Calderonia

‘Ages will pass…’

Posted on June 12, 2019 by Patrick Miles

Where Russia is concerned, I often think of this text by Boris Pasternak, written by him in German. I have only ever seen it in Gerd Ruge’s illustrated biography of Pasternak (Hachette, 1959), where it is described as ‘une dédicace’. For whom this dedicatory inscription was written, I have never been able to discover, but since Ruge was a German correspondent in Moscow and knew Pasternak at the time of the Zhivago affair, I presume it was presented to him and he still has the original.

This would be my translation (improvements invited):

Ages will pass. Many long ages. I shall no longer exist. There will be no return to the time of our fathers or forefathers, which is surely not necessary or desirable. But the Noble, the Creative and Great will finally, after a long absence, reappear. That will be an age of true achievement. Your life then will be the richest and most fertile imaginable. Remember me then.

Peredelkino B. Pasternak

I hope for Russia, of course, but I wish I shared Pasternak’s certainty. My friend the Chekhov scholar Mikhail Gromov said to me in 1981 that where Russia was concerned ‘it is always impossible to think in terms of individuals, only generations’. But even that good old Russian prime minister Viktor Chernomyrdin (1938-2010) exclaimed in desperation: ‘Whatever we do in Russia, nothing ever changes!’

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

LAURENCE BROCKLISS’s review in The London Magazine appears here.

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Boris Pasternak, comments, dedicatory inscription, Doctor Zhivago, futurology, Gerd Ruge, hope, Mikhail Gromov, Peredelkino, Russia, Viktor Chernomyrdin, Vladimir Putin | 3 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 3

Posted on May 29, 2019 by Patrick Miles

14 May
I gather, from a reliable source, that access to Calderonia has been blocked in Russia (I nearly said ‘the Soviet Union’). This would explain why no Russian viewers have featured in the stats for months. One can only sigh. Some of us have greatness thrust upon us, but would rather not have. I suppose ‘they’ took exception to some things I said on the occasion of the centenary of the Bolshevik coup. An old dissident comments: ‘It’s worse than in the Brezhnev period, because the technology now enables them to keep far closer tabs on what people are saying and thinking.’ Actually, I think the Putin regime is more repressive all round. Can you imagine it, last year they even banned the British Council, which had been representing our culture in Russia since 1959…

18 May
We have been on Shetland for nine days. Despite email-checking, it is possible to forget everything back home, above all the need to sell books. It was still Spring on Shetland, with masses of daffodils and narcissus in bloom. The air is breathtakingly clean compared with Cambridge and in the fine hot weather it had a sweetness that I think is compounded of grasses, wild flowers and sheep dung. Above all, the rich wildlife — guillemots, puffins, red-throated divers, terns, wheatears, whimbrel, fulmars, seals, trout, orcas — goes about its existence as though humans are not even there. But one could hardly say that it’s an unspoiled paradise. Some islanders, particularly on Yell, have a disarming custom of dumping their old cars in the middle of moorland. Moreover,

The raven hackles
that flutter on barbed fences
are just black plastic.

22 May
We have come back to yet another Eiger of a learning curve: publishing our first book with Amazon as a print on demand paperback. It is just over a year since Sam2 and I submitted my Calderon biography to Clays for production (they fortuitously delivered it on 4 June 2018, the anniversary of George’s death at Gallipoli, and I still think they did a superb job). As some followers will recall, we had been working flat out on typesetting and preparing the book for submission since taking the decision to self-publish on 6 January 2018. Our feet seem hardly to have touched the ground since; it certainly does not feel like almost a year since we set about selling it. And now we have to take a very deep breath and get What Can We Hope For? out to reviewers a couple of months before its publication date of 16 October. Why on earth are we putting ourselves through this?

It’s because eighteen months of approaches to five commercial publishers produced two contracts which were offensive guff and we had to bin them. From every point of view it made more sense to publish What Can We Hope For? ourselves, and Sam2 easily persuaded the authors that an Amazon print on demand paperback was the best option.

The book’s principal author is famous scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne. He is now wheelchair-bound and cannot write anything longer than a page or two. However, his mind is as sharp as ever and his spoken English highly expressive. This book has been compiled from my recorded conversations with John, meticulously transcribed by Sam2, then edited down by me from 60,000 to 31,000 words. It is about John’s eschatological thinking — eschatology being defined at the beginning of the book as ‘the doctrine of the last or final matters, such as [the end of the universe,] death, judgement and the state after death’. Here is a sample page from the typescript:

26 May
I have had some emails about the first entry in my previous post, concerning the shortlisting for the James Tait Black biography prize. (I don’t want to push this, but it would be so much better for the exchange of views, or even an argument, if people could commit themselves to a blog Comment, as John Dewey has.) My correspondents want to know whether I agree with my friend about the mere ‘wokefulness’ of the short list.

It’s true, Akala’s Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire sounds like a Progress Publishers translation of a tract by V.I. Lenin. But what struck me most about the four titles shortlisted is that two of them are autobiographies, one is about ‘the life’ of Marie Colvin, and the fourth resembles an historical novel. Where are Jenny Uglow’s Mr Lear and other blockbuster biographies brought out in 2018 by the big commercial publishers?

Well, it would ill become me to complain, because I have banged on for nearly five years in this blog about how biography should be an experimental genre! Of course, one can dispute whether autobiography, memoir, diaries, letters and fictionalised history are biography, but for Waterstones and increasing numbers of readers they are. I rather doubt that the quality of writing of the shortlisted works is superior to, say, Uglow’s, but wokefulness aside it is difficult not to agree with Dr Simon Cooke, one of the judges of the James Tait Black biography prize, that ‘this year’s shortlist shows the reach and vitality of biographical writing in the centenary year of the prize’.

Finally, I must admit that even in its first decade the prize was not entirely focussed on biography in the strict sense. In 1922 it was won by none other than George and Kittie’s friend Percy Lubbock for his book Earlham — and whatever that is, it’s not a biography. (See George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, pp. 5-7.)

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

LAURENCE BROCKLISS’s review in The London Magazine appears here.

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Akala, Amazon, biographies, biography, British Council, Calderonia, Clays Ltd, comments, cyber warfare, Earlham, Edward Lear, eschatology, Gallipoli, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, haiku, James Tait Black Prize, Jenny Uglow, John Dewey, John Polkinghorne, Kittie Calderon, Leonid Brezhnev, Marie Colvin, paradise, Percy Lubbock, plastic, pollution, ravens, Russia, Sam&Sam, Sam2, self-publishing, Shetland, Simon Cooke, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Vladimir Putin, wokefulness, World War I, Yell | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 2

Posted on May 16, 2019 by Patrick Miles

18 April
The shortlist for this year’s James Tait Black Memorial Prize (biography) has been announced. Strong contenders are hip-hop artist Akala’s debut Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire and Susannah Walker’s The Life of Stuff: A Memoir about the Mess We Leave Behind. A friend writes: ‘It’s a relief to see that the judges are fully woke in the prize’s centenary year. It would have been unforgivable if, in the twenty-first century, they had chosen the biography of a white male upper-class Edwardian anti-suffragist.’

23 April
An impeccable letter from the Spanish Ambassador thanking me for the copy that I sent the embassy library. George Calderon, he writes, was ‘indeed a very remarkable and generous individual who accomplished great achievements during his, sadly, short life. I hope I will have the opportunity to meet you in the future’. It may only mean Tinker, but the name Calderón still carries weight in the Spanish world…

Athenian door-wedge

3 May
To my stupefaction, Calderonia had a record 243 views today. They are focussed on the period 4 August – 12 December 1914, and between one and five people appear to have viewed each post. I am profoundly sceptical of the figure. I suspect a WordPress glitch or some wheeze played on us by a robot. But Sam2 believes otherwise. He thinks they may all come from an institution that has discovered Calderonia is a useful resource.

Thank goodness I took Andrew Tatham’s vehement advice to continue the blog beyond 2015. I had thought of it only as a way of raising George’s profile before the book came out, but it is now a key element in marketing and in our efforts to sell the edition out. So it will continue at least until then, hopefully collecting viewer-customers along the way.

10 May
Another magisterial email, with paralegal appendices, from the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries, which is situated in Edinburgh. About three months after publication they wrote telling me to send them six copies of my book for the British Library, Bodleian Library, Cambridge University Library, the National Library of Scotland, the National Library of Wales, and the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. I had already, off my own bat, sent copies to the British Library, Bodleian and Cambridge, as those were the only legal deposit libraries when I last published a book. No-one told me to do that back in the 1980s; like thousands of other publishers I just did it.

I am now expected to part with £180 of income plus postage to a quango in Scotland that will redistribute the six copies, sending three back to England whence they came. The Quango’s voice is imperious. But there is no basis to the beast’s bluster. Under the Legal Deposit Libraries Act (2003) only the British Library has a statutory right to receive a copy (and they graciously acknowledged receipt). The other libraries are only ‘entitled to request a free copy within one year of publication coordinated through the Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries’. Presumably, then, I am entitled to refuse.

If these libraries wrote to me requesting a copy, I would not refuse them — though one of them is not even in the United Kingdom! But it is the Agency that is requesting them. London, Cambridge and Oxford have always been copyright libraries and I don’t believe the other three remotely want or need copies (given the existence of Inter-Library Loan). What has happened is that the Agency, like all merely process-driven quangos and bureaucracies, is hell bent on perpetuating itself by arrogating powers. Actually, I don’t believe this Agency achieves any more virtue than the voluntary system that preceded it. It is a waste of taxpayer’s money and should be abolished.

Clearly I am just a hopeless Meldrew attempting to hold back Progress… But I see myself more as an owl trying to wedge open a door so that life can flow freely through it.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged Agency for the Legal Deposit Libraries, Andrew Tatham, biographies, biography, Calderón, Calderonia, comments, copyright libraries, Dardanelles, doorstops, Gallipoli, George Calderon, James Tait Black Prize, legal deposits, marketing, owls, publishers, quangos, Sam&Sam, Sam2, Spanish Ambassador, The Great War, Tinker, Victor Meldrew, World War I | 2 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 1

Posted on May 9, 2019 by Patrick Miles

27 March
Took the train asap to Daunt Books in Hampstead. They had emailed that ‘unfortunately we haven’t sold a copy and if you don’t collect them they will be given to a charity shop’. That’s £180 worth of books! I could see no sign that the books had been taken out of their box. As for my promotion suggestion that George was a Hampstead writer, had been prominent in saving the Heath for future generations, left Well Walk in 1915 never to return… (This is an ‘independent bookshop’.)

1 April
At last an email from Stig: ‘I appreciate that Calderon was a pioneer reviewer on The Dump and a significant Edwardian literary figure, but I am afraid we cannot review your biography as its contribution to Hispanic studies is negligible.’

10 April
I wrote to Mr Ed Maggs, Modern Books specialist at Maggs Bros. Ltd, Bloomsbury, founded in 1853, regarding some Edwardian volumes. I have never had contact with him before. He emails: ‘I am a closet admirer of yours, having more than once stumbled across your blog as I skate around the netweb chasing down people on the margins, and have wondered at how well you have served Calderon and his many connections. Calderonia is a wonderful resource.’ I broke three ribs falling off my chair.

GPO string, c. 1975

13 April
A German bookshop bought a copy online but clicked ‘2nd Class UK postage £32.95 GBP’ instead of ‘Europe £38.65 GBP’. The difference can’t be retrieved, so we lost £5.70 on this copy. I sent the book grinding my teeth.

17 April
Some books are despatched in Jiffy bags, others in bubblewrap and brown paper, of which I have offcuts that I want to get rid of. Some customers get a brown paper parcel secured with the above string and sometimes even red sealing wax. Today the woman in the post office said to me appreciatively: ‘That’s real string!’ It is. Along with the sealing wax and a small wooden wall clock now ticking in our kitchen, it was rescued by my father, who worked on the Post Office when all these things were being thrown out.

The string is strong, natural, and has a kind of chaffy smell from another age. The wavy ellipse that remains of its ball intrigues me. However, whenever I contemplate this phenomenon as it lies on a pile of cardboard boxes in the front room, I can think of only one thing: ‘How long is it going to take me to sell all these books?’

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, comments, Dardanelles, Daunt Books, Ed Maggs, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Germany, GPO, Hampstead Heath, independent publishing, Maggs Bros. Ltd, Post Office, Stig Abell, string, The Great War, Times Literary Supplement | 1 Comment

Inestimable Russianist 3: Harvey Pitcher

Posted on April 29, 2019 by Patrick Miles

(This series is timed to coincide with the 2019 Annual Conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies at Robinson College, Cambridge.)

Hale and hearty in his eighty-third year, Harvey Pitcher is not only one of this country’s leading Chekhov experts, he knows Edwardian Anglo-Russian contacts and life in prerevolutionary Russia inside out. When he offered to read in typescript chapter 4 of my biography, dealing with George Calderon’s stay in Russia 1895-97, and to make suggestions, I knew what an inestimable favour he was bestowing. But that was not all. As a full-time professional writer since 1971, he gave me invaluable advice about my ill-starred (requiring seventeen drafts) Introduction.

Pitcher left Academe to set up as an independent Russianist and translator at an earlier stage than Michael Pursglove or John Dewey. Having learned Russian at the famous Joint Services School of Linguists whilst doing National Service, he read the subject at Oxford, then went off to teach it at Glasgow University. After two years there, he was asked to start up the Department of Russian at St Andrews, which he most successfully did, but after eight years he left to concentrate exclusively on his writing. I cannot help feeling that that was his desired career from the beginning. The ‘early retirement’ of which his Wikipedia entry speaks took place at the age of thirty-five!

In every way, Harvey Pitcher has been a trail-blazer. His first book was published when he was twenty-eight. This was Understanding the Russians (George Allen and Unwin, 1964), which grew out of his experiences as an exchange student in Leningrad. On the one hand it presents a depressing pathology of Soviet life. Uniquely for the time, however, it also focussed on understanding how Russians feel and express their feelings. Undoubtedly this laid the foundations for the first book Pitcher published on leaving Academe:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

The Chekhov Play: A New Interpretation (Chatto & Windus, 1973) unobtrusively overthrew the prevailing British consensus about Chekhov’s full-length plays. At the time, critics, directors and actors believed that the plays were, in Pitcher’s words, ‘vast coded documents which can only be deciphered with the utmost patience’; the plays were supposedly riddled with superfine irony; their whole purpose was to illustrate the ‘tragic lack of communication’ between human beings. What we were offered, then, was an essentially cerebral theatrical experience. We were supposed to think about and evaluate the characters. This melded with the Brechtian influence that British theatre was undergoing at the time, and indeed the disjunctiveness and unpredictability of Chekhovian dialogue/action were presented as a kind of ‘alienation effect’.

In place of this rather male theatre of distancing from the characters, Pitcher offered one of empathy with them. ‘At the heart of the Chekhov play’, he proclaimed, ‘there lies not emotional isolation but emotional contact between human beings.’ Chekhov was a master at activating what Pitcher called ‘the emotional network’ between a group of individuals. In terms similar to Harold Pinter’s about his own plays, Pitcher claimed that the problem was not that Chekhov’s characters couldn’t communicate with each other, but that they communicated only too well. Yet it was ‘important to bear in mind that the social conventions governing the expression of emotion do not coincide from one culture to another’. Pitcher was a pioneer in discussing the nature, strength and expression of specifically Russian emotions in Chekhov’s plays.

Although there have been more popular books in English about Chekhov’s plays, and I think our theatre now takes emotion, interpersonal communication and audience empathy for granted in them, I still feel The Chekhov Play is the most original book written on the subject in the last fifty years. In so far as George Calderon (possibly influenced by the Russian critic Aikhenval’d) originated in English the idea of ‘lack of communication’ between Chekhov’s characters, Pitcher’s interpretation was the first major revision of George’s famous Introduction to his 1912 Two Plays by Tchekhof.

Pitcher’s next book, When Miss Emmie Was in Russia: English Governesses before, during and after the October Revolution (John Murray, 1977) was again groundbreaking. In the 1970s people broadly believed that Tsarist Russia had been as bad, closed and xenophobic a country as the Soviet Union. Only émigré families knew that there had been a whole civilisation beneath the trappings of the Tsarist system. Based on Pitcher’s interviews with elderly British ladies who had lived and taught in prerevolutionary families, When Miss Emmie Was in Russia opened our eyes to the richness and normality of Russian life before 1917. It has gone through four editions. Pitcher’s subsequent books The Smiths of Moscow (1984) and Muir & Mirrielees: The Scottish Partnership that Became a Household Name in Russia (1994) even showed how attractive Russia had been to British businesses in the nineteenth century, how the country had welcomed them, and how at ease with Russia the British families who settled there were. A long, ecastatic review of The Smiths of Moscow by Ferdinand Mount in The Spectator suggested that the book dispelled decades of Soviet propaganda.

Click the image to find books by Harvey Pitcher on Amazon.

An essential feature of all my Inestimable Russianists is that they never take no for an answer. What they do is not just a job, they believe in it and are always prepared to act independently and take risks. Thus when Harvey Pitcher feared he might not find commercial publishers for his work, he founded his own imprint, Swallow House Books. The first book he published was a modest selection of Chekhov’s comic stories entitled Chuckle with Chekhov (1975). But the success of this was instrumental in persuading John Murray to publish in 1982, with great style, Chekhov: The Early Stories 1883-88, a collection translated by Harvey and yours truly that stayed in print for twenty-five years. The mission of this book, and Pitcher’s subsequent Chekhov: The Comic Stories (André Deutsch, 1998 and 2004) was to establish the young Chekhov in British culture as a comic and serious force in his own right.

I think it is recognised by publishers, translators and Russianists that it was Harvey Pitcher who brought this off. The proof that he succeeded is that any shelf of Chekhov translations in a bookshop today will contain at least one volume of Chekhov’s early stories translated by younger hands. As with his new interpretation of Chekhov’s plays and his pioneering act of re-establishing historical continuity between Britain and Russia, Harvey Pitcher has lived to see his championing of the early Chekhov become generally accepted. Few things, surely, can be more gratifying than vindication of that kind. But we should not forget the singlemindedness and proactivity that the effort cost Pitcher. No British publisher at the time would touch The Smiths of Moscow, Muir & Mirrielees, or his delicate novel Lily: An Anglo-Russian Romance; he had to publish them himself.

It bewilders and saddens me that Harvey Pitcher even had to self-publish Responding to Chekhov: The Journey of a Lifetime (2010). For OF COURSE the lucid meditations of someone who has worked for over fifty years on a writer of world stature will be worth reading by anyone who loves that writer — which the British do. The book was beautifully produced by Pitcher and could hold its own with any commercial paperback:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

It was not well received by today’s academic Russianists. This is hardly surprising, as the book is not entitled Analysing, or Extrapolating From, Chekhov, it is about how we Respond to his writing, which is a matter of complex feeling. Moreover, just as Bakhtin wrote that ‘an author does not invite literary specialists to his banqueting table’, so Pitcher did not really invite academics to his. He tells us that his book is addressed to ‘all students of Chekhov’ and to ‘that wholly admirable if slightly unreal figure, the general reader’. Personally, I believe that posterity will cherish Responding to Chekhov.

In this brief series I have suggested that the independent Russian scholar and translator is communicative, interactive, collaborative, always proactive, and driven by love of his/her subject. Another feature is that he/she never retires… Harvey Pitcher writes that he is ‘currently engaged on putting the finishing touches to a translation of “The Lady with the Little Dog” and finding the first paragraph the most difficult, especially the first sentence, and especially the first word’. We wish him luck with translating what has been called ‘the best short story in the world’, and at least another decade of happily productive non-retirement.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Academe, Anton Chekhov, BASEES, biographies, biography, comments, communication, Emma Dashwood, emotional networks, Ferdinand Mount, George Calderon, Glasgow University, governesses, Harvey Pitcher, John Dewey, Joint Services School of Linguists, lack of communication, Lady with the Little Dog, Leningrad, Michael Pursglove, Mikhail Bakhtin, Oxford University, Russia, Russianists, St Andrews University, The Smiths of Moscow, USSR | Leave a comment

Inestimable Russianist 2: John Dewey

Posted on April 15, 2019 by Patrick Miles

(This series is timed to coincide with the 2019 Annual Conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies at Robinson College, Cambridge.)

It is no exaggeration to say that John Dewey befriended Calderonia out of the blue — back in autumn 2015, I think it was. Since then he has given me the absolutely invaluable benefit of his experience and advice as a self-publisher with the Brimstone Press, he has contributed a necklace of Comments to the blog, passed gold dust to me in the form of a list of 250 email addresses used to promote his own Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Tyutchev, and completely unexpectedly written a five-star review of my biography on Amazon. John’s contribution has been truly inestimable. I thank him from the bottom of my heart for the many, many hours that he has given the whole Calderon project.

I say what follows with no aspersiveness (for I simply don’t understand the phenomenon), but the communicativeness, proactivity and sheer altruism that all three of my Inestimable Russianists practise were never conspicuous to me in Academe. But then neither Michael Pursglove, John Dewey or Harvey Pitcher is an academic Russianist. Each at some point left Academe to pursue a deep personal, one might even say existential, commitment to an aspect of Russian culture, and this has blossomed into their real career. They are thus all Russianists in the Calderon tradition: independent scholars and translators.

John Dewey’s commitment came early. At Cambridge his academic results were higher in German than Russian. He was advised therefore to specialise in German, but ‘for reasons I still find hard to explain I opted for Russian instead, with German as subsidiary’. He trusted his intuition and it served him well. He was not headed for a Cambridge Ph.D., which was a real blessing. Instead, he embarked on a career teaching German and Russian in state schools and further education. But I sense that all through his teaching career he was incubating his second career. For at Cambridge he had ‘first encountered the lyric poetry of Fyodor Tyutchev, which cast a spell that was to last for the rest of my life’. He nursed the ambition to write a biography of Tyutchev, he researched it sporadically for years, and after taking early retirement at the age of fifty he was able to get down to it in earnest. Tyutchev is one of the greatest Russian poets. Even so Dewey could not interest a commercial publisher. This led to his involvement with Brimstone Press and the publication in 2010 of this superb 547-page paperback:

It is a dizzying achievement. What needs to be grasped is that, as Stanley Mitchell wrote in the Literary Review, ‘this book is not only the first life of Tyutchev in English, it is by far the best and the most complete anywhere, including Russia’. Whereas T.J. Binyon’s magisterial 731-page biography of Pushkin (2002) must be based largely on other people’s (published) work, Dewey’s is manifestly the work of a ‘first shoveller’ in both official and personal archives. Tyutchev’s life is astonishing for its geographical mobility, heterosexual passions, philosophical depths and political connections. Dewey has written a great human document that is an essential concordance to Tyutchev’s highly personal verse.

Mirror of the Soul is now out of print (and perhaps it is a sign of the times that the indie publisher Brimstone Press has ceased trading), but Dewey has made it available as a free download at www.tyutchev.org.uk and copies can occasionally be picked up on ABE.

His biography of Tyutchev gave him unrivalled contextual access to the poetry, but he already had long experience of translating Russian verse. In particular, his rhymed version of Pushkin’s narrative poem The Bronze Horseman was shortlisted for the John Dryden Prize and published in Translation and Literature in 1998 (it too is available at www.tyutchev.org.uk). It is excellent, but I think the versions of Tyutchev that he published with Brimstone in 2014 are in a class of their own. This is because Dewey is completely attuned to Tyutchev’s idiosyncrasies as a poet and scrupulously conveys them.

Here, for example, is his translation of the first stanza of one of Tyutchev’s most famous poems, Silentium!:

Be silent, guard your tongue, and keep
All inmost thoughts and feelings deep
Within your heart concealed. There let
Them in their courses rise and set,
Like stars in jewelled night, unheard:
Admire them, and say not a word.

I cannot remember noticing that Tyutchev ever breaks a line with a full stop as in the third line of Dewey’s translation. But this creates in English precisely the kind of departure from regularity that Tyutchev delights in producing in other ways. As a translation, then, this is working very subtly by enacting ‘equivalents’ to the original. In fact, this stanza in the original has such an extreme metrical irregularity in the fifth line that one wonders whether it is not so much a poetical acte gratuit on Tyutchev’s part as the product of an editor’s tin ear! That cannot be duplicated in English, so Dewey modulates something else, whereas most translations of Tyutchev that I have seen are more smooth in metre than the original. In this poem Tyutchev particularly modulates the metre of the last line of each stanza, for dramatic, vocal effect, and Dewey does this each time too. ‘Admire them, and say not a word’ is metrically dee-dum-dee, dum-dee-dum-dee-dum, but obviously it must be read as dee-dum-dee, dee-dum-dee-dee-dum (i.e. the penultimate foot is reversed, making the last two iambic feet into a single choriamb, dum-dee-dee-dum, which is a favourite line-ending of Dewey’s). Dewey’s tendency to produce ‘sprung’ rhythm in English on top of the regular metre admirably conveys some of Tyutchev’s own apparent waywardness. If Tyutchev imperceptibly slips a tetrameter or an Alexandrine into a poem otherwise written in pentameter, Dewey will subtly do the same.

Fyodor Tyutchev, Selected Poems: Translated with an Introduction and Notes by John Dewey (Gillingham, Brimstone Press, 2014) is now sold out, but accessible online at www.tyutchev.org.uk.

Since 1994 John Dewey has also translated many modern prose works for the pioneer Anglo-Russian publisher Glas, for example Boris Yampolsky’s classic novel The Old Arbat and writing by Irina Muravyova and Ksenia Zhukova. But I would particularly draw followers’ attention to his selection of the early twentieth century writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, entitled The Sign: And Other Stories. This attractive paperback was published by Brimstone in 2015 and copies are still available from chris@mikeoldfield.org.

I do not read many English translations of Russian works, and when I do I tend to read bits of them very closely and compare them with the original. I sat down with The Sign: And Other Stories intending to do the same, but the English simply carried me away and I read the whole book in two sittings. With translations of prose you want absolute accuracy, of course, but far more. It is not enough to say that you want the translation to ‘read like English’; you want it to read like an absolutely original writer of English and you always want that effect from it — it must be totally consistently native English, talented, fresh and finessed. It’s a lot to ask, but that’s what Dewey has produced with this breathtaking range of stories by Zamyatin, all but one of them never translated before. I did compare some passages of Russian and I am lost in admiration for how he has rendered them. The only adequate compliment I can pay these translations is to say that any reader and/or aspiring young writer in English MUST read these masterpieces of modernist fiction.

The official academic criterion of a person’s output these days is ‘impact’. In Russian Studies, at least, biography seems to be deeply out of favour, presumably because its impact is rated as low. But impact upon whom? The impact of an article entitled ‘Polysemous transgradiency of diachronic antinomial tropes in some poems of Pushkin’s Lycée period’ may be profound on other academics, but beyond? Similarly, believe it or not but in Academe translation is only just being recognised as an ‘impactful’ activity! I feel sure that the impact of Dewey’s scholarly but beautifully written biography of Tyutchev, his absorbing biographical-critical articles on Tyutchev’s poetry published in East-West Review over the last three years, and his translations of the poems themselves, will far outstrip anything of which most academics can dream.

John Dewey, independent scholar, translator and may one say populariser, has produced a body of first-class work that is a very serious contribution to Anglophone understanding of Russian literature. It will endure.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Academe, Alexander Pushkin, Alexandrine, biographies, biography, Boris Yampolsky, Brimstone Press, choriamb, comments, Fedor Tiutchev, Fyodor Tyutchev, George Calderon, Glas, Harvey Pitcher, Irina Muravyova, John Dewey, John Dryden Prize, Ksenia Zhukova, Michael Pursglove, Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Tyutchev, prosody, publishers, Ruslan and Ludmila, Russian Studies, Stanley Mitchell, T.J. Binyon, The Bronze Horseman, Yevgeny Zamyatin | 1 Comment

Inestimable Russianist 1: Michael Pursglove

Posted on April 8, 2019 by Patrick Miles

(This series is timed to coincide with the 2019 Annual Conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies held 12-14 April at Robinson College, Cambridge, where Sam&Sam will be promoting George Calderon: Edwardian Genius.)

When Michael Pursglove reviewed George Calderon: Edwardian Genius at length in the journal of the Great Britain-Russia Society, I was very gratified by the comprehensiveness of his review and the fact that he focussed on some themes that are particularly dear to me. But I was absolutely staggered when he also suggested leads to discovering the identity of two ‘mysterious’ figures in the book who had eluded me for thirty years! These were ‘Mrs Shapter’ (p. 105), who I thought might have taught George Russian, and ‘Professor Rose of Leipzig’ (p. 426), whom Kittie tried to take on to complete George’s book on folklore for OUP. Thanks to Michael Pursglove, I now know who these people were (I will post about them later).

Perhaps I should not have been surprised at all, though, as Pursglove is one of the most experienced and deeply informed Russianists alive in Britain today.

I first met him in 1985, when he was a lecturer at Reading University and I gave a talk there entitled ‘Why Chekhov?’, as a result of which I invited him to give one in Cambridge. This was ‘Andrew Assumption or Andrei Voznesensky’ — the best disquisition on translating Russian poetry into English that I have ever heard. The talk was also notable for its high student turnout and the presence of a fresh-faced future Cambridge Professor of Slavonic Studies who voiced his appreciation of Pursglove’s verse translation of a poem by Voznesensky (‘Assumption’, as the name might be rendered).

Michael Pursglove, whom I don’t think I have met since then, writes that he has ‘some reservations about my university career’. I imagine many of his contemporaries, myself included, have reservations about our own, although it seems to me that his career was highly distinguished, taking in posts in Russian language and literature at the universities of Ulster, Reading, Bath and Exeter. But since retiring in 2002 Pursglove has had a whole new career. This definitely places him in the Calderonian tradition of independent scholar and translator, and perhaps for him even occludes his earlier career.

According to my calculations, he has published over eighty articles and reviews since leaving Academe, ranging in subject from Anna Karenina, poets of Russia’s ‘Golden Age’, Turgenev, Dostoevsky and Grigorovich, to a whole series on the deaf community in Russia. He writes that what he enjoys most is translating poetry, but he agrees with the late Robert Conquest that ‘translating rhymed poetry into English rhymed poetry is the most difficult of arts’. His own published translations of Russian poetry include works by Zhukovsky, Pushkin, Lermontov, Vyazemsky, Tyutchev and Larissa Miller.

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

However, the most remarkable achievement of Pursglove’s new career, to my mind, is that between 2010 and the present he has translated six major works by Turgenev: Fathers and Children, Smoke, Virgin Soil, A Nest of the Gentry, On the Eve, and The Diary of a Superfluous Man. As Pushkin put it, ‘translators are the post horses of enlightenment’ — and some of the horses certainly need changing. One of the things I most admire about Pursglove is his energy and resourcefulness in getting his work out there: his Turgenev translations have all been brought out by the independent publisher Alma Books, founded by Alessandro Gallenzi and Elisabetta Minervini, and when he could not find a publisher for his and A.B. Murphy’s annotated translation of Giliarovskii’s classic Moscow and Muscovites he posted it online, where it has had nearly 3000 hits.

Meanwhile — as if the above were not enough — Pursglove has discovered a rich vein of research in the ‘unknown’ Edwardian translators of the Russian classics, many of whom were women. I 1000% approve. The subject badly needs opening up. Victorian translations were horrendous, and rightly excoriated by George Calderon. Their Edwardian successors, such as Constance Garnett, Aylmer and Louise Maude, and George himself, were real translators, and there are many more of them under the surface who deserve to be discovered. Hopefully Pursglove will be persuaded to do a post for us about them.

I wish the inestimable Michael Pursglove many more years of creative fulfilment, rewarding research, and surprises for us all in his new career.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged A.B. Murphy, Alexander Pushkin, Alma Books, Andrei Voznesenskii, Andrew Assumption, Anna Karenina, Aylmer Maude, BASEES, comments, Constance Garnett, deaf community, Dmitrii Grigorovich, Fedor Dostoevskii, Fedor Tyutchev, George Calderon, Great Britain-Russia Society, Ivan Turgenev, Larissa Miller, Lev Tolstoy, Louise Maude, Michael Pursglove, Mikhail Lermontov, Moscow and Muscovites, Mrs Shapter, Petr Viazemskii, Professor Rose, publishers, Reading University, Robert Conquest, Robinson College, Russianists, translators, Vladimir Giliarovskii | 3 Comments

Inestimable Russianists: A Coming Series of Posts

Posted on April 2, 2019 by Patrick Miles

Frankly, one of the worst experiences from publishing my biography of George Calderon has been the appalling response to the 71 complimentary and review copies that I sent out. I was encouraged, for instance, by specific journalists at The Times, TLS, Daily Telegraph and Sunday Times to send them review copies, but have not had so much as a thank you from them, let alone a review. There are also half a dozen ‘friends’ who have not thanked me and in at least one case have put their inscribed copy on ABEbooks! For the benefit of other independent publishers, I’ll post about this excruciating phenomenon at a future date. Suffice it to say, I shall never make the mistake again…

But one of the best experiences has been making, or renewing, the acquaintance of three Russianists of more or less my own generation who have independently and utterly selflessly supported the project in a multiplicity of ways. I myself had been out of the world of Russianists for over twenty-five years; so I am really moved that they spontaneously stepped forward to help me. They are Michael Pursglove, John Dewey, and Harvey Pitcher. Each of them has a fantastically fertile career behind him, and is still producing translations and articles today. Over the next month, then, I shall be featuring them and their work in three individual posts.

These senior British Russianist-translators are the true heirs of Edwardians George Calderon, Constance Garnett, and Aylmer Maude.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged ABEbooks, Aylmer Maude, biographies, comments, complimentary copies, Constance Garnett, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Harvey Pitcher, John Dewey, journalists, Michael Pursglove, reviewers, rudeness, Russianists, Sam&Sam, translators | Leave a comment

Yes, it’s divorce!

Posted on March 18, 2019 by Patrick Miles

It is with the deepest euphoria that I announce my permanent separation from commercial publishers. They have wasted too much of my time. They forget that serfdom was abolished in Britain in 1574. To celebrate my release, I have asked Sam2 to design the above card, as a sequel to the more fragrant one featured in an earlier post.

My decision has nothing to do with the fact that I spent the whole of 2017 approaching 47 commercial publishers about publishing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius and only two of them offered me a contract — which I had to reject. It was an interesting, if time-consuming experience, from which I learnt a lot. For example, that 50% of them never reply (even when I had had dealings with them before). For example, that big publishers cannot accept anything new. For example, that they yearn to be writers themselves and entirely rewrite your book.

No, the decision has been triggered by my recently acquiring experience of the lower end of commercial publishing, namely publishers who may have old, much respected names, but publish not many books and in specialised areas. What I am going to describe is quite possibly, nay certainly, common knowledge amongst full-time professional writers, but it has come as a revelation to me.

My co-author and I were invited to meet an interested publisher and his editor. The discussion seemed to be going well, except that (I am not exaggerating) one could never see the publisher’s actual eyes in his forever grinning face. My co-author said that he felt the proposed price for the book was too high for something so short which we hoped would reach a wider public. The publisher agreed to drop it below £10. The publisher called for certain additions to the Preface, which I persuaded my co-author to accept. We also consented to shorten the text in eight places. General agreement seemed to have been reached, and the publisher told us he would now draw up a contract. Then he said:

‘Unfortunately, we cannot offer an advance.’

Caught completely off guard, we were lost for words. The publisher, however, had delivered this line as though it were a minor detail, rattled straight on and concluded the meeting as fast as possible. We should have smelt a rat at that point.

Of course, we knew that it would never be a big advance, but an advance is symbolical; however small it is, it conveys good will and a commitment to literary etiquette. The point was not the size of the advance (it could have been as symbolical as £50) but the positive message its giving would have sent. Evidently the publisher didn’t care about that.

Then the contract arrived. It was the most Draconian, exploitative, offensive contract I have ever seen. What it added up to was that the publisher would take every penny off us that he could; indeed we would probably end up giving him money, because of two specific clauses in it. The first is too long and complex to explain here, suffice it to say that it empowered the publisher to withold royalty payments after three years ‘as a reserve’. The second was far worse. This would have obliged us to pay to the publisher the money paid to us from PLR (Public Lending Right provisions for authors). This seemed so extraordinary that I emailed for confirmation that it was what the clause meant. It was. If not actually illegal, such extortion is completely against the spirit and intention of PLR. Incidentally, in the contract the publisher had reverted to the price which he had agreed at our meeting would be dropped to under £10…

We inquired whether this contract was negotiable. It was not. We therefore refused to sign it. Significantly, I think, the publisher told us that he was used to turning down authors for contracts, but not to authors turning him down. He implied he was offended!

Well, at that point the penny dropped. These publishers (we had rejected a contract from a similar one six months earlier) are a new brand of ‘vanity publisher’. A little investigation on the Web reveals that they arrogate the names of distinguished publishing houses of the past along with what remains of them on paper, and launch their enterprises on these imprints. In the old days, authors paid ‘vanity publishers’ to publish their work; these new vanity publishers, however, don’t ask for money from their authors, they simply prevent them from making any and fleece them for extras like PLR payments. Of course, it amounts to the same thing. Despite their venerable names, the publishers we had been dealing with are vanity publishers trading on the fact that their authors want their work published. Indeed, a more detailed examination of the last publisher’s list revealed, as well as a few respectable names, several works that were dreadful (‘unpublishable’).

So I have seen the light about publishers big and small, and I will stay with Sam&Sam, thank you. Henceforth I will resort only to independent publishing of the timbre that brought out George Calderon: Edwardian Genius.

However, I admit this does raise a question; one that I would be very interested to hear readers’ views about. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN VANITY PUBLISHING AND SELF-PUBLISHING? (Apart from the fact that in vanity publishing someone else takes the money and in indie publishing you do.)

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged advances, biographies, comments, commercial publishers, contracts, divorce, etiquette, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, goodbyes, independent publishing, indie publishing, PLR, pricing, Public Lending Right, publishers, Sam&Sam, serfdom, vanity publishers, vanity publishing | 1 Comment

George’s thought for the day

Posted on March 5, 2019 by Patrick Miles

Some time ago a reader asked me whether I thought George Calderon subscribed to Thomas Carlyle’s theory of the ‘great man’ in history. This theory was certainly popular with the Victorians and, as the reader pointed out, George’s extreme individualism could have been underpinned by belief in the ‘great man’ as the driving force of events. For instance, when George decided to travel all over the country at his own expense during the Coal Strike of 1912 addressing thousands of people, it was suggested that he wanted to thrust himself forward as leader of the strike-busting movement (an ambition he denied). Was he driven by a secret desire to be a hero or ‘great man’ himself?

I was startled by this reader’s suggestion, as I had not even mentioned Carlyle in my biography. Yet George owned nine of Carlyle’s books, including the key text Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History, and it occurred to me that when he wrote to Grant Richards on 17 September 1911 that Chekhov was ‘a great man’, but did not explain what made him great, he was simply using the phrase in the Carlylian sense and Richards would have known how he meant it.

When I catalogued George and Kittie’s library over ten years ago, I flipped through each book and recorded whether it was annotated. Except when reading a book for review, George was a sparing annotator, but when he did intervene his comments were exceedingly fine and significant. I suddenly had a worry that I might have overlooked something in his copies of Carlyle. I therefore arranged to revisit his library in store and go through every copy of his Carlyle again, page by page. There was no evidence that he had even read the copy of Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History. As I had recorded before, only his copies of two books bore a few annotations, viz. The French Revolution (3 vols, 1889) and Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (3 vols, 1903).

However… When going through George and Kittie’s library I had come across photographs, greeting cards, visiting cards, and even letters, that had been used as bookmarks. Sometimes these were biographically significant. They were all removed from the books and filed in the appropriate part of the archive. But plain pieces of paper used as bookmarks were left where they were. There was an octavo sheet of laid white paper stuck in a volume of The French Revolution, but it had nothing on the front except a deep brown stain of time across the top where it protruded from the book; so I left it where it was and kept turning the pages. But this time as I turned the bookmark I noticed that it had three lines of writing on the back in very faint pencil. They were in George’s hand, but his own ‘cipher’, as Kittie called it. Having no camera, I attempted a facsimile:

Transcript of note in George’s hand on back of bookmark

Most of this was easily decipherable using George’s key, but the remaining words have taken me eight weeks to crack! I am confident now that the note means:

Jesus cannot have been without sin else he would not have been baptised. For the baptism of John was for the remission of sins and was accompanied by confession.

The handwriting in my opinion is late, around 1912. So why did George jot this thought down at least five years after he had abandoned his fundamental examination of ‘the canonical books of the Christians, in chronological order’ (see p. 200 of the biography)? Was he still as doubtful about the ‘divinity of Jesus’ as he had told Kittie in a letter on 11 February 1899 (see p. 39) and had suddenly been struck by a piece of evidence?

It’s an argument of characteristic Calderonian ingenuity. I have had a look at the accounts of Christ’s baptism in the gospels. They certainly agree that John baptised people only after they had confessed their sins and repented, but John refuses at first to baptise Jesus because he is ‘the Lamb of God’ — presumably without sin. Jesus however insists, ‘for thus it becometh us to fulfill all righteousness’ (Matthew 3, verse 15), and John does baptise him. Why? What does ‘to fulfill all righteousness’ mean?

I asked scientist-theologian John Polkinghorne whether Jesus could have been baptised if he had no sins to confess. Yes, was his answer, because the purpose of his baptism was to express his complete solidarity with human beings, to demonstrate that he was ‘with’ John and all those John was baptising. Thus whereas George concluded the baptism of Christ disproved Christ’s divinity, for a modern theologian it proves Christ’s humanity!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged baptism, biography, bookmark, comments, cypher, George Calderon, great man, humanity, Jesus Christ, John Polkinghorne, John the Baptist, Kittie Calderon, library, manuscripts, original sin, religion, shorthand, sin, theology, Thomas Carlyle | Leave a comment

Heffers surrenders after 7-month siege

Posted on March 1, 2019 by Patrick Miles

As well as online and by personal communication with me, my biography of George Calderon can now be bought at the following bookshops: Blackwell’s of Oxford, Daunts of Hampstead, Foyles of Charing Cross Road, Jarrolds of Norwich, the National Archives bookshop at Kew, and…Heffers of Cambridge.

Where Heffers (owned by Blackwell’s) is concerned, thereby hangs a tale. They took delivery of ten copies only yesterday:

The books are delivered.

Since it is Cambridge’s most famous bookshop after antiquarian David’s, I wrote to Heffers well before publication date (which was 7 September). In fact, I made out a strong case to them for staging my launch there, surrounded by their stock of Russian literary classics in translation (particularly Chekhov) and linked in with the University’s Slavonic Department. No response. A fortnight later, I wrote to the manager again, pointing out that Heffers’s parent company, Blackwell’s of Oxford, had not only bought ten copies outright but were going to mount a ‘promotional around Calderon, Russian Literature and Chekhov during University term’. No response.

Well, having after a visit rejected Toppings of Ely as a venue for the launch, we settled for Cambridge’s Polish Club, Polonia, where the vodka and food were ripping (forgive the Edwardianese) and we had a pretty uproarious time.

Once Blackwell’s had got their promotional underway, I emailed the only address I could find for Heffers, implying heavily that if Blackwell’s of Oxford could do this, why couldn’t Blackwell’s of Cambridge? No response. One has to accept that there are people who, extraordinary though it sounds, don’t buy books online but go to physical bookshops to browse and buy. Around this time, it was becoming increasingly embarrassing as about ten people I know in Cambridge asked me whether they could buy it at Heffers, or told me with a tone of affront: ‘I haven’t seen it in Heffers!’ It annoyed me too, because some of my friends or acquaintances are actually embarrassed to come to me to buy my book, and when they do I feel a similar pressure of embarrassment to give them a copy free…

I seriously considered how I could outwit the CCTV cameras in Heffers and plonk half a dozen copies in the middle of their front display desk. But then I wouldn’t have made anything from them. So there I let it lie. Until the other day I found myself on the website ‘Visit Cambridge’ and there was a different email address for Heffers. I saw red and thundered out, more to get it off my chest than anything:

I have had an email from Professor X of Y College this week complaining that he went into Heffers (Blackwell’s Cambridge) to buy a copy of my book GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS (see sam&sam.co.uk) and was told you don’t stock it. I have written and emailed you three times about this matter with no response whatsoever. If Blackwell’s Oxford, Daunts Hampstead, Foyles London, the National Archives bookshop and Jarrolds Norwich can take 6-10 copies on sale or return, why cannot my local bookshop Heffers that I have been patronising for 52 years?

Naturally I wasn’t expecting a response, but there must be something about the Visit Cambridge website that I don’t know, because I promptly received an apologetic response from the very manager of Heffers to whom I had written by Royal Mail twice in July. To cut the tale short, he agreed to take ten copies and display them as though the book had just been published — on their front display desk, I trust.

Naturally I do not recount all this out of demented Meldrewism, but simply to demonstrate that selling books as an independent publisher is not a doddle. However, there is another moral, I’m afraid: Never write emails whilst seeing red. I carelessly said ‘6-10 copies on sale or return’, when I should have said ‘outright like your Oxford shop’. The manager of Heffers has taken ten copies, but held me to sale or return.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.‘ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian English, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, Blackwell's, Cambridge, comments, Daunts, Foyles, George Calderon, Heffers, independent publishing, Jarrolds, marketing, National Archives, Oxford, Polonia, publishers, sale or return, Sam&Sam, selling books, Victor Meldrew | Leave a comment

A gremlinfest?

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Patrick Miles

Dear Subscribers, if you have received today’s post with its layout all over the place, please go to the website, calderonia.org, for the correct presentation in a form that you should be able to print out. (You may have to copy and paste it into Word, then do some minor editing.) There are still many bugs-glitches-gremlins loose in WordPress, it seems, or maybe I was trying to be too clever. Thank you for your patience! Patrick Miles

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged addenda, biographies, bugs, comments, corrections, corrigenda, editing, errata, glitches, gremlins, Wordpress | Leave a comment

The Errata, Corrigenda and Addenda

Posted on February 20, 2019 by Patrick Miles

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius has now been out for just over five months. I started ‘proofreading’ the book the moment I received it from Clays on 4 June 2018; it’s been ‘hoovered’ many times since. Now seems the right moment to present the typos and mistakes that have been spotted, as well as the small additions that I would make if there were a second edition (which would almost certainly be an Amazon paperback).

Just to remind readers: this is a limited fine hardback edition (we have already shifted 40% of the stock) and I sincerely hope each copy will accrue in value as the decades pass! To round off your unique copy, then, I would suggest printing out the lists below and pasting them inside the back cover.

There are lessons of typography, formatting and design that we have learned since 4 June, and these will be incorporated in a future edition, not enumerated here. The Errata below deal with errors of fact, the Corrigenda with typos, the Addenda with new input. Not altogether surprisingly, because it was read by so many people in typescript, the text itself contains few Errs and Corrs. Most Errs, Corrs and Adds occur in the Bibliography and Index, which were compiled and checked only by the weary author himself…

Errata

p. 60, l. 8, for Com. [?] read Com[mons]. p. 170, last line, for Romanovs read Romanoffs p. 174, l. 11, for Puccini’s La Vie Bohème read a version of Puccini’s opera called La Vie Bohème p. 177, l. 6 from bottom, for sueña read sueño p. 177, l. 5 from bottom, for The Outcast read An Outcast p. 184, l. 15, for Lilico read Lillico p. 188, l. 8 from bottom, for Hueffer read Ford Madox Ford p. 237, l. 5 from bottom, for 2010 read 1910 p. 311, l. 3 from bottom, for Fortnightly read Quarterly p. 352, l. 7, for sueña read sueño p. 479, l. 8, for Mr Cuthbert Bede read Mr Verdant Green p. 485, l. 17, for Bell read Hall p. 500, col. 2, l. 9, for Romanovs read Romanoffs p. 505, col. 1, l.10, for Marguerite read Margaret p. 506, col. 2, l. 8 from bottom, for Lantères read Lantérès p. 507, col. 1, l. 1, for sueña read sueño p. 513, col. 2, l. 9, for The Outcast read An Outcast and reposition on p. 497

Corrigenda

p. 67, l. 1, for car read cart p. 105, l. 12 from bottom, for -Schnurman read -Schnurmann p. 118, l. 15, for preoccuppied read preoccupied p. 135, l. 15 from bottom, for Millenium read Millennium p. 143, l. 6 from bottom, ditto p. 169, l. 4, for Principle read Principal p. 189, l. 5, for mariage read Mariage p. 206, l. 2 from bottom, sailing should be in roman and underlined (not available on this blog) p. 221, l. 9, for Tahiti iti read Tahiti iti p. 237, l. 10, for Landmarks in Russian Literature read Landmarks in Russian Literature p. 237, ll. 23-24, for The Russian People read The Russian People p. 262, l. 1, for July1935 read July 1935 p. 337, l. 5, perfect should be in roman and underlined (not available on this blog) p. 342, l. 8 from bottom, for matinées read matinees p. 344, l. 4, for step mother read stepmother p. 349, l. 1, for matinée read matinee p. 349, l. 3, for The Classical Review read the Classical Review p. 357, l. 5, for The New Age read the New Age p. 357, l. 8 from bottom, ditto p. 357, l. 4 from bottom, ditto p. 374, l. 3 from bottom, the should be in roman and underlined (not available on this blog) p. 374, last line, eleven should be in roman and underlined (not available on this blog) p. 378, last line, for 1st read First p. 379, l. 11, for -year old read -year-old p. 383, last line, loved should be in roman and underlined (not available on this blog) p. 388, l. 7 from bottom, in The Lamp’s romanise ‘s p. 391, l. 5 from bottom, close should be in roman and underlined (not available on this blog) p. 392, l. 18 from bottom, for 2nd read Second p. 447, l. 7, for before.To read before. To p. 451, l. 6, for Faith’, read Faith, p. 453, l. 10, for ennumerated read enumerated p. 455, l. 1, for bagage read baggage p. 472, l. 4, for pp.459- read pp. 459- p. 482, l. 11, for Ellman read Ellmann p. 486, l. 13, for Sitkovetskaia, M.M. read M.M. Sitkovetskaia p. 488, l. 4 from bottom, for 15, p. read 15, pp. p. 489, l. 11, for As read as p. 494, l. 6, for edn, (Lanham read edn (Lanham p. 494, l. 14, ditto p. 499, l. 8 from bottom: indent p. 500, col. 1, l. 16 from bottom: indent p. 500, col. 2, l. 7, for Talismans. read Talismans p. 502, col. 2, l. 19 from bottom, for Leo read Léo p. 503, col. 2, l. 15 from bottom, take out 113 p. 503, col. 2, l. 10 from bottom, for Bergères read Bergère p. 505, col. 2, l. 13, for Hodgett read Hodgetts p. 505, col. 2, reverse order of Hunter-Weston, Aylmer, and Hunt, Violet p. 507, col. 1, move Lloyd George, David to between LLoyd, Nesta and Lodge, Oliver p. 508, col. 2, l. 14, for MkhT read MKhT p. 511, col. 2, l. 11, for Sargeant read Sargent p. 512, col. 1, l. 22 from bottom, for 328 read 329 p. 513, col. 1, l. 5 from bottom, for de read De

Addenda

Relevant articles in the following book are given in the Bibliography, but the book itself is not cited as a separate entry. Therefore:

p. 479, after l. 2 add Beasley, Rebecca, and Philip Ross Bullock, eds, Russia in Britain, 1880-1940: From Melodrama to Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013)

Add the following page numbers after the following Index entries:

p. 498, col. 1, Beerbohm, Max 269 p. 499, col. 2, Works, Cromwell: Mall o’ Monks 228-29 p. 500, col. 1, l. 3, ‘Mademoiselle de Maupin’ 364 p. 501, col. 2, Chamberlain, Austen 250 p. 505, col. 1, Hamilton, Mary 167 p. 509, col. 1, Nicobar Islands 146 p. 510, col. 1, Playfair, Nigel 302 p. 510, col. 1, Polish language 67 p. 510, col. 2, Reuters 83 p. 511, col. 2, Sedgwick, Ann Douglas 429 p. 511, col. 2, Sélincourt, Basil de 429 p. 515, col. 2, Yavorskaya, Lydia 304 p. 515, col. 2, Yeats, W.B. 158

I am exceedingly grateful to Mr John Pym and other followers for their contribution to this whole exercise. If you discover errors that do not feature above, please write to me about them at mail@patrickmiles.co.uk . Thank you.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged addenda, bibliography, biographies, biography, comments, corrections, corrigenda, editing, errata, formatting, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Index, indie publishing, John Pym, mistakes, proofreading, publishing, Sam&Sam, typography, typos | Leave a comment

Is all biography also autobiography?

Posted on January 28, 2019 by Patrick Miles

The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn - Roger Pulvers

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

As long-term followers will know, the above question worries me (in the canine sense). The reason my Introduction went through so many versions was that half of my test-readers thought there was too much of me in it and not enough of George, but the other half thought the opposite. The inspiration of John Aubrey: My Own Life, as its author Ruth Scurr tells us in her Introduction, was her love of Aubrey’s prose, his mind and her native Wiltshire. These are autobiographical facts. Her book, then, although ostensibly by Aubrey, is an autobiographical artefact, the product of her personal dialogue with John Aubrey. As well as supposedly being Aubrey’s autobiography, it is a fragment of Scurr’s own (for this ability to be two voices at once, see the second entry in my spoof post of 29 April 2015). And I certainly would accept that one reason I chose to write George Calderon’s biography was that, like him, I am a Russianist and intermittent theatre bloke. In my book I work out some of my own values/beliefs, e.g. about acculturation, in dialogue with George’s own values/beliefs expressed in his life as I have researched it.

Now it so happens that I have just read a book which exemplifies the complexity of this subject better than any other, and its complexity is even deepened by the presence of a large amount of fiction. This book is The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn, by the extraordinary creative polymath Roger Pulvers. First published in Japan in 2011, it has just been brought out in London by Balestier Press.

Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), despite his improbable name and the improbable events of his life, was a real person. But I don’t have to summarise Hearn’s life, because Pulvers has written his own ‘Life of Lafcadio Hearn’ as his 23-page introduction. This is an exemplary non-fictional Brief Life written with limpid scholarly objectivity. So the book entitled The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn and sub-titled ‘A Novel’, contains biography sensu stricto…

But the Graeco-Irish Lafcadio Hearn ‘became’ Japanese. He took on Japanese citizenship and ‘became’ Yakumo Koizumi. Actually, I would say, the man Hearn became a fictitious person with a great future ahead of him. To quote from Pulvers’s ‘Life’:

He created an illusion and lived his days and nights within its confines. That illusion was his Japan. He found in Japan the ideal coupling of the cerebral and the sensual, the one constantly recharging the other and catalyzing in him the inspiration to write.

[…]

Following his death in Tokyo, the Japanese crowned him with their ultimate laurel: He became their ‘Gaijin Laureate’, the single greatest non-native interpreter, in their eyes, of their inmost cultural secrets. Even today, Hearn is considered in Japan the foreigner who understood the Japanese in the most profound way.

Make no mistake, Hearn was a very serious anthropologist: the energy, curiosity and aesthetic appreciation with which he collected and wrote about Japanese folklore, customs, ghost stories, etiquette, traditional art and ritual are reminiscent of George’s engagement with Russia and Tahiti. But Hearn’s exquisitely mannered Japan was the Japan of the past. Pulvers’s thesis, as it were, is that the Meiji Japanese did not want this past, they were rushing headlong into occidentalism, nationalism, militarism and imperial aggrandizement. According to Pulvers, Hearn utterly disapproved.

So that is the non-fictional biography of Lafcadio Hearn (pp. 9-31) — always remembering that as Yakumo Koizumi the man Hearn fictionalised himself… Now (pp. 35-217) comes the novel entitled The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn.

The first thing to note here is that it’s a first-person novel and the narrator is Hearn/Koizumi himself. I.e. it is an ‘autobiographical’ novel. The second thing to say is, it’s a fantastically enjoyable and skilfully written short novel.

It is an undivided narrative told in episodes of varying length, but these flow seamlessly into each other and themes are subtly reprised (e.g. suicide). The keynote, though, is unpredictability. Either this is a result of the stunning otherness of Japanese life as experienced by Hearn, or it is a function of Hearn’s own self-dramatising and histrionic temperament. Whichever, what used to be called ‘the absurd’, but which might now be called life’s quantum contingency, is never far away, and to hilarious effect.

Pulvers’s Hearn has a usually imperturbable cat called Edgar [Poe]. In the course of one of Hearn’s many arguments with Japanese about the country’s nature and future, Lafcadio raises his voice and the cat bolts indoors:

‘You see? I even frighten my own cat.’

‘No, it was not you. You do not frighten anybody, professor. It was that.’

Akira pointed to the narrow pebbled path at the foot of the verandah. A frog sat on it with his belly glowing from the inside.

‘He swallow too many fireflies,’ said Akira.

I jumped off my rock unable to contain my laughter. I found myself leaping up and down, first beside the rock, then by the frog, which remained in place all the while. Akira, like the frog, stayed where he was, smiling along with me.

Although Hearn is always referring to the impassivity of Japanese faces, he is also constantly discovering their own ability to laugh:

I stopped under a large tree by a paddy field. The farmers were working among their rice plants […] the tree resounded with a veritable string section of cicadas. I approached the trunk and looked up. I started to shinny up the trunk, but the cicadas still did not stop their trilling. I was some six feet off the ground, with my head entirely inside the tree. I could see hundreds of them, a black mass. Resting my knee in the fork formed by two branches I removed my hat — it was even hotter in the tree than outside it — and waved it above my head, screaming to the players at the top of my lungs […] This not only satisfied me enormously, but it also shut up the cicadas. When I slid down the trunk and covered my head again, however, they resumed their music. The farmers, crouched in their paddies, stared at me with bulging faces, as if I were a Basque ghost. I doffed my hat to them, and a cicada flew out of it. They laughed raucously at this, and so did I. We had, indeed, found common ground in unsuspected juxtaposition. Who could now say that I was not, finally, on my own home ground?

Amongst other things, Pulvers has been a distinguished actor and playwright. His impersonation of Hearn’s voice (which we already know from samples of his prose) is impeccable and the dramatic pace of his prose unstoppable.

In Pulvers’s version, Hearn is a kind of Cyclops, always struggling with the difficulties of his gammy eye. Some might say that The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn is a picaresque novel (it contains, for example, a cartoon American of part-Russian origins with the name Pectopah, which is simply how tourists pronounce the Cyrillic of the Russian for ‘restaurant’). But there is also great beauty in the autobiography of Lafcadio Hearn, for instance in a scene where he accompanies Japanese to a sea-washed cave with a statue of Jizo (‘He protects dead children when they cross the river Sanzu and enter the other world’), surrounded by votive plaques left by parents and piles of round stones supposedly ‘left by the dead children themselves in the middle of the night’. Equally, no cultural holds are barred. One of the supreme scenes in the novel is when Hearn makes ‘a fatal mistake, succumbing to admiration’ and attends a soirée given by an American missionary at ‘a palace in Shirogane such as only the wealthiest and most long-established Japanese families could aspire to own’. Whilst grace is being said, Hearn/Koizumi fantasises that he is in the missionary’s study showing him a book of Japanese prints that become increasingly pornographic. The missionary is hypnotised by their ‘realism’ and one of them is described in explicit lurid detail. At that point, ‘the kerosene lamp exploded’!

Hearn is utterly counter-suggestible. ‘The Japanese have the phrase kanzen muketsu, which means “absolute perfection”. But I had thought up kanzen yuketsu, “absolute imperfection”. This had been my ideal.’ In a skilled pair of hands like Pulvers’s, caprice is always refreshing, exciting, mesmerising, comic or farcical. But by the end of the novel, Hearn says, ‘even this ideal made no sense to me at all’. The end is dark. The pupils of Sensei Hearn literally march away from him into the holocaustic future:

A parade was in progress on the campus. I stood, breathing with some difficulty, and walked to the window. There, passing below the tall cherry tree, were students and teachers of the university formed into two straight lines. Some were grasping flags in their fists. One student, with head shaven clean like a monk’s, held an effigy of a Russian soldier, a short sword, sticking out of its belly, flapping up and down as he brandished his effigy high in the air.

I would never dream of defining or over-analysing such an exuberant, Protean creation as this novel. But clearly it manages to be a number of things at once. If the novel part is a novel (which it self-evidently is), then it is a fictive autobiography. But if it is fictive can it have any claim to biographical value?

I would say it can. Even though many of the characters must be fictitious, and I assume all the dialogues are made up, the bare bones of documented (‘historical’) events do run through The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn. But above all the novel embodies the most important biographical facts: Hearn’s psychological insecurity, his cultural self-assimilation, and the nature of contemporaneous Japan. It reads as a novel, but is also truthful biography. It is, if you like, what Doestoevsky called ‘realism in the higher sense’.

Finally, it is a fair guess that The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn is autobiographical not just because its narrator is Hearn himself. Roger Pulvers, with several decades of intimate experience of Japanese life, is surely in a dialogue here with Hearn (and, of course, Japan). Thrust as a nineteen-year-old orphan on America’s shores, Hearn eventually developed intense Americanophobia and moved to Japan. Pulvers himself gave up his American citizenship in 1976. His own autobiography, to be published on 15 March 2019, is entitled The Unmaking of an American: A Memoir of Life in the United States, Europe, Japan and Australia. It will surely be as fascinating as his novel.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged America, anthropology, autobiography, biographies, biography, cicadas, comments, Cyclops, expansionism, Fedor Dostoevskii, George Calderon, imperialism, Japan, Jizo, John Aubrey, Lafcadio Hearn, Meiji, militarism, nationalism, novels, pornography, Roger Pulvers, Ruth Scurr, The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn, The Unmaking of an American, Yakumo Koizumi | 1 Comment

A slim classic

Posted on January 21, 2019 by Patrick Miles

Wilfred Owen, A Biography by Jon Stallworthy

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

In a very stimulating review of my book in the annual Report of George’s old college, Trinity Oxford, Michael Alexander writes: ‘Should a biographer tell all that has been found, or select to streamline the story? It depends.’

He is right. I put everything I knew about George into my biography because there was no biography before and this might be his only chance for another century. I suspect that Falcetta did the same with his biography of Rendel Harris. ‘Long’ certainly does not equal ‘definitive’, but it may imply it and explain why there is a commercial publishing trend towards long biographies that don’t, actually, contain much new. On the other hand, a biography like Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith’s Van Gogh: The Life (2011) contains so much new material that it thoroughly justifies its length (893 pages).

Biographies may be also be short for a variety of reasons. A vast number of facts may have been available for centuries, but the biographer wants to streamline them to clarify a narrative. Similarly, he/she may have studied a person’s life for decades but want to distil his/her interpretation of it into, say, 30,000 words. Another cause of brevity, of course, may be that there is not a vast amount of known facts in the first place. Or simply that the life of the biography’s subject was not long.

When Jon Stallworthy’s classic biography of Wilfred Owen came out in 1974, I imagine people assumed it was short (less than three hundred pages) because Owen’s life was short. Indeed, Stallworthy stresses the preciousness of time in Owen’s life by marking each spread of pages with his age top left and the year top right — something I’ve not seen in any other biography.

However, it could be that in 1974 Stallworthy simply did not have any more facts at his disposal. Equally, it might be that he purposely ‘streamlined’ the biography. There is certainly a strong sense of shape to the work. Perhaps he felt that less was more.

Despite my visceral love of Owen’s work, I had never read Stallworthy’s biography of him until this week. If I had, some of the many references to Owen in this blog since 2014 might have been better informed! My usual rider applies: I have chosen particular books for these posts on biography because they illustrate issues with modern biography that I want to discuss, not because I am reviewing them. And the issue in question here is length.

Nevertheless, the experience of reading Wilfred Owen: A Biography has been so extraordinary that I must say something about that (which still relates to its extent). Stallworthy was a friend of Wilfred Owen’s younger brother Harold, whose memory of Wilfred seems to have been vivid and encyclopaedic. Harold was also able to supply the biographer with a very large amount of written family material. Wilfred’s childhood, his relations with his mother (in particular), and his adolescence, which take up nearly half of the book, are therefore related in great, and sometimes tedious, detail. Moreover, Stallworthy very rarely intervenes in this part of the book with what I called in my previous post ‘speculating and interpreting’. The effect is almost fatally detached. It was a masterstroke to quote so many of Owen’s poems in autograph images (Owen’s handwriting is very legible), but Stallworthy cannot conceal their adolescent flaws, indeed he tersely identifies them; so that does not exactly enhance one’s reading, either.

Then a miracle occurs, or rather two. In June 1917 Owen was posted to Craiglockhart War Hospital, Edinburgh, to be treated for PTSD. Siegfried Sassoon, a published poet and celebrity, arrived there shortly afterwards for his own reasons. Eventually, Owen plucks up courage and knocks gently on Sassoon’s door. In Stallworthy’s words:

A voice answered, the door opened, and Owen advanced into blazing sunlight and the most important meeting of his life.

The sensitivity and sheer goodness with which Sassoon recognises Owen’s poetic gift, befriends, encourages, teaches, nurtures and admires him, is incredibly moving. My breath was taken away as Owen now produced one masterpiece after another: ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ (five drafts reproduced), ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, ‘The Send-Off’, ‘Greater Love’… One is witnessing the miraculous birth of great poetry. But, astonishingly, the miracle is transferred to the biography. Stallworthy himself rises to the occasion:

It is now possible to see that his gifts were not only gifts of genius, but other gifts that only the gods bestow. He came to the War with his imagination in large measure conditioned and prepared to receive and record the experience of the trenches. Botany and Broxton, Uriconium, and Keats, his adolescent hypochondria, his religious upbringing and later doubts, all shaped him for his subject, as no other. He wrote more eloquently than other poets of the tragedy of boys killed in battle, because he felt that tragedy more acutely, and his later elegies spring from his early preoccupations as flowers from their stem [an image adapted from one of Keats’s quoted earlier].

The whole book now advances into blazing light and Stallworthy is never in danger of losing his reader again. Both the story of Owen’s last year and Stallworthy’s telling of it are riveting. The total effect is cathartic. I understand now why Graham Greene called it ‘surely one of the finest biographies of our time’.

So: should this slim classic be longer now that far more (I assume) is known about Owen’s life, for instance about what I take to be his bisexuality? Should it be superseded by a longer biography and indeed has been? The answer, in my view, is that it can always be superseded as a biography, but never as a book. As a unique biographical creation — the poet Jon Stallworthy’s creation — nothing can replace it. But for the rest, I believe there is no such thing as a definitive biography. Like translations, and waves making to the pebbled shore, biographies ‘in sequent toil all forwards do contend’ (Sonnet 60).

The reason I have not appended page numbers to my inset quotations above is that it would be unhelpful given the variety of different editions now available. The book was first published by OUP and Chatto in 1974 and the above image is from a copy of the Oxford Paperback edition (1977) kindly lent to me by a subscriber to Calderonia.

SOME RESPONSES TO THE BIOGRAPHY RECEIVED SO FAR

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘It is bound to remain the definitive account.’ Laurence Senelick, Fletcher Professor of Drama, Tufts University

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Alessandro Falcetta, Armistice, biographies, biography, brevity, comments, Craiglockhart, George Calderon, Graham Greene, Harold Owen, James Rendel Harris, Jon Stallworthy, length, Michael Alexander, Ors, PTSD, publishers, Sambre and Oise Canal, Siegfried Sassoon, The Great War, Trinity College Oxford, Vincent van Gogh, Wilfred Owen, World War I | Leave a comment

A real biography

Posted on January 14, 2019 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

I don’t think I have read a new biography — or any biography — since Helen Smith’s The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, which I wrote about on 1 June 2018. Given that I was constantly reading biographies as they came out whilst I was writing my own between 2011 and 2017, and must have discussed about a dozen on Calderonia, this grinding halt may strike followers as odd. There are at least two reasons for it.

First, I was mainly reading these new biographies in order to keep up with what was going on in the ‘genre’. I was myself attempting to be innovative and there were plenty of original developments at the time that I found inspiring. After my biography of George came out, that need fell away. Second, the last six months seem to have produced mainly biographies of already very famous people, of whom I have read at least one biography before, and I had great difficulty in believing they had much new to say. (Of course, this is not the only reason for writing a biography, as I’ll discuss in a couple of weeks time, but for me at least it’s a major one for reading it.)

Meanwhile, the fertility of modern biography/autobiography, and what exactly it does and amounts to, continues to exercise theoretical minds like Ruth Scurr’s all over the world, as the pages of the TLS testify. So the subject of biography and biographies is what I want to broach again on Calderonia. As I have said before, my posts about specific biographies are not meant as critical reviews of them, rather I am taking them as examples, even perhaps exemplars, of the genre.

Alessandro Falcetta’s 676-page biography of Rendel Harris, published at the same time as mine of George Calderon, has come into my hands quite by chance. My wife is a great-great-niece of Rendel Harris, Falcetta had to approach her for copyright permission, and in return he sent her a copy of the book, which she has read and lent to me before it sets off round the family. In Waterstones I would probably not have been tempted to buy the biography of a ‘Bible Scholar and Manuscript Hunter’, but I am extremely glad that I have now read it.

Falcetta’s biography is what I call a ‘real’ biography, by which I mean it’s prototypical in the best possible sense: it superlatively does what most people, I think, want and expect from a biography. Let me explain.

Unlike George Calderon, Rendel Harris is not unknown. Yet he is not so well known that anyone will have read a biography of him before (there wasn’t one). Therefore Falcetta’s biography is new; it is not one of those biographies I have referred to above, of Churchill or Mary Queen of Scots, say, that are recycling well known material. And it is long, promising comprehensiveness, which readers also want. Where this is concerned, the biography comes with a guarantee: Falcetta spent twenty-three years researching it!

His book is also a cradle-to-grave account, i.e. it starts with Rendel Harris’s Nonconformist commercial family background in Plymouth and moves from his birth to his death. This too, I think, is what most readers want — not an ‘innovative’ shuffling of the time cards, which they may find difficult to follow. But this chronological approach is not drily factual either: already on page 11 Falcetta is speculating and interpreting, which the prototypical biography must also do:

Rendel grew up a slender and tall young man. Piercing blue eyes left no doubts about his earnestness and the radical views he could express in matters of life. At the same time they were merciless assistants to his irresistible drive to make jokes in all situations, a drive that not all his acquaintances appreciated.

Most important of all for the prototypical biography, Rendel Harris’s life was packed with change, travel and action. He scored a top First in maths at Cambridge, was awarded a fellowship at Clare College and taught the subject, but soon became more interested in palaeography, which in his case meant scriptural and early Christian texts. The textual veracity of the New Testament was, of course, a subject of enormous popular interest and religious importance in the late Victorian and Edwardian periods. Harris organised and led three arduous expeditions to the monks at St Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai, with whom he got on extremely well unlike most European scholars. He photographed and handcopied Greek and Syriac texts he found there, discovering ‘one of the first and most beautiful specimens of ancient Christian poetry’, The Odes of Solomon (p. 1) and becoming ‘the first Western scholar to read the Apology of Aristides in its entirety’ (p. 92), this being a highly important second-century defence of Christianity that Harris pieced together at St Catherine’s. The hundreds of fragments and codices that he turned up in the Middle East included lines of Homer, Sappho, Plato, Herodotus, and fifty previously unknown verses from Euripedes’s Medea. He was then chosen to direct Woodbrooke, the first Quaker college in Europe, which he ‘tried to make a Free Church rather than a Quaker institution’ (p. 234). He and his wife helped raise about three million pounds at today’s prices for the relief of victims of the Armenian genocides and themselves travelled to the areas of the massacres, managing and personally distributing aid three times between 1895 and 1915. During the First World War he was twice torpedoed crossing the Mediterranean, on the second occasion only just escaping with his life as the lifeboat drifted towards Corsica and people died around him…

Then there is the intense psychological interest that a prototypical biography must arouse. In the words of William Littleboy, the warden of Woodbrooke, Rendel Harris was ‘the most curious psychological puzzle I have come across. The man who had actually preached the “highest” lecture of any one I know, is the only man I ever met who inspires me with something akin to real fear’. Harris was capable of utterly childlike humility and simplicity, yet in Littleboy’s view his directorship was ‘a dictatorship in the most absolute form’ (p. 233). The reason Littleboy ‘feared’ him, though, was simply that he never knew what Rendel was going to say or do next. Rendel could wear tennis shoes to chair an august meeting and answer ‘Brer Rabbit’ when asked ‘Who is there?’ on the phone. According to close friends, the reason he was never given a chair at Cambridge was not his Nonconformism but that he was ‘prone to putting people’s backs up and to making rather harsh comments about them’; he was ‘not an easy man to understand and get along with: he had a rather whimsical sense of humour and liked to say things to shock people’, as well as ‘enjoying praise and being a centre of admiration’ (p. 140). Well, it is quite clear from this book how stultified British academic, Nonconformist and social life was then, and I think Rendel just wanted to shake it up. He was a wonderful mover and shaker, with the energy of ten of us today. He rocked the boat because he thought the best way to test and improve boats is by rocking them. His disarming humour was in the first instance a ploy to break down po-facedness in the pursuit of truth (the only thing he was interested in), but it is clear throughout this biography that he also used laughter as a means to empathy:

One day, he was travelling with Wood on a train from London to Birmingham across fields where cows were pastured. The only other passenger in the compartment was a lady sitting opposite, looking preoccupied and sad. Suddenly, Rendel leaned towards her and opened the conversation by asking: ‘Don’t you sometimes wish you were a cow?’ This unexpected and discourteous question led to a talk in which he was able to comfort this new acquaintance suffering from some personal trouble. (p. 243)

Finally, a ‘real’ biography always makes you think. It puts you in touch with someone from the past who leaps time and says something relevant to you in the present. Falcetta convinces me that Rendel Harris was a very modern Christian in his lifetime — and still is! Of course, he was a mathematician and scientist, as well as a Darwinist:

For him, every theory had to be tested in an experimental fashion. This principle he applies to Jesus. His faith did not centre on intellectual and unverifiable tenets, as the [Quakerian] inner light might have been, but on an event, the sending of Christ, that is, on a person who had actually lived, about whom historical records exist, and whose influence in one’s own life could be practically felt in a sense of increased power, of joy and fulfilment. (p. 308)

He left behind the guilt-ridden Congregationalism of his upbringing through having an epiphanic experience of being freed of sin by God, then experiencing ‘holiness’ and a union with the personality of Christ. He became a Quaker, but the humour, conversation and singing that he introduced to Meeting did not go down well with some. Another difference was his ‘mysticism’. ‘This was an important feature of his devotional books and many of his contemporaries agreed in considering him a mystic’, writes Carole Spencer:

Rendel’s mysticism placed him in continuity with historical Quakerism but against liberal Quakerism, which was turning into a reasonable, non-mystical faith, precisely the kind of Quakerism that was championed by Littleboy, the author of The Appeal of Quakerism to the Non-Mystic. […] Rendel’s mysticism, Spencer observes, was a warm-hearted relationship with Christ, something that modern, rationalist Quakers discarded as pure sentimentality. (p. 259)

Thus, although Rendel Harris was himself a rationalist and empiricist, Falcetta stresses that the ‘absoluteness of the religion of Jesus’ rested for him ‘on spiritual grounds and is proved experientially’ (p. 37). Personally, I would go further and say that Rendel was a modern existential Christian in the way that post-Kierkegaard, post-totalitarian, post-Holocaust, post-WW2 Christians have been all over Europe and Russia. His faith led him always to confront the ethical demands of the present: to challenge the official prejudice against Nonconformists in British universities, to protest against gratuitous vivisection, to preach and practise gender equality, to organise and deliver humanitarian aid irrespective of creed, to be alive to political deceit everwhere.

Of course, there are many more aspects to Alessandro Falcetta’s book than I have discussed here as ingredients of a ‘real’ biography. For instance, within the thirty-four chapters the text is divided into about three hundred manageable, titled sections that greatly facilitate reading, and within those Falcetta does, in fact, ‘mix it’ with chronological time. Further, he has to devote considerable space to informing the reader of the facts surrounding palaeographical, theological and religious controversies.

The latter, I confess, I found rather heavy-going, but it does not matter. This is a massive, pluralistic masterpiece that deserves to be read rather like a Bible: buy a copy, put it on a home lectern, and read twenty pages a day! You won’t regret it.

P.S. Rendel Harris and George Calderon could well have met at the Third International Congress for the History of Religions at Oxford in 1908, which they both attended. They shared a deep interest in early religions and folklore. Obviously, Rendel was Victorian, Edwardian and Georgian; he was born sixteen years before George and outlived him by twenty-six. Both were polymaths and…maverick geniuses?

SOME RESPONSES TO THE BIOGRAPHY RECEIVED SO FAR

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’ Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter