Calderonia

Guest post: Alison Miles, ‘A Dangerous Innocence’

Posted on April 6, 2017 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

The title of Artemis Cooper’s biography of Elizabeth Jane Howard (John Murray, 2016) certainly gives a clue to what lay behind Howard’s life. Jane (as she was known) developed childhood insecurities that appear to have stemmed from her need for ‘frequent applause and reassurance’ as well as a fear of being abandoned. Her lack of confidence, combined with giving the appearance by the age of eighteen of being ‘very childish and ignorant’ and her belief that ‘if you loved somebody you must want to please them’, may have laid the foundation of the complex life that Artemis Cooper describes.

This biography gives a very good sense of a life that ‘just happens’. Although Jane was a good organiser, excellent cook, and increasingly productive writer as well as being talented in many other ways, it is easy to have the impression that decisions were made impulsively with no concept of ‘cause and effect’. She had a large number of friends and must have been brilliant company and good fun. Her life was a mishmash and included work, holidays abroad (in groups or with individuals), a social whirl and never-ending hospitality in her own house. She kept up with a huge circle of friends, relations and acquaintances, amongst whom there were some with good reason to drop her because of her desperate need for love, sex and reassurance which led to innumerable affairs.

Cooper makes it clear that much of the time Jane was unhappy, often striving for an unobtainable ideal that led her into situations which optimistically might achieve her heart’s desire (whatever that might be) but more often ended in emotional, complex and disappointing confusion.

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

This first-rate anthology Marriage was compiled by Jane in the late 1990s. In Cooper’s words, Jane ‘appreciated the irony — after all, she had never been very successful at marriage herself’. As Martin Amis, Jane’s stepson, said, ‘In fact I’ve always thought that was one of the mysteries about Jane: the penetrating sanity on the page, but when she’s off the page, she’s actually not that clever with people.’

What I like about this biography is that it is so balanced. The story of Elizabeth Jane Howard’s life is told in a straight chronological line (unlike some biographies) and focuses on so many different dimensions. A particularly interesting aspect is the variety of jobs that Jane took on. She needed to earn her living after her marriage to Peter Scott failed. She was writing her first novel and at the same time (through a friend and lover) working for the Inland Waterways Association as well as doing some modelling. Later work included ad hoc typing and editing, reading manuscripts for Chatto & Windus, reviewing and writing for magazines, and being artistic director of the Cheltenham Arts Festival. I was brought up near Cheltenham and as a young teenager I remember the delight with which one of my mother’s friends who was closely involved in the festival announced that Elizabeth Jane Howard had agreed to participate. This friend later described how wonderful it was to see Jane Howard and Kingsley Amis ‘falling in love’ when they were together at Cheltenham.

As well as describing Howard’s liaisons, complex relationships and their unsatisfactory outcomes, Artemis Cooper gives the reader a chance to find out about Howard’s literary output. She shows how the process of writing a book was often fraught with emotional incidents and that Jane had no experience of (or inclination to adhere to) deadlines. We are also given an insight into the way Howard managed her publishers, for example when she insisted that The Long View should be written backwards, a likely explanation for the three-year delay between completion and publication.

Cooper helps the reader by providing relatively long summaries of each book with analysis of plot and characters. She identifies the people on whom Howard’s persona were based, and they were usually from the cast of Howard’s drama at the time. This aspect is one that I find fascinating. I can hardly believe that Howard was not constantly accused of a lack of imagination and creativity in developing characters, or even libel, as she wrote her friends, family and acquaintances into her novels as almost identical matches to the original in everything but their name. Her choice of the name ‘Cazalet’, for the family described in the Cazalet Chronicles, in itself was controversial. Cooper explains that the real Cazalet family resented the fact that their eminently respectable name had been hijacked by Howard, who had gone for its Huguenot origins without researching further. I read the five Cazalet Chronicles before Artemis Cooper’s biography and was astonished to find so much content was the same in both books from the 1920s to the late 1950s, from the numerous abortions, her grandfather’s nick-name ‘the Brig’, the description of Jane’s post-Peter Scott home, to her parents’ broken marriage. I have since read some of her novels and the same has happened to a lesser extent – events, characters and emotions that match Jane’s personal life, culminating in Falling that contains, as her Guardian obituary says, ‘many of the torments of love, betrayal and misjudgement that bedevilled her own life’.

It is very interesting, however, to compare Artemis Cooper’s biography with Howard’s 2002 autobiography, Slipstream, which I resisted reading until recently. Howard’s own account of her life appeared far more reasonable than I was expecting. This may be explained by the fact that I had effectively been introduced to the characters through the Cazalets. Whether biography or autobiography, it is essential (but tricky) for the reader to separate Howard’s fictional characters from their real prototypes, for example the newly married Cressy in After Julius from the newly married nineteen-year-old Jane, Henry Kent in Falling from Malcolm the psychopath, and of course the Cazalets from the Howards.

One hugely positive quality of Artemis Cooper’s biography is that, unlike Howard’s novels, it is impossible to become irritated with the characters, curious, ignorant, manipulating or naïve though they are. The book is very well researched with plenty of incidental explanation to clarify the vast range of characters and events that were so important in Howard’s extraordinary life between 1923 and 2014. The acid test is whether there is an incentive to turn the pages — yes, there is. Cooper’s fascinating and straightforward account of Howard’s long life is an excellent read.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alison Miles, Artemis Cooper, biographies, biography, Cazalet Chronicles, Cazalet family, Chatto & Windus, Cheltenham Arts Festival, comments, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Inland Waterways Association, John Murray, Kingsley Amis, marriage, Martin Amis, Peter Scott, Slipstream | 1 Comment

‘He was away, far away…’

Posted on March 21, 2017 by Patrick Miles

The S.S. Aguila, a cruise ship of the Yeoward Line, dropped anchor off Funchal, the capital of Madeira, on 31 March 1913, probably around lunchtime. There were twenty-nine passengers aboard, including George Calderon. Within a couple of hours he was sitting at a café with other passengers ‘in a plane avenue’, writing Kittie a postcard.

Funchal tourist postcard sent to Kittie 31 March 1913

The 2017 equivalent

March is not the ideal month in which to make a cruise to Lisbon, Madeira and the Canaries. The Aguila had had a rough time in the Bay of Biscay and then, as George described it,

We came out of Lisbon in the teeth of a howling cold wind, and for two days the sea all foaming and mountainous to the horizon, the rigging yelling, the bows bumping, and all the passengers laid by; the funeral feeling that comes over a storm-ridden ship. But this morning heat and smoothness, resurrection and smiles; deck games began, the great competition for 6d prizes bought in Lisbon.

By contrast, he wrote from the café (which was probably in the Old Town or on the seafront where the Lower Cable Car Station is today), the weather in Funchal was ‘calm and semi-tropical’. Judging from our own recent visit, I imagine the temperature as about 75 Fahrenheit, the sky a radiant blue, the air soft and with a perfect humidity.

Because the postcard George sent shows Funchal’s Tropical Gardens, I assumed that he had been there. These gardens and Monte, which was an aristocratic quarter high above the city, are certainly one of its top tourist attractions today and on our second day in Funchal, 11 March 2017, we visited them:

Foreground: the old entrance path to the Monte Palace Hotel, now Tropical Gardens, March 2017

Storage jar dated 1915 beside the entrance path to the Monte Palace Hotel, now Tropical Gardens, March 2017

Note, however, that the caption to George’s postcard is not ‘Tropical Gardens’ but ‘Entrance to the Monte Palace Hotel’. In 1913 it was known predominantly as the poshest hotel in Funchal. Of course, George did not stay there, as he was based on the Aguila. Moreover, the grounds of the once hotel seem to have been transformed into the Tropical Gardens as late as the 1990s by a local entrepreneur. Finally, when we got home I read my transcript of George’s letter from Las Palmas in the Canaries dated 2 April 1913 and discovered that in Funchal ‘we stayed below [in the town] to escape the expense of the funicular and toboggan (which runs to 9 shillings in half an hour)’.

Plus ça change! This is precisely why we ourselves didn’t take the funicular up and wicker toboggan down. Today it would cost you ten euros up to Monte by the cable car, and thirty down by toboggan (unless you shared with one other), totalling £34.69, whilst in 1913 it cost the equivalent of £39.93… The ten-minute downward journey by the wicker toboggan (carro de cesta) is almost unanimously described as exhilarating, and from the church at the top of Monte where the last Austrian Emperor is buried we could see how skilfully the boatered drivers steered them; but I think a lot of people baulk at thirty euros for travelling in a basket, especially as the carros leave you with still quite a way to walk into Funchal. Personal recommendation: take the cable car or a taxi up there for about ten euros, see the sights, then buy a ticket for the funicular down to the Botanical Gardens, which including entry to them costs fourteen. Both gardens are stupendous and you may be lucky enough, as we were, to be buzzed by a Monarch butterfly:

Monarch butterfly on bougainvillea in the Botanical Gardens, Funchal. Photo credit: Trip Advisor.

So George and his friends did not ascend to Monte. The sledge ride down had been devised in 1850, apparently, but in 1913 the accepted way for tourists and the well-off to get about the city was in a variety of carriages on runners, drawn by oxen.

The start of the wicker toboggan rides from Monte, March 2017

Ox-drawn sledges in Funchal, c. 1914

In the evening, George wrote Kittie from the ship:

We’ve had a lovely afternoon, just sampling Funchal as quickly as could be done alone: wandering round the streets, driving along them in an oxsledge (2 oxen pull a covered sledge over the slippery cobbles at a slow pace up and down the steep hilly streets). In the middle of the town running down from the hill, a stony channel between steep river walls […] arum lilies growing wild on banks below and pink geraniums creeping right down as in Cornwall. [All was] sweetened with the clean touching tropical feeling of the strange big-leaved trees, the translucent dark shadows, the flat floors — the luxury of Tahiti penetrating the busy port atmosphere.

The wild arums, geraniums, bougainvillea, carpets of nasturtiums, phalanxes of Agapanthus, the sweet-smelling white acacias in the streets, the dramatic proboscis-waving agaves, African tulip trees and bananas, are indeed fantastic. Altogether, on our five-day visit I should think we saw fifty species of exotic tree and flower in bloom, many of them on a six-mile levada (irrigation channel) walk that we did high above the vine terraces of Campanário, with magnificent views out to sea.

African Tulip on Funchal’s seafront

An author overpowered by acacia blossom on Levada do Norte

George concluded his two-page letter:

The ship is near going and the steward is asking for letters, the winches still rattling. Funchal looking wonderful and Tahitian with its lights in patterns up the hill and the grey mountain against a clear sky. Goodbye for a fortnight: I’ll hardly send a letter now that can reach you much before I do. P.P.P. [Pore Peeky Peety]

His card left Funchal on 31 March and arrived at 42 Well Walk, Hampstead, on 5 April. His letter, which presumably was taken ashore on a tender, left Funchal on 1 April but also reached Hampstead on 5 April. Both were redirected by the housekeeper, Elizabeth Ellis, to Kittie at Acton Reynald in Shropshire. In fact, George wrote Kittie from the Canary Islands a long letter on 2 April and a postcard on 6 April and both arrived before him.

Judging from his surviving letters, George’s time in Funchal was the most enjoyable of his twenty-seven-day cruise. The fact that the word ‘Tahiti’ suddenly pops up twice in his letter to Kittie speaks volumes. His visit to Tahiti in 1906 was one of the happiest times of his life, as one can tell from his posthumous (1921) bestseller about it. To compare Madeira to Tahiti was the highest praise.

By contrast, George had had a ‘terrible hard day on expeditions’ on 26 March at Lisbon, when a group of twenty passengers decided to visit all the palaces within twenty miles of the city. As he explained in a ten-page letter to Kittie written on 28 March, they went

like sheep, tram, train, shay […] with a guide who told us all we ought to know, where the King sat, where the Bishop knelt, and the places of the people in waiting; and stood tuttutting and slapping his old hands anxiously together under the palm trees to get his silly tourists together, who would go wandering off down the green slopes, among the waterfalls and scented bushes instead of hurrying on to the next palace. When we got into Cintra for the second time and were led off to another palace, Joyce [a brewer from Dublin] and I escaped to a little wine shop on the market place and played Portuguese billiards.

The following day there was a ‘general rebellion against official expeditions’ and the ‘shiny old guide wandered with a group of [only] six’. George and three other men formed a group that he called ‘the Gang’ and ‘marauded the town’ shopping. ‘I am interpreter to the party, regarded as a regular dab at Portuguese by the rest’ — which must have been a bit tiring — and in the evening they attended a satirical review in Portuguese, at which one member expected George to perform simultaneous interpreting!

At the Aguila’s next stop after Funchal, Las Palmas in the Canaries, the Gang’s policy of breaking away from organised tourism had a most interesting consequence, which George explained in his letter to Kittie of 2 April:

It is the chief principle of the Gang not to go on the official expeditions prepared for our advantage by the Company; that is our only plan for the day, not to go on the official journey. The only remaining feature of our plan is to take Miss Strachey in our care. This is a very highly educated intelligent Suffragette; about 32, but sadly tinged with old maid, limp, appealing, grateful. Prostrated with work for the Cause, she was prostrated with the voyage next but perked up by Madeira, and did the right thing by the mountains, while we stayed below. […]

Miss Strachey, who is Secretary of the London Society for Women’s Suffrage (Mrs Fawcett’s brand) has suddenly realised that I am the Antisuffrage monster and discovered that we have held official correspondence about debates and things.

The idea of these four men being overcome with protectiveness for feminist activist and organiser Philippa Strachey is hilarious. Since George had first mentioned her (‘an intellectual bright plain woman’) in his letter to Kittie of 28 March from Lisbon, he had presumably turned all his famous Iberian charm and courtesy on her and she now found herself trapped in the metaphorical embrace of an anti-suffrage Beast! He even took it upon himself to defend her against ‘some damned Scotchman’ on the ship who had ‘complained’ about her at dinner…

Philippa Strachey, 1921. Photo credit: National Portrait Gallery.

George was very wrong about three things concerning Miss Strachey. First, she was not thirty-two, but forty; second, she could not be a suffragette if she was a member of the National Union of Suffrage Societies, which rejected militancy, she had to be a suffragist; thirdly, in the sad way men do, George had mistaken her willowiness for lack of grit. Philippa Strachey, who was a sister of Lytton and a cousin of the anti-suffragist St Loe Strachey, organised the Women’s Service in two world wars, lived to be ninety-six, and was ‘always in such good spirits’ that friends visited her at her nursing home ‘in order to be cheered up’ (Oxford Dictionary of National Biography).

* * *

Why did George embark on this winter cruise?

Actually, the reason was the same as with Philippa Strachey: he was ‘prostrated by work for the Cause’, but it was a different Cause. He commonly signed himself ‘Pore Peeky Peety’ when he was on a trip designed to restore his health. 1912 had been the busiest year of his life: in January his epoch-making Two Plays by Tchekhof had been published, he rushed around promoting it and a London production of The Seagull with Lydia Yavorskaya, he was involved in two productions of The Fountain, one of which toured, he completed his classic article ‘The Russian Stage’, he spent a month touring the country addressing meetings about the Coal Strike, followed by two months working at the London docks during the strike there, then there was the premiere of The Maharani of Arakan at the Albert Hall, the premiere of Revolt at Manchester, and finally the move in December 1912 to Well Walk after eleven years at Heathland Lodge in the Vale of Health.

All this would have strained the nervous health of any man, and George’s was not robust. A busy family Christmas at Foxwold and Emmetts was evidently not relaxing enough, as immediately afterwards he went downhill. We know this because he was unable to accompany Kittie to her lifelong friend Nina Corbet’s wedding to Reginald Astley at Moreton Corbet in Shropshire on 27 January 1913, and Nina refers to the fact of his illness in a letter that she wrote Kittie four days later from Gibraltar on her honeymoon.

I would really appreciate it if someone who knows could enlighten us about when ‘restorative’ cruises to the Canaries, the Mediterranean, the Far East, and even round the world, first came in. I have the impression that it was in the 1880s, but at that time, surely, such voyages were within the means of the upper classes only? Even when Kittie’s first husband, Archie Ripley, went on a reviving cruise around the world in 1894, judging by his letters the other passengers were well off. On George’s 1913 cruise, however, there were Lancashire cottonspinners, clerks, a farmer, a brewer, and bank cashiers. (George entertained them all night after night with his piano playing.)

There really was nothing out of the ordinary, then, about George taking a month’s package holiday to restore his health. It was unusual, though, for a man to go without his wife. He was seen onto the S.S. Aguila in Liverpool on 20 March 1913 by the auburn, svelte Mary Dowdall, whom he liked very much (she was the wife of his close Oxford friend and Mayor of Liverpool, Harold) and who had brought her fourteen-year-old daughter Ursula with her. In a letter written on board before the Aguila cast off, George apologised to Kittie for having to take the holiday and leave her ‘all alone in our big rambling house’.

But Kittie entirely approved of him going, and on his own. In her memoirs she wrote that a cruise was the only thing that could set him up again after overworking to the point of breakdown: ‘Adventure was essential for George – and a man can’t have completeness of adventure if he has got a woman with him.’ Furthermore, their lives were normally so symbiotic that being with George was pretty demanding and she probably welcomed a break from it.

Kittie did have a life of her own; it revolved around her relations and Nina Corbet. With George away, then, first she went to visit an uncle and cousin in Taunton, and probably Mrs Stewart at Torquay. We can tell this from the redirected addresses of George’s missives from the cruise. Then at the beginning of April she was at Acton Reynald, the Corbet family home. The reason for this is unclear, but it may have been to reunite Nina’s eight-year-old daughter Lesbia with her mother after Nina returned from her honeymoon.

Lesbia Corbet (1905-90) and her brother Jim (1892-1915), c. 1914, reproduced by kind permission of the Lambe family

Lesbia was one of at least four god-daughters that Kittie had, and she told me herself in 1986 that she had lived with Kittie whilst George was ‘away, far away, for a long time’. She thought he might even have been in Russia, but this can be ruled out for several reasons. He was on this restorative cruise and Lesbia probably did not see him from one end of her stay with Kittie to the other, which may have made her think he was away for longer than he was. I have often thought about the strange wistful intonation with which Lesbia said ‘He was away, far away, for a long time’, and have come to the conclusion that it was a reminiscence of the sadness that she perceived in Kittie then, as a mere eight-year-old, and perhaps the sadness that they both felt without George at 42 Well Walk.

In Lesbia’s words, she ‘hardly ever saw’ her mother Nina, who was something of a socialite, and she was ‘brought up by nannies and governesses’. However, probably in 1912 Nina rented Compton Lodge from the singer Clara Butt, ‘so as to be near Aunt Kittie’, as Lesbia put it. The Lodge was at 7 Harley Road, Hampstead, about a mile and a half from 42 Well Walk, and it is quite possible that this meant it was easy for Lesbia to go and stay with the Calderons whenever her mother was otherwise engaged. For Lesbia certainly stayed at Well Walk when George was there, and we know from a letter of John Masefield’s that George was master of ceremonies at her ninth birthday party held in the Calderon home.

Whilst Auntie Kittie was ‘like a mother’ to Lesbia Corbet, and ‘much closer than any of my real aunts’, it is probably true to say that Lesbia was the daughter Kittie Calderon wanted and never had. She stayed in the closest touch with Lesbia all her life, particularly after Nina’s death in 1921. In 1940, Lesbia married a hugely talented naval man, future Admiral of the Fleet Sir Charles Lambe, whom Kittie adored.

* * *

George and Kittie were reunited either late on 15 April 1913 or next day. He immediately joined rehearsals for the London premiere of his and St John Hankin’s play Thompson. He had been gratified to hear from Kittie (in a letter to him at Lisbon now lost) that not many changes had been made to the script in his absence, and the production, starring the popular comedienne Lottie Venne, was a success.

The next voyage George Calderon was to make was in 1915 in the R.M.S. Orsova bound for the Dardanelles.

Lesbia scrupulously preserved all Kittie and George’s surviving papers after Kittie’s death in 1950 and gave me the inestimable benefit of her knowledge of the Calderons and their circle of friends. My biography George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is dedicated to Lesbia’s memory.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged acacias, Acton Reynald, African Tulip, Anton Chekhov, Archie Ripley, biographies, biography, Botanical Gardens Funchal, bougainvillea, cable cars, Canary Islands, Charles Lambe, Clara Butt, comments, Dardanelles, Funchal, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Harold Dowdall, Jim Corbet, Kittie Calderon, Las Palmas, Lesbia Corbet, Levada do Norte, Lisbon, Liverpool, Madeira, Manchester, Mary Downdall, Monarch butterfly, Monte, Monte Palace Hotel, Nina Astley, Nina Corbet, Portugal, R.M.S. 'Orsova', Reginald Astley, Revolt, S.S. Aguila, Spain, Tahiti, The Canary Islands, The Fountain, The Great War, Trinity College Oxford, Tropical Gardens Funchal, Well Walk, wicker toboggans, World War I, Yeoward Line | 2 Comments

George L. Calderon, cartoonist

Posted on March 17, 2017 by Patrick Miles

I am extremely grateful to James Miles for his vibrant guest post on Schulz and Peanuts. It certainly improved Calderonia’s viewing figures! I am always loth to ‘take down’ guest posts, because they have something unique and often definitive about them. But of course they are not really taken down: they are always there below the blog’s growing edge.

New visitors to Calderonia will not know that I have run a series of posts about modern biography because as well as being about George Calderon’s life, Calderonia is about my biography of him and all that is happening in the rather exciting world of biography at the moment. Thus, odd though it may sound, even posts that do not mention George by name are keyworded ‘George Calderon’ as they are part of ‘his’ set, Calderonia.

But James’s review of David Michaelis’s biography of Charles M. Schulz immediately got me thinking of parallels with George. He had been at Oxford with Max Beerbohm and greatly admired the latter’s cartoons. Initially, George’s own cartoons were heavily influenced by Beerbohm’s (the classic collection of whose literary cartoons is The Poet’s Corner). Beerbohm’s are large, immaculate compositions in subtle colours — works of art, in fact. George’s too, at this stage, were full-page stand-alones. As I understand it, they are just examples of his Sunday painting, although Kittie published four in Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory and I shall include what I think is the best one, a penetrating lampoon of Tolstoy, in my biography.

Beerbohm, I believe, never progressed to the ‘moving’ cartoon, the strip cartoon, which as far as I can tell existed in children’s comics in Edward VII’s reign but did not make it into newspapers until after the First World War. George, though, can be seen to be going that way in the stream of small cartoons that he drew in the left hand margin of his ballet libretto The Red Cloth for Michel Fokine around 1912.

Cartoons from page 1 of the typescript of George Calderon’s ballet libretto The Red Cloth, reproduced by kind permission of Mr John Pym

The really important thing about George’s ballet The Red Cloth is that it is a comic ballet. In fact it comes beguilingly close to being a parody of one of Ballets Russes’ greatest hits, Schéhérazade. George’s cartoons would emphasise this to Fokine, who in Kittie’s words himself had a ‘delicious humour’.

I really think, then, that George would have appreciated strip cartoons when they finally appeared in the press in Britain. Moreover, I’m absolutely convinced he would have heaved with laughter over Peanuts, as Schulz’s soft, absurd, very knowing and at times almost Zen sense of humour comes remarkably close to George’s own.

* * *

Another company of letters to publishers is about to go over the top, poor devils… (Ambiguity intended.)

* * *

After about ten years of procrastination, we have just visited Madeira, more precisely its capital Funchal. I most definitely did not go there because George Calderon had called in for four hours on a recuperative cruise in March 1913. However… Funchal’s Edwardian heyday as a wintering place is palpably present in Reid’s Hotel, the Ritz of 1905, the Tropical Gardens, the wicker toboggans that can still whiz you down from Monte if you don’t fancy the cablecar, and in the villas (‘Quinta’s’) that were let to tourists. Walking around Funchal, I suddenly felt myself in touch with George again. I think my next post, then, must be about the circumstances of his 1913 trip.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Ballets Russes, biographies, biography, Charles M. Schulz, comments, Funchal, George Calderon, Kittie Calderon, Madeira, Max Beerbohm, Michel Fokine, Peanuts, Percy Lubbock, The Red Cloth | Leave a comment

Guest post: James Miles, ‘Schulz and Peanuts’

Posted on March 6, 2017 by Jim D G Miles

Schulz and Peanuts, by David Michaelis, is a scrupulously researched biography of Charles M. Schulz, the prolific cartoonist responsible for the hugely popular Peanuts comic. Indeed ‘responsible’ is particularly accurate here, as we learn in the book of Schulz’s determination to draw each and every one of the 17,897 strips by himself, sans assistants, sans assistance.

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Sketches and strip cartoons are a well-known medium for autobiographical expression. Not only is it easy to imagine when reading one what the author might have experienced to inspire the panels in front of us, but we have all at some point said, of a scene in our own lives, ‘hey this would make a good comic strip, wouldn’t it?’. The observation can even wear a little thin, when overused, much like trademark Mark Kermode-ism ‘hey that’d be a good name for a band, wouldn’t it?’…

Enjoyable as it is to play armchair Freud and wildly speculate how an author has projected their life onto their art, a biography such as Schulz and Peanuts can present the hard facts to really nail that down and reduce the guesswork.

Naturally, much of the book plays a pairing game, matching characters from Peanuts with characters in Schulz’s life either chronologically as ‘Sparky’s’ story is told, or when specific strips are mentioned. As a fan of the comic, I get huge satisfaction from the interspersing of these strips throughout the text, either explicitly as in the excerpt below or more broadly, thematically (and even cryptically, in places).

An excerpt from page 222 of the biography.

While the raw information of Schulz’s life is impressive – the dates, the places, the people, and so on – it is with Michaelis’ psychoanalysis that I am most impressed. For a work this meticulous, there is always the risk of the biography being a dry description of events in a man’s life with what the person is known for – in this case the cartoons – providing the sole vector of engagement for the reader. However, Michaelis brings to bear a fierce emotional intelligence and pulls no punches in his appraisal of Schulz’s character, foibles, insecurities, strengths, and weaknesses, throughout the book.

Schulz is a particularly good target for such an approach, where his principle character Charlie Brown is so tragically honest with the reader that there is a wealth to mine. This short clip of Schulz talking while he draws Charlie Brown neatly summarises the world explored in the biography.

When I mentioned to my father that I had been rereading this book, his immediate question was whether I thought another biography would expand on it, or if this was the definitive word on Schulz’s life.

My instinct was that, no, there would not be another such Schulz biography. At 655 pages, and with Michaelis’s microscopic attention to detail, the idea that there was room for more to be said seemed slim. Perhaps a mini-biography, more summarising and less rigorously analytical, but not another weighty tome.

However, as a self-professed Peanuts ‘nerd’, I do read articles here and there about Schulz’s life, and occasionally those articles contain information not covered in Schulz and Peanuts.

The most interesting I have read recently is the story of how Peanuts’ first African American character, Franklin, came to be in the strip. Franklin’s existence is largely thanks to a Los Angeles schoolteacher, Harriet Glickman, who wrote to Schulz following Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination and argued that such characters really ought to be featured in America’s most popular comic strip. The correspondence led to Franklin’s introduction in Peanuts and, naturally, pink noses being put out of joint across the country. It all came to a head in Schulz’s outspoken response to the comic’s distribution company president:

I remember telling Larry at the time about Franklin — he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said, “Well, Larry, let’s put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How’s that?”

My summary does not do the story justice and I urge you to read the letterpile article I learned all this from, written – entertainingly enough – by an African American called Ronald E. Franklin. You can also watch Glickman herself give an ‘Oral History’ account here, for The Charles M. Schulz Museum.

Coming back to Schulz and Peanuts, if the facts of those Franklin events had been available to Michaelis when writing the biography then he surely would have found a way to include them – the radical racial significance is so great, especially for the time it happened. We can only assume the information came about too late for inclusion.

Does that mean there is space for a whole other Schulz biography, as rigorously researched as Michaelis’? Of course not. But, for the biographer, an outlet to add supplementary information and perspective is a useful tool. An outlet even to cover periods of time that didn’t or couldn’t fit in the paper biography itself. An outlet like a blog, perhaps…

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, blogs, cartoons, Charles M. Schulz, Charlie Brown, comments, David Michaelis, Franklin, George Calderon, Harriet Glickman, James Miles, Mark Kermode, Martin Luther King Jr, Patty, Peanuts, Ronald E. Franklin, Shermy, Sparky | 2 Comments

Guest posts and…George a Labour man?

Posted on March 1, 2017 by Patrick Miles

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that biography is going through a particularly fertile and innovative time. I’m always interested, then, in biographies about new subjects and biographies that tell their stories in new ways.

Next week, blogmaster James Miles will give a guest post on a biography of the ‘Peanuts’ cartoonist Charles M. Schulz, and at the end of the month Alison Miles will present the fruits of her reading of the novels of Elizabeth Jane Howard and the new biography of Howard by Artemis Cooper, A Dangerous Innocence. Later still, I hope to read and review an extraordinary-sounding Cambridge biography with which I may have a connection, A Life Discarded, by Alexander Masters. If anyone would like to do a guest post on a recent biography that they found arresting and innovative, they are very welcome to contact me through my website, www.patrickmiles.co.uk . The standard limit is 1000 words and images are of course encouraged.

Meanwhile, after Easter we shall be very favoured indeed to carry a guest post by L.W.B. Brockliss, author of the monumental and highly entertaining The University of Oxford: A History (OUP, 2016). Professor Brockliss’s interests range from European medical education, the Enlightenment, childhood and violence, to celebrity, Horatio Nelson, and Irish clerics. For the last three years he has been leading a prosopographical study of the Victorian and Edwardian professions. As I understand it, prosopography is the investigation of the common characteristics of an historical group, and I am greatly looking forward to reading what Laurence makes of George Calderon in that framework.

* * *

I have just received by Inter-Library Loan an image of what appears to be the only review of the production of The Fountain that was stage-managed by pancake-maker Philip Harben, produced by his father Hubert, starred his mother Mary Jerrold in the lead, and was performed at the Strand Theatre, London, on Sunday 13 December 1925 (see my post of 9 February). The review commences rather startlingly:

It is interesting to note that the Sunday evening meetings of the Independent Labour Party at the Strand (lent by Mr Arthur Bourchier) have led to the establishment of a national movement ‘to link Socialism with music, drama, and art’. The I.L.P. Arts Guild has already 150 dramatic societies, choirs, orchestras, and art circles connected with the Socialist movement affiliated […]

Sunday evening’s celebration, which drew a large audience to the Strand, took the form of an excellent performance of the late George Calderon’s three-act comedy ‘The Fountain’ […] Needless to say, its various Socialistic qualities and references to economics went like hot cakes among the audience […]

This can only be described, in the modern parlance, as ‘a bizzarity’. Did no-one remember, or know, that in the Great Unrest of 1912 George had been a ‘strikebreaker’ and a ‘blackleg’, that he rejected Socialism, did not like G.B. Shaw, and had written a famous preface to The Fountain in which he described its Fabian hero as ‘not a socialist at all, he only thinks he is a socialist’?! It is very difficult to believe George would have wanted it presented as an Independent Labour Party event, or that Kittie, who abominated the trade union shoguns and syndicalism, would have licenced this production.

Nevertheless, she did licence it, but probably only to please her and George’s friends the Harbens, further their acting careers, and promote George’s play at any cost. The Stage sang the praises of all the actors, especially Mrs Harben as the ‘charmingly impractical Chenda Wren, all heart and no brain’, and did exactly what the Harbens must have hoped for: recommended that The Fountain be given a London run. Incidentally, the review also contains the hitherto unknown fact that there was a production of the play ‘at the Hampstead Garden City a year or two ago’.

What can one say but ‘everything is in the eye of the beholder’? I seem to remember G.B. Shaw himself being vastly amused on a visit to Bolshevik Russia to discover that The Forsyte Saga was published in large numbers by the state. Knowing Galsworthy and his politics personally, Shaw thought the novelist would be bemused at his popularity in the Socialist Paradise. But Russians explained to him that The Forsyte Saga was the perfect deconstruction of bourgeois society… Similarly, in the USSR of the 1970s I was told that Brideshead Revisited was an unsurpassable portrayal of the decadence of the British upper classes.

Despite George having explained in his preface that The Fountain was not a political satire on slum landlords and ‘the Wicked Rich’, as he put it, the members of the Independent Labour Party were presumably determined to ‘read’ it in that Shavian manner at the performance on 13 December 1925. How George might have laughed!

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Masters, Alison Miles, Arthur Bourchier, biographies, biography, Brideshead Revisited, Charles Schulz, comments, Elizabeth Jane Howard, Evelyn Waugh, Forsyte Saga, George Bernard Shaw, George Calderon, Hubert Harben, Independent Labour Party, James Miles, John Galsworthy, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Brockliss, Mary Jerrold, Philip Harben, Strand Theatre, The Fountain | 2 Comments

The War

Posted on February 22, 2017 by Patrick Miles

Every day brings another press extract in The Times’s ‘The First World War’ series, every week another email in their history of the war, and the stream of Tweets from the Imperial War Museum, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission, historical institutions, the media, descendants of the fallen, never slackens…

The War grinds on. I try to analyse how my attitude towards it has changed since August 2014. Posting almost daily on George’s experience of the war 1914-15, particularly at Ypres and Gallipoli, was, of course, an exceptional mode of apprehension — eviscerating; exhausting; enervating on the day and hour at Hampstead when we marked his death. As I said at the time, though, such empathy, for want of a better word, or re-living, is the biographer’s job whatever is going on in his/her subject’s life. It was bound to fade away after 4 June 2015. Indeed I believe the biographer always has to come out of that experience again: ‘the limits of empathy are understanding’.

However, I still follow the war quite closely. Possibly I try to look at the cataclysm more historically now. As that superb book The Long Shadow by David Reynolds shows, we are living in a world still shaped by two German world wars. What really was the nature of our commitment to Europe in 1914, and again in 1939? What’s the connexion between those wars and Brexit? What does the past tell us as a nation about our future?

History aside, though, I only have to re-read the 1914-15 chapter of my biography (as I did yesterday to check archive permissions), or stumble on a war poem, and it ‘all’ comes back to me; by which I mean the visceral experience, George’s experience, my grandfather’s experience, Sassoon’s experience, Graves’s experience, Owen’s experience, everyone’s experience. As I have said before, if a German President could state that ‘there can be no moral closure for Germany’, we know from experience that there can be no emotional closure for the rest of us.

This is why the personal effects, the documents and the works of art of World War I affect us so deeply. I read a poem of Rosenberg’s or Trakl’s again, I glance at a souvenir brought back by my grandfather from Ypres, or I chance upon a photocopy of George’s letter to Kittie as he left on the R.M.S. Orsova for Lemnos, and all the emotions are re-ignited.

There is a superb exhibition of Paul Nash’s life’s work at Tate Britain until 5 March. Nash must be one of the very few painters who was a war artist in both world wars (George’s close friend William Rothenstein was one in 1914-18). An unforgettable war painting of Nash’s, which came out of his experience of Ypres 3, is We Are Making a New World, which you can see on the Imperial War Museum website by clicking here. On 13 November 1917 Nash wrote to his wife:

It is unspeakable, godless, hopeless. I am no longer an artist interested and curious, I am a messenger who will bring back word from men fighting to those who want the war to last forever. Feeble, inarticulate will be my message, but it will have a bitter truth and may it burn their lousy souls.

It is not feeble, of course, and Nash’s anger in this letter is searing. By ‘those who want the war to last forever’ he may have had in mind Lloyd George, who still pursued a ‘knock-out blow’ in the West, or the French with their jusqu’au boutisme, but it equally applied to the Germans, who in their ‘Turnip Winter’ of 1917 launched unrestricted submarine warfare as the way of turning the war. They had forfeited the chance of peace offered them by Woodrow Wilson, by refusing to vacate Belgium. As Norman Stone has written:

Bethmann Hollweg [the German Chancellor] could not say that he would restore Belgium, because he did not intend to do so: Germany was fighting for a German Europe, in effect the ‘Mitteleuropa’ programme partly realized at Brest-Litovsk a year later, and Belgium, with its French establishment and British leanings, did not belong. German industrialists were expecting to take over the considerable coal and iron reserves of Belgium, and the military at the very least wanted to take the fortifications of Liège with a view to any future war.

To some extent, these two quotations epitomise the artist’s and the historian’s different apprehensions of the war.

It is uncanny, I find, how one’s mood follows the war’s emotional trajectory. The shock, the excitement, the moral fervour, the ‘gallantry’, even the fear, are gone: the flower of the nation’s manhood has been blasted, in Kitchener’s words the women are ‘doing nearly everything done by men’, the population are being bombed and starved, it has come down to cold, gritted determination that could fray into mutiny and insanity. If, after thirty months, the commemoration of the war has actually desensitised us, there is something authentic about that: so it had contemporaries, although not brutalised them, I think.

The people I do not envy at this moment are those professionally engaged in the commemoration of the war, day in day out, for another two years. I can close the book of poems, shut my grandfather’s bag of memorabilia, put the photocopied 1915 letter back in its file, and turn away from the war. The professionals of the IWM, the CWGC, historical institutions, the army, the navy, the air force, churches, museums and archives, cannot, and I wonder how on earth they manage to carry on.

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Belgium, Brexit, commemoration, comments, Commonwealth War Graves Commission, Dardanelles, David Reynolds, Gallipoli, General Kitchener, Georg Trakl, George Calderon, Imperial War Museum, Kittie Calderon, Lloyd George, Norman Stone, Paul Nash, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, The Great War, The Times, Theobald Bethmann Hollweg, Third Battle of Krithia, Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Turnip Winter, Wilfred Owen, William Rothenstein, Woodrow Wilson, World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

Checking my wiring

Posted on February 16, 2017 by Patrick Miles

To reprise a motif of my last post, ‘the first pancake was a lump’, in the admirable Russian phrase (pervyi blin upal komom). That’s to say in English that my carefully prepared approach to a group of publishers went off at half-cock. There’s still some follow-up there, so it’s not hopeless. But, changing metaphors, I feel that my advance party is trapped behind the lines and it’s time to send the second wave of letters over the top.

I find myself reflecting on John Dewey’s observation in his Comment of 18 January that ‘unfortunately luck does play a large part’.

My gut instinct is that he is absolutely right. Funnily enough, I rather respect Napoleon’s habitual question when asked to promote someone to general: ‘A-t-il de la chance?’ Yet in the final analysis I have never ever been able to believe in luck. If I did, I suppose I would wear a St Christopher, carry charms on my key ring, buy a black cat. Rifling through my encyclopaedic wallet, I discover three icons in it, and it might be assumed that these are lucky charms; but two of them (in card) were given to me by a Russian friend thirty years ago and have simply stayed there, they are not of holy folk I particularly like, and the other is just a piece of paper 60 x 85 mm that I cut out of a V&A leaflet twenty years ago:

‘Not a charm’

This icon — of St George, obviously — I do like, partly because I’m so fond of Iurii Zhivago’s poem about the myth. But it’s still not a ‘lucky charm’. It’s for looking at, admiring, and thinking about, if and when I come across it!

Below the ‘icons’, I am astounded to find these bits of card:

‘Be Prepared’

Why on earth do I have four? To be honest, I had completely forgotten that I had any of these wiring diagrams at all. Probably the first one was deposited in the Filo-wallet thirty years ago because I was genuinely uncertain about wiring new plugs, maybe I collected the others to give to my children if they ever had to wire a plug, but most likely I just kept stuffing them in my wallet because I was so anxious about wrongly wiring…

These diagrams, I think, are far more characteristic of my attitude to chance/luck than the icons. If I think back, nearly every book I’ve published could be said to have had an element of luck or coincidence about its publication. Very often the element seems to have been a chance acquaintance or a friend of a friend. It really does look as though John Dewey is right. On the other hand, although the encounters may have been ‘chance’, or ‘stuff just happened’, if I hadn’t seized and built on that ‘luck’ nothing whatsoever would have come of it. You have to look for these ‘chances’, therefore, and make them into opportunities, as John did with Brimstone Press. Where finding a publisher is concerned, you have to keep your eyes constantly open, do your homework, keep abreast of publications, and facilitate your good luck, as it were…

Until the end of June, I will continue to check my contacts and wiring, and doubtless I shall occasionally have to replace one of my fuses. Come to think of it, carrying an icon of St George in my wallet may not be so inappropriate, either.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, Boris Pasternak, chance, coincidence, comments, electricity, George Calderon, icons, Iurii Zhivago, John Dewey, luck, pancakes, plugs, publishers, St Christopher, St George, wallets, wiring, wiring diagrams | Leave a comment

Another wildcard!

Posted on February 9, 2017 by Patrick Miles

After fifty years practice, I have no difficulty transliterating Russian into the Roman alphabet using three different Anglo-American systems; it’s so automatic I can practically switch my brain off as I do it… But I cannot hold the hundred or so Modern Humanities Research Association rules for bibliographic referencing, plus tricky sub-variations, in my head as I check my Bibliography of three hundred entries. I glaze over after two pages and it’s a waste of time continuing. I have to come back and tackle the next two pages twenty-four hours later. It’s the only way to encourage accuracy. Even so I keep spotting errors in what I’ve done already. Perhaps an ‘editor’ will insist on a different system anyway!

This anaesthetising activity has, however, brought a most unexpected benefit.

One of my bibliographic minefields is J.P. Wearing’s indispensable compendium of London theatre productions between 1890 and 1959. It comes in seven ‘volumes’ of decades, plus one of accumulated indexes, but some of these ‘volumes’ are in two or three books, they have different publishers, and some of these decade-volumes are now being brought out as a second edition in single volumes. There was nothing for it but to go back to the University (copyright) Library and examine the actual books.

Whilst I was at it, I decided, for absolute surety, to check all of Wearing’s entries for the London productions of George’s plays — data I had first extracted four years ago and relied on ever since. Oh dear…oh dear oh dear oh dear: absorbed (I suppose) in the seminal 1925 production of George’s translation of The Cherry Orchard, I had completely missed another entry for 1925. To be honest, I was not completely disbelieving that I’d done this, as my fallibility/dementia seems to have waxed as the book wore on, but I was certainly amazed at what the missed production was. One could never have guessed it.

Philip Harben stage-manages a pancake on television, c. 1960

On Sunday 13 December 1925 The Fountain was performed at the Strand Theatre, now the Novello, at the corner of Catherine Street and Aldwych. It had an incredibly impressive cast. In fact, key parts were played by the actors who had premiered it to great acclaim in London and Glasgow in 1909: Mary Jerrold as Chenda, Frederick Lloyd as James Wren, Hubert Harben as the East End vicar Tom Oliver. But it only saw one performance. Why?

An answer might be indicated by the fact that (a) the original twenty-one speaking parts seem to have been reduced to twelve, (b) the Harben family were at the core of the production.

It would certainly be possible to mount a viable production of The Fountain with twelve actors and, perhaps, some doubling. It would save a lot of money. The production might even have been more effective in this streamlined state than in its thirty-actor original, and George would undoubtedly have approved. But Mary Jerrold was actually Mrs Hubert Harben (both wife and husband were to become successful film actors), Hubert Harben not only played Tom Oliver but was the producer (today ‘director’), and the stage manager was their nineteen-year-old son Philip, who was destined to become the first TV celebrity chef.

It seems to me, then, that this 1925 cut-down production of The Fountain was probably the brainchild of the Harben family. Perhaps they wanted to show managers, agents and the professional Sunday-going audiences one of their past theatrical hits in the hope of the play being revived commercially with Jerrold, Harben and Lloyd starring? The very first production of The Fountain, after all, had been on a Sunday and Monday for the Incorporated Stage Society at the nearby Aldwych Theatre, and it had taken off from there, reaching its acme of popularity with two touring productions in 1912. However, nothing further came of the Harben venture. My guess is that in 1925 the subject of the play was perceived as too Edwardian, i.e. ‘passé’, to bring in the audiences.

There is another possibility. In 1909 the Harbens became friends with the Calderons. Mary Jerrold had even — to critical acclaim — played Arkadina in the English premiere of The Seagull at Glasgow following on from her triumph in the Glasgow Fountain. George dedicated the first publication of The Fountain (1911) to MISS MARY JERROLD, THE CHARMING CREATOR OF “CHENDA”, and even in the 1922 volume of his plays, edited by Kittie, the dedication was TO MISS MARY JERROLD. Perhaps, then, the Harbens mounted this one-off 1925 production of The Fountain as a tribute to George ten years after his death, out of affection for Kittie, and in the wake of the impact made on the British theatre six months earlier by the London Cherry Orchard? (The third and last publication of The Fountain as a one-off was also in 1925.) Nothing, in my experience, is ever done in the theatre purely for altruistic reasons, but these factors might have fed into the 1925 production as well as it being a showcase for the Harbens, Lloyd, and other actors resting between engagements. The production could have been financed not just by the Harbens but by other actors in the cast, and perhaps even Kittie.

The problem with this hypothesis is that so far there is no evidence for it. It is not mentioned in any of Kittie’s papers (mind you, she might not have been able to see the performance if she was still tied up with the aftermath of Mrs Stewart of Torquay‘s death on 24 November 1925). There seems to have been only one review, but for the theatre profession this would be a significant one: it was in The Stage of 17 December 1925. This organ is notoriously difficult to recover online, in hard copy or microform. I await my digitised image through Inter-Library Loan.

Perhaps this image will explain a thing or two. I am keen to write a new paragraph into the biography if the production is connected with George’s memorialisation, of course, and if, like the Pienne portrait, it introduces some different ‘lighting’ into the story of Kittie’s life after she left Hampstead disastrously for Petersfield in December 1922.

Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Aldwych Theatre, Anton Chekhov, bibliography, biography, comments, Frederick Lloyd, George Calderon, Hubert Harben, J.P. Wearing, Kittie Calderon, Mary Jerrold, Modern Humanities Research Association, Novello Theatre, Philip Harben, Strand Theatre, The Cherry Orchard, The Fountain, The London Stage, The Seagull, Theatre Royal Glasgow | Leave a comment

‘The errors of Democracy’

Posted on February 1, 2017 by Patrick Miles

I am very pleased to have been able to incorporate in my Bibliography an article that was published only three weeks ago: Thomas Lansdall-Welfare and others, ‘Content Analysis of 150 Years of British Periodicals’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114 (2017), no. 4, E457-465. My attention was drawn to it by an excellent feature by Oliver Moody, Science Correspondent, in The Times of 10 January 2017, p. 3, entitled ‘Age of Celebrity Born as Victoria Died’.

A team at Bristol University led by Nello Cristiani, professor of artificial intelligence, and including the historian of ideas James Thompson, developed a computer tool that could crunch 35.9 million articles (28.6 billion words) from 120 regional newspapers published in the U.K. between 1800 and 1950, and plot selected words and semantic clusters in this dataset over time. Because newspapers obviously come out more in ‘real time’ than books do, this Bristol project has produced a much sharper picture than a similar one of 2011 involving millions of digitized books published over 200 years.

Thomas Lansdall-Welfare and his co-authors exercise very proper caution in interpreting their results. For example, one hardly needs to be shown high spikes for the word ‘coronation’ in 1902, 1911 and 1937, as one already knows that Edward VII, George V and George VI were crowned in those years! But the magnitude of a keyword’s frequency might well cast light on such matters as the role of the regional press over time or the ‘popularity’ of the event/person/activity etc. concerned. Thus a graph for frequency of mention over time for ‘suffragists’ and ‘suffragettes’ produces exactly the sudden spikes for the ‘suffragettes’ that one would expect, around 1910 and 1918, but it is the height of those spikes that is astonishing. What is going on here? We know that for most of the nineteenth century suffragism was perceived as a boring, almost academic movement, and it flatlines on the graph. But the term ‘suffragette’ was probably introduced by journalists in the first place (from America), the suffragettes wanted as much publicity as possible, and their activities were a godsend to popular journalism. The PNAS authors suggest, indeed, that the ‘sharp rise in coverage of the suffragettes (and suffragists) following the dramatic death [1913] of Emily Wilding Davidson, who was trampled to death by the King’s horse at Ascot’, is ‘perhaps an early 20th century example of the importance of a “media event” to a political campaign and its ability to capture the journalistic imagination’.

Over the last eight years or so, I have read an awful lot of British national newspapers from the late Victorian and Edwardian periods, and some regional ones. I was gratified, therefore, to see that my mere brain had picked up a few cultural shifts in the period 1895-1915 that are ‘scientifically’ confirmed by the Bristol project. For instance, the project indicates that trains overtook horses in popularity around 1902 and association football outstripped cricket around 1909, which was already my vague feeling. A particularly interesting finding of the project, not mentioned in the PNAS publication but described by Oliver Moody, is that the word ‘democracy’ flourished after 1900.

I can say that I had picked this up from about 1908, when George Calderon became involved in the anti-suffragism movement, but it exemplifies how careful one should be in interpreting word-frequency data of this kind.

From the fact that ‘democracy’ features increasingly in the press from 1900 onwards, it would be natural, perhaps, to conclude that this is because democracy was becoming more popular. But my own impression is that the word was used pejoratively in about fifty percent of the cases I have seen for the period 1908-1915. In other words, only half of the increase in the word’s frequency might be attributable to the ‘popularity’ of democracy; the aggregate increase might actually indicate a significant conflict over democracy’s desirability in Edwardian Britain.

For a start, it seems to me that the Edwardian upper classes did not view democracy as a concept, let alone as an ethical value. They regarded it as a possible form of government like any other, e.g. monarchy, parliamentary democracy, or oligarchy. Their classical education taught them that in Athens rule by the hoi polloi (‘rabble’) had been a bad thing. Democracy tout court might therefore be the lowest form of government. The key factor here for the Edwardian establishment was ‘education’, for which read ‘qualification to have the franchise’. From what I have seen, it is possible that the landowning classes, Tory politicians and imperial consuls like Lords Cromer and Curzon thought enfranchising more people was desirable in theory, but only if these people were ‘educated’ enough to make electoral choices ‘responsibly’; otherwise, it would be disastrous. This, of course, was their objection to extending the franchise to women and the working classes: these groups of people weren’t educated enough to make the right decisions…

This may seem a completely preposterous, class-bound view, but you would be wrong to think it is dead. A friend recently said to me, ‘It rather looks as though the Brexit vote split along lines of education.’ He didn’t expatiate, but the remark was made in the context of the cities of Oxford and Cambridge delivering the biggest Remain votes in the country. He was, in fact, implying that those who voted Leave weren’t educated enough to know what they were doing. Others believe they have a right to reverse the outcome of the 2016 referendum. This is quite clearly an oligarchic argument like the Edwardian establishment’s, and laughably wrong in principle and fact. They want us to be governed by Philosopher Kings.

In our case, the problem is the exercise of referendums as an instrument of democracy. The Edwardians, I think one could be pretty sure, would never have understood the need for referendums, as their ‘democracy’ elected M.P.’s to parliament and parliament was sovereign. In fact, there have only been three U.K.-wide referendums in the country’s history, and they have all been in the last forty-three years. Presumably they were thought to be necessary because the referendums’ issues were so important to the nation’s existence that they couldn’t be left to M.P.’s whose view was out of kilter with their own electorate. Well, that may have applied to Brexit, but no referendum was held on capital punishment (which the electorate overwhelmingly wanted, but M.P.’s didn’t). Conversely, in Edwardian Britain around 1909 a narrow majority of M.P.’s approved of votes for women, but the government could appeal to polls that showed there was no national majority desire for it.

George Calderon had all the experience of parliamentary-style debate that came with a Rugby and Oxford education (his friend Archie Ripley, Kittie’s first husband, actually became President of the Oxford Union). His experience of autocratic government in Russia informed his interest in the nature and future of western democracy. Thus we find him studying Edward Carpenter’s Towards Democracy when he returns from Russia and is living at Eastcote. He thought that Tsarist autocracy was bad for Russia, but he recognised that most Russians wanted it. On the other hand, in 1903 he was impressed by the Russian view that ‘the Emperor sits for minority as well as majority, and for the Country as well, a constituent not represented in our Parliament’. This pushed George towards espousing proportional representation.

As the male owner of Kittie’s property, George had the vote. He certainly exercised it, and at the turn of the century seems to have been close to his friend Newbolt’s Liberal Imperialism. However, the splits in the Liberal Party and Conservative-Unionist government over Home Rule, the Boer War, Free Trade and so on, seem seriously to have disillusioned him with parliamentary democracy. He felt it led to weak government, and this is the source of the bitterness that underlies his 1904 satire Dwala. It is disappointing, of course, that he could not see that contemporary political instability and rudderlessness were the products of politicians’ incompetence, not the fault of democracy as such. The final paragraph of Dwala reads:

There is no remedy for the errors of Democracy; there is no elasticity of energy to fulfill purposes conceived on a larger scale than its every-day thought. Other systems may be purged by the rising waves of national life; but Democracy is exhaustive.

I leave it to readers to decide what he meant, but he certainly did not think that Democracy’s performance could be improved by expanding the franchise from 30% of the mature population to include women or the ‘lower classes’ — or by holding referendums.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Archie Ripley, artificial intelligence, autocracy, Brexit, comments, coronations, cricket, culturomics, democracy, Dwala, Edward Carpenter, Emily Wilding Davidson, football, George Calderon, horses, James Thompson, journalism, Kittie Calderon, Liberal Imperialism, Nello Cristiani, newspapers, Oliver Moody, Parliament, proportional representation, referendums, regional newspapers, Russia, suffragettes, suffragists, Thomas Lansdall-Welfare, trains, Trinity College Oxford, Tsarism | 11 Comments

‘Literally for this…’

Posted on January 25, 2017 by Patrick Miles

Click the image to find this book on amazon.

This is the most original, enjoyable, moving and impressive book about the First World War that I have read since the centenary began. It is not a ‘history’ book like Max Hastings’s Catastrophe, say, Peter Hart’s Gallipoli, or David Reynolds’s The Long Shadow, but it opens up a dimension of the reality of the war that, for me at least, is fresh and deeply thought-provoking. I would go so far as to say that if you engage with the existential reality of the Great War, you must read this book.

Perhaps the shortest way to give an idea of its substance is to explain its structure. These are Lewis-Stempel’s core chapters:

II: And the Birds Are Beautiful Still: Avifauna and Men on the Western Front (46 pp.)
III: All the Lovely Horses: Equus as Beast of Burden, War Horse, Comrade (52 pp.)
IV: Of Lice and Men: Trench Pests, Vermin and Disease (46 pp.)
V: The Bloom of Life: Trench/POW Gardens, Flowers and Botanists at the Front (32 pp.)
VI: The Dogs (and Cats, Rabbits, etc.) of War: Trench Pets (27 pp.)
VII: A-Hunting and A-Shooting (and A-Fishing) We Will Go: Field Sports and Poaching
at the Front (19 pp.)

Very cleverly placed around these are the shorter ‘Interstices’. I say ‘around’ rather than ‘between’ since Chapter II is preceded by ‘Interstice 1: Birds of the Battlefield, Western Front 1914-18’ (a list), and followed by ‘Interstice 2: Poems about Birds Written by Serving Soldiers’, making the section about birds actually 59 pages long. After Chapter III you have ‘Interstice 3: Poems about Horses Written by Serving Soldiers’; after IV, ‘Interstice 4: The Statistics of Disease’; after V, ‘Interstice 5: Nature and the Ancre Battlefield, 30 July 1917’; after VI, ‘Interstice 6: A Complete List of Soldiers’ Pets and Mascots’; and after VII, ‘Interstice 7: British and Empire Naturalists Who Died on Active Service 1914-1919’. In a sense, then, the ‘Interstices’ wind round and through the ‘body’ of the book.

Stempel-Lewis’s writing in this body never knows a dull moment, shifting from narrative and explanation through prose and poetry quotation to potted biography, speculation, and a staggering range of war memoirs and personal documents. But it is fair to say that the technique and content of the thinner ‘Interstices’ enhance the variety of the book and the reader’s experience of it even more.

What can one say of the ‘body’ of the book? It is so overwhelmingly rich and challenging that I could quote, paraphrase and discuss it till Kingdom come. One is simply made to feel vividly how close the bond between the British soldier and a vast range of the animal world and Nature became — and how important it was to him.

The skylark’s refusal (‘brave’ was the adjective usually attached) to quit its habitat because of warring man caused widespread admiration. The bird even stayed put on day one of the Somme […] The correspondent of ‘The Times’ informed readers that the skylarks could be heard singing during the battle ‘whenever there was a lull in the almost incessant fire’. […] Skylarks turned the eyes upwards from present problems.

Rooks also became ‘icons’ of resilience, nightingales evoked wonder, swallows building their nests in observation posts and Nissen huts evoked tender solicitation and brought a strange comfort. Some very serious ornithology was done and even published (incidentally, I think the author might have stressed that ‘bird-nesting’, whether by privates or generals, was usually for the purpose of viewing the beauty of the eggs, not stealing them). The golden oriole became ‘the holy grail of bird-watching on the Western Front’, partridges proliferated, carrier pigeons became comrades and heroes, and

In what was simultaneously charming and cruel, ambulance trains were fitted with canary cages, so the birds could sing to wounded troops in transit to hospital. As everyone Edwardian knew, birdsong was a guaranteed cheerer-upper. Caged songbirds were still a common fixture in the back street homes of Britain.

Chapter II, which is prefaced by Elgar’s words about the iniquity of horses being pressed into war (see Paul Johnson’s Comment on my post of 12 July 2016), proves me utterly wrong in assuming that Warhorse was a sentimental confection. Soldiers did live, sleep and die with their horses. They became so close to them that they felt their horse could read their thoughts. Some even wished to be killed and buried with their horse, and were. When at the end of the war scores of thousands of horses were to be sold for meat rather than be transported back to Blighty, their riders ‘disappeared’ them, or even took them away and shot them themselves. There is no sentiment in this key chapter, just remarkable stories of comradeship and love to which Lewis-Stempel brings a sober vision. It is encouraging to read that after public outrage at the treatment of horses in the Boer War, the Army Veterinary Service was improved and expanded into the Army Veterinary Corps, and ‘effectively, humane treatment of — and kindness towards, indeed — animals [became] institutionalised in the army’. The war could not have been won without the horse, the donkey and the mule.

But Lewis-Stempel’s consummate touch was to enclose the ‘body’ of his book in chapters that seek to interpret the whole phenomenon, viz. ‘Chapter I: For King and Countryside: The Natural History of the British’ and ‘Chapter VIII: And Quiet Flowed the Somme: War’s End’. He is so right to speak of the participants as ‘Edwardians’ and those who returned — indeed British society after 1918 — as something else.

‘For the generation of 1914-18’, he writes, ‘love of country meant, as often as not, love of countryside.’ He prefaces Chapter I with Edward Thomas’s words ‘Literally for this’, which were uttered when a dismayed Eleanor Farjeon asked why he was joining up and Thomas showed her a handful of English soil. ‘Edward Thomas died at Arras for Adlestrop’, Lewis-Stempel ventures, referring to Thomas’s poem encapsulating the Gloucestershire countryside on 24 June 1914. The Edwardian countryside was ‘full of birdsong’; it was ‘countryside worth fighting for’; it was ‘God’s Own Country’; ‘an Edwardian childhood was conducted outdoors as much as it was within the confines of the house’; as George Calderon’s friend Ford Madox Hueffer, 9/Welsh Regiment, wrote on an embarkation train to Southampton as he watched the countryside roll by: ‘It is for the sake of the wolds and the wealds/That we die,/And for the sake of the quiet fields…’

Conversely (Chapter VIII), ‘on return to Britain, soldiers took to nature as a cure for the wounds of the mind’, a massive smallholding movement was launched for veterans, and the cemeteries on foreign soil became English gardens:

To preserve a special British feeling snowdrops and crocuses were allowed to push up through the grass. In the cemeteries, where memory was planted, the French countryside was sequestered and remodelled to become little bits of Britain. Unambiguously, the cemeteries are corners of foreign fields ‘for ever England’. The dead are not buried in France; they lie in English scenes. They are interred at home.

A wonderful book, written in a vibrant personal language.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Adlestrop, Army Veterinary Corps, Belgium, birds, British Expeditionary Force, cats, comments, Dardanelles, David Reynolds, dogs, Edward Elgar, Edward Thomas, Edward Thomas's reason for signing up, Eleanor Farjeon, Ford Madox Hueffer, Gallipoli, George Calderon, horses, John Lewis-Stempel, Max Hastings, Nature, Peter Hart, rabbits, rats, skylarks, The Great War, Warhorse, World War I, Ypres | 2 Comments

Publishing

Posted on January 18, 2017 by Patrick Miles

After nearly fifty years of contact with publishers, I could bore for England on the subject…which means that I must make sure I don’t! I will try to keep this short and focussed on the task of finding the right publisher for my biography.

In 1998 I wrote (letters, in those days) to fifteen publishers with a proposal for two biographies of about 80,000 words each: Black Pot, a documentary biography of George, and White Raven, a fictography of Kittie. Looking through the file now, I am amazed that every publisher replied and their responses were so positive. However, of course, they all said they couldn’t sell enough copies of biographies of people ‘not widely famous among general readers’ — 6000 being the minimum usually quoted. One editor whom I particularly respect wrote that ‘even the chapter breakdown suggests the Calderons were an interesting couple’ and recommended ‘combining the two subjects in one volume’.

So what has changed in the intervening nineteen years?

Well, first, so much more material surfaced about George and Kittie that when I actually started writing in 2011 I was able to do exactly what that editor had recommended. When I floated the idea of the two biographies in 1998, I hadn’t, of course, written a word of either. I now have a completed typescript of 180,000 words (about 400 printed pages), honed synopsis, alternative introductions, blog, and so forth. But the publishing world has changed enormously since 1998.

Between 2013 and 2015 I meticulously researched thirty-four possibly appropriate publishers and proposed George Calderon: Edwardian Genius to them, although only about 70% of it was written. I should think this took at least five times longer than my 1998 approaches. In some cases it meant making the proposal through a detailed template on their websites. Most communication was by email.

Less than half of these thirty-four publishers even replied. There is no doubt whatsoever that this reflects the tsunami of proposals crashing down on them these days. On the one hand, note, there are far more publishers in the field and it is cheaper for them to produce a book. On the other, we have become a nation of logo-maniacs, there is a pandemic of cacoethes scribendi, we are all blogging and writing books… We publish more books per head (3000 new titles a week) than any other country in the world.

As a result, some publishers announce ‘no unsolicited submissions’, others will ‘only consider submissions which come via a literary agent’ (my experience of agents other than theatrical ones is dire). Infuriated by this in the case of one very distinguished publishing firm, in 2015 I wrote them a three-line letter:

I know from N’s website that you are too overwhelmed to read submissions, so you will be pleased to hear that I am not approaching you about my full-length biography of a major Edwardian literary and political figure as featured in TLS Blog posts of 9/9/14 and 30/7/15. Thank you for reading this.

Astonishingly, their top commissioning editor emailed me and asked to see some chapters, even though the biography was ‘horribly unlikely for us’. I sent some, and that was the last I heard from him. I have since been warned off by other writers, who say that this old and hugely respected publisher ‘does no marketing’! It was a great pity that my research had not turned that fact up in the first place.

However, there have been some positive developments too. Biography, autobiography and memoir now outsell history. Some publishers, e.g. John Murray, have returned to biography after years away. There has even been some movement towards high-profile houses publishing the life stories of people who aren’t ‘widely famous among general readers’. This has encouraged me to research who is publishing my kind of biography now and produce a shortlist (currently seventeen and largely different from the 1998 and 2015 lists). Despite the fact that in 2015 three publishers expressed an interest in seeing the finished typescript — and I will of course give them that opportunity — each of them has a drawback from my point of view, so I will tackle the whole of the new list from the top downwards, as it were. It is important to aim for your ideal publisher, even if you know that the chances are slim.

And it is vital, in my view, to put yourself through this long campaign rather than jump straight into self-publishing. Five experienced published biographers have advised me not to bother with commercial publishers but bring it out myself, presumably because they believe George Calderon is still too obscure to catch one, but are too polite to say so. They may, of course, be right, but I think one owes it to oneself to strain every muscle to find the best commercial publisher first. One can at least say then that one has tried.

The explicit reason three of these biographers have given for self-publishing is that ‘you get exactly what you want’. Having battled with an editor who wanted to reduce my punctuation to dashes, and another who introduced clever factual errors throughout my text, I know what they mean. This is another unhappy development in modern publishing. In 1982 the oldest and probably most respected commercial publisher I have ever had dealings with, John Murray, took my and Harvey Pitcher’s typescript of Chekhov: The Early Stories 1883-88, their editor read it, and not one iota was changed for publication. Now a vast new class of young, meddling and often uneducated editors (themselves ‘writers’, they always tell you) has arisen.

But it is naive to think you can ever get ‘exactly what you want’ in publishing a book (I once self-published before computers and the printer left the title-page out!). Of course I am prepared to negotiate with a commercial publisher over length, punctuation style, illustrations, the blessed Introduction, end notes etc, up to a point, because I would prefer to be paid for my book, not have all the toil of bringing it out myself, and reap the full benefit of their marketing and distribution. The very first person I shall contact is the ‘editor I particularly respect’, whom I mentioned in my second paragraph and who has given me invaluable advice over the years. The game is afoot.

The plan, then, is to do my darnedest until 30 June to find the best commercial publisher, but not at all costs of compromise. If this has not worked by that deadline, Miles Enterprises will go into overdrive to bring the book out ourselves for Christmas 2017, using my old imprint ‘Sam&Sam’.

To what I have described as the ‘positive’ recent developments in commercial biography publishing, I would add two of my own since 2011: 1) I purposely widened the scope of my biography to appeal to the growing interest in the Edwardians as such, and 2) the blog has not only raised awareness of George Calderon, it has brought me several excellent contacts in the literary and publishing worlds. These developments contribute to firing me up with my customary inextinguishable over-optimism.

Advice and ideas will always be welcome.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, biography, comments, George Calderon, Harvey Pitcher, John Murray, Kittie Calderon, publishers, publishing, Sam&Sam, self-publishing, The Great War, World War I, writing mania | 3 Comments

‘Iconography’

Posted on January 11, 2017 by Patrick Miles

Left: George Calderon as Sherlock Holmes, c. 1912, Right: Basil Rathbone as George Calderon, 1939

Lest it be thought that my previous post expressed a scepticism towards or weariness with blogging, I hasten to reassure followers: the pleasures and benefits of running Calderonia have been a fantastic bonus to writing the actual book. I never remotely expected to write a separate, day-to-day biography of the last year of George’s life, but that is what happened between 2014 and 2015, I hugely enjoyed writing it (despite the problems of ‘chronotopia’), and am proud to have been one of the first in on the genre of blography. But consider the other benefits: manuscripts discovered by followers and bought for the archive, references supplied by followers to mentions of George in obscure publications that I would never have found myself, leads suggested for fruitful further research, and above all the comments, observations, suggestions of fresh other minds.

The latter, I think, is why I would always recommend to biographers running a blog about their work in progress. Of course you do the slog of research mainly yourself, of course you have your own closely guarded image of the biography’s subject, of course (as we said of Ruth Scurr’s ‘autobiography’ of Aubrey), you actually have absolute control over the result. But the more you go it alone, the greater the dangers of tunnel vision. A biographer needs those outsider views, that different angle of vision, because it is so difficult for oneself to stand outside and look in. I daresay some biographers would say they don’t want other people’s takes on their subject; that it is their image they are presenting of their subject. I consider that naive. Biography is not a solipsistic genre, it should aim to be empathetic and objective. You don’t have to accept other people’s views, of course, but you would be wise to assay them, as they may be gold. How many times between July 1914 and July 1915, for instance, did followers write in with their interpretations of George’s and Kittie’s thinking, feelings, motivations that modified my own interpretation?

A late, but outstanding example would be the dialogue started by Clare Hopkins, Archivist of George’s alma mater Trinity College, Oxford, about the Arnold Pienne portrait commissioned by Kittie and presented to the college in 1930. I had always known this portrait, because Kittie kept a facsimile of it and this eventually joined her archive. But I had subconsciously, I think, dismissed it because it was (a) done not from life but from Hollyer’s ‘iconic’ photo-portrait, and (b) it didn’t look (to me) remotely like George…

That was to miss the point, which Clare raised in her guest blog of 9 December 2016 and followers discussed in subsequent Comments, namely WHY Kittie commissioned such an aethereal version of the Hollyer photograph? For — I accept — the Pienne silverpoint is so different from the chiaroscuro Hollyer portrait that its differences can’t be put down to ineptitude, especially as Kittie herself said she found the Pienne portrait ‘beautiful’. This is such an interesting and profound point where Kittie‘s biography is concerned, that it has prompted me to write a few new sentences about it in the relevant chapter, linking up with my treatment of the Hollyer original in an earlier one. I am hugely grateful to Clare, Jenny Hands and Celia Bockmuehl for having discussed it. The book would be poorer without their contribution, but without the blog that contribution couldn’t have happened!

Iconography can be a very important factor in writing a biography. By ‘can’ I mean if you decide to let it be. The impact of images from the past is slippery…subjective…fraught with interpretative dangers. I don’t propose saying more about the subject generally than that. In George Calderon’s case, there are only about twenty-five known images and they are so different. I well remember the impact that the published ones had on me back in the 1970s when I started translating Chekhov’s plays and came across George for the first time. As I have said before, the pallid, lean, closely shaven, immaculately groomed, tight-lipped, snowy starched collared ones put me in mind of Henry Newbolt or Lord Curzon, and that mind said to itself: ‘another Edwardian bastard’. The Hollyer portrait directly put me in mind of Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.

This, of course, is but one of the dangers of iconography in biography: you don’t intimately know and recognise the semiotics of the period, so your brain reaches for comparison with what you do know. For me, Holmes has been and always will be Basil Rathbone, not Benedict Cumberbatch. And perhaps there is more to it after all? George admired the Sherlock Holmes stories. With his own severely rational, forensic and cryptographic mind he was something of a Sherlock himself. He too smoked like a chimney, though not a pipe… It is possible that Basil Rathbone, who was twenty-four years younger than George, had come across George in London theatre life, as Rathbone was just becoming known as an actor. Could he have observed George’s dark looks and manner? Unfortunately Guy Rathbone, whom George almost certainly knew from the Stage Society’s British premiere of Uncle Vanya in May 1914, in which this Rathbone played the lead, was no relation to Basil, who was born in South Africa. Guy was an intelligent and promising actor born in Liverpool in 1884 and killed in action in 1916.

* * *

Nothing much happens in publishing houses before the middle of January as they wrestle with their backlog. I am still tweaking the typescript, a totally different, alternative version of the Introduction has been written, and there is now a fuller title:

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius

The Man and his Times

I keep updating (improving) the Bibliography and Acknowledgements. None of this is an obstacle to tackling publishers, as the core text is finished. I will outline my general publishing strategy in my next post.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels | Tagged Anton Chekhov, Arnold Pienne, Basil Rathbone, Benedict Cumberbatch, biographies, biography, blogs, Calderonia, Celia Bockmuehl, Clare Hopkins, comments, Frederick Hollyer, George Calderon, Guy Rathbone, Henry Newbolt, iconography, Jenny Hands, Kittie Calderon, Lord Curzon, Ruth Scurr, Sherlock Holmes, The Great War, The Stage Society, Trinity College Oxford, Uncle Vanya, World War I | Leave a comment

Calderonia: the way forward

Posted on January 7, 2017 by Patrick Miles

A very happy New Year to our subscribers, followers and visitors. May 2017 be a good year for you all. I doubt whether any of us will agree with George Calderon’s ‘brutal’ assertion in a letter to Katharine Ripley of 31 December 1898 (her late husband’s birthday) that ‘the New Year […] is only a new number at the top of the newspaper’!

2017 is, of course, an important year for the whole Calderon project, as I am determined come what may to see my biography published within the next twelve months.

I had thought to carry on blogging much as in 2016, but mainly about the whole process of finding the right publisher and getting the book to press. There would have been plenty to tell about that day by day, but I have now decided otherwise. I will blog approximately once a week, but it will be about a range of topics including publication. My reasons for this reduction are as follows:

1. I think it would be wise to imitate the Prime Minister’s approach to Brexit negotiations and not show my hand to the world whilst playing… Moreover, finding a publisher is a full-time job and won’t leave so much time for blogging…

2. I’m inclined to think I don’t have anything more of interest to readers to say about George and Kittie…

3. It’s ‘all’ in the book and I owe it to potential buyers not to perpetrate ‘spoilers’…

4. But I already know that fresh themes and ideas about the Calderons constantly pop up, so I will post about them as and when. Not to mention about more-or-less-relevant topics. Guest posts are also, of course, invited.

5. We really cannot put any more photographs or documents from the Calderon Papers on the Web — we must leave some for future archival researchers!

6. After two and a half years of writing Calderonia (with, of course, others’ very gratefully acknowledged help), I fear I am tired and jaded. Not that I couldn’t be tempted to start a more general literary blog in two or three years time…

7. Calderonia is now pretty large by blog standards, I think, and I experience more and more heart-stopping moments when I lose contact with WordPress whilst writing or trying to save a draft. For someone with my blood pressure range this is a serious issue…

8. I have had enough of trollery. Interesting though this phenomenon of people ‘losing it’ on the Net is, I do not need their thousands of words of omniscience and abuse.

Vive Calderonia, then, it’s not dead yet!

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, blood pressure, Brexit, Calderonia, comments, George Calderon, Katharine Ripley, Kittie Calderon, New Year, publishers, spoilers, Theresa May, trolls, Wordpress | Leave a comment

A soft landing and season’s greetings!

Posted on December 24, 2016 by Patrick Miles

After five and a half years living full time with writing this book, I am somewhat dazed by the soft landing of Bibliography, Acknowledgements and the odd tidying up. I am a bit light-headed. It feels unreal, especially compared with living Ypres and Gallipoli in the past two years. I still can’t really believe that the ‘writing’ is all over! (But is it?)

In the New Year, the campaign opens to find the right publisher. I shall be blogging less often then, but will explain all that after Twelfth Night. It only remains now for me to thank all our followers and visitors for reading us in the past year, and to wish you

(Shed Man acknowledges the arrival of Christmas)

A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS AND PROSPEROUS 2017!

To add your own seasonal comment, click here.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, Calderon project, Calderonia, Christmas, comments, Dardanelles, finishing, Gallipoli, George Calderon, holly, Kittie Calderon, New Year, Patrick Miles, publishers, season's greetings, sheds, The Great War, World War I, Ypres | 3 Comments

‘…but Mr Jones does look a nice dog’

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Patrick Miles

After enduring a long bout of illness and the first anniversary of George’s disappearance at Gallipoli, in the summer of 1916 Kittie decided she must channel her energies into a number of useful and therapeutic activities. One of these was writing to soldiers at the front and sending them whatever they needed. Thus she tracked down George’s last battalion, 1st KOSB, in France, began a correspondence with the officer commanding his old company, and sent them food and clothing. Probably at the sculptor Eric Gill’s suggestion, she also wrote to his twenty-four-year-old apprentice Joseph Cribb, who was at the Somme. She sent him a cake, sweets, and ‘lemonade tabloids’.

The longest series of soldiers’ letters in Kittie’s archive is from an ex-miner, Clement Quinn, who in 1916 was only twenty-one and stationed in Lucknow, which he found extremely trying. Kittie was asked to correspond with Quinn by Robert Holmes, a writer of popular spy-thrillers who happened also to be Sheffield’s first probation officer. Presumably Kittie had met Holmes in London literary circles. Holmes described Quinn’s deprived childhood in a letter of 1 November and asked Kittie to write Quinn ‘improving’ letters — perhaps implying that Quinn had once been in trouble with the police. Kittie said she was incapable of writing ‘improving letters’, but promptly wrote to Quinn and sent him a parcel of tobacco. Quinn replied thanking her on Christmas Day, 1916.

‘Mr Jones’ and Katharine Ripley, 1899

Kittie’s letters to Quinn have not yet been found, but seventeen from him to her have survived, spanning 1914-19. They are remarkable. He writes very clearly, slowly (one imagines), and probably just as he spoke. But he is an intelligent young man. The letters discuss the course of the war, the wartime conduct of the trade unions (he disapproves of the Coal Strike of 1912), barrack and social life (he is very critical of the way the British behave in India), and his plans to train as an engineer when he comes home to Sheffield. Kittie sent him many things, including a fountain pen and John Masefield’s book about Gallipoli. The impression is inescapable that she wrote him long and chatty letters.

On 11 July 1917 Quinn wrote to Kittie requesting a photograph of her ‘if it is your wish for me to have one, as I shall always remember you, for how good you have been to me whilst I have been out here’. Kittie was rather sensitive about portraits of her, most of which she seems not to have liked. In the autumn of 1917, however, she agreed to send Quinn an ‘old’ one. It was the photograph I show above, which was taken when she was still Mrs Ripley, eighteen years earlier. Despite her white dress, she is wearing mourning accessories following Archie Ripley’s death in October 1898. On the back of Kittie’s own copy, George had written ‘equally best’, presumably meaning equal to the one of Kittie that features on this blogsite under ‘Biographies of George and Kittie Calderon’.

Quinn answered from Lucknow on 26 January 1918, after his twenty-third birthday:

Well I do think it is a good Photo, and of Mr Jones. […] You say under your hat there is Gray Hair, but you look quite young yet, but [sic] Mr Jones does look a nice dog.

‘Mr Jones’ was the Aberdeen terrier that Archie Ripley and Kittie had acquired after their marriage. They were both very fond of Jones, as was George. The dog died probably in 1909. Quinn hung this photograph above his barrack bed. On 7 November 1918 he wrote to Kittie speculating about the end of the war. Then he added:

I hope and trust that you have the Honour of seeing your hubby now the Turks are mastered. […] Do you know what I’m thinking of now is when you were skating last winter and the zepps [Zeppelin bombers] came over.

He wanted to meet Kittie at Hampstead when he returned to Britain, but since this was in April 1919 when she was distraught at the confirmation of George’s death, and suffering from pernicious anaemia, it seems very unlikely that he did.

In his last surviving letter, Quinn wrote from Sheffield that he was ‘going down the pit again, as soon as my month leave is up’.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Archie Ripley, Battle of the Somme, biographies, biography, British Expeditionary Force, Clement Quinn, coal mining, comments, Dardanelles, Eric Gill, Gallipoli, George Calderon, India, John Masefield, Jones, Joseph Cribb, Katharine Ripley, King's Own Scottish Borderers, Kittie Calderon, Lucknow, Mr Jones, photographs, Robert Holmes, Sheffield, soldiers' letters, The Great War, The Raj, Third Battle of Krithia, World War I, Ypres, Zeppelins | Leave a comment

Guest post: Clare Hopkins, ‘One Man and his College’

Posted on December 9, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Anyone who has ever watched an episode of Morse or Lewis will know that Oxford Colleges are well supplied with portraits. Founders, archbishops, prime ministers, and Nobel Prize winners gaze grandly down from the panelled walls of Dining Halls. Smaller paintings of distinguished professors, college heads, tutors and benefactors grace common rooms and fellows’ sets. And then, somewhere about the place, a third tier of pictures of the great and the good is usually to be found. In George Calderon’s alma mater Trinity College a large collection of engravings and photographs hangs on the Senior Common Room back stairs: four somewhat shabby flights that link the bar, the fellows’ garden, the kitchen, the hall steward’s pantry, and a series of rooms where the fellows and others hold meetings, eat meals, host receptions, and read newspapers and journals over coffee. At the first turn, as one ascends, Arnold Pienne’s drawing of George Calderon stands out. Its label is different from the rest; it is one of only three or four original art works on the stairs; and it is the only silverpoint owned by the College. ‘Stands out’ is a little misleading, though. George’s grey mount and delicate creamy tones withdraw into almost invisibility against the deep shade of the wall.

Trinity College’s portrait of George Calderon, drawn in silverpoint by Arnold Pienne, 1930

Anyone who has ever had an Oxbridge graduate as a friend will know too that a College is not just for three years, it is for life. This post, then, is an attempt to deconstruct George’s relationship with Trinity, tracing his footprints in the college archives from his first visit, aged 17, to the arrival of his portrait, some fifteen years after his death.

The name George L. Calderon first appears in the Governing Body minutes of 15 December 1886, recording the award of an exhibition worth £40 p.a. for four years [for today’s retail value multiply by a hundred]. This was the lowliest of the seven scholarships and exhibitions on offer, and had been won in a gruelling examination held over several days in the first week of the Christmas vacation. Some of the papers survive: Latin and Greek translation, verse and prose, in both directions; ‘historical questions’; and an English essay entitled, ‘How far is the actual constitution of society a standing mockery of its projected Christian ideals?’.

George came into residence on 15 October 1887. Since 1664 all new members of Trinity have written their own entries in a leather-bound register. That, and shaking hands with the President (the Rev. Henry Woods), made George a ‘Trinity man’. Immediately below his entry is that of Harold Dowdall, a friend from Rugby; above is Arthur Lowry. Turning the pages reveals the names of others who were to become George’s lifelong friends: Laurence Binyon, Archibald Ripley, Michael Furse…

A member of Trinity College, Oxford: George Calderon’s autograph entry in the Admissions Register

As a freshman George occupied a ‘set’ at the top of Staircase 7 (these days, 14) in the corner of the Garden Quadrangle. The staircase servant lit his fire, brought hot water, and delivered breakfast and lunch from the kitchen. Dinner was a communal meal, eaten in Hall, where the scholars and exhibitioners shared the long table nearest the fireplace. The room rent was £5 a term. In October 1888 George moved across the Quad to a first-floor room on Staircase 10 (today’s 17), for which he paid 10 shillings more. One can learn a lot about the lifestyle of an undergraduate from mundane ledgers and buttery books. In his first term George paid a gate charge to come in after 9 pm only once or twice each week; mostly he had the basic threepenny breakfast. I took down a Stores book at random, and leafed through Michaelmas Term 1890. George did not regularly buy coffee or tea, and a single box of biscuits (2s. 4d.) lasted him the term. Then suddenly, on 27 November, he splashed out 18 shillings on claret, and 11s. 3d. on port. Perhaps he was planning a party for his 22nd birthday on 2 December. The ‘Broad Book’ was used to calculate each man’s end-of-term bill. In the summer of 1889, George’s battels (the sum of weekly buttery bills) were the fourth highest in College at just under £20; and the total cost of his term, including university dues, various compulsory subscriptions, and tuition at 7 guineas, was the sixth highest, at £58 6s. 11d.

In the late 1880s Trinity had some 140 undergraduates in residence (in college or digs), of whom up to sixty would participate in Sunday night debates in the Junior Library. Debating Society minutes can suggest a man’s character, even presage his future career. George found his voice in his third term (Archie Ripley spoke much sooner), moving an amendment (defeated). Do I sense a man who enjoyed arguing for the sake of it? Almost always, it seems, he was on the losing side. On 1 December 1889 he moved ‘That in the opinion of this House the measures adopted by Temperance Reformers are incompatible with the dictates of reason and expediency’ – to which ‘the opposition was overwhelming’ and he lost by 20 votes. He was defeated again in January 1890, when he opposed the motion that ‘Realism in Literature and Art is to be deplored’.

George was quickly elected to the debating and paper-reading Gryphon Club. Members met weekly in each other’s rooms; they dined termly; and gathered for an annual photograph. George was funny, and he liked performing. In November 1890, the Oxford Magazine reported that he entertained the Gryphon with a ‘particularly amusing paper on “women”’. The following month he starred in a Smoking Concert (think in-house music hall), giving a ‘specially notable […] lecture on the art of recitation, illustrated by the poem of Burglar Bill’, and closing the first half in an unaccompanied quartet with Mike Furse and two others, singing the comical ‘catch’ ‘My Celia’s Charms’.

The Gryphon Club, 1890.

George (front left) often sits cross-legged in college photographs; and this is not the only one that shows him with a “no. 2” haircut, unusual for men of his class at this date. What with the cane and the waxed moustache, he has the air of an amateur magician — no wonder Herbert Blakiston (middle far left), is giving him such a dirty look. Other friends in this photograph are Archie Ripley (front far right), Laurence Binyon (back far right), Arthur Lowry (seated next to George), and Harold Dowdall (glued into the centre of the back row).

Sport was big in late Victorian Oxford. The Trinity Archive has a charming photograph of George leaning against a wall in a photograph of the 1890-1 Rugby XV. But how fast a runner was he really? A programme survives for the Trinity College Athletics Sports held at the end of his first term. George was one of 20 men competing in the heats of the 150 yards handicap, and was given a penalty of 7 yards. He was not placed, but came second in the mile. In the two years following, he again entered the mile, and again did not win. A keen but not outstanding middle-distance runner, then, at least as a young man.

George sat his Finals in the summer of 1891, and his Second in Literae Humaniores (Latin and Greek literature, philosophy, and history) was published in the University Calendar. And so he went down, as the Oxford jargon has it. But Trinity College remained in his blood. In Trinity Term 1895 George took his MA, that curious Oxford degree by means of which graduates acquire the status of life-long membership of their college and university. Trinity invited its MAs back regularly to college feasts – known as gaudies – while a committee of alumni organised an annual dinner in London. I don’t know if George ever attended, but I see in the battered ledger that equates to today’s alumni database that he updated his address when he returned from Russia: South Hill Farm, Eastcote, near Pinner. And when his close Trinity friend Archie Ripley lay dying, Percy Lubbock’s Sketch attests that George visited him assiduously. I think we can guess one thing at least that they talked about.

In 1902, George published his satirical novel Downy V. Green. Its unkind depiction of Herbert Blakiston has been discussed elsewhere on Calderonia, but let us consider here the setting of the book, the landscape and texture of the story. The moment when Downy is told off for walking on the grass of the Front Quad… His rooms on ‘the ground floor of a third quadrangle, surrounded on three sides by grey crumbling stone buildings, and open on the fourth, but for an iron railing, on to a long and stately garden’… Every detail, every custom of the fictional St Ives College shouts ‘Trinity!’. George was deficient in neither energy nor imagination: this vivid realisation is surely a testament to his deep and lasting affection for the place. A contemporary identified the character Bill Sykes as an ‘unmistakable reproduction’ of the Trinity rowing Blue Hugh Legge, and Sykes’s room as an ‘exact’ double of Legge’s. George drew his own illustration of undergraduates eating breakfast together – and is that the author himself sitting with his back to the window?

A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77

We don’t actually know how deeply Blakiston was offended by Downy. George was not the first person to make fun of him, and certainly not the last. Soon after his election to the Presidency in 1907, ‘Blinks’ began listing alumni publications in his annual reports, and George’s books appeared regularly: The Fountain, for example, in 1911. I have searched in vain for any evidence of Blakiston’s reaction to the famous incident in March 1912, when George was called on stage at the end of The Fountain’s first performance in the city and felt inspired to invite undergraduates to join him in a meeting in the Hall to discuss the Miners’ Strike. It is surely significant that it was to Trinity’s large gates on Broad Street that he led them. Trinity was his home in Oxford, and he acted instinctively.

And then, the War. Blakiston followed events closely in The Times. On 15 July 1915 he snipped out the announcement that George was missing – a man whom he had got to know in his first term as a tutor. For four years the President recorded the names of Trinity’s fallen on a scroll in the Chapel – a grim total of 155, each of whom he had known personally. Trinity’s War Memorial is the largest of any college memorial in Oxford, and it was very much Blakiston’s brainchild. Although not the most beautiful, it is undoubtedly the most useful, and arguably the most moving. Gifts of money and books poured in to build and stock the War Memorial Library – a place where the young men never did grow old. Laurence Binyon donated two guineas. Kittie sent a copy of Percy Lubbock’s Sketch of George. The Library was formally opened in November 1928, with the name G. L. Calderon emblazoned in gold letters almost at the top of the board above the entrance. George was the second most senior member of Trinity lost in the War, and the oldest to fall in action. The College does indeed remember them: the names are read in the Chapel every Remembrance Sunday, while for the duration of the First World War’s centenary, a new roll of honour is on display outside the Hall, alongside the earliest surviving manuscript of Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’.

Trinity’s fallen on the Roll of Honour in the War Memorial Library. The names are arranged by year of admission to the College. (Click image to enlarge)

It was almost two years after the Library was opened that Kittie Calderon wrote to Herbert Blakiston, out of the blue, to offer Arnold Pienne’s silverpoint drawing. Her letter of 14 July 1930 runs to three pages.

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Kittie’s letter to President Blakiston, offering the silverpoint portrait, 14 July 1930

Kittie’s tone seems oddly nervous; perhaps she was daunted by the President’s crusty reputation. She seems to have taken a break half way through writing, then picked up her pen to add a rush of detail; almost as if she is trying to offload responsibility for the idea onto Laurence Binyon. Or perhaps the gift was indeed Binyon’s suggestion in the first place, and Kittie is feeling awkward about the whole business. Binyon was a regular visitor to Trinity; he would have been familiar with the picture collection. The label glued on the back of the picture is in his writing.

George’s label, written by his undergraduate friend Laurence Binyon

Kittie calls the drawing ‘very delightful’ – but did she really think that? Patrick tells us she liked very few pictures of George. I very much look forward to reading his expert interpretation of this letter. Personally, I think she was spot-on when she described the drawing as beautiful. It seems so much nicer than the Frederick Hollyer photograph on which it was based (see extreme right in Calderonia’s portrait masthead). The silverpoint is softer, and warmer; George has lost that disdainful, almost audible, sniff. Yet he seems so pale, so mysterious; he looks desperately, achingly, sad. One can almost make eye contact – but then he slips away. He has come home to his College like a ghost. Or like a man who ‘just vanished in the smoke of battle…’

Clare Hopkins is the Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford. Throughout the project of researching and writing the first full-length biography of George Calderon, Clare has given me the full benefit of her knowledge as the college’s historian. Moreover, her suggestions, comments and ideas have shaken up my thinking in innumerable productive ways. Patrick Miles