Calderonia

Is it Cricket?

Posted on May 23, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Click the image to find this book on Amazon.

For years, one of the most pleasurable things about the parish magazine I am sent from my home town has been the monthly book review by a retired bishop. It is about 350 words long and his range of reading is impressive: at one end, shortish religious books for the season, or Justin Welby’s Dethroning Mammon, at the other Len Deighton’s SS-GB, Paul Kalanithi’s When Breath Becomes Air, Paula Hawkins’s The Girl on the Train, Julian Barnes… The bishop certainly does not shy from the disturbing and visceral.

I have always admired the elegant economy of his reviews. They give you a succinct sense of what the book is about, they are quietly empathetic in that they address how you the reader might find the book, and they administer criticism with perfect manners. In short, they always come across as open-minded and objective.

Until, unfortunately, this month. His review of the above book is the longest I have seen by him, it falls apart, and it is almost entirely subjective. I am quite shocked. Even a cursory glance at the page reveals that the commonest word on it is ‘I’. This is because, although ‘we missed each other in Oxford’, the bishop ‘sat on the same red benches in Westminster’ as Cowdrey, he is ‘of Cowdrey’s generation’, he knows the Kent County Cricket set, and Cowdrey and he had ‘a devotion to cricket only just short of the spiritual’. The first half of his review is full of that kind of thing, rather than telling us about the book.

Then we get down to it:

I have a criticism of the author. It is true that, thanks to the Cowdrey family, he had access to personal diaries of Colin, so there are some fascinating things here [please give us at least one example] which have never been published before. That makes it a worthwhile enterprise in itself. But surprisingly for an English master at a prominent public school there are one or two elementary mistakes [not many, then]. […] As a first class cricketer himself some of the descriptions read like dressing room banter and sometimes like an autobiography of the biographer [rather like this review?]. That may add a light touch but it produces a deficit of depth. The measure of a man is more than the sum of his achievements and certainly Colin Cowdrey, like the rest of us, is an enigma. A really penetrating biographer will attempt to decode that enigma.

What has led the good bishop to this uncharacteristic literary pontification? The answer, I fear, lies in that phrase ‘devotion to cricket only just short of the spiritual’. I cannot help feeling that he has been elegant and restrained in all his previous reviews because there was nothing in those books, even the ‘spiritual’ ones, that he could ever get as worked up about as cricket! But the ‘spiritual’ reasserts itself in the wonderful backhanded compliment of his final sentence following on from my quotation: ‘Andrew Murtagh is probably too nice a man to dare to do that.’ OmG.

There is a serious issue here. In literary terms what the bishop has done isn’t cricket. Literary reviews shouldn’t be autobiographical or self-focussed. That would be boring and unprofitable for the reader. The reviewer’s commitment must be to the book they are reviewing and to the reader who might consider buying it. (Pardon this passing pontification.) If you ask another ‘expert’ in the field to review a book, s/he will probably rubbish it for a variety of purely personal reasons. You don’t want someone with their axe to grind, you want the sense of a well-read, independent, objective judge.

I am sure the bishop will recover his poise in next month’s issue, but I think we all need to keep Richard Steele’s words ringing in our ears: ‘It is great vanity to think anyone will attend to a thing because it is your quarrel.’

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Andrew Murtagh, biographies, biography, bishops, Colin Cowdrey, comments, cricket, Julian Barnes, Justin Welby, Kent County Cricket, Len Deighton, literary reviews, parish magazines, Paul Kalanithi, Paula Hawkins, reviews, Richard Steele | 4 Comments

A ‘funny’ moment

Posted on May 16, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Idly doing my housework, as one does, I suddenly realised that my nylon ‘feather’ duster had whisked over Kittie’s surviving suitcase without my even noticing it. I paused and by reflex put my hand on the case. Why I did this, I don’t know, but I stood there a while touching it, contemplating it, and staring out of the window.

The book is ‘over’, it is at the printer’s, it may arrive in three weeks time.

They seem so far away now, George and Kittie, a hundred years and more. Yet they are not: I still feel their presence as though I could walk into a room and talk to them. Touching the case, I felt ‘connected’. Unlike some professional biographers (that’s to say who engage with one life after another) I don’t think I am ever going to wave them goodbye. That is not, of course, to say that I won’t ‘move on’.

Have I really shown them as they were? Have I done them justice? Curiously, I feel I have with Kittie, but I have nagging doubts about George. This is because Kittie lived longer (she died on my second birthday), I knew far more people who knew her than had known George, and the fact that it transpired my great-aunt and -uncle in Ashford probably met her also drew her closer, whereas there is a lot that it is impossible to verify about George. Was he a manic depressive? Future biographers will probably conclude he was, but the evidence is tenuous; in my view, he suffered from occasional bouts of ‘blue devils’, as he called it, and knew how to fight them. Was he a secret Taoist? Possibly, but can we ever know? Martin Shaw, whom I quote on my flyleaf, refers to George’s knowledge of economics and even calls him an ‘economic propagandist’; but there are only two or three documentary crumbs to corroborate that. What was the real impact on him of witnessing the ‘Khodynka tragedy’ in Moscow as a foreign correspondent, in which 1389 people were trampled to death? He never spoke about it…

There is no better account of the neuroses of the biographer than Susie Boyt’s FT article ‘The experience of writing a biography’. I can’t add to it.

Sam2’s note: The FT article is normally behind a subscriber paywall and the above link will likely not work for non-subscribers to the FT. However, if you type ‘Susie Boyt, The Experience of Writing a Biography’ into Google and click the first link, we have found that still gives the full article without subscribing. (We tried various ingenious ways to make the link above have this magical property, but it turns out really the only surefire way is through manual googling.)

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged aftermath, biographies, biography, comments, depression, economics, George Calderon, housework, Khodynka, Kittie Calderon, Martin Shaw, Moscow, political economy, publishers, publishing, suitcase, Susie Boyt, Taoism | 1 Comment

What I have learned about today’s books

Posted on May 13, 2018 by Patrick Miles

After, in effect, four sets of proofs since March, we uploaded the complete PDF file of the book to the printers (Clays of St Ives) three days ago, five days before the deadline. There will be no celebrating, however, until we have received, read and returned their final proofs of the book, the jacket and the 150th anniversary bellyband. Clays have a fantastic reputation, and their customer care has been wonderful, but I have begun to have nightmares again about the time I took delivery of a book of mine from ‘the best printers in Cambridge’ and found they had left the title page out…

In my own publishing efforts I have been guided since the 1970s by Oliver Simon’s classic Introduction to Typography (Faber & Faber, 1963). I’ve repeatedly consulted it this time round, too, concerning things like margins and the layout of the ‘preliminary pages’. If you want rules, for instance about when to put a number on a page and when not, or whether to start a new section recto or verso, Simon’s your man.

But, of course, things are vastly different in this age of digital printing. Sam2 has more experience of it than me. It’s been a pretty vertical learning curve and rather humbling. For instance, on a mature consideration I decided the Dedication must go centre page, but every time I looked at the proof of that page the Dedication seemed too low, although it had been digitally positioned dead centre. Then I suddenly remembered Mrs Stringer telling us in year three at primary school (1956) that the optical centre is higher…

We have consulted about ten recently published hardback biographies in the course of our decision-making, and it has revealed a fascinating thing: they break the typographical rules all over the place. For instance, a best-selling biography that I have written about on Calderonia hardly has any pages that are ‘bottom-justified’, i.e. the verso and recto end at different levels. This book has lots of short quotations in it, and it looks as though the publisher simply decided to give up on bottom-justifying. Mind you, just as astonishing is the fact that when I read this book I never noticed!

A more recent biography, published by Jonathan Cape, has such narrow top and spine margins that the text almost looks cramped on the page. Whereas Simon recommends setting the Index in a font two sizes smaller than the text, this book’s Index is set about four times smaller and in three, not the more friendly two, columns. As with almost all the recent biographies I have looked at, it has no blank pages at the end. Books have to be printed in ‘signatures’ of sixteen pages, so if your book ends on page 533 (as ours does) it has to have another eleven blank pages after it to complete the ‘signature’ (to break that up, we have printed a Sam&Sam bibliography on page 535). I conclude, therefore, that publishers are cramming text onto the page, reducing font sizes and starting sections verso rather than recto in order to cut the cost of blank end pages.

Some publishers, I have noticed, now ignore the tradition of avoiding ‘orphans’ (single lines of a new paragraph left at the bottom of a page) and ‘widows’ (the last line of a paragraph carried over to the top of the next page). In Boris Johnson’s The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History (Hodder & Stoughton, 2014) there are so many ‘orphans’ that you feel they are a new design fad.

The experience of publishing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius ourselves has also given me insight into features of modern hardbacks that have always mystified me. For instance, it’s not uncommon to see a final ‘f’ fused with a following apostrophe (like that one), or any final letter in italics collapsed upon the roman inverted comma or bracket following it. To rectify this, minute spaces called ‘hair leads’ have to be inserted between the two characters. This is almost hand typesetting, and terribly time-consuming, so it’s not surprising if in many of today’s books the blemish is ignored. Similarly, I can now understand why garbage appears in a printed book for exotic characters that were correct in the proof, or why some Index references are out by precisely a page: (1) you just cannot predict a computer gremlin, (2) if top and bottom justification has to be fine-tuned after the final proofs, the Index is not going to be adjusted accordingly.

A new hardback nicely published by Chatto & Windus, HarperCollins, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, or Faber, has a natural authority. It convinces you that everything about it is meant to be just as it is. However, my experience this year has shown me that it is more of a quantum world in there than a Newtonian one. Increasingly, I think, anything goes. And that really makes me wonder whether printed books will be around forever.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, Boris Johnson, Chatto & Windus, Clays Ltd, comments, Faber & Faber, geometric centre, George Calderon, hair leads, HarperCollins, Hodder & Stoughton, Index, Jonathan Cape, layout, nightmares, Oliver Simon, optical centre, orphans, printing, publishers, The Dedication, typography, widows | Leave a comment

Word and image

Posted on May 10, 2018 by Patrick Miles

One of the many, many benefits to me of this blog has been what I would go so far as to call the ‘democracy’ of it: the fact that it stands open to feedback and Comment from you, its subscribers, and indeed from whomsoever. That has been very valuable. For instance, I had been assuming for years that the twenty-five illustrations would go into a couple of glossy tranches inside the book, but the majority of followers who responded said they preferred to see them as close as possible to the narrative that they illustrated.

This consensus was very fortunate for me, as I had been baulking at the cost of the glossy illustrations, tending myself to want the images ‘integrated’ with the words, but hesitating because it is still not common in biographies. There exists a belief that black and white images were first dropped into a continuous prose text by W.G. Sebald back in the 1990s (see The Rings of Saturn, Austerlitz, etc.). That model rather put me off, in fact, as Sebald’s images are often indistinct and unhelpfully surreal for non-fiction.

Two image print trials and the professional comments on them from three followers of the blog convinced me that the quality the printers could produce on the text paper would be excellent, so I decided to go ahead. Instantly, though, this raised another problem: HOW was I going to ‘integrate’ them into the text, to what extent was this a DESIGN issue, to what extent were we going to IMPROVE the given images, indeed beautify them?

To enlarge, click on this image and next

The more we looked at this challenge, the trickier it became. It’s a juggling act and the factors being juggled kept going round and round like clubs.

One has to recognise that any book is an exercise in design, irrespective of the power or otherwise of its verbal content. One wants to create a book that gives readers pleasure not only to read, but to look at and hold in their hands. The positioning of our images had to be very carefully chosen so as not actually to break the continuity, the size of them was very important (give them space to breathe on the page), and they had to be shown off to their most reader-friendly advantage. Thus one or two have been trimmed, e.g. masses of foliage cut back to concentrate on the human figure; all black edges that come from scanning have been removed; two have actually been rounded at their corners by us; those that are studio shots on rounded card have been cut to their real edges. We have used computer manipulation to get rid of blobs and enhance definition.

At the same time, I wanted to retain some of that feeling of discovered documents. This is not a biography of someone whose life was already known; the whole book is more of a process of first-time discovery. Thus many bald square images, like the one from George’s cartoon book above, have not been framed, but simply laid down in the text where their subjects occur. Similarly, even if it had been possible to remove a water stain over Kittie’s eye on a delightful photograph of her as a young girl, or lift off the heavy foxing on a studio photograph of Manya Ross, I would not have done it. Most outrageously of all, perhaps, we have left a gaping crack on an amateur photograph of George from 1901. I wanted some of these precious images to be as ‘in your face’ as I first experienced them in the attic where they had lain for forty years. My only regret now is that I have not used more than twenty-five of them and that they are rather unevenly scattered through the book.

I think at the end of the day the images in a biography have to remain subordinate to the writing. For that very reason, where a photograph in my biography is rotated by ninety degrees to fill a page, I have kept the running head on that page. It emphasises that the image is an adjunct to the story, even if it is an important one that we must try to display to its best advantage. The word does take precedence. I wanted the images to be as far as possible ‘synchronous’ with the words, with narrative/reading time.

For the finest balance between text and image that I know, buy Andrew Tatham’s A Group Photograph whilst stocks last! I am serious: it is now in its second edition and I doubt whether it will be republished. I would expect it to have sold out by the end of this commemorative year, as it is comparable to the ceramic poppies being sold in their thousands from the ‘Bloodswept Lands and Seas of Red’ installation. Tatham’s book will be a vital part of the permanent legacy of the centenary of World War 1; a book that you will return to again and again. Andrew is a writer and an artist. For me, the most beautiful combination of word, image, layout and colour is that celebrating Louis Arthur Klemantaski between pages 110 and 111. But every section on a soldier and his family is a work of art, and every ‘memorial window’ that Andrew has designed for them is a unique composition of image and subtle colour.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged A Group Photograph, Andrew Tatham, Austerlitz, biographies, biography, Bloodswept Lands and Seas of Red, book illustrations, cartoons, commemoration, comments, design, George Calderon, Kittie Calderon, Lev Tolstoi, Louis Arthur Klementaski, photographs, printers, self-publishing, The Rings of Saturn, W.G. Sebald, World War I | 1 Comment

Tense, moi?

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Patrick Miles

If you sensed unwonted stress at the end of my previous post, you were right. When I decided at the beginning of January that we would bring out the book in six months, I calculated that as ‘the beginning of June’… So actually five months. That in turn meant that we had just over four months in which to deliver the book to the printers. Mad! If I had known all that it would involve, and the pressures it would put Sam&Sam under, I would never have gone there.

The unforeseen challenges have been the complexities of computer typography. It is well known that the period of reading proofs is the most dangerous one for an author, as s/he is so used to the text by then, so I decided to read the first proofs slowly, at about sixty pages a day, which consequently took ten working days. This did not throw up many textual problems, but it revealed four typographic ones: the familiar phenomenon of ‘orphans and widows’, i.e. solitary one-liners at the bottom or top of a page; unsightly elastication of lines of text; repeated non-alignments of the bottom of pages; ‘collapses’ of certain characters, particularly in italic, onto the following character.

Sam2 ingeniously solved all these hitches, and is going to write a guest post when the saga is over, about how he did it. It is a fantastic achievement, as there are plenty of commercially published hardback biographies in print that display these very faults!

The vital function of the first proofs was to give us an ‘Extent’, i.e. a text length with (we thought) page numbers set in stone, from which I could insert the page numbers into my already constructed alphabetical list of index terms. Alas, sorting out the orphan/widows and the full page justifications led to some repagination. Not only that, in the first chapter we discovered that a large chunk of text had mysteriously slipped into a slightly smaller font size… So for the second proofs the first chapter and all those misaligned pages had to be re-indexed. Then the whole typeset index had to be proofed and read back to me over three hours, with me following in my master copy, which revealed dozens of transcription mistakes on my part and altogether 110 corrections to be made. I think I understand now why you notice small errors of page numbers in many published indexes! Determined to cure this, I have since carried out massive checks on the typeset Index.

But Sam&Sam’s new-found awareness of line elastication, page misalignment and character collapse meant that we noticed more and more of these glitches in the second proofs, which had themselves taken me another ten days to read. We have decided we have to go for a third proof, but this time in the PDF in which the book has to be delivered. Meanwhile, I have paid the printers up front, as one must, and we are locked into delivery by 15 May… Goodness knows what problems the PDF might throw up, so goodness knows whether, after four months at it, we can deliver to the printers by that date. If we do, the printers offer to deliver in Cambridge on 4 June. Little do they know the Calderonian significance of that date.

Altogether, it has got a bit hot in the kitchen and I feel sure it has led to some ‘character collapse’ on my part, too. Oh for the relaxed, unstressable indifference of Edwardian politician Arthur Balfour: ‘Nothing matters very much, and few things matter at all.’ But at the end of the day, if we don’t meet this deadline, or if big problems emerge when we receive PDF proofs of the book and jacket from the printers (I have paid extra for these, as too much is at stake to risk gremlins at their end, though I have only two days in which to read them), we will still have some time in hand. The anniversary that this biography synchronises with, the 150th of George’s birth, isn’t until 2 December.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Arthur Balfour, biographies, biography, commemoration, comments, Dardanelles, deadlines, Gallipoli, George Calderon, indexes, orphans, PDF files, pressure, proofreading, proofs, publishing, Sam&Sam, stress, Third Battle of Krithia, typesetting, typography, widows | 1 Comment

DnA

Posted on May 3, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Longer-term followers of Calderonia will be aware of my preoccupation with Edwardian ‘dilettantism’ and ‘amateurism’. Laurence Binyon, Martin Shaw and Percy Lubbock went out of their way to stress that George was not a dilettante, and the word ‘amateur’ was not derogatory in that period. Nevertheless, since the 1920s George has been increasingly disparaged as an amateur and even a dilettante. If you want to know how I resolve this issue in the concept of ‘Edwardian genius’, you will have to read the Afterword of my biography! I think it is a complex subject.

When I wrote in my post about the gender pay gap that a senior figure in an oil company confessed to me in about 1998 that he could not take women seriously in the workplace, I implied that he described them as ‘dilettantes’. On second thoughts, he may have used the softer word ‘amateur’. The words are not interchangeable, but I would claim that their semantic content today is identical (‘unprofessional’) and ‘dilettante’ merely intensifies it to the extreme of pejorativeness — contempt.

It was not always so. Deriving from Italian for ‘delight’, a dilettante was originally someone who took real and sustained pleasure in the fine arts as a consumer. S/he may not have progressed beyond a pretty superficial enjoyment of them, but they did love them (this was the original sense of ‘amateur’ too). An amateur not only loved them as a consumer, but practised them, and seriously; hence originally an amateur was no amateur in the modern sense (i.e. dabbler), let alone a dilettante in the modern sense (i.e. botcher). As far as I can see, in the eighteenth century dilettante and amateur were neutral words describing different types of people, but with an area of overlap in the concept of taking pleasure in or loving.

By the Edwardian period, the vital point was that s/he practised the given art not for filthy lucre, not for a livelihood, not as a ‘profession’. Practising the art (e.g. cricket, painting, war) for pure love of it was regarded as superior and the amateur was expected to be every bit as good at their art as the ‘professional’, if not inherently better. Where sport was concerned, George certainly subscribed to this notion of amateur. Where his writing was concerned, contemporaries may have regarded him as an amateur because he appeared to have a private income (Kittie’s!), but actually that was not so: he earned a living wage from his journalism, fiction, plays and translations.

Where the literature and theatre of the Edwardian period were concerned, George preferred to think of himself as an amateur because he wanted to stay outside a literary establishment of ‘professionals’ that he saw as stuck in a Victorian rut. Thus in a TLS review he praised to the skies two ‘amateur’ humorous writers (without knowing that they were women) because they were fresh, creative and writing outside the ‘professional’ (his word) box. Conversely, for a long time the Edwardian/Georgian literary establishment regarded those whom we now call the War Poets as amateurs.

For George, amateur in the arts meant innovative, anti-establishment, genuinely creative, serious. Authentic art of that kind we would be tempted today to call ‘professional’. We all know, for instance, that fringe theatre can be professional in the sense of trained skill, and produce more significant dramatic art than some commercial theatre. On the other hand, the worst feature of fringe theatre is when you have directors and actors who are doing it only for themselves. Unfortunately, this self-gratification amongst fringers and amateurs is quite common. Such people do not understand, as real professionals would, that their skills should be selflessly focussed on the work and their audience.

A writer whom I respect referred to ‘the dreaded D-word’ in a discussion about George Calderon. He was right: despite the fact that in 2018 we ‘multi-task’ and have ‘portfolio’ careers, we dread being thought of as dilettantes or amateurs. The phrase ‘it’s what I do’ is used to dismiss all one’s other paid/unpaid activities and stress that ‘really’ one’s vocation, one’s serious and inalienable role in life, is X. People are not at ease with being thought to ‘spread themselves too thinly’ in a perceived dilettante fashion.

I am experiencing this unease myself over publishing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. I can assure followers and potential readers that Sam&Sam are tackling the task of producing a quality book with all the professionalism of which we are capable. However, as I have said, one can’t get round the fact that designing, typesetting and printing a long and complex hardback like this, for which one is going to ask £30, is extremely challenging. We are not ‘professional’ (i.e. commercial) book-publishers. I know that I am not ‘really’ a publisher, what I ‘do’ is writing. I fear the dreaded D and A words…

On the other hand, I have had this amateur role thrust upon me. Were I the bitter type, I would holler that the British publishing establishment has let me down and I would excoriate the politics of publishing. But bitterness is toxic. We must just keep buggering on, as Churchill put it. Is that the spirit of the dilettante, the amateur, or the professional?

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged amateurism, biographies, biography, comments, dilettantism, fringe theatre, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Martin Shaw, Percy Lubbock, publishers, Sam&Sam, self-publishing, semantic, TLS | Leave a comment

Jacketed!

Posted on April 21, 2018 by Patrick Miles

I herewith post the front and back cover of my book, designed by Dan Mogford, who has been a delight to work with and whose first-rate services are not pricey. The front and back flaps are also ready, but I don’t want to post ‘spoilers’.

At the end of a long day, we felt we had no alternative but to use Hollyer’s 1912 ‘iconic’ photo-portrait of George on the cover, as it is artistically the best image of him and likely to be the only one that potential readers have ever seen. At first glance, perhaps, the front cover is a little funereal or ‘black pot’, but to my astonishment some women have spontaneously told me they find George in this photograph ‘very handsome’!

Is it the eyebrows? A touch of Clooney perhaps, or Connery..?

The title on the front and spine will be in gold, as will the frame of the image on the back:

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Back Cover

Click to enlarge

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, comments, Dan Mogford, Derwent May, Emmetts, Frederick Hollyer, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, George Clooney, Harvey Pitcher, jacket, jacket design, Laurence Brockliss, Sean Connery | 7 Comments

George Calderon and the gender pay gap

Posted on April 17, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Obviously I believe George Calderon’s life is interesting in itself — dramatic, even — but another reason I have written his biography is that many of the issues of the day that he responded to are still with us (e.g. Russian autocracy, the power of trade unions, commercial theatre, public philanthropy), and his take on them was original. Despite his reputation as a Tory (which he wasn’t), George never belonged to an Establishment, political, theatrical, literary, or other. He always strove to think outside the box.

His opposition to votes for women brought out the worst in him. However, since his reasoning, like that of the women anti-suffragists, was essentially based on gender difference (the ‘separate spheres’ argument) and gender differences are still with us, even here he can be relevant, or at least challenging, today.

One of the suffragists’ claims was that enfranchisement would raise women’s wages because it would raise their status (yes, it was italicised as a Latin word and presumably pronounced with a long ‘a’). Correspondence about this erupted on the pages of The Times in April 1909 and George weighed in with a very long letter, which was printed in full presumably because he put ‘Hon. Sec. Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage’ after his name. He treated the wages claim with his malignest sarcasm:

In spite of facts and statistics, the woman suffragists continually do cry that the vote must raise wages; but they can never show any instance where it has. When put to it for the manner how, they take refuge in a meaningless parrot cry of ‘raising woman’s status’. And what is meant by status none of them can tell; it is a word like ‘Mesopotamia’, or the technical terms of metaphysics and theology. If they had to put it into English they could not do it, because there is no meaning in it at all. It is a magical formula, an algebraic symbol of the same order as the square root of minus one. If women workers are to be enriched, out of whose pockets is the money to come?

What George was driving at was that the suffragists could not explain the economic mechanism by which enfranchisement would close the gender pay gap, and in the absence of that it wasn’t going to happen. One of George’s many qualifications was that, unusually for the time, he had studied ‘political economy’, i.e. what today we call ‘economics’. He consequently thought he knew what he was talking about. Indeed, very slyly in his anti-suffrage tract of the previous year he had pointed out that Millicent Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was a trained economist and could ‘prick the wages bubble in a moment’. He had also ‘searched Mrs Fawcett’s Political Economy for Beginners in vain for any hint that legislation is one of the possible means of raising wages’. He in fact believed, like a French economist who had studied the subject in 1906, that ‘the cause of women’s low wages lies chiefly in the competition of women for whom the wage is a supplement and not a livelihood’. The economic mechanism, then, that would perpetuate the gender pay gap was, in the words of his Times letter of 13 April 1909, ‘the market value of women’s work’.

The title page of George’s anti-suffrage tract

As we know only too well from the recently published statistics, enfranchisement and equal rights won by women since George’s day have not led to equal pay for women. So was he right about the role of invidious market forces? Yes, and no.

The current public debate about the gender pay gap demonstrates how complex the subject is. To take three of the simpler aspects, are we talking of a gender pay gap for doing exactly the same job, or of some kind of aggregate gap, does anyone have ‘equal’ pay given the existence of performance-related increments, and are the figures for gender pay gaps based on gross pay or income net of tax and benefits?

One thing that men in their right mind seem to have agreed on for centuries is that it is inequitable, insupportable, and indeed incomprehensible, that women should be paid less for doing the same job:

I put a question to him [Samuel Johnson] upon a fact in common life, which he could not answer, nor have I found anyone else who could. What is the reason that women servants, though obliged to be at the expense of purchasing their own clothes, have much lower wages than male servants, to whom a great proportion of that article is furnished, and when in fact our female house servants work much harder than the male? (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson)

So neither Boswell, nor Johnson, nor ‘anyone else’ in that Age of Reason, could explain why the gender pay gap existed! Since they were men of reason, the implication is that they concluded it was the result of a perverse prejudice. And, of course, that is the short answer. But what still escapes us, it seems, is the substance of this prejudice. What specifically is it that men object to in their women colleagues that even drives employers to break the law about equal pay and the minimum wage?

Here George’s defence of ‘market forces’ can perhaps enlighten us. He was right, and the suffragists who expected enfranchisement to raise women’s pay in a market economy were wrong. But what are the forces that determine the ‘market value of women’s work’? Having identified the economic mechanism, George seems to think he has found an irrefutable, perhaps even objective, explanation of the gender pay gap. But we know perfectly well that there are a host of market forces that are purely psychological — and hence open to prejudices. George himself inadvertently identified one such prejudice, when he wrote that for women ‘the wage is a supplement and not a livelihood’.

In Edwardian Britain, as another Times correspondent pointed out, this statement was literally true, because ‘as the law now stands, a man is bound to bear the whole charge of supporting the family’. Quite possibly, therefore, a woman’s wage was regarded by everyone, including the women themselves, as a ‘supplement’, and competition between the women for a limited number of jobs did drive down the ‘market value’ of their work.

It is a long time since a woman’s salary was just a ‘supplement’ to the family income. However, even though more women are financially independent than ever before, and even though it is an official and legislative truth that they are equal to men, I believe the idea that their income is a ‘supplement’ still lurks in the male psyche. I have been self-employed for most of my life, but whenever I worked in large teams or offices I sensed a perception, perhaps even amongst some women, that they were ‘dilettantes’ at work because, as one male expressed it to me, ‘women can have children and men cannot, so of course they put children before everything else, whereas men have only work to put before everything else’. The implication was that women were only working until their maternity leave kicked in, whereupon they would rush off to do what they were really interested in, and meanwhile could not even be expected to work as hard as men.

I hasten totally to dissociate myself from such views, but we are trying to explain something that is widely thought to be almost an enigma in modern liberal society and I feel George has inadvertently identified the chief prejudice beneath it. The ‘supplement’ prejudice is the market force that produces the income differential when men and women are doing the same job (e.g. in the BBC).

The deeper question then is, why do men persist in the ‘supplement’ prejudice? There can be no rational excuse, but I suggest it is simply because our brains are programmed by gender difference, in this case bearing/not bearing children. Gender difference, as George realised when he considered the fact that most women in 1908 did not want the vote, plays havoc with the equality project. I think this is now being increasingly recognised. A correspondent in The Guardian of 2018, for instance, presents it as a fact that ‘many women prefer jobs aimed at looking after individual people, rather than committing their energy to playing the organisation game’, thus excluding themselves from higher-paid jobs open to them. That fine feminist and anti-suffragist Octavia Hill would have understood.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, comments, economics, feminism, gender difference, gender pay gap, George Calderon, James Boswell, market economies, market forces, market value, Men's League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, Millicent Fawcett, National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, Octavia Hill, political economy, Samuel Johnson, suffragism, suffragists, The Guardian, The Times, Woman in Relation to the State, women's wages | 8 Comments

Sam&Sam rejoice

Posted on April 11, 2018 by Patrick Miles

The achievement of the deadline is sealed in 2013 Burg Wildeck Riesling Extra Trocken

Sam (aka Patrick Miles) and Sam (aka James Miles) are pleased to announce that they met their deadline of 7 April for completing the typesetting of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius including images and Index, and the first proof has been read.

As followers will know, we ordered two print trials of the images from our printers, Clays Ltd, St Ives plc. The second set were sent out to four readers, all of whose comments were positive. We are particularly grateful, however, to Andrew Tatham and John Pym for their professional attention and technical suggestions. We accepted most of those suggestions and believe they have greatly enhanced the result.

At the same time, the generously offered experience of John Dewey, John Pym, Andrew Tatham and Peter Gibson concerning the problems of modern digital typesetting of text has been invaluable. We thank them warmly. As Sam 1 has acknowledged, for someone whose last self-published book was printed in 1987 by offset litho, producing a hardback book in 2018 that looks as good as a commercially published one is a steep learning curve. We do not claim to have completely mastered it, but thanks to the above-named we have been saved from a lot of egg on our faces. Sam 2 has done a magnificent job with the typesetting and presentation of the images.

So we have now gone into installing first-proof corrections in the text and fine-tuning certain typographical aspects. The whole thing (533 pages!) will then be printed out again, on recycled paper, as the second and final proof. Next week I hope to feature the jacket design by Dan Mogford.

NB. The historical origins of Sam&Sam were explained in my post of 1 March. But sam in Russian means ‘himself’, so the name translates roughly as ‘Him&Him’ (cf. Barker et al., 1971-87, ‘It’s goodnight from me…and it’s goodnight from him’). Back in 1974 my friend and I thought this would be appropriately opaque for the ‘organs’ (KGB), as well as alluding to the word samizdat (self-publishing). However, such is this imprint’s impersonality that any two male persons working together on a publishing project could adopt it, as Jim and I have done. Of course, if one of the two publishers were female, in the name of gender equality it would have to become Sam&Sama, as the latter means ‘herself’. Rather temerariously, gender equality will be the subject of my next post.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Andrew Tatham, Clays Ltd, Dan Mogford, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, John Dewey, John Pym, KGB, Peter Gibson, proofs, publishing, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Sam&Sam, self-publishing, typesetting | 5 Comments

Far End draws closer

Posted on March 31, 2018 by Patrick Miles

On 26 January I blogged about the house Far End at Kingham in Oxfordshire, which I had heard about for the first time from Mrs Mary Lowe, whom we traced as the copyright holder for unpublished works of the American writer Anne Douglas Sedgwick (1873-1935). The Guest Book for Far End, which runs from 1912 to 1963, shows that George and Kittie stayed there in 1912 and 1913, but that Kittie returned in the stressful year of 1919 after accepting that George had been killed at Gallipoli in 1915, despite the fact that his body had not (officially) been found. Her last visit was in 1922, before she moved to Petersfield.

I was fortunate to be the guest of Mrs Lowe in famously hospitable Cumbria on 21st and 22nd of February. Mrs Lowe knows more about Far End than anyone else alive, since she lived there from the 1950s until 1986. Understandably, she is eager to pass it all on to posterity; and I was fascinated to hear it. The story of Far End has, I feel, a unique poetry. This poetry has grabbed me, and I think the only way to do it justice is for Mrs Lowe and I to write an extended article with lavish illustrations for a publication like Country Life, once George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is finally signed off. In the meantime, here are a few facts that may whet your appetite.

The house was designed and built by the literary critic Basil de Sélincourt (1877-1966) in 1907. It was set in four acres of land at the edge of Kingham and came with a five-acre field. Three of Basil’s brothers were also writers and their father owned the Piccadilly store of Swan & Edgar; which was presumably a financial help. After New College, Oxford, Basil seems to have gone into ‘higher’ London journalism, but in 1905 he published a well-received book on Giotto, in 1908 he married Anne Douglas Sedgwick, they settled at Far End, and the following year he published William Blake. I have read the whole (sic) of Blake in my time, and I have read this book. It is not only beautifully written and produced, I agree entirely with de Sélincourt’s evaluation of the glories and weaknesses of Blake’s sensibility. Mrs Lowe tells me that in later years Basil would fulminate about F.R. Leavis (a great Blakophile), but on the evidence of William Blake I do not understand why. In 1914 he published a critical study of Walt Whitman.

Far End shortly after construction

Anne Douglas Sedgwick’s novels sold well, particularly in America. Between 1912 and 1929, for instance, she had three titles in the U.S. top ten for the year, and three of her bestsellers were made into films. I have read Tante (1912), The Encounter (1914), and The Little French Girl (1924). They are extremely well written, but like her readers Sedgwick clearly felt that more is more. Incidentally, in Tante, published the year before George appended the word ‘barbarian’ in Greek to his signature in the Guest Book, Sedgwick used ‘barbarous/barbarian’ several times about unrefined male views and emotions, so maybe she had applied it to George too! The three novels I have read revolve around both strong and controlling women. I have written to Virago Classics suggesting they reprint them.

From Anne’s earnings, she and Basil built a further one-storey range, which can be seen in the next image. This must have enabled them to entertain family and friends on the scale that the Guest Book testifies. But the most interesting thing about this photograph is the glimpse it provides of the enormous vegetable garden. Basil was a passionate grower. He wrote in the mornings and cultivated in the afternoons. Apparently his produce was superb. During the Second World War he turned over Far End’s tennis court to further cultivation and sold vegetables from a stall in the village.

The range built onto Far End later, with vegetable plot

Anne Douglas Sedgwick died in 1935. The last letter in the highly readable book of her selected correspondence that Basil published in 1936 is to Julia Alsop, née Chapin, and this fact is hardly fortuitous. On her deathbed, Anne told Basil that she wanted him to marry Julia, a divorced mother of four, whose old American family she had known for decades. After Basil had corresponded with Julia (whom he already knew) and travelled to the U.S. to propose to her, they were married at Gosport, Hants., on 23 September 1936. He was fifty-nine and Julia forty-eight.

Julia Chapin Alsop by John Singer Sargent, 1909

Julia Chapin Alsop was Mrs Lowe’s maternal grandmother. Mrs Lowe’s father was a colonial administrator and when her parents were abroad she was brought up by Julia and Basil at Far End. Thus Basil de Sélincourt was a father both to Julia’s children by her first marriage and Julia’s grandchildren. He was ‘the most intellectual man I have ever known’, Mrs Lowe told me. ‘All the Russian authors were in the house and Basil fed them to us as we grew up. He considered they translated better into French than English.’ Mrs Lowe describes him as a pacifist (he and Anne Douglas Sedgwick worked in French hospitals and orphanages during the First World War) and an agnostic, but a deeply ethical man and ‘probably a pantheist’.

Basil de Sélincourt, c. 1960

What impresses and fascinates me about Far End is that it was not just a house created by Basil and Anne, but a real literary hub which, unlike Garsington, had not a trace of the dilettantism that was so mercilessly satirized by Lawrence in Women in Love. Both Anne and Basil were professional, hardworking writers. She beautified the house, was herself a celebrated beauty, and he cultivated his garden. They led an intense artistic and intellectual existence together, which contemporaries from Laurence Binyon and George Calderon to Sir Edward Grey and Lady Ottiline Morrell herself were pleased to come and partake of. To some extent, as Mrs Lowe has put it to me, at Far End Basil, Anne, Julia and others lived the Good Life.

Far End in the 1980s

Basil de Sélincourt departed this life in 1966. When his widow died eight years later, Mrs Lowe inherited Far End and lived there with her husband, the distinguished art historian Ian Lowe, for another twelve years. They did not want to leave Far End, but the combination of factors prompting it seemed ineluctable. In 1986 Far End was sold.

That is not at all the end of its story, however. It had been designed by Basil to his personal taste and with his own vision of it as a literary haven, and it proved very difficult to change. For instance, the bathroom was directly off the hall, with windows opening onto the drive, successive new owners tried to move it to the first floor, but the rooms there were planned in such a way that it was impossible. Eventually, in 2008, the whole set of buildings called Far End was demolished for a new development.

On a dark afternoon in April of that year, Mr Lowe visited the site (Mrs Lowe could never bring herself to). He took photographs. On the back of one he wrote: ‘No stone survived except in a bleak nearby cottage. All was neglected in contrast to rest of village and adjacent field which has been turned into a garden. The orchard was a mess too.’ And on another: ‘I could wish that we had never left it and I shed a tear at our having done so. It was a happy house which could not be turned by at least three owners into what they wanted. Basil’s house beat them and had to be destroyed.’

What actually remains is the luminous memory of a successful experiment in living, of a cultural life that attracted some of the most original minds of its age. Reading Mrs Lowe’s accounts of life there, both before and after her birth, and listening to her vivid memories of it, I could not help thinking of a passage in Proust where after his grandmother’s death the narrator visits the resort of Balbec, which he had first made the acquaintance of when she took him there and was so caring towards him. He re-experiences things that happened then, indeed he searingly re-experiences his grandmother. But the ‘presence’ of the ‘past’ has a terrible downside:

On the one hand, I felt again an existence and a tenderness that lived on in me just as I had known them, that is to say which were created for me, a love that found its utter complement in me, its purpose […] and on the other, as soon as I had relived it as present, this happiness, I felt it crossed out by the certainty of a void that had expunged my image of that tenderness, destroyed that existence […] the moment I refound it.

Far End has, and has not, vanished.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Balbec, Basil de Sélincourt, biographies, biography, D.H. Lawrence, Dardanelles, F.R. Leavis, Far End, Gallipoli, Garsington, George Calderon, Giotto, Ian Lowe, Julia Chapin Alsop, Kingham, Kittie Calderon, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Laurence Binyon, Marcel Proust, Mary Lowe, New College Oxford, Oxfordshire, Petersfield, Piccadilly, Sir Edward Grey, Swan & Edgar, Tante, The Encounter, The Good Life, The Great War, The Little French Girl, Third Battle of Krithia, vegetables, Virago Classics, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Women in Love, World War 2, World War I | 5 Comments

Aleksei Remizov: the Imp has landed!

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Aleksei Remizov, c. 1907

On 23 April 1914 Bertram Christian, of the publishers James Nisbet & Co. Ltd, wrote to George Calderon suggesting that he produce for them a volume of stories by the Russian writer Aleksei Remizov (1877-1957). There had been a glowing review of Remizov’s fairy tales in the TLS of 9 April 1914 and ‘again today’, Christian wrote, there had been an article about Russian writers which referred to Remizov as ‘a great man [who] may be said to be the writer of the most beautiful stories that Russia is bringing forth’. The author of the two pieces in the TLS was the Russophile Stephen Graham, and at the beginning of the first he had written: ‘Someone of sympathetic genius should translate the new fairy tales of Remizov. These are the most delicate and fresh creations of today.’

Without a doubt, George would have been that ‘sympathetic genius’, as he had spent twenty years studying Russian folklore, relished its humour, and like Remizov loved quirky words. Moreover, as Roger Keys puts it in his profound Introduction to the just-published Sisters of the Cross, Remizov’s style is a ‘singular amalgam of colloquial, literary and folkloric Russian’ and George would have been able to handle all three with precision.

But he didn’t. He was deep in a lucrative contract translating Il’ia Tolstoi’s memoirs of Leo, as well as working on Tahiti, his ballet libretti for Fokine and, probably, his blockbuster on folk religions Demon Feasts. So, dear follower, you have probably never heard of Aleksei Remizov. There was a cluster of book translations in the 1920s by ‘cognoscenti in the west’, as Keys puts it, some of whom knew Remizov in his Paris emigration, and there have been a number of English-language academic publications of Remizov works since 1981, but the first are now antiquarian rarities and the second never penetrated beyond Academe. That is about to change, I hope, with the publication in 2018 of this 175-page translation:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Sisters of the Cross is by common consent Remizov’s best short novel. It will blow your mind. If the opening, in which a pay clerk is suddenly sacked for no apparent reason and sinks to the bottom of society, strikes you as conventional (the ‘little man’ of Russian literature), you will soon realise that the joke is on you. This work is post-Dostoevsky, post-Tolstoi, post-Chekhov. It is a classic of Russian modernism, to be set on a par with Belyi’s Petersburg. You will find yourself in a world where it is an article of faith that dreams and cartomancy tell the truth, where the spirits of woodland and water torment a property developer to death, an old woman goes to hell and comes back to describe it convincingly, houses ignite spontaneously, a man with ‘no head, his mouth in his back and his eyes on his shoulders’ eats so much honey in the comb that he has ‘bees inside him, a whole hive of them’, and sees the salvation of Russia in flies…

The ‘sisters of the cross’ are the women whom the destitute hero, Marakulin, encounters in the vast barrack of St Petersburg flats that he is reduced to living in. Most of them are brutally exploited and abused, especially but not only sexually. Yet the various ways in which these women respond to their oppression and survive are deeply instructive to Marakulin. The women save him from illness, despair and suicide, and he falls tragically in love with one, who is driven into a classy form of prostitution. Some work hard, drag themselves up, soothe others, bring joy into the barrack world by their spontaneity, and are always engaged in helping or at least communicating with others. A paragraph repeated in different contexts in the book is:

If people studied each other carefully and took note of one another, if they all were granted eyes with which to see, then only a heart of stone would be able to bear all the horror and mystery of life. Or perhaps none of us would need a heart of stone if only individuals took note of one another.

Other women just disappear, as if in Stalin’s purges or China today. Three are called Vera (Faith). Several seem to believe that it is their Christian duty to submit, to suffer, to forgive, and one even believes it is her own fault if a revolutionary comrade, and then her own brother, rapes her repeatedly. ‘Nobody should be blamed’, is the cartomancer-holy fool’s refrain. There is a very strong current of Russian Orthodox kenoticism here: the belief in being a strastoterpets, a martyr who gives herself like the Lamb to the slaughter. But if ‘nobody should be blamed’, is nobody guilty, asks Marakulin, and does nobody have self-responsibility? It is an old, old Russian problem.

The last thing I want to do, however, is give the impression that Sisters of the Cross is heavy and depressing. Certainly you need strong nerves to take the brutality of much of it, which I am sure is utterly authentic. But Remizov not only looks like an imp, his whole approach to writing is impish. He constantly catches the reader unawares (‘If only [he] would drink an infusion of horse manure, then everything would be all right’), he plays with the reader, his plot is never predictable, he embeds leitmotifs and refrains in his prose that he dares his reader to notice and appreciate, he suddenly digresses into anecdote and joke. My only reservation about this translation, in fact, is that it does not appear to reproduce all the idiosyncratic paragraphing and typographic layout of the original, but tends to give the impression of a much more assimilated English paragraph structure. I immediately qualify that, though, because a) my copy of the original Russian may not be canonical, b) Remizov himself can produce monster prose periods, so there is no such thing as a ‘Remizov paragraph style’, c) the translators have well over a hundred years between them of working with Russian literature, so one can be sure they know what they are doing, and d) they manage to reproduce the telegraphic pace of Remizov’s prose in English without resorting to his very short (sometimes one-word) paragraphs:

When some teacher or other complained to Obraztsov that the school was damp and cold and only six degrees Centigrade, this is what he replied […]: ‘For heaven’s sake, six degrees,’ he exclaimed, ‘that’s real luxury! Now in Pokidoshenskaia Province when I was carrying out inspections there, I once came into a school where the children were all wearing sheepskins and the teacher was in a fur coat and galoshes. I sat there for a short while and got chilled to the bone myself. I was going to make a note about my visit, but the ink had frozen. The teacher blew and blew into the inkwell, trying to thaw it out, but nothing would work. So I had to leave without making a note. That’s what real cold is like — but you’re in clover here.’

This gag is then applied twice more, and just as hilariously, to ‘overcrowding’ in the school and the ‘masses of frogs’ that infest it. Afficionados of the Gogolian and Chekhovian absurd will never be disappointed with Remizov. But laughter in Sisters of the Cross covers the whole spectrum from irony to farce. Beneath the diabolical realia of Remizov’s world there is always his own irrepressible carnival.

This first-rate translation by two masters of the craft should at last put Remizov on Anglophone reading lists. Sisters of the Cross bears comparison with the best in European modernist literature. The Russian Library of Columbia University Press are to be congratulated on their enterprise in producing it, and I trust that in due course they will seek a famous commercial publisher to bring it to an even larger readership.

Posted in Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Aleksei Remizov, Andrei Belyi, Anton Chekhov, Bertram Christian, biography, Brian Murphy, Columbia University Press, comments, Demon Feasts, fairy tales, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Calderon, Il'ia Tolstoi, James Nisbet & Co. Ltd, kenosis, Lev Tolstoi, Marakulin, Michel Fokine, modernism, Nikolai Gogol, Roger Keys, Russian Orthodoxy, Sisters of the Cross, St Petersburg, Stephen Graham, strastoterpets, Tahiti, Times Literary Supplement | 2 Comments

The Castle…of Oz?

Posted on March 14, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Followers may remember that last year I also worked on a book with mathematical physicist-theologian John Polkinghorne, derived from a year’s conversations we had about his views on eschatology (i.e. nothing less than the life and death of humans, animals and the universe!). It took a long time to edit down the 60,000-word transcripts to a book of five chapters and 31,000 words, but John was pleased with the result and eager to find a publisher. Given John Polkinghorne’s high profile, I felt pretty sure this was going to be an easier ride than George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. However, John wanted to observe the etiquette of approaching publishers ‘seriatim’, i.e. one after the other, whereas I tackle them in fives, and this has prolonged things rather — but I don’t think there’s much doubt it will be published commercially at some time.

After well substantiated rejections from two of John’s previous publishers, I decided to tackle a publisher of short books on ‘spirituality’ and ‘progressive christianity’ that I had found on the Web and that looked very promising. I went to his website (the publishing firm bears his name), found the series in question, and was directed: ‘Please go to Author Inquiry and fill out the form.’ After living in Soviet Russia, I find the word ‘form’ somewhat depressive. The ‘form’ was actually only an eleven-item template. Nevertheless, in retrospect I find the choice of this word profoundly revealing of its author’s mindset.

There were only ten boxes to complete in the template, but some of them naturally demanded a hundred words or more, e.g. About the Author(s), Your Previous Books, Brief Description of Your Book, Any Endorsements. The most surprising feature, however, was that you were invited to ‘attach your manuscript’. I have never known this for an initial approach before. But our manuscript was ready, so I attached it (after a small problem: the programmer had not allowed for upper case file names, which were rejected).

The wall of words about ‘Submissions’ told me that ‘we’ would be ‘getting back to you within days’, and ‘they’ did, saying: ‘interested, need some more detail, which is the next stage, a Proposal, click here’. The words ‘next stage, a Proposal’ bemused me, because the information I had given, together with the entire manuscript, was a Proposal, or would be construed as such by every other publisher I know. However, I clicked the prompt and…a vast and wondrous world opened before me.

I was sent to a distinctly under-designed page of 17 chapters and Appendices, entitled ‘Publisher System Manual’, clicked on chapter 1, ‘The Proposal’, and a magnolia of eight sub-prompts bloomed, including ‘How to complete the proposal’, which was just ‘an invitation to provide us with a little more detail’. When I went to the template for that, it contained twenty bullet points, of which one particularly caught my eye: ‘Supply a minimum of 5000 words [‘a little more detail’!] describing what your book is about’ (but see above: Brief Description of Your Book). Incidentally, at one point the verbiage itself referred to the Author Inquiry as ‘your proposal’.

I had reached a ‘damping’ moment like the one I described in my previous post. Filling out this template and supplying 5000+ words written by John Polkinghorne and myself was going to take ages. I needed to go into mental training before tackling it.

In the meantime, a ‘Publisher at Large’ rang. This is a relatively recently evolved species. They are experts in their field, probably get paid very little, but they are far cheaper than employing editors and the honorific probably appeals to them. The trouble is, they have no power. They are merely middlemen between the author and the publisher, whom they themselves never see. This Publisher at Large was a very nice clerical chap and we had a conversation lasting nearly an hour about the book. He liked it and seemed to think the publisher’s readers he was going to find would like it. Terrific!

A few days later, he rang again. Not only did the readers like the book, but X, the Publisher, wanted to publish it. But there was a problem, the Publisher at Large told me. X said that I hadn’t ‘joined the database’, by which he meant signed up through the Proposal. Well no, I said, because evidently the Author Inquiry, with the whole manuscript, was enough for X to decide he wanted to publish, so it was now time for X to make John Polkinghorne and me a proposal. Ah, right, he would tell X that.

If readers have followed me this far, they may be feeling as I did by then, that this database you had to ‘join’ was as mysterious and impersonal as Kafka’s Castle (see above) and X himself as shadowy a figure as its owner, since it was impossible to communicate directly with him or any other servant of the Castle save the ‘Publisher at Large’… The whole experience was becoming surreal.

But perhaps I am just revealing my advanced Foginess again? Perhaps X is not a figure out of Kafka at all, but a benign little old fairground man who manipulates his intimidating, borderless database as the Wizard of Oz did his voice and image? Perhaps if I stopped ‘over-reacting’ about his cyber-castle, this wise old Wizard of Oz could teach me something I need to know to ‘bring me into the twenty-first century’?

Alas, no. The Publisher at Large came back with the reply from his master that I had to complete the Proposal (for a book already accepted), ‘join’ his database, collect my ID and password, and submit a ‘minimum of 5000 words describing what your book is about’. Since John Polkinghorne is eighty-eight, disabled, and no longer physically able to write, but his mind is as sharp as ever and he speaks brilliantly onto tape, which is then transcribed, he and I decided not to set off up this particular Yellow Brick Road…

Seriously, though, friends, what does this all amount to? Personally, I am amazed that after forty years of personal computers being in common use the websites of organisations like Nielsen UK ISBN and Publisher X are still so primitive. They seem to have been designed and programmed by sociopathic amateurs addicted to length and their own loquacity. These designer/programmers have never heard of Occam’s Razor (‘entities are not to be multiplied more than necessary’); on the contrary, they practise, one might say, Botcham’s Beardificator, producing hirsute fiorituras of luxuriating otiosity…

I call such creations ‘sociopathic’ because they display no evidence whatsoever that their designer/programmers have taken the user into consideration; that they care how difficult the average person may find interacting with them, or how much time he/she will expend on trying to use them. They have never asked themselves how their customers think, or how precious their customers’ time may be.

In fact, such websites are designed to make the customer do the work, rather than the organisation that is supposedly providing the ‘service’. Yet the websites are so inefficient that, presumably, large numbers of under-paid people have to be employed on their Help Desks (which is a benefit for them, but only up to a point). I find the relatively recent idea that profits should be maximised by making the customer do as much of the work as possible — if not torturing him/her to death — profoundly patronising.

A corollary of the fact that large areas of our economic life seem not to apply Occam’s Razor to design and verbal expression is that they have also lost track of Time. One could fritter away days wrestling with Nielsen UK ISBN or X Publisher. Paradoxically, it seems to be precisely the invention of computers that has led to this — at least, in the sense that so many businesses and institutions seem unable to use computers efficiently. Twenty years ago if I wrote to an official on Cambridge City Council I got a letter back within ten days. If I send such an official an email today, I never get a reply. Most institutions seem not to be able to cope with email.

The experiences I have meldrewed on about in this and my preceding post remind me of the ever-expanding, mind-destroying pretensions of current British and EU copyright law. There must be something wrong and vulnerable about a society that has lost its grip on words, regulation, time and cyber-space. The unfitness for purpose, the inanity and logorrhoea that we are exposed to in our attempts to communicate online actually undermine our viability as a society. They must, surely, be part of the elusive explanation for Britain’s notoriously low productivity. It occurs to me that the armed forces may be the only institution left that operates in real time (at least, I hope they do).

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged armed forces, Botcham's Beardificator, bureaucracy, Cambridge City Council, computers, copyright, Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, databases, email, eschatology, EU Directive on Term of Copyright, Fogeyism, Franz Kafka, John Polkinghorne, Occam', Occam's Razor, programmers, publishers, Publishers at Large, self-publishing, sociopaths, submissions, The Castle, The Net, The Wizard of Oz, totalitarianism, websites, Yellow Brick Road | 3 Comments

Has one become a Fogey?

Posted on March 10, 2018 by Patrick Miles

In 1985, when Sam&Sam needed an ISBN number for N.A. Berdiaev, Aforizmy, I rang up the then registration agency and they sent me a form by post. I filled the form in (by hand, of course) and sent it back to them with a cheque for under £20 (I can’t remember the exact figure). About ten days later, I received a postcard with the number and publication details of the book on. The whole operation had taken fifteen minutes and a ten-day wait.

Today the ISBN service has been, as they say, privatised. It is run by the Nielsen Corporation based in New York. On 12 January 2018 I logged into their UK ISBN Store and was fairly rapidly relieved of £159 for ten ISBN numbers. Note that to buy a single one costs £89, so if you are ever going to publish another book it is in your interest to purchase ten in one go. On the other hand, a comparison of the two figures suggests that £89 is the product of rapacity red in tooth and claw, especially as a modern book has to have an ISBN number… Nielsen have been handed a monopoly!

In effect, I had parted with £159 for a single number, a mere number generated by a computer. Well, not quite, because the text in bold that came with the ten numbers recommended that I use ‘the free online service, Nielsen Title Editor, to supply forthcoming titles and to submit updates to existing product data’. This sounded a good idea, except that it wasn’t free at all, as you could only use it if you had already bought your ISBN number, and of course you had to marry your publication details to the number at some point, because the two weren’t going to come to you on a postcard.

On 22 January at 9.10 I set about registering with the Nielsen Title Editor. It was quite a long template and rejected my data several times. One problem was that it didn’t like the ISBN number I was putting in, another that it kept supplying the wrong telephone number for my address and rejecting the real one, but the worst was that there seemed to be no United Kingdom, Great Britain, Britain, or England on the mile-long alphabetical list of countries to input. At 9.30 I therefore emailed ‘Pubhelp Editorial’. Clearly they are used to such questions, because at 10.01 they emailed me to explain the format in which ISBNs must be input (there was nothing on the template to say) and that ‘United Kingdom’, for some unexplained reason, was ‘5th on the drop down list’. I made these adjustments and at 10.32 received an email confirming my registration. But… ‘Please allow 5 to 10 working days for your name and password for Nielsen Title Editor to be issued.’

(Interpolation: the reason I waited ten days before I tackled registering with the Nielsen Title Editor was that I had received a clear signal from the blurb which came with the ISBN numbers that things didn’t move quickly in this system, so I’d best allow a few days for the numbers to sink into it; also the verbosity of the blurb and the news that it would take 7-10 working days to get an ID and password to me had a damping effect. In a word, the user-unfriendliness of everything so far was a factor in slowing the process down, so I believe the ten-day delay is rightly included in the total experience.)

The following day, 23 January, I received an email from ‘Data Production and Client Services’ at 14.05 asking me how my ‘e-books/digital products are distributed to customers’, as this information was needed to ‘set up your account [never mentioned before] properly’. I supplied the information at 14.23 and at 16.32 came the riveting news that it had been sent to ‘our Supply Data team, who will create the internal codes needed for your organisation, and then send them back to me so that I can continue with your application. This will take a few more [!] working days, and you will be emailed your login details in due course [!]’.

Only two days later I received my username and password (the second so far) from Nielsen, but it came with two riders: (1) although I could access my Title Editor account straightaway, I couldn’t add ‘new title records or make amendments to existing title records for the next 24 hours as any changes made through the site may be lost [!]’, and (2) ‘if you have just registered your first title with us it may take 3-5 [!] weeks to become visible through the Title Editor site’. I waited five weeks, but it wasn’t visible. Another session followed with the Help desk on 2 March, from 11.47 to 12.39, then I got to my record and was able to edit it.

On 5 March came an email from Nielsen informing me that I had ‘registered for Nielsen BookNet Web Online Order Collection Service’, which I had never heard of before. I would have been almost disappointed if it had not come with another ID and password.

Now admittedly the process of acquiring the ten ISBN numbers took only about half an hour (as opposed to a quarter in 1985), but to get my title registered with this ISBN number and visible took two hours and thirty-two minutes of my time and a wait of 39 days compared with ten in 1985. Altogether, the process had taken a quarter of an hour and ten days in 1985 and three hours and 49 days in 2018.

Personally, I think a measured, mature, rational and dispassionate assessment of this process of Nielsen’s suggests that it is not fit for purpose (though the staff are marvellous). However, I am aware that the very act of comparing the purchase of an ISBN number tied to one’s book in 1985 with the process that that involves in 2018 suggests I am just a Fogey. I admit that may be the explanation for my splenetic frustration with the process, but even so the comparison of time intervals is…in-teresting, isn’t it?

In my next post I will look at a more poetic recent case of the same thing, before drawing any Meldrewesque general conclusions about modern life. But in the meantime, I have two questions to followers of the blog and anyone else out there:

1. How/why do the young, i.e. anyone under thirty, who are surely used to efficient, ‘real time’ communication on computers, put up with the sort of torture perpetrated on customers by Nielsen UK ISBN Store?

2. Can anyone with modern business and management experience explain to me how such a nebula of inefficiency and fatuousness comes about?

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged book registration, bureaucracy, capitalism, comments, fatuousness, Fogeyism, ISBN numbers, logorrhea, Nielsen Corporation, Nielsen Title Editor, Nielsen UK ISBN Store, privatisation, Richard Wilson, Sam&Sam, verbosity, Victor Meldrew | 2 Comments

What we are trying to do

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Patrick Miles

We have met our deadline of typesetting the whole book, less Index, by today. However, the printers took a month to deliver to us the sixteen-page ‘print trial’ of text with images embedded in it. They emailed that the images had ‘printed well but we have noticed some faint lines on some of the halftones…we can rectify this on the main run so please don’t worry’. I’m not so sure. The pages only arrived yesterday, after endless hassles, and some images are far better than others. We are going to have to look carefully at them, and possibly take expert advice, before we can decide whether to go ahead and embed them in the text. Until the images and captions have been incorporated in the text (or not) and the whole book repaginated, I can’t complete the Index, or even give the cover designer a spine width. The inordinate delay in getting the trial pages to us means that we may fall behind our own production schedule.

An acquaintance who writes beautiful, slim, best selling books on horticultural history recently complained to me that publishers have become more and more aggressive about her meeting their deadlines, and about the penalties if she doesn’t. ‘Yet,’ she added, ‘once they have got my finished manuscript they take a year to publish it. Why? Authors can get a book out themselves in six months!’ I have heard the latter so often from authors that I adopted it as my own timescale for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius…only to get my arithmetic wrong and allow myself five months (4 June 2018) in which to do it.

Now that I understand how much time and effort are involved in publishing a single hardback, commercial publishers almost rise in my estimation. I seem to have been working flat out since 7 January on the design of the printed text, choice of paper, typesetting, index, insertion of new material, budgeting, accounting, illustrations, ISBN, British Library CIP data, FSC logo, ‘case’ (board and covering, colour and material), ‘foiling’ (spine lettering), choice of jacket material, cover design, 150th anniversary bellyband, blurb, author’s photograph, author’s biography, endorsements, copyright lines, bar code… Of course, a ‘real’ publisher has a team of people who specialise in all these things, who are not doing them for the first time.

What we are trying to do is produce a hardback of about 500 pages that is as good as one produced by a commercial publisher and worth every penny of £30. I would be the first to admit now that it isn’t easy. Of course, we are doing our darndest, we are modelling ourselves on the very best examples, and of three recent commercially published biographies lying on my table two were printed by the printers we have chosen. But, with the exception of our cover designer, we are not trained and experienced book designers, typesetters, blurb-writers etc etc etc. Given the large number of variables, it is statistically unlikely, even impossible, that we will get it all right.

Nevertheless, try we must! It would be considerably easier to produce the book in paperback, but I feel it is something of a magnum opus and deserves to start off, at least, in a limited hardback edition. If, God forbid, it has the odd amateurish touch, let’s hope that enhances its charm and eventual rarity value. And let’s be frank: commercially published biographies aren’t always perfect in their design or execution, either.

The last books I published myself were printed by offset litho, so I have had to learn the ways of today’s digital presses. I am very grateful to all my friends who have run small presses recently for sharing their experience with me so generously. In particular, I wish to pay tribute to the experience, advice and help of John Dewey, who in 2010 published Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Fyodor Tyutchev, and Harvey Pitcher, who in the same year published Responding to Chekhov: The Journey of a Lifetime.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, comments, commercial publishers, Fyodor Tyutchev, George Calderon, Harvey Pitcher, hassles, illustrations, John Dewey, print trials, printers, production timetables, publishers, publishing, self-publishing, typesetting | 2 Comments

Sam&Sam publishers — a brief history

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Patrick Miles

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius will be published under the imprint Sam&Sam. ‘What?’ you ask. ‘What on earth’s that?’ Quite. It was deliberately concocted to give nothing away, because it originated in Russia in the period of samizdat.

Having been a dissident himself, Ul’ianov (‘Lenin’) knew only too well the power of the private printing press, so he made it a criminal offence to own one. To get round this, in the post-Dzhugashvili (‘Stalin’) era, people started pounding out unprintable works on their sit-up-and-beg typewriters. I have seen up to nine carbons on a typewriter beneath onion-skin paper. These copies were then stapled together or professionally bound in the black economy, circulated on the dissident networks, or even bartered for goods and services. The activity was called samizdat, which simply means ‘self-publishing’. I first made the acquaintance of Brodsky’s and other poets’ work through this medium.

A friend of mine was part of a literary group that were specialists in samizdat. He fell in love with an explosive red-headed beauty, a single mother, but his efforts got no further than a distinctly Elizabethan relationship of raillery, tease and (for my friend) agony. He tried everything, including writing Shakespearian sonnets to her in Russian, which he claimed were translations of the works of ‘Samuel Goathead’ (159?-1629). She said these were not translations, as Goathead never existed, and challenged him to produce the originals; at which point he came to my room in the Moscow University skyscraper and asked me to bash out the ‘originals’ (i.e. translations!) on my Olivetti typewriter.

When I got back to Cambridge I published my own, now exceedingly rare edition:

The title page of Goathead’s complete sonnets in Camizdat

Number three in this scholarly edition was the ‘original’ of the first sonnet by my friend to the Titian-haired Maia, the sonnet that started it all off:

Click the image to enlarge

I had smuggled out the odd samizdat work in 1970, after ten months in Russia, but when I went back in 1972-74 my friend was churning out typescripts of excellent works by other people (often deceased), and in the name of Russian culture I decided I should get these into safe keeping in the West. My own typescript-smuggling intensified, therefore, and I also used the diplomatic bag (strictly forbidden for this purpose). In, I think, 1974 my friend proposed that when the ‘weather’ was right we should start anonymously publishing some of his samizdat texts in Britain. The question was, what should we call ourselves that was opaque? Since we were both pseudonymously Samuel, and the sam bit in samizdat means ‘oneself’, the solution seemed obvious…

Sam&Sam published their first book in 1979. It was for children and came out in Russia in 1000 copies. The second was an anthology of ‘aphorisms’ by the Russian émigré philosopher Berdiaev. It had been compiled and typed by my friend and resided with other samizdat works in the dolgii iashchik (‘long gestation drawer’) of my attic. Berdiaev had been expelled from Russia by ‘Lenin’ and was completely non grata in the ‘Stalin’ era. In 1985, perestroika encouraged us to cast his aphorisms on the water. I printed 500 copies in Cambridge in a very small format. About a third, I would say, were bought in Britain. The rest were taken to Russia, where the book was even quoted in the Duma.

After the fall of communism, things took off. The final typescript, corrected by the author, of the Russian translation of Sophie Koulomzin’s Our Church and Our Children, which had lain in my attic for ten years, was retrieved by my friend on a trip to Britain and published openly in Russia in a joint venture with another publisher, Martis, in 20,000 copies in 1993. The following year it was reprinted in 30,000 copies! My friend had been, and probably still considers himself, a member of the ‘catacomb’ church in Russia rather than the nationalist one, but not all the books Sam&Sam published in Russia were religious. Notably, two of them were about Pushkin.

Two publications of the Russian branch of Sam&Sam

I myself have so far published only one other work under the Sam&Sam imprint, and that was in 1987. My main job, of course, was to get the typescripts out of Russia and preserve them from mould for the day when they would be publishable there. Perhaps Sam&Sam’s most considerable achievement in Russia has been to publish with Martis a twelve-volume hardback edition of the works of Georgii Fedotov, a scholar, theological philosopher and democrat who also died in emigration.

The two books I published as Sam&Sam in England were nicely produced, I would say, but in soft covers. A 500-page hardback, with jacket, illustrations and index, is proving a rather different matter. (More next time.)

Samizdat does not qu-ite seem necessary in today’s Russia. There is the Internet. On the other hand, the successors to the KGB continue to tighten their grip on the use of that. But, just as the digital revolution has slashed the cost of printing over here, so too, if necessary, digital publishing could take over in Russia from the old typewriters and carbons.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Pushkin, Camizdat, carbons, comments, Duma, Georgii Fedotov, Joseph Brodsky, Joseph Stalin, KGB, Maia, Martis, mice, Nikolai Berdiaev, perestroika, publishing, Sam&Sam, samizdat, Samuel Goathead, sonnets, Sophie Koulomzin, typewriters, Vladimir Lenin, William Shakespeare | 6 Comments

I accept the white feather

Posted on February 17, 2018 by Patrick Miles

I am hoping to attend the ceremony at Ors on 4 November this year to commemorate the death of Wilfred Owen a hundred years ago (see Damian Grant’s post of 4 November 2016), and thought we might go on from there to Ypres and Bruges. In this connection, I have been reminded that in a blog Comment of 1 November 2015 I wrote:

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

So how do I square that with visiting Ypres in 2018?

It is a good question and in the first instance I would refer new followers of Calderonia to the long dialogue we had about the commemoration of World War 1 following the centenary of George Calderon’s death, i.e. 4 June 2015. Please search on ‘Commemoration’ and you will find a good selection of arguments. You might particularly like to look at my posts dated 3 July 2015 and 22 November 2016, and Comments by Clare Hopkins, Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, dated 20 July 2015, 2 November 2015, and 18 December 2015 (these Comments can be found dated at their end under ‘See All Comments’, series 3, and the dates are in the American style, i.e. 2015/07/20 etc). There is no doubt that the national conversation about commemoration will flare up again with the centenary of the Armistice.

My short answer to the present question is that I had not thought of a visit to Ypres in terms of the Menin Gate and the big cemeteries. I would like to see the town centre that George rode into with the Blues on 14 October 1914 (‘It seemed like history’), and I would like to find the field near Zillebeke ‘where Peety fell’ (i.e. where George was shot in the ankle on 29 October 1914 and invalided home). Thinking about it, though, if we were at Zillebeke I would feel duty bound to visit the small churchyard cemetery there, where George’s commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Wilson is buried and the twenty-seven-old-old Alexis de Gunzberg, who was killed at his side after taking George’s place as Wilson’s interpreter. On closer consideration, I wouldn’t mind visiting the Menin Gate, because it is not gigantic, it was there for centuries before 1914, and it was familiar to Tommies during the War before it became a memorial. But I don’t know about attending the commemorative ceremony held there every day…

Yes, I stand by what I said about the sheer scale, ‘marmoreal impersonality’, gigantism, touristic voyeurism etc of the vast cemeteries and monuments like Thiepval, but at the most visceral level it comes down to this: Thiepval, Verdun, Sanctuary Wood, Helles, Auschwitz would render me incoherent with emotion. Since the age of fifteen I have had difficulty holding back tears whenever the Last Post struck up. Since my immersion in British and German World War 1 poetry, and researching and living (pardon the literary exaggeration) every day of Calderon’s war ‘career’ up to the moment of his death, I have become positively brinkish and potentially convulsive.

And this is why, at the moment, I can’t face watching the new film of Journey’s End. I already know, have had the experience of the Front (‘Their uniforms of shit/their lives of shit/their deaths of shit/we live./What means ‘forget’/THE GLORIOUS DEAD?’). Call me a coward, hand me the white feather, but I can’t take any more. Yet. I am also wary of indulging in ‘tragic pleasure’ and what Clare Hopkins has aptly termed ‘war porn’.

I therefore invite followers who have seen the film — which has already been described in the press as ‘the greatest film about World War 1 ever’ — to share their emotions and views about it on Calderonia as Comments or, indeed, a guest post. I know the play, of course. Are its humour and public school idiom irretrievably dated? Have the makers of the film changed the original ending, a direct hit that destroys the dugout? Do they show the blood and body parts that the theatre could not? Is it a national Commemoration comparable to the poppy installation ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ and Andrew Tatham’s A Group Photograph?