprehensive — so people zooming in and out may not feel they are qualified to Comment on it… Personally, I don’t think that should put anyone off, but I know from their emails that many loyal ‘Calderonians’ also feel they have no more to say.

So I am going to leave the hall in other people’s courts for another week, before I attempt a reply to Clare myself, which she has certainly earned. The reply should be comprehensive, of course. It will be just like old times! Depending on what happens after that, I may ask my blogmaster to ‘archive’ the Comments so that viewers can read them all.

I think we have more or less exhausted the subject of what the device stands for that Kittie designed for the Arts and Crafts covers of Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory and George’s selected works, but I think it is so attractive that I am going to leave it here a bit longer. It will then join our Gallery at the right. A close inspection indicates, incidentally, that the gold really contains gold.

I am glad to report that the writing of the penultimate chapter of my biography of George, ‘Aftermath and Masterpiece’ [Kittie 1915-22] is going very well. I am hopeful that readers will have benefited from my difficulties with ‘chronotopia’, which gave me much longer to think about this chapter before writing it than would have been the case had I not been running the blog. I believe I have a far better understanding of Kittie’s life after 4 June
1915 than I would have had otherwise.

I always have four or five approaches to publishers in the air, hut if you have any ideas about plausible publishers yourself, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 17 September 2015

17/09/15. We have had a wobble of excitement this week. An advertisement appeared in AbeBooks entitled ‘Calderon, Lieut George Leslie — Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry — an Original Photographic Portrait […] printed circa 1919’. Sensational! The implication was that it was a studio portrait of George taken in his Ox & Bucks uniform, perhaps before embarking for Gallipoli. Not only would this have been the first such portrait to have come to light, it might have told us something about his physical condition in May 1915, a subject much speculated upon. I was sceptical, though, because there is no such photograph in Kittie’s collection and one might have thought she would have used it in Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory in preference to the ghastly ‘dead-eyed’ one of George in insignia-less uniform as an Interpreter in October 1914 (see the banner to this website).

Unfortunately, the photograph advertised in AbeBooks is actually the familiar 1914 one after all. Mr Barrie Kaye, of KBooks, who are selling the portrait ‘mounted and ready to frame’, kindly sent me a scan and incidentally explained that the portrait came from a seven-volume Memorial to Rugbeians killed in WW1, which was produced in 1919. This was in itself interesting, as I researched and wrote my chapter on George at Rugby long ago and was not aware of this publication. Apparently, as well as a photograph there is a page or two on each of Rugby’ s war dead, describing their school life and war services (which would, of course, specify his commission as being with the Ox & Bucks). I had better have a look at this publication. l am grateful to Mr Kaye for telling me about the
Memorial, and I see that the photograph is still available through AbeBooks.

If you haven’t read the latest cracker of a Comment from Clare Hopkins, I recommend that you do (top right)…and contribute to the discussion! Clare is absolutely right that in ‘laying out George and Kittie’s daily lives’ I have invited readers to ‘subject an Edwardian character to 21st century scrutiny’ . I think this is fruitful. It is one major reason why I am writing the biography.

(By the way, my chapter on George’s opposition to women’s suffrage is available on my website at ‘Recent Writing’.)

Katy George has emailed me with some very interesting observations on this device that Kittie Calderon designed for the cover of Percy Lubbock’s book about George and all the subsequent Volumes of George’s works:

I had suggested, based on Edwardian emoticons used in letters, that the two intersecting circles were George and Kittie, the letters perhaps stood for ‘George’ and ‘Catherine’ as well as ‘George Calderon’, and that the ear of barley referred to Christ’s words ‘except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit’. However, this doesn’t explain why it is an ear of barley and not wheat (and we know from Percy Lubbock’s correspondence with Kittie that it is barley).

Katy has suggested that the barley is a reference to Robert Dwyer Joyce’s ballad ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ — and I find this very plausible for two reasons. First, the ear is still a symbol of immortality because in the ballad the barley springs up every year on the graves of the Irish rebels who carried grains in their pockets as food but who, like George, also died for their country and left their loved ones in order to fight. Second, Kittie was born and brought up in Ireland, was a member of the Irish Literary Society, and I think we can presume that she knew Joyce’s ballad.

Katy has also suggested that the circles might be ‘mandorlas’. If you Google on ‘mandorla’, you will discover what a rich subject this is. I am not myself convinced that the circles in Kittie’s design are mandorlas in the religious sense (roughly, two haloes enclosing a figure, e.g. the Virgin Mary). Nor, clearly, are they examples of the most famous geometrical form of mandorla, the vesica piscis, as their perimeters do not pass through each other’s centres. However, in effect the circles on the book cover are a form of the latter. Perhaps, quite simply, they symbolise George and Kittie’s (larger and smaller) wedding rings. Whichever, I am extremely grateful to Katy for her stimulating contribution.

One of the subjects I have had to delve into more deeply in order to write my next (and penultimate) chapter, is the whole Arts and Crafts movement. it is clear to me now — from the interior furnishing of her home with Archie Ripley, through the Brasted artistic community, to the very firm that produced the blocks for illustrations in Percy
Lubbock’s Sketch — that since being an art student Kittie had always moved in the A&C swim. Even George, despite his conservative cast of mind, held views about craftsmanship and manual labour reminiscent of William Morris.

A fascinating new biography has just come out, Amazing Grace: The Man Who Was WG, by Richard Tomlinson. It is a biography after my own heart, because it not only presents the fullest account of Grace’s life to date, but has an overriding theme: the ‘amateur’ (i.e. ‘gentleman’)/ ‘professional’ divide in cricket which led to ‘shamateurisrn’ and in the words of Guardian reviewer Peter Wilby ‘turned English cricket into a joke from which it has never quite recovered’. This is an Edwardian subject, of course, and crops up periodically in my biography because Calderon believed in the ‘amateur’ both on the cricket field and in his many other life pursuits. However, the theme of my own book could perhaps best be summarized in a new title such as George Calderon: The Case For Edwardian Genius.

As always, if you have any ideas about plausible publishers, please email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 2 September 2015

2/09/15. If you haven’t seen the latest cracker of a Comment from Clare Hopkins, I recommend that you do (top right)…and contribute to the discussion! Clare is absolutely right that in ‘laying out George and Kitties daily lives’ I have invited readers to ‘subject an Edwardian character to 21st century scrutiny. This is fruitful. In fact, of course, it is why I am writing the biography.

(By the way, my chapter on George’s opposition to women’s suffrage is available on my website at ‘Recent Writing’.)

Katy George has emailed me with some very interesting observations on this device that Kittie Calderon designed for the cover of Percy Lubbock’s book about George, and all the subsequent volumes of George’s works:

I had suggested, based on Edwardian emoticons used in letters, that the two intersecting circles were George and Kittie, the letters perhaps stood for ‘George’ and ‘Catherine’ as well as ‘George Calderon’, and that the ear of barley referred to Christ’s words ‘except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit’. However, this doesn’t explain why it is specifically an ear of barley and not wheat (and we know from Percy Lubbock’s correspondence with Kittie that it is barley).

Katy has suggested that the barley is a reference to the Robert Dwyer Joyce ballad ‘The Wind That Shakes the Barley’ — and I find this very plausible for two reasons. First, the ear is still a symbol of immortality because in the ballad the barley springs up every year on the graves of the Irish rebels who carried grains in their pockets as food, but who also died for their country like George and left their loved ones in order to fight. Second, Kittie was born and brought up in Ireland, was a member of the Irish Literary Society, and I think we can presume that she knew Joyce’s ballad.

Katy has also suggested that the circles might be ‘mandorlas’. If you Google on ‘mandorla’, you will discover what a rich subject this is. I am not myself convinced that the circles in Kittie’s design are mandorlas in the religious sense (roughly, enclosing haloes round figures of Christ and the Virgin Mary). Nor, clearly, are they examples of the most famous geometrical form of mandorla, the vesica piscis, as their perimeters do not pass through each other’s centres. However, in effect the circles on the book cover are a form of this. Perhaps, quite simply, they symbolise George and Kittie’s (larger and smaller} wedding rings. Whichever, I am extremely grateful to Katy for her stimulating contribution.

A fascinating new biography has just come out, Amazing Grace: The Man Who Was WG, by Richard Tomlinson. It is a biography very much after my own heart, because it not only presents the fullest account of Grace’s life to date, it has an overriding theme: the ‘amateur’ (i.e. ‘gentleman’) / ‘professional’ divide in cricket which led to ‘shamateurisrn’ and in the words of Peter Wilby ‘turned English cricket into a joke from which it has never quite recovered’. This is an Edwardian subject, of course, and crops up periodically in my biography because Calderon believed in the ‘amateur’ both on the cricket field and in his many other life pursuits. However, the theme of my own book could perhaps best be summed up in a new title such as George Calderon: The Case For Edwardian Genius.

As always, if you have any ideas about plausible publishers, please email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 25 August 2015

25/8/15. If you haven’t seen the latest cracker of a Comment from Clare Hopkins, I recommend that you do (top right)…and contribute to the discussion!

A special part of my in-depth research of Kittie’s life 1915-22, for the next chapter, has been tracing how her ideas for a ‘memoir’ about George transmogrified into Percy Lubbock’s book about him (George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory, 1921). There is a quite continuous trail of their correspondence during the collaboration. It has vastly changed my own perception of Percy’s book. Basically, I think that in important ways it was a dry run for his most famous book, Earlham, which he wrote next. Both of them present views of the past and in an essentially static form.

The book was going to be published by Grant Richards, but Kittie had a big say in its design, which was to be the same as the four volumes of George’s works that followed. She went to one of the few women bookbinders of the day, Sybil Pye, who was an Arts and Crafts disciple like herself but also a friend of Kittie’s neighbour Tom Sturge Moore and lived not far from Emmetts, the Lubbocks’ home in Kent. Pye made the following motif for the cover, to Kittie’s instructions:

If anyone would like to suggest what it means, do leave a Comment.

My own interpretation is based on George and Kittie’s use of the Edwardian dot-within-a-circle emoticon in their letters. The two circles may stand for George and Kittie. The dots at the bottom and top could be their ‘selves’, as well as just abbreviation dots going with their initials (Kittie’s baptismal name was Catherine). The ‘selves’ are separate but the two circles intersect. The barley ear (we know from Percy’ s letters that that is what it is) perhaps refers to St John chapter 12, verse 24: ‘except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it die, it bringeth forth much fruit.’ These words are the epigraph to The Karamazov Brothers, of which I think Kittie was an admirer (George seems to have preferred Tolstoi). Ingeniously, the combination of the barley ear and the intersecting circles itself creates a dot — the ‘corn’ (grain), or a single self?

As always, I will end by saying that if you have any ideas about plausible publishers of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please email them me through my website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 16 August 2015

16/8/15. If you haven’t seen the latest cracker of a Comment from Clare Hopkins, I recommend that you do (top right)…and contribute to the discussion!

I have been away for a week. This necessitated carting the manuscript with me and a memory stick with the entire typescript on. At this stage in completing a book you are so paranoid about losing everything you’ve written that you don’t want to leave all your copies in one place behind you. Needless to say, I didn’t write anything.

But I did think a lot about ‘epilogues’ in modern writing and carry on wondering about the form of the next chapter, which is brief and covers the aftermath of George’s death 1915-22. Before leaving Cambridge, I was reading ‘in depth’ all of Kittie’s correspondence after 4 June 1915, and got as far as 1920. It became far clearer how Kittie set everything aside, including her health and George’s probate (much to her solicitor’s and the War 0ffice’s
annoyance), to produce Tahiti and Percy Lubbock’s book about George for publication in 1921. This has given me a completely new form — a narrative always permeated by Kittie’s ascertainable state of health and mind— for this chapter from the one I had before, and I shall probably start writing it this week.

Approaches will be made to another six carefully researched publishers this week, making twenty-six out of a total of forty-seven possibles. All the time, I have a dull feeling about who the most likely publishers (three) really are, but you have to tackle the ones you would ideally like; you would never forgive yourself if you didn’t. The existence and availability of Calderonia undoubtedly help my case.

As always, I will end by saying that if you have any ideas about plausible publishers of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please email them me through my website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 6 August 2015

6/8/15. I was flabbergasted last week when the TLS featured ‘Calderonia’ a second time on its very popular blog, this time to mark our closing (see link on right under ‘Related’ to ‘Second TLS blog post’). I cannot thank Michael Caines enough for his attention and his superb summation plus discussion of themes touched on over the past year, many of which he has linked in his text back to where they feature in ‘Calderonia’.

Long-term followers will be interested to hear that we have identified ‘Peel’ in my blogs about ‘appling’ (22 January, 19 March, 15 May, 19 July 2015) as Lieutenant Robert Peel of the 9th Ox and Bucks, who in May 1915 was aged thirty, married, with a son aged three. His wife was Helen Beatrice Mansell Peel, née Merry, aged twenty-four. This must mean I was right in reading her name under Kittie’s ‘appling’ as [Helen?], when the graphologist had failed! But we still don’t know who ‘[Emma?], poor girl’ was. Further, when I looked at a screen image of the inquiry form about George sent by the War Office to the U.S. Embassy in Constantinople (see my post of 29 July) I discerned it was headed in pale blue ink ‘Commented’ — and the comment was the word ‘Ottoman?’ written over ‘British Foreign Office’. So someone in the War Office wondered whether Hoffman Philip
had got it wrong, too. The new facts in the present paragraph will be incorporated in the appropriate blog posts. I have already rewritten my post for 4 June 1915.

The search for the best publisher carries on. I have approached twenty, haven’t yet heard from them all, and have another twenty-seven possibles at the time of writing. The market, as I’ve always known, is tough for biographies of dead, ‘unknown’ people, however flamboyant and original. Usually the ‘rejections’ are affable and apologetic enough. I have also approached an agent. If you have any ideas, please email them me through my website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!

Watch this Space 31 July 2015

31/7/15. Blogged out, I am chilling out — slightly. I’m particularly interested in the reception of Patrick Marber’s stunning play THREE DAYS IN THE COUNTRY at the National Theatre, as it is based on my literal translation of Turgenev’s A MONTH IN THE COUNTRY and it has been terrific working with Patrick Marber. At 150,244 words,George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is 94% finished. I may well write the penultimate chapter (Kittie’s life 1915—22, 3500 words) in the next week, if I can find a good cigar… The search for the best publisher hots up. If you have any ideas, please email them me through my website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!