Calderonia

Guest post by John Pym: Henry James’s ‘The Death of the Lion’

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Patrick Miles

The title page of Terminations with a portrait of Henry James (1906) by the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn. Photograph of James courtesy of the Literary Canon (S 2464).

An unnamed young Englishman, a lowly journalist with literary ambition, begins to tell a story (cast in the form of ‘meagre’ private notes): the author Neil Paraday is recuperating at home in the country from a grave illness; he’s published four books and his latest work, in two volumes, is about to appear. Signs suggest it will finally make his name. But will he live long enough, the reader wonders, to enjoy his good fortune? So begins Henry James’s tale ‘The Death of the Lion’, divided into ten fast-paced chapters, which appeared in April 1894 in Volume I of The Yellow Book, the Bodley Head’s strikingly illustrated new periodical.

A year later, James gathered together three of his published tales (including ‘The Death of the Lion’), two from The Yellow Book and one from Scribner’s Magazine, each touching on the intermingled themes of the business of literature and the price of reputation. These were to form the basis of a new collection which would conclude with a brand new work, a mystical, slightly suffocating story titled ‘The Altar of the Dead’, a two-hander, one of whose characters is a woman who earns her living by writing for magazines – though magazines, one infers, less generous or cutting-edge than The Yellow Book.

The four tales appeared between hard covers under the title Terminations. Opposite the title page of the English edition the London publisher William Heinemann drew attention to five other six-shilling ‘short stories in one volume’, including Frank Harris’s Elder Conklin and I. Zangwill’s The King of Schnorrers (‘With over Ninety Illustrations by Phil May and Others’, Heinemann added in a second notice at the back of the book).

In 1895 short stories sold well. They were admired and enjoyed, and could, as Terminations demonstrates, be attractively recycled. One reason James favoured The Yellow Book, his biographer Leon Edel notes, was that its publisher offered the inducement of no limit on an author’s word count. ‘The Death of the Lion’ runs to nearly fifteen thousand words, a figure that few if any commissioning editors of print journals would countenance today.

On reading Terminations a few months ago, I was struck first, however, not by the modern anomaly of three short stories reprinted between handsome blue boards, the page signatures of which had to be cut with a paperknife by the book’s first eager reader, but by how little the literary world sardonically (yet often merrily) satirised by Henry James in the closing years of the reign of Queen Victoria, had changed nearly a hundred and thirty years later at the start of the reign of King Charles III.

There were, perhaps, no Hay-on-Wye literary festivals or heaving Frankfurt book fairs in the mid-1890s, or indeed wearisome month-long author tours, but as James’s narrator recounts, looking at the scene from the outside, many of the modern absurdities of the Literary Life – in London, Venice or New York – were then abundantly present and oppressively to the fore.

The story opens, for instance, with a markedly unvarnished scene between our narrator and his ‘chief’, Mr Pinhorn, the sharp new editor of a weekly magazine recently saved from extinction by a fire-sale buy-up. The former pitches the idea of an interview with Mr Paraday: a man who hasn’t as yet, in that cold phrase, ‘been touched’ by anyone else. ‘When I had reminded him [Mr Pinhorn] that the great principle on which we were supposed to work was just to create the demand we required, he considered a moment and then rejoined: “I see; you want to write him up”’ (my italics).

Neil Paraday – his creator’s alter ego? well, maybe – was a timid, somewhat anti-social man anxious mainly to be left in peace to complete his work. He had a rented base in Sloane Street, Chelsea, and a wife from whom he was separated but whose upkeep he paid. He was, at this point, it seems, simply getting by. But fame was about to crash on him like a wave, and the narrator perceives, in a characteristic burst of Jamesian empathy, his author’s acute vulnerability, and without ado (or even permission) appoints himself to the role of amanuensis and gatekeeper.

Enter the vainglorious Mr Morrow, with his walking stick and ‘violently new gloves’, a celebrity gossip columnist, who appears at Paraday’s country retreat, looking for a scoop and boasting of his syndicated effusions in thirty-seven influential journals – including The Tatler’s ‘Smatter and Chatter’ column. He’s a hack crashingly determined to create the required demand. Mr Morrow, the coming man, would not, one feels, have hesitated a second to burglarise a film star’s phone – had there been film stars or mobile phones in 1894.

James warms to his task as the tale unfolds. Next up is the salon hostess Mrs Weeks Wimbush, chatelaine of a grand mansion called Prestidge (pay close attention to these names), to which she invites her grand friends, Lady Augusta Minch and Lord Dorimont, plus a bulky, privileged and perfectly delineated European Princess, to be entertained by her latest literary lion, who, this July, is the luckless and not-at-all-well Neil Paraday.

James has his narrator elegantly embroider the tapestry of his ‘meagre notes’ by beginning to relate the climactic events of this catastrophic house party by means of a letter, a love letter of sorts, to the American heroine of the tale, Miss Fanny Hurter, a would-be autograph hunter first introduced bearing a huge volume containing signatures of the great and the good, living and dead.

I will not spoil the wrap-up – ‘The Death of the Lion’ is available at no cost to read online – except to say that Miss Hurter does not disappoint and that Henry James proves himself a quite exceptional farceur as Mrs Wimbush’s guests first casually disrespect the two volumes of Paraday’s new book, which have been reverentially displayed for them to leaf through and appreciate, and then succeed in losing the manuscript ‘scheme’ of the author’s next and very possibly greatest work.

It should be noted, however, that the tale’s final episode features two other authors wholly unlike Neil Paraday. They’re literary shooting stars possessed of a miraculous insight into ‘the larger latitude’ (whatever that may be) who play key roles in the denouement: Guy Walsingham author of Obsessions, and Dora Forbes author of The Other Way Round. But, heaven’s above! ‘Guy’ is really Miss Collop, ‘a pretty little girl who wore her hair in what used to be called a crop’, while ‘Dora’ is ‘florid and bald; [his face adorned with] a big red moustache’.

‘You bewilder me a little,’ the narrator says to Lady Augusta, chief culprit in the loss of Paraday’s priceless manuscript, when all this is being explained to him, ‘in the age we live in one gets lost among the genders and pronouns.’ Henry James – dated and unreadable..?

* * *

Kittie’s copy of Terminations and George’s inscription.

I’m grateful to Patrick Miles – whose Diary post of 6 February 2023, on the subject of short stories, prompted me to write the above – for the kind gift of a copy of the second edition of Terminations. The book came from the Library of George and Kittie Calderon and proved surplus to requirement when the collection was archived. The inscription on the flyleaf reveals that it was a Christmas present to Kittie from George (‘Peety’) in 1905.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Terminations', 'The Altar of the Dead', 'The Death of the Lion', comments, commissioning editors, Frank Harris, gender, George Calderon, gossip columnists, Henry James, I. Zangwill, John Pym, journalism, Kittie Calderon, Leon Edel, literary hostesses, literary life, literary salons, literature, magazines, manuscripts, Neil Paraday, Peety, Phil May, pseudonyms, Scribner's Magazine, short stories, The Tatler, The Yellow Book, William Heinemann | 2 Comments

Keith Dewhurst: a new Spring of writing

Posted on April 10, 2023 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Keith Dewhurst (whose Wikipedia entry does not log half his achievements) was born in 1931. I would say he is the greatest survivor of the British post-war theatrical renaissance that is often compared to the Elizabethan-Jacobean phenomenon. As well as being one of the original Z-Cars writing team and author of over twenty TV plays, he has created many plays for the Royal Court, the National Theatre and elsewhere, including Lark Rise and Black Snow, and written the screenplay The Land Girls, the novel Captain of the Sands, and a fantastic book about Manchester United entitled When You Put on a Red Shirt.

So Keith Dewhurst is ninety-one… You might expect something diminuendo, then, even autumnal, from his latest book (see above), published in March. Far from it! This and the other two works of fiction he finished in lockdown are as vibrant, original, mind-bending, comedic and unputdownable as anything out there by a young writer.

The actual key to the title of his latest book can be found in the eponymous first novella, but to say more would be a spoiler. Take it from me, the ‘faery kingdom’ of Autumnia is an exceedingly ingenious element in the plot, which concerns the absolute self-belief of an upper class matriarch, Mercy Runacre, married to Hector, an MP in Attlee’s government, and the return of their eldest son who disappeared on a bombing mission over Germany in 1943. As a boy in the 1950s I knew families like this and Dewhurst’s evocation of post-war Britain is uncanny. There is a lot of class, bounders and cheerless sex, but bags of humour too. One of my favourite moments is when, having lost the 1951 election, Attlee summons Hector to offer him a Barony. ‘How are you?’ Hector asks. ‘The dry little man scraped at his pipe with a match-stick. “Slugs all over the garden,” he said, “but I suppose we mustn’t complain.” He tapped down fresh tobacco and tried to light a match.’

The second novella, ‘Art Movers’, will really keep you on your toes. In all of the novellas Dewhurst tells his story through short scenes that knit beautifully together, but in ‘Art Movers’ the scenes are shorter than ever and not titled as chapters, because the essence of Charlie March’s job is flitting from one place to another with his van and managing a cast of about thirty characters and bit parts (his part-time employees). March is an ex-soldier who fought in Iraq and suffers from bad PTSD, but has discovered his métier as an efficient, no-questions-asked transporter of valuable art works, mainly in London. You have to work out, then, what exactly is going on in his daily life, and with whom, which is demanding. But as I have implied, Dewhurst’s vast theatrical experience shines through his prose here: each scene moves at a terrific pace on the page (there is not a redundant word), so the effect for the reader is really like watching live theatre. Arcing the whole narrative is the question of whether Charlie will accept Beth’s demand that they live together. It is not resolved until the last two pages — and very movingly.

The novella that you might assume is ‘autumnal’, even autobiographical, is ‘After’, whose hero is an elderly widowed dramatist, Wilf, who has serious heart problems, a carer aptly named April, and an undying drive to write. Like Keith Dewhurst, Wilf lives on the Isle of Wight, but that’s as far as the resemblance goes. Wilf’s situation (‘Old Man Desperation’, the title of chapter 2) enables him to deliver himself of choice comments about life in Britain today, of which this is a representative sample:

‘Look at them. Bloody newsreaders. All they do is read autocues but they think they are philosopher kings.’

Wilf asked [the Help Line] if any of the self-righteous wanking do-gooders running British television had any artistic rigour at all, and was cut off.

‘If only transgenders play transgenders I suppose only serial killers will play serial killers?’ Wilf mocked.

But such Meldrewism is incidental. There are two plotlines, both superbly handled. A young relation named Cookie turns up, who is curious to know Wilf as she believes he is her grandfather. She also resembles him as a loner and black sheep. Covid and lockdown strike. ‘Self-isolation, Wilf had observed, was what writers sought above all, but for the most part the world denied them.’ Cookie stays for the duration and again Dewhurst achieves a brilliant twist of a resolved ending…which again I must not spoil.

The other plotline, however, is not resolved. When Wilf tried to write, ‘there was the ache behind his forehead again, and a blank when he sought a situation that would be the metaphor for what he wanted to show’. But that situation is found in the death of theatre in the English Civil War. An actor who was there tells the story of the demise of the King’s Men (‘Shakespeare’s company’) in chapters parallel to the main plot, evoking the life of these actors as marvellously as Dewhurst did with Victorian actors in The History of Polly Bowler. The great theatrical renaissance of the first Elizabethan age is killed by the zealotry of Puritans and Cromwell’s soldiers…a metaphor for the death, as Wilf sees it, of the theatrical renaissance of the second Elizabethan age at the hands of militant wokery.

Keith Dewhurst, the Isle of Wight Literary Festival programme, 2022. (Copyright Andy Butler)

It is very rare for me to re-read a new work of fiction immediately, but I have done just that with Autumnia and enjoyed it even more the second time. It seems to me these three novellas would be perfect for a reading group, as each is so different and bound to stoke interpretation, discussion and even argument. They are all utterly up to date. Dewhurst’s knowledge of life in Britain today puts my own to shame. ‘Art Movers’ and ‘After’ are particularly topical. And he always writes fast, vividly and punchily. Autumnia is so fresh and alive that it leaves you feeling Keith Dewhurst has not entered ‘Autumn’ as a writer, but a new Spring. The book is pure Primavera!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged art dealing, Autumnia: Three Novellas, Clement Attlee, COVID-19, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, English Civil War, Iraq, Isle of Wight, James I, Keith Dewhurst, King's Men, Lark Rise, lockdowns, London, Manchester United, National Theatre, novella, plotlines, Primavera, PTSD, Puritans, Royal Court, The History of Polly Bowler, theatrical renaissance, Venice Three, wokery, World War 2, Z-Cars, zealotry | Leave a comment

Guest post by Jim Miles: Call My Agent!

Posted on March 27, 2023 by Patrick Miles

One of my jobs is teaching English at a language school in Cambridge. I have students varying in age from teenagers right up to retired adults, and from countries all over the world. This makes the work very interesting but naturally it can be quite tiring, especially when there is a rapid turnover of students requiring very different needs and lesson content/styles.

At the start of the year I had a French student whom I taught mostly 1-to-1 for 90 minutes per day, working on general fluency and training her for potentially taking the IELTS exam so that she can study at a UK university. Often 1-to-1 classes with the same student every day for weeks can become quite grindy and even exhausting, but with this student we had five weeks of such classes without it ever feeling like the format was wearing thin. I think one reason for this is that we had bonded over our mutual interest in Netflix shows and she recommended a few to me that I had even begun watching and discussing with her. The one that hooked me the most was Dix pour cent (literally, Ten Per Cent, titled Call My Agent! in English).

Dix pour cent is a French Netflix show, set at a fictional Paris-based acting agency, with a core cast (pictured above) playing the agents at the firm and a ‘real-life’ actor every episode playing a ‘version’ of themselves. For example, over the 4 seasons of the programme (24 episodes in total) we see Juliette Binoche, Jean Reno, Sigourney Weaver, Isabelle Huppert, and so on, each playing themselves in their own episode where the plot of that particular instalment essentially revolves around them and their interactions with the agency. It’s a great concept which gives the real-life actor a chance to parody and mock themselves in hilarious ways, but which also has many story arcs about the agency itself, and the personal lives of the agents (who, unlike the guest actor, feature in every episode).

I’ve seen all four series now, and in fact have started again from the beginning, watching with my parents. We are two episodes in and they seem to be really enjoying it. The student who recommended the show to me said that she is in a cycle herself of watching and rewatching it all on a loop: she will miss the characters so begin from the start, get through all the episodes and then, a few months later, do the same again!

Watching the programme helped my classes with my student because each day when we began I would explain which episode I had seen the previous day and we would start by discussing that as a warm up. Often I would ask about particular aspects of French language or culture that had come up, and I think this was a very good way to encourage her to be articulate and dynamic in her use of English, as she was actually talking about something she knew very well and was interested in, rather than the often rather dry prompts from the stock exam materials.

One particular bit of language which appeared in the show and which I discussed with my student is the French term bobo. Actually my student had already told me this word when it came up in an alternative context to do with particular areas of Paris and the type of people you find there. However, it then featured in an episode of Dix pour cent that I watched, so I had the meaning reinforced.

In this scene, shown above, two of the agents are trying to film in a public place for rather complicated and convoluted reasons relating to a contract that they have broken. As you can see, there is a guy in the background on an electronic scooter ruining the shot!

He is described by the agent Andréa as a bobo, which is a portmanteau of ‘bourgeois-bohemian’. What makes this interesting to me is that in the English subtitles the term is translated as ‘hipster’, however after discussing this with many of my French students it seems they disagree with that translation and the term is more nuanced — something more like ‘champagne socialist’ in English, rather than merely a ‘hipster’ (which many of them said they use in French). I think the translation to ‘hipster’ works fine in the context of the scene, but it was interesting to learn from my students that there was some additional subtlety to this term bobo and that they use ‘hipster’ themselves in their native language, with perhaps a very slightly different meaning from in English.

I spoke to a French former colleague about the show, and she described Andréa (seen with the cigarette above) as the main character and it being ‘based on a true story’. From this I extrapolated that the writer of the ‘true story’ had been the Andréa character and that the events in the show were adapted from her own life, but the sources I found online suggest that actually Dix pour cent is based on the memoirs of Dominique Besnehard, a French actor and talent manager. Either way, I think I agree with my friend that Andréa is the main character in the show, as several of the later story arcs revolve around her personal life and even from the early episodes she is one of the most watchable and formidable presences at the agency. Indeed, watching now for my second time and my parents’ first time, they comment constantly about her behaviour, usually paired with something about what an impressively-sized nose the actress who plays her (Camille Cottin) has.

Dix pour cent is a show that is compelling and funny even if you do not really have an interest in the French language — certainly it is easy to follow with the English subtitles, which are very high-quality. However, for people who do have an interest in the French language it has an additional layer of enjoyment for these bobo-like terms that pop up. I am looking forward to continuing it with the folks!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged acting agencies, bobo, Call My Agent, Camille Cottin, comments, Dix pour cent, Dominique Besnehard, France, guest posts, hipster, IELTS, James Miles, Juliette Binoche, language teaching, Netflix, Paris, scooters, Sigourney Weaver, subtitles, translation | 4 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 22

Posted on March 20, 2023 by Patrick Miles

‘Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, holds the flag of a military unit as an officer kisses it, during commemorative event on the occasion of the Russia-Ukraine war one year anniversary in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 24, 2023. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP)’

24 February 2023
A recent study made by a reliable Moscow source indicates that 22% of the Russians polled were fervently in favour of the war on Ukraine, 20% were deeply opposed to it, and the rest (58%) ‘had no feelings either way’. I sighed when I read this, because it is exactly what I would have expected. The bugbear of Russian politics has always been the profound indifference of most Russians to what their government is doing. ‘There is the government, Patrick, and there is us, you see. The two are quite separate. We don’t want anything to do with the government’, was the sort of thing people said to me when I was in Russia (admittedly, under communism, but they no longer said this out of sheer terror). Or as Nadezhda Mandel’shtam put it: ‘In Russia everything always happens at the top. The common people say nothing’ (narod bezmolvstvuet — the last stage direction of Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov, interpolated by a censor, probably the tsar). The narod may well have a pungent, intelligent and meditated opinion about Russian politics and politicians (this was confirmed to me by what I heard when I travelled incognito third class across the steppe from Taganrog towards Donetsk in 1970), but they have absolutely no desire to represent it. Yes, it really does mean that about 60% of the Russian people aren’t interested in democracy. So they do not have it, and have no experience of a true, functioning democracy. Freedom and effective democracy demand responsibility rather than the pursuit of self-gratification, and the former is far too much effort for most Russians. It’s a horrible saying, but true: people get the government they deserve, in the sense of what they have either passively permitted or actively fought for.

4 March
I have just come across the Greek quotation mega biblion, mega kakon (the poet Callimachus, apparently, third century BC). It means ‘A big book is a big mistake’. I love the sound of the Greek word for ‘mistake’, which could be loosely (‘loosely’!) translated as ‘cack-on’. My biography of George Calderon (534 pages) is the finest-looking book I will ever produce, but I shall never again publish one so thick. We simply had to charge £30 for it. Of course, I think it is worth every penny, but despite all the good reviews and laborious marketing we only recently broke even and still have 27% of our stock left to sell. There is no doubt in my mind that £30 is too much for most people to pay for a biography, especially when its subject is not already well known. A thick book is an expensive book. Callimachus was right: ‘a mega-book is a mega-cack-on’…

11 March
Talk of the Devil and… Two days after writing the preceding, I decided I must read Jennifer Homans’ November 2022 biography of the Georgian-Russian ballet master George Balanchine (1904-83), who together with Lincoln Kirstein (‘the money’) founded New York City Ballet and is recognised as the Father of American ballet generally. It is a magnificent Granta hardback, 772 pages long, weighs in at 2.5 lbs, and costs…well, that’s the interesting thing: £36.50 at W.H. Smith first time round, now the RRP is £35, you can get it on Amazon for £27.69, the paperback for £22.50, and Kindle for £15.19. So the hardback started at over £30, but it looks as though someone realised £36.50 was not only a very odd price (perhaps a conversion from U.S. dollars), but a publishing cack-on.

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

It took me five days to read the book, and personally I think it could benefit by being 150 pages shorter (but who am I to talk?). Jennifer Homans is undoubtedly a very brilliant person. In her late teens she trained at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, observed him in the last years of his life, danced in many of his ballets, then at twenty-six embarked on an academic career that has culminated in her being Scholar in Residence at New York University and the New Yorker’s dance critic. It is not clear how long she researched this blockbuster, but it was ‘over a decade’ (p. 608) and took her to archives all over the world. I think she spent too long informing herself about early influences on Balanchine’s mind (Russian Nietzscheism, Vladimir Soloviev, theosophy etc); the resulting part is too long, superficial and unconvincing. As someone who has been on the inside of American ballet, she is also apt to cover pages and pages with names and ballet politics. But the book is still 75% absorbing, and make no mistake: balletomanes the world over are going to have to own a copy. (I decided I must read it because of the cross-over between Ballets Russes, Michel Fokine and George.) A mega-book, then, but not a mega-publishing-cack-on.

18 March
One of the expressions of George Calderon’s that I am rather fond of (and there are many), occurs in his letter to William Rothenstein of 1 January 1915: ‘I have fallen into a routine of slight occupations’.

The ‘slight occupation’ in my case is to have become practically the literary agent for two poets and two prose translators. Needless to say, I am not a professional literary agent, despite one of the poets having just written to me: ‘let us know how much and we will pay whatever you suggest’! (Definitely not; it would be the thin end of a not-slight occupation wedge.) I just think they are all first-rate and one should assist good art if possible.

What happens is that I suggest who they should submit their work to, or I myself write to the poetry editor/publisher a straight recommendation with corroboration, and the only reason a surprising number of these recommendations have been taken up is that I manifestly have no ‘axe to grind’. A lot of my poems have been published, and I have absolutely no translation ambitions left. Or, as I have put it to one of the translators, ‘I am retired, which is as much as to say dead, and therefore Olympian, or at least not vexatious’.

Frankly, no professional literary agent has ever done anything for me. My theatre agent since 1988, Alexandra Cann, has been wonderful — finding me translation work in theatre and radio, as well as introducing me to eminent theatre people. But, of course, I am not an actor. To discover the excitement and psychodrama (some might say farce) of ‘representation’ for actors, you could not do better than watch the Netflix show Dix pour cent (Call My Agent!, with subtitles). It has ineffable French flavours, but as far as I can see the agency it portrays is the same in its essentials as big acting agencies this side of the Channel. Sam2 (aka James Miles) introduced me to it a few weeks ago, and I just had to invite him to do a guest post about it — which follows in a week’s time.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Personal commentary | Tagged acting agencies, Alexander Pushkin, Alexandra Cann, autocracy, ballet, Ballets Russes, biographies, books, Boris Godunov, Call My Agent, Callimachus, comments, democracy, Dix pour cent, France, freedom, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Balanchine, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Granta Publishing, independent publishing, James Miles, Jennifer Homans, Lincoln Kirstein, literary agents, Michel Fokine, Moscow, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, New York City Ballet, opinion polls, responsibility, Russia, Sam&Sam, School of American Ballet, theatre agents, theosophy, Ukraine, Vladimir Soloviev, Volodymyr Zelensky, William Rothenstein | Leave a comment

Cambridge Tales 5: ‘East of the Rhine’ (Concluded)

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Patrick Miles

One afternoon in the last week of November, there was a soft knock on the door of my room. Before me stood an elegantly thin woman in her late twenties, wearing an extremely expensive-looking bleu nuit cashmere coat with a silk scarf and holding a flat, shiny black handbag. Her eyes had a sparkle, but her black hair and brows, and the pallor of her face, gave her an unmistakably serious, even strained expression.

‘Gerald? I am Azita…a friend of Eric Smith.’

I ushered her silently in, but she said she had only a few minutes. Without taking her coat off, she sat down.

‘Eric thought highly of you – he told me about the conversations you had. So I am sure he would want you to know what has happened to him.’

‘Ye-s… Where is he?’

‘As I think you know, he went with the British contingent to Bosnia. He got on extremely well with the Serbian commanders and soldiers, and even learned a lot of Serbian – he was very quick at languages. So he was drawn into a bit of intelligence work…reconnaissance and so forth.’

She fiddled with her fingers on her lap.

‘Then the Serbs took over Srebrenica. Eric heard rumours of what happened there, but he did not believe them… He was stationed far away from it, you see, but he had met officers who he knew were in that area, so after the NATO bombing he managed to visit villages around Srebrenica… He found people were digging up mass graves – from executions – and concealing the bodies elsewhere. He saw things – corpses blindfolded and with their hands tied, soaked in blood, mutilated and dismembered, sometimes with their throats cut, even young boys murdered – things that no-one should ever have to see, and when the local people discovered he was British, they told him horrific stories… It was not just war atrocities, he said, but genocide… I don’t know. He couldn’t stand it, and went back to Vitez…where he had a nervous breakdown.’

‘I see…’

‘Eric’s parents contacted me when he was sent home, and I managed to visit him. He was, how do you say, catatonic, weeping all the time, and drinking a lot, of course.’

‘But why on earth did he go back to Bosnia?’

She looked down for a second, tensed her lips, and when she looked up I saw her bright eyes glint. She sat upright and drew in her stomach.

‘It was shame, Gerald. He told me that he felt such personal shame. He had thought the world of those soldiers, he admired them so much…and he simply could not understand how the same men could do such terrible things. “They are not soldiers…they are not soldiers”, he kept repeating. And he felt so ashamed of having admired and trusted them – and even other soldiers, in the past – that he said he had to “expiate” it before the Bosniaks, Srebrenica’s Muslims who had been murdered. I…I am a Muslim myself. In September he drew out a lot of his savings, he managed to bluff and bribe his way – you can imagine – to a village just north of Srebrenica, and he worked there with a lot of investigators exhuming the victims and giving them proper burials.’

I was speechless and felt sick. Azita sat and stared at me.

‘Wha- Where is he now?’

‘They have a lot of alcohol there, and I believe he sank lower and lower. He basically became a gravedigger. Then at the end of October, in an evening’s drinking, he was killed with a spade by someone who said he had insulted Serbia’s honour.’

She looked at her watch.

‘I must go, I’m afraid. Look, this is where he is buried.’

She took out a wallet from inside her coat and showed me a coloured photograph. In the foreground, blurred, were a number of white stelae, evidently gravestones in a formal cemetery. But set back from them against a fence and overhung by a small tree in what looked like an orchard, was a slightly narrow English-style tombstone, brought into focus. It bore Eric’s name, his dates, and a strange epitaph in capitals: DEFEANCE.

‘It was put up by the Bosniaks,’ the beautiful woman said. ‘The British Army informed Eric’s parents.’

‘But what does this word mean?’

‘I don’t know. The locals buried him and I think they must have got confused. “Defence”? “Defiance”? It seems to be both. Presumably they heard Eric say it – repeat it.’

‘Oh, in Eric’s case I’m sure it was “Defiance”… As in Henry the Fifth: “Scorn and Defiance!” He was a great admirer of Churchill and he himself defied all conventional thinking, of course.’

‘Yes… I must go. I will try to write to you. I still have this.’

She opened her handbag, to my astonishment took out Eric’s folded claret tie, then carefully put it back.

I accompanied her to the front door. She turned, smiled cursorily but sincerely, and almost ran up the drive. I could see what looked like a black limousine waiting for her.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged alcoholism, atrocities, Azita, Bosnia, Cambridge Tales, cemeteries, defiance, Eric Smith, genocide, Iran, massacres, militarism, NATO, Nazis, Persia, Rhine, Serbia, Srebrenica, Territorial Army, The British Army, ties, Vitez, war crimes, war graves, Winston Churchill, World War 2, Yugoslavia | Leave a comment

Cambridge Tales 5: ‘East of the Rhine’

Posted on March 6, 2023 by Patrick Miles

For Andrew Tatham

I can’t unerringly recall how the ‘East of the Rhine Drinking Society’ started – and it only met three or four times – but it has left a long vapour trail across my mind.

At first, you didn’t notice Eric Smith at postgraduate gatherings, as he was slight and about five foot six. But when your eyes did light on him, he instantly stood out from the other historians: he was dapper and, well, really very handsome. He had strong black hair and close-shaven stubble visible from a distance on a slightly gaunt face, twinkling blue eyes, rather beautiful lips that curled when he spoke, as though about to stammer, and was impeccably dressed in jacket, waistcoat and dark red tie. He always seemed to be conversing with a restrained but intense humour. Nevertheless, I did not make his acquaintance at these gatherings. He stood ramrod straight and his nickname, I heard, was ‘The General’.

What I think happened is that we once found ourselves walking up the same road to our respective accommodation, he stopped until I caught up with him, and he initiated a humorous conversation. I noticed that if he found something deeply funny, his eyes would twinkle more than ever and seem to withdraw into his head. When we reached the college house I lived in, I must have invited him in to finish a bottle of vodka I had left from a party, together with the remains of some gherkins and rollmops.

I remember that he was delighted by the innovation of knocking back small glasses of chilled vodka and following them with a tiny snack. He was animated, but sat stiffly in his armchair, and I soon realised that his lower jaw was somewhat set, too. It flashed on me that, although only about twenty-five, he had some incipient neurological complaint, especially as his hand occasionally quivered.

Apart from immediate tacit agreement about the Soviet Union, the only thing I recall from this session was that Eric took a childlike pleasure in double- and triple-barrelled names. It emerged when he happened to mention his supervisor, Hugh Quabberton-Minns. He dissolved in laughter.

‘Quabberton-Minns! Qua-bber-ton Minns!’ He spoke slowly, deliberately, and his whole face beamed. ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it…how they all seem to have these mouthfuls of names… It somehow immediately gives them more “bottom”!’

He took a slow, particular drag on his long cigarette, then held it close to his face, the smoke braiding upwards.

‘When we were in Africa, my father knew Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa…’ He looked up and enunciated the name rotundly. ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ He rolled it off his tongue with twinkling eyes and a series of short laughs from his throat. ‘Or: Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam! See-woo-sagur Ram-goolam! Mind you, that’s not double barrelled. Do they have them in Russian?’

I am afraid I could think of only one. But in next to no time Eric was able to reproduce it.

‘Afan-arsy Ars-aynevich Kutoo-zov Golen-ee-shchev… Fan-tastic!’ He repeated it several times, then: ‘Did you know that Ranulph Fiennes is really Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes?’

I did not, so I practised saying it. I must admit, the fruity aristocratism of such names had always amused me, and we finished the bottle of vodka spluttering and collapsing in laughter over the increasingly concatenated and preposterous varieties Eric produced from his store.

A week or two later, I suppose, Eric buttonholed me after Hall and asked me if I would like to come to him ‘for a return match’ on a day that he named. It was possible for me to accept.

He lived in the smallest flat of his postgraduate hostel, up six flights of stairs. I entered straight into the tiny living room, which was set out: two chairs, a coffee table between them with a bowl of peanuts, two small tumblers, and in the middle a tall, unopened bottle of schnapps.

Eric was in an infectiously merry mood. He was standing fairly rigidly to welcome me, in waistcoat and red tie, but grinning all over his face and even lightly rubbing his hands. He dug his jaw forwards as he laughed his deep-throated laugh.

‘Huh-huh-huh! I thought this evening we would drink from another culture – as it were!’

We sat down immediately and he broke the seal on the bottle.

‘Let’s drink first to our finishing our theses! Prosit!’

‘Do we have to click our heels?’ I said, and raised my glass.

My main experience of spirits hitherto had been of vodka; so I may have downed too much of the glass first go. Neat schnapps was certainly a more substantial drink…

‘I saw you chatting to Maurice Dawson at Hall.’

‘Yes, he’s offering to let me read his thesis.’

‘Huh-huh-huh! It’s on Thomas Tabberer, isn’t it? Some very minor Tudor chancellor…’

‘Yurss… He’s not only finished it, it’s bound and submitted. Apparently it’s quite slim and I could read it in an evening.’

‘Huh-huh-huh, I bet you could – if you wanted to! He’s finished it two terms early and will probably go off to teach at Marlborough or somewhere. He’s a schoolmaster! Thos Cromwell is the only interesting Tudor chancellor…’

Eric poured us another glass of schnapps and expanded on Sir Thomas More, whom he considered ‘a fraud’. More was ‘a reactionary’… I expatiated on Konstantin Pobedonostsev, certainly a reactionary religious statesman under Alexander III…

Suddenly, the front door opened and a slim girl of about seventeen darted in. She had lightish hair and wore a grey dress with, however, a turquoise shirt over the top. She moved deftly round us, with her eyes downcast, but I could just see a demure smile on her mouth. She was carrying a small pile of ironed clothes. She flitted into the gyp room and quietly closed the sliding door behind her.

I looked at Eric. He twinkled his eyes and grinned at me.

‘That’s Mila.’

‘She’s, er…’

‘Yes! Her older sister is even prettier. Actually, the older sister is stunning…but already betrothed. They are twigs on the Persian royal tree, you know.’

I asked no questions. I had the impression from a few clinks that Mila was washing up.

‘Let’s have another. Good, isn’t it? Echt deutsch!’

The conversation turned to my experiences in Russia, which, unlike most people, Eric was genuinely interested in. Suddenly the gyp room door opened. Mila nipped past us into what I assumed was Eric’s bedroom, emerged with a carrier bag, and was making for the front door.

‘Thank you, Mila.’

The girl stopped, half turned to Eric, smiled, and was gone.

‘Actually, I am very interested in Prussia. I’ve been there a few times…former Prussia, you understand, as both the Americans and Adenauer wanted to abolish it. Prussia played a massive part in German history… You and I, one could say, are both East of the Rhine blokes!’

He poured us another glass of schnapps and I scooped up some peanuts.

I had known that Eric’s field was military history; now, as we slugged our way through the bottle, more emerged. He had first become interested in the German army when he did World War 1 at school. Schlieffen, the Moltkes, Falkenhayn, they were all Prussians of course…and they all failed… His focus now was World War 2 and the ‘Battle of Egypt’.

‘Churchill invented that name for it. “Not the end, nor even the beginning of the end”,’ he chuckled imitatively, ‘“but perhaps the end of the beginning”…’

The conversation got slower and slower. To an observer, the pauses would have far outweighed the words. In fact, recalling it now it seems ‘timeless’; as though Eric’s one-liners were suspended in Time.

‘He desperately needed a victory, you see… Alamein was it… The “turning point” of the War… I’m taking an ex-tremely close look at El Alamein… Day by day… And “Monty”…’

After the schnapps, I am pretty sure Eric produced a bottle of white wine, which we also drained. Between glasses and weighty utterances, we dozed where we sat, then somehow or other I negotiated all the stairs and got home around three.

About a fortnight later I was sitting deep in one of the distressed leather armchairs of the Middle Combination Room reading the paper, when Eric looked round the door, greeted, sat down next to me, and picked up the Spectator.

‘Isn’t it about time we had another meeting of the East of the Rhine Drinking Society?’ he grinned.

I knew what this meant, of course, so I prepared with lemon zest a bottle of green label Moskovskaya and put it in the freezer for a week later.

He was on sparkling form, assisted by the plates of zakuski I had laid on.

‘Since our last meeting, I’ve become a revisionist! You see, I just don’t believe the Battle of El Alamein was the turning point of World War 2 that it’s cracked up to be. Churchill ordered all the bells to be rung after it, of course, because in 1942 he desperately needed a victory. The Conservative Party were beginning to doubt his leadership! When you come down to it, Stalin was right to tell Churchill that he was scared of fighting the Germans – by attacking across the Channel.’

‘Ah, well, you can’t expect me to agree with Stalin!’

‘Certainly, certainly, but it was the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk that really turned the tide against Hitler. Look: the death toll at Alamein was infinitesimal, compared with the half a million men the Germans and Russians each lost during the Stalingrad campaign!’

‘But Montgomery defeated Rommel, didn’t he?’

‘Yes. Yes, he did. In the summer of 1942 Churchill shouted at his War Cabinet: “Rommel, Rommel, Rommel, Rommel! What matters but defeating him?” The Eighth Army pushed the Panzer Army Africa back to Tunis, it surrendered, but Rommel – the “Desert Fox”! – escaped. He is by far the most interesting, original and innovative general. Montgomery was a set-battle man. You can’t imagine him downing a schnapps or smoking! He was a dry old stick…there’s something cold and peculiar about Monty. He was ascetic, you know, almost Edwardian.’

Eric continued to expound his ‘revisionist’ view of the Battle of El Alamein through three or four more vodkas, then turned to asking me about Russian women. But I also discovered something startling about him. He revealed that a year earlier he had joined the Territorial Army, having held some superior rank in the Combined Cadet Force at school. I could imagine his TA uniform hanging in his wardrobe, as immaculate as his usual state of dress, but wondered how his hand tremor might affect his markmanship.

The third meeting of the East of the Rhine Drinking Society was a significant deterioration. Entering Eric’s room, I saw a short, goblet-like glass set out on either side of the table, with a bottle of beer and a tall glass beside each. This combination, Eric explained, was a Herrengedeck (drinker’s set). Into the small glass he poured a clear liquid called Korn. You could down this in one like vodka, but it was probably best not to, huh-huh-huh; the real point of the Herrengedeck was to ‘chase’ it down with the beer (which was also German). I am glad he warned me about the Korn, because it was absolutely disgusting. It somehow tasted as though it was raw rye grain, it immediately hollowed out my mouth, and when it hit my stomach I wanted to vomit. The beer on top was certainly a relief.

After relating with many a witty dig and radiant smile that he was feeling more and more ‘alienated’ from the other college historians, Eric took up again the character of Bernard Montgomery.

‘He was boring! You only have to look at him… Always wearing sack and that ridiculous black beret! Then look at Rommel – ’ He went to his desk and showed me a framed photo. ‘The full suavity of a German field marshal, with his embossed shoulder boards, stars, the eagle on his breast pocket, and the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords at his throat…’

‘Quite the Kurt Steiner from The Eagle Has Landed.’

‘Well, Caine certainly knew how to wear that uniform…’

‘But someone in Russia once told me that when Monty appeared at a reception in the Kremlin, everyone was amazed that he was wearing only one medal – perhaps the Order of Merit or something. Zhukov’s chest, for instance, looked like an iconostasis. At first everyone found it ridiculous that Monty was wearing only one medal, but then, apparently, they respected him for it. It was the sort of thing only Stalin could have done.’

‘Hm – huh, huh, huh – Mongomery saw himself as a “Christian soldier”. He had no charisma!’

Eric poured us each another Korn and opened two more bottles of beer. He loosened his tie, undid his shirt collar, and lit a long cigarette. I continued my line:

‘But I thought Monty’s troops adored him, didn’t they? And that was a big part of his success…’

‘Just imitating Rommel! Not only his own troops adored Rommel, the Italians did, and even the Arabs and colonial troops. He always led from the front, you see, he would get stuck in with his men hauling vehicles out of rivers, he – ’

Mila appeared, with a pile of ironed clothes, and darted into the gyp room.

Eric was off. He explained, to my scepticism, that Rommel believed in Krieg ohne Haß (war without hatred). Rommel had refused to hand over Jews in North Africa for the Final Solution. Rommel would not poison wells when he retreated from territory he had won. Rommel loathed the Gestapo. Rommel was a ‘chivalrous’ and completely professional soldier…

Eric poured us more Korn and beer (there was absolutely nothing to eat with it) and got going on how Israeli commanders like Moshe Dayan regarded Rommel as superior to Montgomery and even a ‘model’ for themselves.

Mila finished her washing up and retrieved another plastic carrier bag from Eric’s bedroom.

‘Here, Mila – meet Gerald!’

The girl gave me a nod, then tightened her little mouth, glared briefly at Eric, and was gone.

‘Rommel wasn’t Prussian, was he?’

‘No. And that’s the whole point. He was able to view that whole military tradition and its failures from outside, and innovate. That, of course, is what interests me. Even in World War 1 as a lieutenant he would attack from unexpected directions – even behind enemy lines – and always take the initiative to mount an assault. These tactics were behind his bestseller Infantry Attack, which Hitler read. But I’m particularly interested in his last, unfinished book Tank Attack. Where is the manuscript of that? I’ve decided now to make Rommel the subject of my thesis.’

I was delighted that in the second year of his Ph.D. Eric had finally decided on its theme. ‘Rommel’ seemed rather a large subject to me, but I assumed he would be concentrating on the military theory side.

We finished the Korn and all the beer, then Eric fetched some cans of lager from his fridge. I fell asleep.

This must have been in the winter of 1995. I definitely met Eric at least once more before I left for Moscow in late March, but I am sure that it wasn’t at a session of the East of the Rhine Drinking Society. I fancy I’d decided to avoid any more of those, but it was my turn and I think I deflected him into a Berni Inn, where we could not share any bottles of spirits. I clearly remember him being elated, and wearing a brand new jacket.

‘I am going to Germany!’ he announced. ‘Just after you leave for Russia. I’m going for six weeks, to work in the Rommel archive, and a professor in Stuttgart – who rejoices in the name Heinrich von und zu Stebbling-Zechstein – is going to introduce me to the Rommel family.’ Eric beamed with retracted eyes and rubbed his hands.

‘Excellent. Well here’s to it!’ I said, raising a schooner of sherry. ‘What exactly will you be working on?’

‘The bits and pieces of Tank Attack, but also Erwin’s relationship with Hitler.’

‘Rommel was politically naive, wasn’t he?’

‘Goodness no. By 1944 he had his own plan for ending the war.’

‘How far did it get?’

‘Well, of course, he joined the 20 July plot and it cost him his life.’

‘But he can’t have understood much about totalitarianism, if he actually attended meetings of conspirators. Lots of Russian generals hated Stalin’s guts, but they would never have proceeded so openly; they knew they would practically have to communicate by telepathy, or act as a lone assassin.’

‘Ha! Maybe that’s why there was no attempted coup in Russia, but there was in Germany! I can see that you don’t like Rommel, Gerald. I’ve come to the conclusion he is the exemplar of a military leader.’

Eric paused. The humour slid from his face, he looked down at the tablecloth, then spoke emphatically.

‘A great commander of men…brilliant tactician…an uncanny feel for the battlefield…apolitical, and a victim of Nazism.’

This was the last time I saw Eric. I had been in Moscow four months when I received an airmail envelope through the Embassy post which contained a photograph of him in uniform sitting at a makeshift table in a wood, with some British officers and soldiers whose uniform I didn’t recognise. They were all holding aloft small glasses and there were several bottles on the table. Eric was grinning broadly and had written on the back:

Vitez, 25 June. The East of the Rhine D.S. lives! This is the real thing. Slivovitz all round! These Serbs are fine fighting men. Back in October. Keep drinking. Eric

I concluded that somehow Eric was in Yugoslavia with the Territorial Army and would be back in Cambridge for the start of the Michaelmas Term. I myself returned in August. Over lunch, one of the historians told me that Eric had volunteered in June to go to Bosnia with the Territorials as part of the logistics staff of the British presence there, and ‘because of his, you know, bonhomie and ability to get on with foreigners, he’s even acquired some role in Army Intelligence’. The same chap told me in September that Eric had come back to Britain for a week at the beginning of the month, then ‘cleared off back to Yugoslavia in civvies, apparently’. This person was himself just off to the Bibliothèque Nationale for three months, so my information dried up. Eric didn’t appear for the start of the Michaelmas Term, but I thought nothing of it. I admit that at some level I was relieved. But he had not turned up by the middle of November, either.

(To be concluded next week)

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Adolf Hitler, alcohol, Battle of El Alamein, Battle of Kursk, Battle of Stalingrad, Bernard Montgomery, Cambridge Tales, double-barrelled names, Eric Smith, Erwin Rommel, Germany, historians, history, Joseph Stalin, Korn, Nazi Germany, Prussia, Rhine, schnapps, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, vodka, war, Winston Churchill, World War 2, World War I | 1 Comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 21

Posted on February 6, 2023 by Patrick Miles

Katherine Mansfield

7 January
Almost themed, one could say, in Calderonia, Cambridge academic Ruth Scurr has written a meaty review in today’s Spectator of Claire Harman’s experiment in biography All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything. Anyone who writes short stories should know Mansfield’s work intimately. But I am not sure that I agree with this Scurr/Harman statement: ‘In our age of pandemics, loneliness and an overwhelming number of texts online, Harman suggests, appreciation of short stories — which ask “the biggest questions in the smallest spaces” — is burgeoning.’ I can’t say I have noticed such a burgeoning. The problem, surely, is that word ‘overwhelming’. I have posted a few of my old ‘piffle’ stories on Calderonia, and admit it’s a terribly convenient way of putting short stories ‘out there’. But given the ‘overwhelming’ nature of the Web, can many, if any, short stories get noticed? Are that many writers bothering, then? The days when many more writers than Chekhov could publish a story a week in a newspaper, or Mansfield regularly publish in literary magazines, and get paid a living wage for it, are gone forever.

My publishing project this year is a book of twenty of my short stories, old and new, 60% of which are written. Maybe Harman’s words have encouraged me to preview some new ones online fresh from the oven… It needs thinking about.

14 January
Paranoia apart, it’s my considered view that Calderonia was shut down yesterday by a Russian hacker. The Russian end of Sam&Sam had committed himself to a much longer and franker thread than usual — which I diminuendoed back to silence as fast as I could. Shortly afterwards, a view from Russia popped up on ‘Statistics’, despite the fact that the people I know in Russia can’t access Calderonia. By the evening, Calderonia was ‘unavailable’ worldwide, although of course I did not notice this immediately. My guess is that someone in Russia was researching (not for the first time?) who I am, and discovered my take on Ukraine. Ostensibly, the problem was that the server security certificates of some strands of patrickmileswriter.co.uk had expired. We have never had this problem in nine years, however. Why it should have happened now and triggered unavailability was not really clear. My own theory is that disabling or ‘enforcing’ some of these security certificates was the only way a hacker could shoot us down, given that WordPress’s cyber defences seem state of the art. Fortunately, Calderonia’s own IT expert (aka Jim Miles) was able to restore us to the Web within half an hour of my emailing him.

26 January
A very generous and discriminating friend gave me for Christmas Ronald Blythe’s 2022 book, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside. It was a pleasant shock to discover that Blythe was still alive, as the only other book of his I knew, Akenfield, was published in 1969. Then came the news that he died, aged 100, at his beloved Bottengoms Farm in Suffolk, on 14th of this month.

I started reading the book on Boxing Day and for peculiar reasons that I will attempt to analyse later, I finished it only yesterday, despite the fact that I had been reading it every day. As I immediately let my friend know, the book is a fantastic delight. It is an extremely skilful 456-page compilation, arranged by month but each month divided into subjects (‘Snowfall’…‘How to Paint Towers’…‘The Reverend Francis Kilvert’…‘On the Way to School’…‘Dwindling Landworkers’…‘To Console’…), from the weekly column ‘Word from Wormingford’ that Blythe wrote for the Church Times between 1993 and 2017.

Its style is all, and doubtless the man. The best description of it that I have seen is ‘a philosophical prose style as light as air’. A newspaper has described Blythe as ‘England’s greatest living country writer’ and the blurb calls him ‘one of the UK’s greatest living writers’ full stop. I could agree with both of those statements. Each section within a month is a fresh surprise, although there is a core of common themes — the church’s year (Blythe was a Reader at three country churches), his cats, the wildlife where he lives, village life and death, the farming year and ghostly past, John Constable, certain English poets and prose writers, hornets, and others. Here is a fairly typical short extract from page 128:

‘It was not always like this,’ I admonish the white cat: ‘tinned breakfast regularly at six, gorgeous radiators, blackbirds through the window, devoted old chap.’ Sometimes I hear them, the skinny labourers clumping down from the bothy to feed the stock, the girls singing in the dairy, the barefoot children falling over the dogs, the mother shouting, the pot bubbling. All gone into the dark, says the poet [T.S. Eliot]. Or into the light, says somebody else [Henry Vaughan].

It is all so fresh and unstrained, so effortless-looking, but actually the very pitch of linguistic skill and literary art. Nor, surely, can there be a more authentic portrait of country life in the very recent past, and presumably somewhere even now. I doubt whether Blythe chose or approved of the book’s title, which is rather obviously cashing in on the post-pandemic vogue for ‘Nature’ as mental therapy, but the book does produce a very strong feeling of an unstressed life ‘in harmony’ with something (perhaps ‘God’, rather than ‘Nature’), and Blythe isn’t ill in it once. I believe everyone should read the book and will enjoy it. It is beautifully produced, by the way, by Calderonia’s own Clays of Bungay, and Blythe’s is the first hardback of theirs with both bookmark and bellyband that I have seen since George Calderon: Edwardian Genius!

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

The Times, in a leader on 17 January sub-titled ‘Ronald Blythe’s bucolic writing appealed to a certain idea of England’, wrote that ‘For many, the real England is a Norman churchyard, a half-timbered pub and the tinkling of the doorbell in the village shop’. Blythe, the leader-writer claimed, ‘did more than most to promote this Elysian ideal of the countryside’, referring to his ‘ intimate study of village life from the 1880s to the 1960s’, Akenfield. This criticism is quite wrong, in my opinion. It was shot down next day by a reader who wrote that ‘In fact much of Blythe’s writing about provincial English life was thoroughly unsentimental and was marked by an acceptance of the need for change’ (evidence supplied). Blythe himself addresses the question in a section of this book entitled ‘Brutal Realities’ (p. 141): ‘The great quandary of those who write about the countryside, or who paint it, is how to keep the euphoric vision, if not out of the general picture entirely, in its proper place.’ In any case, the image that remains with one from Akenfield, I would have said, is of how unremittingly hard and un-euphoric life in the country was — hence Private Eye’s merciless parodying of the book as Akenballs.

The problem for me with Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside is rather different. I enjoyed the book so much when I started that I could hardly put it down. Around page 200, however, I began to feel funny, but couldn’t rationalise it. I decided to read at the rate of three or four sections at a time. That didn’t diminish my enjoyment; after all, it is written in entirely separate sections of a page or two, so it lends itself to a segmented reading. But gradually I came to think that the reason I was reading it slowly was that it was subtly but inexorably depressing me. If you look more closely, at least 65% of it is about the past. Events of long ago are constantly being re-evoked, Blythe sees ‘ghosts’ of the past in his mind’s eye, most of the writers he lovingly revisits are long dead, he officiates at many funerals, death and dead friends often feature. Moreover, time in the book is cyclical: the cycle of the seasons, of the Church of England’s services and saints, of an individual’s own life. The cumulative effect, for me at least, was a feeling of entrapment, of rising claustrophobia. In a strange way, then — strange because the writing is so good — I was relieved to finish the book and escape back into the fresh air of the present.

28 January
The death has been announced of the actor Sylvia Syms, at the age of 89. I am moved by what I read about her, because I previously did not know much about her film career (starting with Ice Cold in Alex, 1958, when she was twenty-four), everyone speaks so tenderly of her, and I can see that she was indeed beautiful as a young woman. I only knew her during the rehearsals and tour of Cambridge Theatre Company’s 1987 production of Last Summer in Chulimsk by Alexander Vampilov, for which I was the translator and Russian consultant. She would come and talk to me, but was so modest I never realised what a great star she had already been.

But I certainly realised that she was an exponent of real acting, with both enormous talent and sharp empathetic intelligence; which is why I prefer to use the generic word ‘actor’ of her. Her range was far greater than that of some of the grandes dames of our theatre today. In Chulimsk she played Anna Khoroshikh, the long-suffering manageress of a Soviet cafeteria in the depths of the Siberian taiga. Although literally never centre or front of stage, because the bar and kitchen were always upstage, the part of Anna has more truly tragic depth than any other, and Syms conveyed it with supreme restraint and power. She was completely ‘inside the head’ of this middle-aged woman who has an illegitimate son from being raped during the War and is still in love with her drunkard husband Dergachev, who was wounded, captured, sent to Siberia on his return, yet eventually married her. Without exaggeration, her acting of the part was so natural that she simply was this Russian woman. In this short scene she was unforgettable:

KHOROSHIKH (Sardonically): If you catch any sables, you will save one for me, won’t you? (Seriously) You will, won’t you?.. You used to give me things.

DERGACHEV: Used to, but those days are over. (Goes into back of cafeteria)

Khoroshikh wipes her eyes with her shawl.

Front left: Roy Marsden as Shamanov, centre: Sylvia Syms as Khoroshikh, back: Aidan Gillett as Pashka

Sylvia Syms as Khoroshikh at her ‘bar’ in Last Summer in Chulimsk, 1987

When the production came to Cambridge for a week, Sylvia very skilfully conveyed to me that she would like me to invite her into my college as a guest at high table. This was impossible, as I was not a Fellow of the college, only its Russian Lector. I always regret it, because she would have had the Fellows who remembered her in Ice Cold in Alex and Victim at her feet, and would undoubtedly have said something forthright to them (she was well to the Left) that would have been recounted over the port for years to come.

1 February
The words ‘Spring offensive’ are apt to strike fear. In March 1918 Ludendorff had stealthily brought up 750,000 new troops and three quarters of his entire artillery to concentrate on what he judged to be the weakest point of the British line; the Germans broke through, and within a week had advanced forty miles on a fifty mile front. Putin plans to draft 300,000 new conscripts into occupied Ukraine by the end of February and mount a similar attempt, some say at a weak point like Bakhmut, others say he has instructed his generals to throw this numerically superior force all along the eastern front and make a general advance.

I recently met a British career diplomat who specialises in War. He told me that at the moment, the ‘war of attrition’ on the Ukrainian eastern front is ‘just like the First World War, the only new element is the attacking drones’. I said I thought we had to be ready for the Russians to make considerable advances during their spring offensive, as we had not given the Ukrainians state-of-the-art tanks and other systems soon enough. Therefore, I added, it will all come down to the Ukrainian counter-offensive: would the West make sure the Ukrainians had the weapons to win that, and go on to drive the Russians out completely? As diplomats are skilled in doing, he simply did not react to that.

Are we, in fact, giving the Ukrainians just enough to prevent them from being defeated this year, but not enough to enable them to win? If we gave them all the materiel they need NOW, we would save thousands and thousands of Ukrainian — and Russian — lives, because the war would be shortened. On the other hand, after the Germans broke through in March 1918, the allies, especially Foch and Haig, learnt fast from their mistakes, evolved a different strategy, counter attacked, broke through the Siegfried Line, and by November had won. The Ukrainians, with their superior morale and creative imagination, are quite capable of doing the same even if the Russians break through in places.

3 February

From left to right: the Speckled Wood, Ringlet and Marbled White, of the Family Satyridae. The first two have colonised Cambridge gardens since 2000, the Marbled White was sighted in one last year.

I have received communications from Cambridge City Council officers that they have commissioned wildlife ‘surveys’ this year of the 0.4 hectare Tree Belt that the Council owns behind our houses. The history is that for thirty years this wildlife haven and corridor was kept closed to the public, the Council treated it as ‘a kind of nature reserve’ (their words), but they recently transferred it with no public consultation from Property Services to Open Spaces, thereby surreptitiously changing its use. Since then, it has been invaded by ‘educational’ groups who took in dogs, lit fires, trampled on undergrowth, picked wild flowers, screamed and rang bells. A majority (63%) of local residents adjoining the Tree Belt are against the change of use and have been fighting it tooth and nail for the past year.

To give you an idea of the Council’s competence, it had promised residents a Management Plan before any group was allowed in, but forgot about it (and facts such as fires being banned on Council property). The Council ought also to have commissioned a ‘baseline study’ of the haven’s wildlife before permitting public use, but they did not. A councillor assured me that access would be restricted during the birds’ nesting season (February-June/August), but it has not been. Since the Tree Belt has been unmolested for thirty years, a surprising range of birds has been observed (from gardens) to nest in there, from Tawny Owls and Spotted Flycatchers to Blackcaps and Sparrowhawks. Armed with the opinions of the RSPB and British Trust for Ornithology, I sought to persuade Council officers that the only ‘baseline study’ of nesting that would be fit for purpose would be one of the status quo ante, i.e. of the TB closed to public access for the duration of the study. Alas, no, they have dropped the idea of a ‘baseline study’ and gone for ‘surveys’ carried out this year whilst up to 80 people a week are traipsing in and out. An ornithologist friend who was once Head of Science at English Nature, describes this as ‘ridiculous’.

The particular reason I’ve got involved is that, although I have entered the Tree Belt only twice in thirty years (1991 with the Council’s Conservation Officer and 2022 with the Biodiversity Officer), my family seem to have been the only locals who have kept lists of wildlife observed in their gardens abutting the Tree Belt, and these records are now useful. They suggest a decline in biodiversity of 20-25% since 1991. The reasons could include a big increase in human activity; noise pollution and traffic (the only Tawny Owls I have actually seen in the neighbourhood recently were squashed flat on roads); species epidemics; global warming. The weird thing is, though, that some species are more common than ever (e.g. Goldfinches) and some entirely new species have appeared, for instance the Speckled Wood butterfly, Ringlet, and (last year) the Marbled White. Of course, I greatly regret the loss of Greenfinches and Small Tortoiseshell butterflies due to epidemics, or the disappearance from our garden (despite wilding) of the Wall butterfly, Large Skipper and Essex Skipper. The vitality of the new Satyridae species, however, is astounding. Evidently there are ‘winners and losers’… But the cause is fundamentally the same: human impact on ecosystems, whether global or a mere 0.4 hectares.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Vampilov, Anton Chekhov, armaments, baseline studies, biodiversity, biographies, biography, birds, Bottengoms Fram, butterflies, Calderonia, Cambridge, Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Theatre Company, Church of England, Church Times, Claire Harman, claustrophobia, Clays of Bungay, comments, conservation, cyber warfare, death, ecosystems, entrapment, Erich Ludendorff, Francis Kilvert, funerals, General Douglas Haig, General Foch, ghosts, hackers, Henry Vaughan, Ice Cold in Alex, James Miles, John Constable, Katherine Mansfield, last, Last Summer in Chulimsk, Next to Nature, paranoia, Peter Hall, Ronald Blythe, Russia, Ruth Scurr, Sam&Sam, security certificates, servers, short stories, Siberia, Spring Offensive 1918, Suffolk, Sylvia Syms, T.S. Eliot, The Great War, The Spectator, The Times, The Web, Tree Belt, Ukraine, Victim, wildlife, wildlife corridors, wildlife havens, World War I | Leave a comment

Guest post by Damian Grant: ‘Radio Scotland’

Posted on January 23, 2023 by Patrick Miles

We live in France. In Lille, where the language is French. About a year ago — not knowing anything about the animal — I bought a HomePod online. I had thought it was just a superior (and very stylish) kind of loudspeaker, which I could plug into my i-phone and get it to do my mainly musical bidding. How surprised was I, and how unsurprised my wife Madeleine, to find that this was a much more sophisticated device than either of us could handle, which was not to be tamely plugged in like a dog on a lead (except to the power supply) but required talking to, and being treated with respect if not deference, whereupon it might perform one of the functions it was being asked to do. Like switch on the radio; preferably, BBC Radio 3, the beating heart of classical music.

I betray myself immediately by saying ‘it’. Because the moving spirit of the HomePod is not an ‘it’, but a she; and she is Siri. Nothing gets done unless Siri is asked politely; and unless the formula Dis, Siri is used, she won’t even listen. Dis, Siri, mets BBC Radio 3. But Siri for all her multiconnectedness cannot find the station in my library, in i-tunes, or anywhere else. She has many suggestions for other kinds of music I might like to listen to; or services to which I might like to subscribe. But one does not subscribe to BBC Radio 3, one simply switches it on. This is beyond Siri’s capacity.

Eventually, by means which I neither did nor do understand, Madeleine found a way of getting under Siri’s guard, and forcing her to acknowledge that there was indeed such a radio station, and that its offering might legitimately be accessed by the device over which she presided. Which I was then grateful to do; the fact being that you only had to tap Siri on the shoulder in the morning for her to put you in touch with Petroc Trelawney and his team. Sitting at breakfast, you could even ask Siri to increase the volume, or turn it down, depending on one’s interest in the piece then being broadcast. Turn it up always for the news. (Not that this is always a wise decision.)

One problem that we soon became aware of was that Siri seemed to have a mind or a will of her own. Sometimes she refused point-blank to connect with Radio 3, and regaled us instead with some charming nursery rhymes and songs for children which Madeleine had stored on one of her other devices. (How Siri found these I can’t imagine.) On one surreal occasion, she even interrupted our dinner with the spontaneous question: did we intend to buy a new car? Sometimes she resorted to her old trick of saying that Radio 3 didn’t exist, and that we should be listening to something else. And quite recently she has stumbled on another subterfuge: when asked, strictly according to the formula, for Radio 3, she connects us instead to BBC Radio Scotland. Now I have nothing against the Scots; I even support their desire to be independent of Brexit-touting Westminster. And it’s true that Mendelssohn wrote some fine music up there, around Fingal’s Cave. But this is not the point.

Another hazard of the system is that our grandchildren, two adventurous boys, soon learned the abracadabra that would open Siri’s cave, and developed a relationship with her that involved exchanging jokes, demanding translations into remote languages, and setting her conundrums to which she was forced to confess she did not know the answer. There were also less polite interpellations to which she disdained any response. It was during one of these sessions, recently, that I (returning home with some complicated bad news) became extremely irritated, and seized the HomePod off the shelf, disconnected Siri from her electric soul, and — not knowing where to put this package for the moment –dropped it into the waste paper basket by my desk. It could be put back, and she disciplined, later. Which of course it wasn’t.

This happened on a Wednesday. Thursday is the day our long-time cleaning lady comes for the morning, to do various jobs such as washing the tiled floor, emptying the grate, ironing, etcetera. Normally we would be around, to oversee what was going on and to answer any questions she might have. But this morning Madeleine and I were attending the funeral of a friend, and so Sylviane was left to her own devices. (Devices!) The rest of the day being busy (we went to the theatre that night, to see what turned out to be a long and not very good play), it was not until I lay awake early next morning — I often enjoy a few moments’ quiet reflection, before the alarm rings around seven — that I realized I had never removed the irritating HomePod from the waste paper basket; and that unimaginable things might have happened to it at Sylviane’s most innocent hands.

Go downstairs in my dressing gown. Unlock the front door, out into the cold December morning. Look into the paper bin; nothing to be seen. Look into the general waste bin: two neatly tied bags of household rubbish. Resolve to research into this more fully after breakfast, with Madeleine. (Whose slumber I had punctured with this absurdity.) After breakfast, alerted by a tell-tale yellow cable just visible, we open one of the bags, and indeed find the disgraced HomePod, its stylish orange mesh covered in ash from the fire-grate. Madeleine interrupted my expostulations, and we took the thing inside. With a mixture of brushing and hoovering, it looked again a bit like the device I had once most inadvisedly purchased. But did it still work? Would Siri speak to us again, after this humiliation? We plugged it in, there was a glow from the disc on top, and Madeleine asked, tentatively, for BBC Radio 3. To which Siri, in her usual cheerful tones: Voici BBC Radio Scotland.

© Damian Grant, 2023

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio Scotland, Brexit, chaos theory, classical music, cleaning ladies, comments, Damian Grant, Felix Mendelssohn, Fingal's Cave, France, grandchildren, HomePod, IT, Lille, Madeleine Grant, nursery rhymes, Petroc Trelawney, Scottish Independence, Siri, technology, waste paper baskets | 2 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 20

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Patrick Miles

16 December 2022
The Times has a long piece today entitled ‘Putin’s absence fuels rumours of Noah’s Ark plot’. It reports Putin cancelling his annual ice hockey match on Red Square, his annual press conference, and his annual ‘conversation with the people’ (the latter two are broadcast live by state television). This has led to speculation that he is not going to give his ‘state of the nation’ address to the lower and upper houses either, even though he is obliged to by his own constitution. He is said to have had a fall, to be suffering from thyroid cancer, and to have been tipsy and rambling when filmed on a recent visit to Kyrgyzstan (I saw this video on Twitter and reckoned it a fake). Is there any credibility, then, to the rumour that his cronies have set up a plan, codenamed ‘Noah’s Ark’, for him to escape to Argentina or Venezuela if he loses his war with Ukraine and is toppled?

I doubt it; he’s more the Hitler type. On the other hand, I have felt from the very beginning that the Russian military’s heart is not in this war, partly because Putin never gave them enough advance notice to prepare professionally for it. He has made them look fools. Now he is trying to shift the blame for its failure to them, staging events with generals both on their own and with him ‘listening’ to their reports/advice. If the Russian military continue to fail, and conclude that Putin is not going to go quietly, things could change. Rommel joined the plot to kill Hitler after it was obvious that they had lost the war but Hitler said the German people could ‘rot’ — i.e. that he did not care a damn about the German people — rather than him stop the war. My personal view is that if Putin died in office before this war was over, as Nicholas I did during the Crimean War that he brought on himself, it would lead in the short or medium term to a complete upheaval in Russian society comparable to that produced by Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War.

27 December
By chance, but most serendipitously, Jim Miles (Sam2) and I (Sam1) have given each other Christmas presents that commemorate our work with the late John Polkinghorne: I gave Jim a framed print of Opus 9 by Naum Gabo which we used for the cover of What Can We Hope For?, and Jim gave me this book:

No, I cannot read Japanese! But I guessed pretty quickly what it is the Japanese version of — John Polkinghorne’s book The Quantum World (1985) — because John had talked about it with some amusement. He could not read it either, but he was struck by the portraits in it of famous quantum physicists, for example this one of Paul Dirac, who taught him:

What amused him was the rays that seem to be emanating from the great physicists’ heads: were they a form of halo? He seriously wondered what they were intended to convey. Was it a Japanese convention? Are they a feature of the Japanese iconographic tradition and would be instantly understandable to the Japanese reader?

Sam2 was quick to explain: ‘I think in the first place that the portraits are there to bring the physicists to life for the reader — to put faces to names, especially for Japanese readers who could be intensely curious what these people looked like — and then the shapes, or ‘rays’, coming out of them are a bit mysterious, but I think they could represent light, as some of the portraits appear to ‘bend’ the rays. The subtle perspective changes applied to the portraits (and the rays) could be a very clever physics reference that is going over our heads (or certainly mine)…’

3 January 2023
Every year at this time I read in Russian some of Joseph Brodsky’s Christmas (or ‘Nativity’) poems. Whenever possible, he wrote a poem at Christmas, believing that, as he said in an interview, ‘Christmas is the birthday of the God-Man, and it’s as natural for people to celebrate that as their own birthday’.

Nevertheless, there was little specifically religious about his early, longer Christmas poems (1962-71), which I read at the time in blurry carbon samizdat. Gradually he focussed on ‘the cave’, as he called it, with Mary, Joseph and the Child, the star and the magi. To those who knew him in the 1970s and 80s, it comes as a shock to see him referred to now as a Christian poet. In retrospect, though, perhaps it should have been obvious. When I spent part of an evening with Brodsky in Leningrad on 11 January 1970 and asked him why he was so attracted to John Donne, he said it was because Donne ‘represents a vital period in the development of Western Christianity since the Greeks’; I was amazed he didn’t refer to Donne’s poetics. He admired and recommended Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

Joseph Brodsky, c. 1969. Photographer unknown, Patrick Miles archive

Brodsky’s untitled 1989 Christmas poem begins ‘Imagine, by striking a match, that night in the cave’. Every year I start translating it in my head, but I can’t replicate his tone (expressed in rhymed couplets of amphibrach tetrameter), or the compression that the highly inflected Russian language allows him, so shake my head over its impossibility. Seamus Heaney, using presumably a literal translation by his Russianist son, makes a very good English poem out of it. Heaney’s ear is faultless, so he certainly catches the amphibrach tone, but it entails more English words and a much longer line. Also, he rhymes only once and that rhyme is badly strained. Not having the Russian ringing in his head, Heaney can paraphrase in English as he sees fit (or perhaps in the direction of what he assumes Brodsky meant). To know the source language intimately may not be an advantage for the translator of poetry…au contraire!

7 January
I’m relieved to receive a Christmas card from a couple who support Putin’s war on Ukraine. She is Russian, he English. On their card last Christmas they told me that I shouldn’t believe everything I read in the British press about Russia and Ukraine, so I thought that this year, knowing my stance on the issue, they would cast me off altogether. She believes Ukraine has no legitimacy, she ignores the facts of its history since 1945, she protests that Crimea, Odessa, Luhansk and Donetsk ‘are Russian’, and is exasperated by Ukraine’s criminal corruption after 1991, as though Putin were shining white. She believes Russia is doing the right thing, because she ‘loves’ Russia. I was once at a gathering where the Russian wife of eminent British Slavist X, referring to X’s dislike of Putin, also exclaimed: ‘The trouble is, X doesn’t l-o-o-o-ve Russia!’ (and there was a suggestion that if he loved her, he should love her country). It is difficult to know what to say when political discourse is at such an irrational level. Essentially, these women are possessed by the ‘my country right or wrong’ attitude, which can never be ethical. I am relieved, though, that the card-senders have not terminated a forty-year friendship that saw better times.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 20 July 1944 Plot, Adolf Hitler, Alexander II, Argentina, Christmas, Crimea, Crimean War, Donetsk, Erwin Rommel, Field Marshal Rommel, iconography, James Miles, Japan, Jim Miles, John Polkinghorne, Joseph Brodsky, Luhansk, Nativity, Nicholas I, Noah's Ark Plot, Odessa, Paul Dirac, professors, Russian Army, Russian language, Russian poetry, Sam1, Sam2, Seamus Heaney, The Quantum World, The Times, translation, translations, Ukraine, Venezuela, verse translation, Vladimir Putin, What Can We Hope For? | Leave a comment

A year of hope

Posted on January 1, 2023 by Patrick Miles

A happy new year to subscribers and viewers, and thank you sincerely for following us through our ninth year of existence. The question of Calderonia’s future is always in my mind, but I can assure you we shall continue at least to 2024, when the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies conference will next be in Cambridge and Sam&Sam MUST appear. After that, perhaps I should take an Elon Musk-style poll?

I entitled my New Year post last year ‘A Year of Promise’. That may now seem to have been ill-advised. In fact I was referring to the prospect of the pandemic ending in 2022 and Sam&Sam making their first public appearance in the U.K. — as a stall at the Cambridge BASEES Conference — which would have sold quite a few books. I was convinced in December 2021 that Russia was going to invade Ukraine, and thought that on the Soviet precedent they would do it over Christmas. Before 24 February I believed Russia’s aim was to pin down the Ukrainian army north of Kyiv, invade from the east, and stop at the Dnepro River, partitioning the country. I never expected it to become a total war about liberty and democracy that affects every one of us and, inevitably, led to the cancellation of the Cambridge conference in protest.

You may feel I am equally ill-advised to call this post one of hope. The amazing Ukrainians have retaken this year almost half of the 25% of their country that Russia seized, but driving the Russians out of the rest will be hell. Meanwhile, Russia is inexorably destroying Ukraine’s infrastructure, and there is every sign that Putin is planning another direct assault on Kyiv. The unity of western nations is formidable. Who would have expected Justin Welby, on a visit to Ukraine, to say that Boris Johnson was ‘stunningly right’ in his response to the invasion? Who would have expected Johnson to pay fulsome tribute to the EU for its support of Ukraine? Personally, I don’t think Joe Biden has put a foot wrong on the issue. Yet the West could run perilously low on ammunition and money.

Nevertheless, we must make this a year of hope. Not the kind as in ‘I hope for an award’, meaning ‘I’m in with a chance and it would be nice if I got one’, but an ‘absurd’ hope, the hope that begins the other side of despair (at what happened in Bucha, for instance). This is the hope that never falters in desiring something, willing something, believing it must happen. A hope that never, never surrenders. This hope comes very close indeed to courage. And you will certainly find that hope and courage here:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged A Message from Ukraine, BASEES, BASEES Conference, Boris Johnson, Bucha, Cambridge, comments, courage, despair, Dnepro, Elon Musk, hope, Joe Biden, Justin Welby, Kiev, Kyiv, New Year messages, pandemics, Russia, Sam&Sam, the pandemic, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky | Leave a comment

Christmas in Moscow, 1969

Posted on December 21, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Leningrad, 3rd January 1970

I had an excellent Christmas in Moscow. We couldn’t get a turkey unfortunately (the French girls thought it a bit ambitious, anyway), so we had really tasty coq au vin. To go with it: best Brussels sprouts and fried bacon from the Embassy, potatoes and sausage, not to mention the caviar (red and black) beforehand, champagne, and fruit to follow. The sprouts had been kept between the inner and outer window panes of my room and were so hard (it had been -30 outside) that you could bounce them off the floor like golf balls. Since I had got back late from trying to ring you up at the International Post Office in town, and the cooks had overslept anyway, and the Russian guests came late, we were somewhat behind on our timetable, but that made the rest of the day all the more fun. After a lot of black coffee, we went off to the Gorki Park of Culture, which is completely flooded along its paths to make one big skating rink. You can hire skates here but they are all of the type we use for figure skating, I think, with low uppers, so it’s rather like being thrown in at the deep end. Still, I was taken in hand by a little master-skater of about nine, who taught me the first steps, and although I didn’t get very far before going bow-legged or knock-kneed, I only fell once. Then it was straight by taxi to the Bolshoi. As it happened, this was the first night of their new production of Swan Lake, so it was something of a gala. We were very lucky to get tickets. I presume it was the prima ballerina dancing. This performance was the best I’ve seen at the Bolshoi. When we came out of the Metro at the University, all the trees were twinkling with ‘rime’, a special kind of hoarfrost.

I couldn’t find any more in George’s letters home about his 1895 Christmas in Russia, so decided to post an excerpt from a letter I wrote my parents from Russia in 1970 (I was based in Moscow, but spent New Year in Leningrad). I hadn’t read this letter since writing it! Although it’s not been been possible to verify whether Odette was danced on Christmas Day by Maya Plisetskaya, the Bolshoi’s prima ballerina assoluta, I think it was her. I saw her dance in Moscow many times and can visualise her arm movements even now.

A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO YOU ALL!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged ballet, biographies, biography, Bolshoi Theatre, British Embassy, Brussels sprouts, caviar, Christmas, Christmas Day, comments, coq au vin, George Calderon, Gorki Park, hoarfrost, Leningrad, Maya Plisetskaya, Moscow, Moscow University, Odette, Patrick Miles, prima ballerina assoluta, rime, Russia, skating, Swan Lake | 1 Comment

Mending into…

Posted on December 7, 2022 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to buy this book.

In my mind’s eye, I can see George Calderon opening this book and chuckling with delight — not just because it was written (and gorgeously illustrated) by a great-granddaughter of his close friend ‘Evey’ Pym, but because it exemplifies something George believed himself.

Celia Pym is a highly skilled mender of garments, particularly woollen ones, but she does not set out to mend invisibly, quite the contrary:

I like to mend so that you can see what’s missing and what has been lost. To mend with a contrasting colour to highlight the hole is a distinctly confident move. It makes visible the change in the garment, its aging and its life. It makes the thing different and new with a fresh colour. And then when mended again, in the future, with another colour, this will add an additional layer to the story of the garment.

Similarly, George knew that in many cultures, including parts of our own, to wear pin-new clothes was to attract the ‘evil eye’. So he believed you should always distress new clothes in some way first, perhaps even adding a visible patch to them.

Celia Pym explains that her interest in damaged garments began with her great-uncle Roly’s sweater, ‘which I inherited after his death and is the first story in this book’. Roland Pym and his sister Elizabeth (George’s god-daughter) are familiar friends to followers of this blog! Note, however, Celia’s phrase ‘the first story in this book’. For the book is ‘not a guide to mending techniques’, its stories ‘describe the ways in which clothes and cloth become holed, why a damaged sweater or backpack can be emotionally affecting and how mending a garment can unstick a stuck feeling’. Thus, although she was not particularly interested in mending when she inherited Roly’s sweater,

two things moved me about the garment. That the holes and damage were a trace of Roly’s body, evocative of how he moved and wore his sweater, and that the darning marks were evidence of Elizabeth’s care. These two ideas about care and the body written into worn garments have kept me curious for the past fifteen years.

And here are the results of this particular mending:

Left: Roly’s sweater, Right: Elizabeth’s cardigan (photographs by Michele Panzeri)

‘Dear me, what a mess!’ may be your unfiltered reaction, ‘How bizarre! How counter-intuitive! How to ruin the fine work of the original knitters!’ But the more you look at the fresh shapes on these clothes, the more you will change your mind, I guarantee you. I will return to this subject in a moment, because the bulk of this book (pages 19-87) is self-effacingly entitled by Celia ‘Stories’, and these will deeply engage you and move you first.

She briefly relates the lives of Roland and Elizabeth; the life of her grandmother who bought her mother a Fair Isle sweater in 1951 which she has mended; the story of a Norwegian friend’s ‘shoddy factory’ and mind-boggling collection ‘Treasures from a Ragpile’; that of a retired GP who with his pullover mended yellow on deep gold became the star at a V&A exhibition; of a century-old cape from the Monte Carlo Opera House due to be binned, but which set out on an active life round the world once mended with Celia’s participation; of Lara and Lolu’s backpacks, how mending them was important to both, and how Lara, who suffered from cancer, ‘believed in embracing repair’. ‘Mending-language works on the body as well as on garments’, the author has remarked earlier.

So this is above all a book about our humanity, and how our clothes relate to that, the stories that our lives and bodies leave on them for us and others. It is philosophical, in fact — though I would much prefer to say ‘it makes you think’! It will challenge and stimulate you to meditate on areas of life, as the author herself evidently does. In this connection, it is revealing that Celia Pym is a qualified nurse, took part as a garment mender in a project with anatomy students in the dissecting room of a London teaching hospital, and ‘came to see an overlap in the way we use our hands and use observation to understand mending and anatomy’. The book is an act of great physical and psychological sensitivity.

But to come to the finished works themselves. Here is a woollen dress made by the Women’s Home Industries, worn by Vivien Leigh, and resurrected by Celia Pym after it had lain disintegrating from moth in the film director Jim Ivory’s attic for fifty years:

Vivien Leigh’s 1965 dress mended now (photograph by Michele Panzeri)

The dress was once a slinky, homogenous deep purple creation, but now that ‘the moth holes have been mended with warm, white cashmere wool from Japan’ it evokes a constellation in outer space with perhaps a rocket moving down through it. In other words, it is now not just a garment that ‘was’, it is simultaneously a new garment that ‘is’ — it has extension through time, it lives into our present and beyond. Then look more closely at the darning and finely woven-in mends on Roly’s, Elizabeth’s and others’ sweaters. They have an abstract life of their own, and a very detailed one. They remind me of Malevich’s Suprematist shapes, or Piet Mondrian’s compositions, but also of the beautiful ‘chaotic systems’ of the natural world, for instance murmurations of birds, or fields of teazles. I know that I am risking an appearance in Pseuds Corner here, but I think it is time to complete the title of this blog: Celia Pym’s form of mending is mending into art.

A wonderfully warm book for Christmas!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged anatomy, Bill Smith, biographies, Celia Pym, chaotic systems, Charles Evelyn Pym, comments, Elizabeth Pym, Evey Pym, evil eye, Fair Isle, George Calderon, Hope Pym, Jim Ivory, Judy Auerbach, jumpers, Kazimir Malevich, knitting, Lara Veitch, Lolu Oluwole-Ojo, mending, Monte Carlo Opera House, moth infestations, murmurations, Piet Mondrian, Pseuds Corner, pullovers, Roland Pym, silk, snowflakes, Suprematism, sweaters, teazles, Treasures from a Ragpile, Victoria & Albert Museum, Vivien Leigh, Women's Home Industries, Wool | 1 Comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 19

Posted on November 28, 2022 by Patrick Miles

4 November
On its back page, the voluminous weekly DIE ZEIT, which I still think is the best newspaper in Europe, always carries a large photograph of an animal looking at the camera with a distinctive expression, and the caption above Du siehst aus, wie ich mich fühle (You look how I feel). I might say the same of this creature:

No-one left a Comment on my previous diary post suggesting what the mystery object there might be…and because I berated people for emailing me in such circumstances rather than leaving a Comment, no-one emailed me either! I now reveal that the object was a soapstone ink and brush holder brought back by my great-grandfather from China. But, as you can tell from the wear across the front and the blue mark extreme right, it was used for holding and striking matches.

The above has been variously described as ‘a crocodile’, ‘a toy horse trough’, and ‘something Aztec for a Mexico project’. It was made by Sam2 at the age of seven. It is invaluable for holding and drying out those slivers of soap you’re left with from a bar.

12 November
Returning from buying my morning paper, I pass the professor at his five-bar gate. He initiates a conversation: ‘Patrick, I disagree with your position on Ukraine.’ (How he knew my ‘position’, I don’t know.) ‘I have come to the conclusion that what is needed is a peace conference.’ Subduing a tidal splutter, I reply: ‘I entirely agree with you, Philip. How are you going to get Putin to the conference table?’ The professor believes that Zelensky’s position, e.g. that all Russian forces have to be withdrawn and he will never negotiate as long as Putin is in power, is ‘not helpful’ and the war requires United Nations arbitration. In order not to raise the temperature too quickly, I suggest that Hitler would not have agreed to ‘international arbitration’ over the Sudetenland. What I wanted to do was quote Winston Churchill’s ‘You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth’, but the prof. is probably not a Churchill fan. I actually said that I thought Russia had a case about Crimea and this should be evaluated by an independent body, but neither side would ever accept that; otherwise why would Putin have annexed it in 2014? Then I put the wind up the prof. by explaining my theory that the Russians want to evacuate Kherson of their troops and ‘subjects’, entice the Ukrainians in, and detonate a tactical nuclear weapon over them. Needless to say, I hope I am wrong. But anything mad is possible.

13 November
If you want to know what the war is like for a flesh and blood Ukrainian, a poet of international standing who knows his native country and his people, read this book:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Soon after 24 February, Alexander Korotko started writing ‘in complete prostration’ two or three poems a night. There are 88 in all, numbered and mostly without titles. They are printed in their original Russian, with Ukrainian and English translations.

At first, they are short, conventional and declarative (‘we pay/the West/for help/with blood,/but the West/makes no haste/to deliver’ (13)). Then Korotko finds his form in quite long poems of only two or three words a line, rhymed at various intervals. The effect is zerfetzt, finely torn up, and jagged down the right hand side like the bricks of a wall that a missile has passed through. There are anapaestic overtones of Mandel’shtam (e.g. 48), which is utterly to the good, and the verse is never without musical concentration.

But the body of the book presents a world that has flown apart — literally. Like a figure in a Chagall painting, a dead soldier finds himself ‘flying/in a wooden envelope/with friends./I am the moon,/born early/in the sky’ (34). Angels fly, souls fly, dreams, a steamer, houses, stars; the commonest tropes are blood, death, sun, sky, moon, night, life, dawns; the commonest word is ‘pain’ (in at least fifteen poems, and it becomes the central obsession of the latter half of the book); the commonest phrase, ‘eyes charred with tears’.

This is a sequence that conveys unbearably powerfully the trauma of a nation; but it enacts also the terrible trauma of a poet. Korotko reminds one of no-one so much as Georg Trakl. Certainly he often slips into incoherence (which the English translator faithfully conveys), but what else would one expect? The truth of the Ukrainian war demands straining the rationality of language and imagination beyond breaking point. For all its unevennesses, Korotko’s War Poems is a masterpiece that will be read and pondered to futurity.

20 November
We have been on the Inner Hebridean island of Islay (pronounced Eye-la) for the best part of a week. It was a wonderful visit from every point of view. The island is a complete world of its own, with an astonishing range of natural habitats (and weathers). Stars of the show were the very old Iona-style crosses, the malt whiskies, the great friendliness of the inhabitants, and this Learesque corvid, which I had never seen before:

A Chough on Islay, photographed by Will Miles

Returning from far,
we find the chrysanthemums
got sick of waiting.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Adolf Hitler, Alexander Korotko, China, choughs, chrysanthemums, comments, Die Zeit, Edward Lear, emeritus professors, Georg Trakl, haiku, images, Iona, Islay, Kherson, malt whisky, Mexico, Osip Mandel'shtam, peace conferences, professors, Russo-Ukrainian War, soap, soapstone, Sudetenland, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelensky, war poems, war poetry, whiskies, Winston Churchill | 3 Comments

Was there an ‘Edwardian Age’, and was it ‘great’?

Posted on November 14, 2022 by Patrick Miles

William Page (1888-1962) and Maria Page, née Beck (1891-1982)

When I began to read George and Kittie Calderon’s archive for my biography of them both, I little thought I would be drawn deeper and deeper into the question of ‘Edwardianism’. Yet I instantly felt as I read George’s letters of the 1890s, that he was not Victorian. My knowledge of him, his times and contemporaries broadened (after some years) to the point where I even decided that he exemplified a special Edwardian form of genius — and the adjective entered the subtitle of my book.

It has been really stimulating to revisit this subject in the series of eight posts since 4 June 2022 — of which this is the last — devoted to a fan of aspects of the Edwardian Age. I’m immensely grateful to Alison Miles, John Pym, Laurence Brockliss and Damian Grant for their painstaking guest posts that have shed fresh and fascinating light on this beguiling, often contentious period of British life.

My own living link with the Edwardians was my maternal grandparents (photographed above in about 1914). I knew them well as I spent long holidays between 1953 and 1958 living with them in a thatched cottage adjoining the 1.5 acre smallholding in the Kent countryside that was their livelihood. Edward VII reigned only from 1901 to 1910, so my grandfather was an Edwardian in the strict historical sense between the ages of thirteen and twenty-two, and my grandmother from ten to nineteen. But I sense deeply now that the pre-1914 era was when their whole outlook was formed, and they remained Edwardians in their outlook till they died, although they doubtless did not think of themselves as ‘Edwardians’.

They both spoke with affection of the King, calling him ‘Teddy’. The only other king I ever heard my grandfather mention was George VI, and that was to tell me sotto voce that he had had ‘a stammer’. My grandfather’s hero was Robert Baden-Powell. He adored cricket, golf, the wireless, flowers, and birds. When I received a copy of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy at a school Speech Day, my grandmother remonstrated with my mother that it was by ‘Bertie Russell — he’ll turn the boy into a Bolshie!’ My grandparents’ favourite modern writer was H.G. Wells (not Henry James, whose house in Rye my grandmother visited as a junior tailoress, and never D.H. Lawrence). They were far more accepting of modern technology, and far more interested in travel, than my parents. In fact they were far better read, more independent-minded and more enterprising. They were charitable and saw poverty as everyone’s problem. My grandmother was as anti cruelty to animals as Kittie Calderon. My grandfather, I surmise, thought the First World War destroyed the Edwardian world (in which they knew the King as ‘The Peacemaker’ for his attempts to contain Germany), and was the worst thing that had happened to him. He served at Gallipoli, in Mesopotamia and at Ypres, suffered from PTSD, and raved on his death bed about a dead Turk beneath it. My childhood spent in their loving care and free to wander the smallholding was idyllic.

However, as Adrian Gregory has written in his brilliant 2014 book The Last Great War: British Society and the First World War (p. 278):

Any discussion of the world before the war, the world we have lost, must start from the realisation that Edwardian Britain contained not one, but several worlds within it.

My grandfather was gentle, soft, passive (many thought), and when my mother was leaving him in his hospital bed for the last time and turned to look at him from a distance, he simply opened wide his emaciated arms to her in a gesture of love. So why was he so pro-hanging (he even told me the name of the public hangman), why did he say seriously ‘the only good German is a dead German’, tell me that in Moslem countries they cut a thief’s hand off, or inform me as I was about to go to the local grammar school, ‘Mr Oakes [the headmaster] beats boys’? All these things were terrifying to a child… As I wrote on this blog long ago with reference to George Calderon and others, the Edwardians seem to have believed they had a right to be nasty. That side of them, in both male and female, is undeniable. In The Edwardians (1972) Peter Brent insisted that ‘for the pre-1914 British chauvinism was the cement that held the social fabric together’ (p. 10); was that the source, then, of the cruel and regressive side of Edwardian life? This acceptance of violence as normal is what for me disqualifies the Edwardian Age from being ‘great’.

And was it an ‘Edwardian Age’? On the death of Queen Victoria, Wells famously said that she was ‘like a great paperweight that for half a century sat upon men’s minds and when she was removed, their ideas began to blow’. A 2017 ‘culturonomic’ computer analysis of local newspapers confirmed that ‘the years around Queen Victoria’s death were a fulcrum when the country changed abruptly in almost every way imaginable’ (Oliver Moody, The Times, 10 January 2017, p. 3). Yet I sensed immediately that George Calderon and his Trinity College friends of the 1890s were ‘post-Victorian’, and as Professor Brockliss has pointed out, ‘there can be no doubt that all the chief characteristics of the new age date from the early 1880s’ in the aftermath of the 1870s economic depression. Similarly, when did the ‘Edwardian Age’ end? In the 1920s it was commonly thought to have ended in 1914 (during the reign of George V), but of course it was the process of the war, not its commencement, that struck much of Edwardianism dead — in the course of writing my biography, I felt that the Edwardian ethos/syndrome succumbed in 1916 after the Somme, and was gratified to discover later that D.H. Lawrence thought the same. Yet Professor Brockliss makes a very convincing case for the end-date of the Edwardian Age being ‘the early 1930s in the midst of another and greater economic depression’.

Whatever dates one chooses, the ‘Edwardian Age’ was a far longer period than the reign of Edward VII. I would be tempted to rename it ‘the Post-Victorian Age’ (preceding the new Georgian Age), except that Queen Victoria was still alive when it started! If the Edwardian Age began in the early 1880s, she still had nearly twenty more years to reign. Is there an analogy here with our late Queen’s long reign? In the 1950s to 1980s Elizabeth II’s reign was widely perceived as the ‘New Elizabethan Age’ (the theatrical renaissance, for instance, was often compared to that of the first Elizabeth). But in my experience people ceased doing that in the 1990s, when Elizabeth II still had another thirty years to reign. Did the present Carolean Age begin with, say, the premiership of Tony Blair and the death of Diana Princess of Wales — twenty-five years before Charles III became King?

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Adrian Gregory, Alison Miles, Bertrand Russell, Carolean Age, Charles III, chauvinism, comments, culturonomics, D.H. Lawrence, Damian Grant, Dardanelles, Diana Princess of Wales, Edward VII, Edwardianism, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, Ephraim Parker Oakes, Gallipoli, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, George VI, Georgian Age, H.G. Wells, Henry James, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Brockliss, Maria Page, Mesopotamia, New Elizabethan Age, Oliver Moody, Peter Brent, PTSD, Queen Victoria, Robert Baden-Powell, The Great War, Tony Blair, Trinity College Oxford, William Page, World War I, Ypres | 2 Comments

Guest post by Damian Grant: D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’

Posted on October 31, 2022 by Patrick Miles

‘All feelings belong to the body, and are only recognized by the mind.’ This statement by Lawrence can be taken as a categorical refutation of another manner of presenting human beings in fiction, one which was touched on by Patrick Miles in his post about two late novels by Henry James last week (‘the presence of the living and breathing human body [in these novels] is negligible’). Lawrence’s statement explodes a landmine under Edwardian consciousness and convention. True, it comes late on in Lawrence, in his essay on Lady Chatterley’s Lover in 1929; but this fundamental belief informs all Lawrence’s writing, from the very beginning. It certainly motivates a very early story, written in 1909 when he was only 24, ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’. First published in The English Review in 1911, the final version of the story appeared in The Prussian Officer and Other Stories in 1914; quotation here is made from the text edited by Brian Finney for Penguin (Harmondsworth, 1982, pp. 88-105). It should be noted at the outset that during this process Lawrence made significant alterations.

The subject of this story is an incident which would have been not uncommon within the author’s experience: the death of a miner in a pit accident. What makes the story slightly different is that the man here, Walter Bates, is killed while working alone down the mine, after his colleagues have ended their shift. But what makes it entirely different from such a story conceived merely as a material event, is the fact that Lawrence’s real subject is Walter Bates’s wife Elizabeth, and the flux of her feelings as she waits that evening for her husband. First she waits angrily, supposing that he has gone drinking before coming home; then fearfully, as she conceives of other possibilities for his non-appearance; and ultimately with the full realization of what his death means to her. In these concluding pages the young writer announces his full ambition, and proves he is equal to it, sounding the depth of the woman’s feeling and laying out for the reader, as on an extraordinary scroll, the lucid and bewildering awareness which she is brought to.

The opening paragraph itself has been justly praised, as Lawrence provides the physical context of the colliery and atmosphere with startling concreteness and economy. The engine providing the ‘slow inevitable movement’ of the black coal trucks is contrasted with the energy of a startled colt, that ‘outdistanced it at a canter’; but the natural world here is far from energetic. ‘The fields were dreary and forsaken […] oak leaves dropped noiselessly’. We then focus on a ‘low cottage,’ whose brickyard boasts ‘some ‘dishevelled pink chrysanthemums’, which serve to introduce Elizabeth Bates, the miner’s wife, ‘her mouth […] closed with disillusionment’. We meet her five-year-old son, whom she reproves for tearing at the chrysanthemums (a sprig of which she puts in her apron), and her father, who drives the engine. She is clearly unhappy that her widowed father is remarrying.

Lawrence praised George Eliot for showing later novelists the way ‘by putting all the action inside’. This is exactly what he himself proceeds to do, but in a more modern idiom, in line with his own developing theory of how feelings operate, how they may be understood and described. It is when the woman goes inside the house, superficially engaged in attending to her children (there is also a daughter), that Lawrence goes inside her, and explores what is happening beyond her own volition or control – while time advances (as it does throughout the story) mechanically, like the coal trucks…half past four, quarter to five, and so on. We also learn that not the least of what goes on inside her is that she is pregnant.

Meanwhile, the daughter Annie notices the chrysanthemums, and enthuses about them; which only prompts a derisive summary from the mother:

It was chrysanthemums when I married him, and chrysanthemums when you were born, and the first time they ever brought him home drunk, he’d got brown chrysanthemums in his button-hole.

But immediately after this, the pointed symbolism of the chrysanthemums is shouldered aside by the dramatic irony of the wife’s angry exclamation: ‘He needn’t come rolling in here in his pit-dirt, for I won’t wash him. He can lie on the floor.’ And this feeling then assumes a physical reality, via an extraordinary animal metaphor: ‘Her anger wearied itself, lay down to rest, opening its eyes from time to time and steadily watching, its ears raised to listen. Sometimes even her anger quailed and shrank.’ As the evening wears on, and the children fret, ‘her anger was tinged with fear’.

This fear is soon justified as she perceives her neighbours’ concern: ‘At this, suddenly all the blood in her body seemed to switch away from her heart.’ Undercutting convention, the body and the blood insist on speaking their own language. When Elizabeth Bates hears ‘the rapid chuff of the winding-engine at the pit […] Again she felt the painful sweep of her blood’. When her husband’s mother appears, ominously in her black shawl, the wife begins to admit to herself the worst possibility: ‘“Is he dead?” she asked, and at the words her heart swung violently’; and her emotions are again rendered with surprising precision, as ‘The tears offered to come to her eyes’. The old woman laments, self-pityingly (her emotions by contrast are quite conventional); and eventually, ‘at half past ten’ a group of miners bring the body. ‘“They’re bringin’ ‘im, Missis,” he said. Elizabeth’s heart halted a moment. Then it surged on again, almost suffocating her.’ Her husband, we are told, has been suffocated — ‘smothered’ — by a fall of rock; Lawrence uses this parallel, once again, to establish the literal link, the balancing of physical realities. As they leave, stepping over the body, one of the men knocks over a vase of chrysanthemums (the symbolism is not forgotten).

It is at this point, where the ‘plot’ ends — and where many a short story would also terminate — that Lawrence begins his burrowing into the woman’s deeper and unacknowledged self, to reveal the awareness that will assert itself at moments like this from her traumatized body: arrested as it is beside the dead body of her husband. Elizabeth Bates is looking at death still from the outside. Her social self, with its irritations and anxieties, is here ‘countermanded. She saw him, how utterly inviolable he lay in himself. She had nothing to do with him’. But she must wash the body. ‘She was afraid, with a bottomless fear, so she ministered to him.’ The mother and the wife work together at this task:

They never forgot it was death, and the touch of the man’s dead body gave them strange emotions, different in each of the women; a great dread possessed them both, the mother felt the lie was given to her womb, she was denied; the wife felt the utter isolation of the human soul, the child within her was a weight apart from her.

Lawrence now explores and illustrates this extreme of isolation, channelling through the woman his own highly-charged and powerfully imaged perceptions: ‘Life with its smoky burning gone from him, had left him apart and utterly alien to her. […] Was this what it all meant—utter, intact separateness, obscured by heat of living?’ She feels it is the ‘false’ intimacy of marriage, and the marriage bed, which has obscured this the most:

There had been nothing between them, and yet they had come together, exchanging their nakedness repeatedly. Each time he had taken her, they had been two isolated beings, far apart as now.

This chilling idea is followed up with an image which would recur, curiously, in another context, in writing about intimate combat (in and under the trenches) in the First World War : ‘They had met in the dark and had fought in the dark, not knowing whom they met nor whom they fought.’ As her anger, earlier, was animal, now her fear becomes concrete, mineral: ‘In her womb was ice of fear […] The child was like ice in her womb.’ And the pregnancy provides part of her realization:

He and she were only channels through which life had flowed to issue in the children. She was a mother — but how awful she knew it now to have been a wife.

She can even project herself into the dead man’s consciousness, in sympathy: ‘He, dead now, how awful he must have felt it to be a husband. […] He had been her husband. But how little!’ This imaginative dilation complicates the action: ‘She was almost ashamed to handle him; what right had she or anyone to lay hands on him; but her touch was humble on his body.’ The body exacts its due, to the end.

We know that it was partly the experience of Lawrence’s aunt Polly, who had lost her husband in a mining accident, that provided the frame for this story; but the depth of perception here derives more from his highly sensitive reaction to his parents’ marriage, to be presented more fully and with more complexity in Sons and Lovers. And in addition I would like to quote the point made (in a personal email) by my learned Lawrentian friend Michael Bell, concerning the significance of the changes made through successive versions of the story, which have not been my main focus here:

The point about ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ is that in the first version the wife remains hostile to the husband even in death, but by the final version she undergoes a reversal of attitude and sees herself as having failed to accept and love him: she adopts the critique of herself that Lawrence makes of Mrs Morel in Sons and Lovers to some degree and more distinctly in The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, which is a dramatic version of the ‘Odour’ story.

Penetrating and unsparing as is Elizabeth Bates’s perception, this fundamentally post-Edwardian story is not, of course, the author’s last word on the possibilities of human relationship. As much of Lawrence’s writing, early and late, makes plain, it is relationships formed in the context of modern industrialism that typically lead to such a bleak conclusion. In other, saner, contexts, the marriage of true minds — and bodies — is still possible. Tom and Lydia Brangwen plumb other, richer depths in their life together on Marsh Farm in The Rainbow: Tom’s view is that his whole life had ‘amounted to the long marital embrace with his wife’. Their grand-daughter Ursula finds her fulfilment likewise with Birkin in Women in Love, their coming together being described by Lawrence as ‘wordless, and utterly previous to words’.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage | Tagged 'Odour of Chrysanthemums', A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', chrysanthemums, coal mines, D.H. Lawrence, Elizabeth Bates, George Eliot, Henry James, Michael Bell, miners, mining disasters, Patrick Miles, psychology, the body, The Engolish Novel, The Prussian Officer and Other Stories, The Rainbow, The Widowing of Mrs Holroyd, Walter Bates, Women in Love, World War I | 6 Comments

Henry James: Edwardian writer par excellence?

Posted on October 17, 2022 by Patrick Miles

No series of posts about the ‘Edwardian Era’ would be complete without a reference to Henry James, often regarded as its greatest novelist. I have always admired his short stories. I have read ‘Daisy Miller’ every few years since 1974 (I note from the inside cover) and for sheer profundity would rate it close to Chekhov’s ‘Lady with a Little Dog’. I have also read James’s riveting but over-long story ‘What Maisie Knew’ more times than I can say. In my twenties, however, I could never get into his novels. For these Edwardian posts I decided I must, so I chose the two novels above from Kittie Calderon’s library.

The date and signature beneath the top image come from her copy of The Ambassadors. The Wings of the Dove (which seems not to have been returned to Mudie’s borrowing library!) is dated in her hand ‘1905’.

May 1906 is when George was on his way to Tahiti, returning in October, and Kittie was staying with Lady Corbet at Acton Reynald. We also know that 1905 was for both Calderons a year replete with holidays at country houses. And this is the first thing that strikes me as Edwardian about these novels: you have to have a superfluity of leisure in which to read them (Ambassadors is 458 pages, Wings 576), and you have to want to sink into all that time — to be moved along that slowly. The characters themselves live lives of affluence, comfort and leisure, they ‘flaunt their wealth and mobility more extravagantly than ever’, in Professor Brockliss’s words. (Let us recall George’s comment of 1912: ‘The richer we have got the higher we have put our standard of luxury.’)

I have to confess as well that in these two novels I find it infuriating that not one of the upper class women characters who are prone to present themselves as victims ever hits on the idea of getting a job (despite Brockliss’s observation that, historically, ‘unmarried women of the respectable classes no longer considered paid work beneath them’).

Another feature that strikes me as quintessentially Edwardian about The Ambassadors and The Wings of the Dove is conveyed by Joseph Conrad’s comment of 1904 that the ‘fine consciences’ of James’s novels ‘ultimately triumph, in their emergence from the circle, through an energetic act of renunciation’. Renunciation was an Edwardian reflex. ‘Every time you violate self by forcing it to do that which it dislikes and which you know to be right, you strengthen your character all round’, wrote Lady Corbet (GC: EG, p. 55). I sometimes feel the Edwardian military even regarded the Somme and Gallipoli as not so much defeats as ‘renounced victories’.

But for me what is most Edwardian about Henry James is his loquacity, or perhaps we should say loquaciousness-ness. I am quite an experienced and determined reader, but to turn over one page in these novels that is a solid wall of words only to discover another wall facing one, is terrifying. Moreover, they are all too often mega-paragraphs of telling — telling us why or what characters think — not showing. It is too ponderous, I think, for the modern sense of time to have patience with, not to mention the sometimes unintelligible ganglia of James’s sentences. Yet James can write superb dialogue. What is really bizarre is the alternation of pages and pages of telling with pages and pages of speech (showing). It’s an unannealed wound in the text; a breakdown of novelistic dialogue in the deeper sense; it seems narratorial incompetence. But the Edwardian era witnessed not only an ‘explosion of middle-class democracy and pluralism’ (GC:EG, p. 319), it experienced an explosion of dialogue and verbiage, particularly on the pages of newspapers. I have only to think of the acres of small print in the Cambridge Daily News reproducing George’s and others’ contributions to a debate about the Coal Strike of 1912. The Edwardians were intoxicated by printed words. They couldn’t get enough of them.

Finally, the presence of the living and breathing human body in these two novels is almost negligible. So little bodily physical detail is given — although plenty about clothes and adornment — that it is nearly impossible to visualise characters. We are told that Merton Densher and Kate Croy, in The Wings of the Dove, are in love, indeed feel passion for each other, and become secretly engaged, but on the page they never even kiss. Outrageously, as the price for his agreeing to fall in with Croy’s plan for fleecing a dying American heiress, Densher insists that she ‘come to him’, i.e. secretly, once, probably in daylight, in his own rooms. Astonishingly, we are told that she did this. But we haven’t a clue what happened. Croy, who is surely intacta, has previously been portrayed as a rigid (James’s word), calculating Edwardian tease and Densher as a vacuous dimwit, so it is hilariously impossible to imagine any sexual intercourse between them. This lacuna, however, is also essentially Edwardian: neither Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), nor Wells’s Ann Veronica (1909), which seemingly celebrate women breaking out of Victorian marriage conventions, contains any presentiment of climactic lovemaking.

As Professor Brockliss very wisely says, ‘the Edwardian age was full of contradictions’. James’s fineness of psychology and conscience seems unsurpassable. Leavis even wrote that James’s art ‘has a moral fineness so far beyond the perception of his critics that they can accuse him of the opposite’ — something that also happened to Chekhov. Yet, in these two late novels at least, the lack of human physical existence leaves James looking woefully cerebral and etiolated. He is unquestionably a great writer, but the Edwardian contradictions are there.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.