24 January 2022
I have received several emails commiserating with me over my ‘anxiety’ and ‘nightmares’ about marking examination papers. The writers clearly assume I am Dr Robinson in my story Ghoune — that the story is strictly autobiographical and the flummery in it is what actually happens in Cambridge. An hilarious assumption! Actually I first typed out the flummery on a side of paper in 1976 for a colleague who was examining for the first time and certainly was anxious. My sketch was light-hearted and even he realised that the Impactor Librorum was a fantasy. He subsequently became an important archivist. During Black Crow I decided I should work the sketch up into one of my Cambridge Tales, so I asked him if he could send me a copy, but he could not find it.
29 January
Today we raise a glass to Anton Pavlovich on his 162nd birthday (actually today is his saint’s day, he was born on 16 (28) January 1860), and to the simultaneous publication of my shortish biography of him:
Click the cover to find the book on Amazon.
Sam2 and I are very pleased with Amazon’s printing of it, but for one thing: despite four Amazon proofs and all our efforts, they simply can’t get the page margins right or centre the title on the spine. That is to say, the bottom and top white spaces are consistent, but the side margins vary between 9 mm and 14.5 mm, therefore the ‘gutter’ in the middle of a two-page spread varies too. A variation of 5.5 mm in the side margins is far too much. How do they manage it? What on earth is the trouble?
To be fair, even the best printer in Britain, Clays of Bungay who printed George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, printed the book with far tighter left and right margins than we specified. As with Amazon, we were not consulted about this change and there was no way of correcting it. From a minute subcutaneous examination of Clays’ Terms and Conditions, I formed the suspicion that in reality there is 6 mm ‘tolerance’ in trimming the pages of a book. But why so much in the twenty-first century, when everything else is precisely programmed by the computer (e.g. the typesetting)? What is the problem? If anyone out there knows, please explain to us patiently in a Comment!
10 February
Andrew Tatham — himself the author of two highly innovative biographies — was quite right to suggest I should read A.J.A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (1934). It is clearly the progenitor of all those biographies today that have ‘In Search of …’ in their title or subtitle. I can see, therefore, why the book reminded Andrew of my ‘Quest for George’, as he puts it. And like Symons’s, my biography ends by trying to evaluate ‘Who’ its subject ‘Was’.
But there are two vital differences. First, as Andrew says, ‘Corvo [Frederick Rolfe] was a much spikier and more socially awkward character than Calderon’. That is something of an understatement. The culmination of Symons’s ‘Quest’ is to discover that Rolfe was a vicious homosexual paedophile, and to interpret his whole life in terms of his need both to disguise that in Edwardian society and to indulge it. George Calderon could be deliberately elusive, but I can say with certainty that his life was not a pretence.
Second, as everyone agrees, the forensic narrative of how Symons pieced together Rolfe’s life is at least as interesting as Rolfe’s life itself; in fact it is the central continuous plot of the book, and in A.S. Byatt’s words ‘more enthralling than most novels’. Some readers have told me that the story of how I ‘discovered’ George and Kittie’s archive and pieced together their lives was ‘exciting’ and should have been foregrounded in my biography. But I could never, ever have done this, as it was a book entirely about George and Kittie’s lives, not mine. It is a common saying that a biography ‘tells you as much about its author as about its subject’, and it may be implicitly true (I too am a translator and director of Chekhov’s plays, a man of dubious success in the British theatre, a bloke whose life was deeply affected by his experience of Russia, etc), but that is very different from consciously turning a segment of your own life (the ‘Quest’) into your biography’s main narrative.
A remarkable testimony to the vitality of Symons’s method is Carole Angier’s 2021 Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald. Sebald is famous for his blend of fiction and non-fiction. Angier set out to investigate just how much of what Sebald presented as fact in his life and art was fiction, by tracing and interviewing those who knew him. Some of these, notably Sebald’s widow, refused to talk to her, which sharpens the suspense. But Angier shows that Sebald did play fast and loose with objective truth. She concludes:
If you read him without questioning, and are moved — that is his main aim. I remind you of the truth. That is the job of the biographer. (p. x)
This is all well and good, but inherent in the ‘personal quest’ method is an element of subjectivity, which can be destabilising. As an aesthete, dandy and epicure himself, and someone whose ‘inclinations have always exceeded my income’, Symons was prone to ‘understanding’ Rolfe’s excesses to the point of compromising his, Symons’s, objectivity — and in my view this happens. Of herself and Sebald, Augier writes:
Though the Holocaust was far from the only tragedy he perceived, it was his tragedy, as a German, the son of a father who had fought in Hitler’s army without question. It was also my tragedy, as the daughter of Viennese Jews who had barely escaped with their lives. I think it is right to see the Holocaust as central to his work. But if I make it too central, that is why. (p. viii)
You rarely encounter a biographer who warns you from the outset that they may be too subjective.
22 February
The invasion of Ukraine has begun from its eastern borders. It was incredible to me to hear the BBC’s correspondent sign off yesterday with the words ‘in Taganrog’. Taganrog on the Azov Sea is where Chekhov was born and he wisely got out of it as fast as he could. It was proverbial for its provinciality, hence the epigram on Alexander I: ‘Vsiu zhizn’ on byl v doroge,/A umer v Taganroge’ (‘He spent all his life travelling [Europe etc], yet died in Taganrog’). In the Soviet period it was not a tourist destination and visas were not issued to it. When I got there in 1970, the director of the Chekhov Museum told me that I was the first westerner they had ever seen and their last foreign visitor was a Hungarian in 1958.
The destruction of Ukraine’s liberty, sovereignty and democracy by military attacks, subversion, blackmail and political murder will now proceed according to all the rules laid down by Machiavelli. NATO and Ukraine are no military threat to Russia whatsoever, but Ukraine’s democracy is a dire threat to Putin. He loathes it. What would happen to him if Russians suddenly remembered what real democracy is and wanted it back? The only reason Putin needs the ‘buffer states’ of Belorussia and post-invasion Ukraine is to protect his own homicidal dictatorship and set Russia back seventy years.
27 February
One thing leads to another…
In January ‘Winterwatch’ featured a report of a Speckled Wood butterfly in a Cornwall garden. It sounded very unlikely, as this triple-brooded butterfly is generally seen April-October. Chris Packham commented that it was ‘possible, because it does hibernate’. The context implied that he meant ‘hibernate as a butterfly’. If he did, then most unusually for Packham he was wrong. The Speckled Wood is unique amongst British butterflies in overwintering both as a caterpillar and a chrysalis, which brings survival advantages and has helped its phenomenal spread northwards through Britain since the 1960s (it has even evolved stronger wing muscles in the process).
The January sighting, which turned out to be genuine, sent my mind back to the very first Speckled Wood that I caught as a boy. I remember it well, as I was out on a nature ramble in some woods with Juin, the adopted Dayak (Bornean) son of a local naturalist, and Juin had helpfully pointed out some areas of undergrowth that we should not go into as they had evil spirits in them. It was a clear day but I recall it being cold — late March. The butterfly fluttered out of some dark pines, I thought it was a moth, and netted it for a look (I did not collect moths). So Speckled Woods could be around earlier than April…
But not in this case! I opened up my old butterfly cabinet, and there it was:
The somewhat florid data label, which normally lives folded up and impaled on the pin beneath the butterfly, means: [Captured by] P.J.S. Miles [in] Betteshanger [Park, East Kent, the woods where Rupert Brooke did his military training in October 1914]; [The] 1st recorded sp[ecimen]. 18 April 1961. Not March, then… But the best-informed local entomologist confirmed that it was the first record for this part of Kent; presumably, this capture was early evidence of its future spread.
I saw other Speckled Wood butterflies in those woods, in dappled sunlight on warm summer and autumn days, but did not catch them, let alone kill them, as I was already aware, aged thirteen, how precarious butterfly populations were. Moreover, I was very into breeding butterflies from the egg. It was deeply satisfying to raise more actual butterflies (‘imagos’) from a brood than would have survived in nature, and I soon could not bring myself to kill them for my collection, so they were released. The local entomologist I referred to had a great collection, but by the time I knew him (1958) he had changed: he was becoming a convinced conservationist. Under his influence, I gave up collecting butterflies when I was fifteen and have been a butterfly conservationist ever since.
So where is this leading..? To this:
Why, sixty years ago, was it still acceptable for boys to collect, i.e. catch and kill, butterflies? (I never heard of girls doing it.) This is what I have frequently asked myself whenever I have attended to the preservation of my small collection from that time, which is now of historical environmental interest.
My answers at the moment would run like this:
(a) It wasn’t wholly acceptable. People of my parents’ generation (of whom the local entomologist above was one) were already doubting it, for both conservation and humane reasons.
(b) The generation above them did find it perfectly acceptable, and they were Late Victorians/ Edwardians. My grandfather, for example, born 1888, encouraged my collecting, two of his friends were serious Edwardian lepidopterists, and they actually passed on to me setting boards, pins, and fine Late Victorian/Edwardian books on the subject. As a boy, I was much more influenced by my grandfather than my father.
(c) It was still thought necessary to the scientific study of lepidoptera. You had to have the set specimen with data label to ‘prove’, say, the occurrence of a species. Paradoxically, perhaps, you had to have the dead specimen of an aberration or ‘variety’, to prove that it existed (i.e. had existed). The study of vast collections of butterflies led to the identification of new species and seasonal/regional forms; to a deeper understanding of butterfly genetics and evolution in action. Nearly all of this has been superseded by highly sophisticated live photography.
So a statement by Chris Packham has led me back to the Edwardians. The explosion of collecting and amateur scientific study of insects in that period is an interesting side to Edwardianism that I had not considered before. Natural history became even more popular, with some fine writers on the subject (e.g. W.H. Hudson of Hampstead, whom George Calderon knew). Women originated the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which received its charter from Edward VII.
I feel the urge to read my biography of Calderon from cover to cover again for the first time since 2018. There have been new books that are relevant and it would be interesting to discover to what extent I see things differently now. Watch this space, then, from about May onwards, for a return to some personal and guest posts about the Edwardians!
4 March
The invasion officially began on 24 February, but it was clear to some of us well before Christmas what the gameplan was, so there is no need for me to change a word of what I wrote in this diary on 22 February.
BUT: the utterly magnificent solidarity of the Ukrainian people has meant that every day by which they hold back the advance of Russian troops is a victory for Ukraine. According to intelligence reports, the delays have thrown Putin into Hitlerian rages.
Always trust the body language. The dictator’s ‘security council’ were plainly depressed, if not appalled, by the action he was asking them to ‘approve’, and his ‘economic advisers’ looked in total shock and despair. Neither group had known in advance what he was planning to do in Ukraine. Apparently, many govt officials wanted to resign, but were terrified he would accuse them of treason and put them in camps. I think there is a deep reluctance amongst the military, even. They have their own dignity. Implementing the historical fantasies of a murderer and war criminal may not be to their liking.
Where will it go from here? Unfortunately, the endgame will be pure Machiavelli as I said on 22 February. The occupation will be ruthless. People in the West will hardly be able to believe what the Russians perpetrate. We will weep tears of despair and frustration.
BUT: events have shown that the Ukrainian people love their liberty, sovereignty and democracy as their country — those, in addition to everything else, are what their country is for them — and they will never, ever resign themselves to losing them. Democracy is now a part of their identity, written in their blood and bones. At all costs, therefore, Zelensky and his brilliant team must escape and eventually form the government waiting in exile. If they don’t, I am sure Putin will kill them all. Obviously Putin wants to annex the whole country, but I have never believed he has the troops to do it and hold it. He may have to settle for the eastern half and grab the rest later — if he survives that long.
AND: Spot polls in Russia indicate that at most 3 out of 10 people support what Putin is doing. 150 Russian Orthodox clergy have signed a moving petition against it, even though, disgusting to relate, the Patriarchate approves of the invasion. The plotters will already be plotting, if only individually, since they realise that the only way to stop the economic and moral collapse of their country is to remove the psychopath. The Russian people made a terrible mistake twenty years ago in deciding that they had ‘done’ democracy and wanted a ‘strong man’. They were too lazy to make democracy work. Yet never underestimate the Russian people: as Pushkin wrote in similar circumstances, ‘Rossiia vsprianet oto sna’ (‘Russia will spring up from its sleep’). How long, though, will it take?
7 March
To my intense chagrin, Sam&Sam have had to cancel our participation in the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) conference here in Cambridge 8-10 April. Sam1 in Moscow told me nearly four weeks ago that it was too risky for him to leave Russia, and I agreed. I was determined to man our stall with Jim. However, 85% of our books are in Russian and printed in Russia, so it is now too dangerous for Sam1, with his history of dissidence, to be seen to be associated with a western event whose organisers have publicly condemned the invasion. There was no alternative, then, but to pull out, and the President of BASEES emailed me: ‘I think it is the right decision.’ Moreover, certain ranting, Russophobic members of BASEES are planning to disrupt the conference and I don’t want to be either boycotted by them or harangued/interrogated by them. In the present climate, Sam&Sam would risk looking irrelevant. I fear the conference may not take place at all.
11 March
Some readers have asked me what George Sandison died from, and even whether he did die. Well, he certainly died, at the age of eighty-one, but I haven’t seen his death certificate so I can’t be definitive about the cause. He had had a very stressful day, of course, and it is well known that if you suffer from angina you should not suddenly raise your arms as it will put too much strain on the heart. Two of my relations died this way — one hanging up the washing, the other putting up a pelmet — not to mention other people I know of.
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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.
A writer-publisher’s Ukrainian diary: 1
16 March 2022
Tony Blair has said that to keep telling Putin all the things we won’t do in the face of Putin’s carnage (e.g. enforce a no-fly zone, give Ukraine Polish MiGs, co-occupy and safeguard Western Ukraine with the Ukrainian Army, guarantee Ukraine from nuclear attack), is ‘a strange strategy’. Worse, it is encouraging Putin to continue his insane war. For almost the first time in my life, I find myself agreeing with Blair.
28 March
Joe Biden called Putin ‘a war criminal’, to screams of protest from Moscow, but Biden is literally right. Now he has called Putin ‘a butcher’ who ‘cannot stay in power’, to screams of ‘gaffe!’ from the West. I don’t for one moment believe that by ‘cannot stay in power’ Biden meant ‘the U.S. will remove him’; I think most people believe he was saying ‘such a madman simply has to go’. He was expressing his outrage. As I have said myself, there are certainly Russians who want to remove Putin for morally and economically ruining their country, and I bet they are about it. Personally, I find it a relief to discover that a President of the United States still dares say publicly what millions of us are thinking.
29 March
For reasons that I quite understand, Zelensky has repeatedly called for ‘face-to-face talks with Putin’. But I hope to God he doesn’t mean it literally. The Times reports today that Abramovich and two Ukrainian negotiators ‘developed symptoms consistent with chemical poisoning whilst staying in Kyiv after a day of negotiations’, and although U.S. intelligence thinks the cause was ‘environmental’, the statistical likelihood is that they were poisoned intentionally. I was told by Russian dissidents years ago that Putin was obsessed with poisoning. Remember Litvinenko, remember former Ukrainian president Yushchenko’s bloated face, the attempt to poison Politkovskaya, the poisoning of the Skripals, Navalny’s near-fatal poisoning… Putin and his people think poisoning is a great wheeze, terribly funny. (Recall the CCTV footage of his agents laughing in Salisbury after delivering novichok.) A British woman I know was interpreting at high-level talks with Putin, he took a dislike to her for particular reasons, and she could not appear in public for weeks afterwards as she came out in a dramatic rash. (The theory is that the chair she sat on at the Russian Embassy was impregnated with some virus like Pityriasis rosea.) If I were Volodymyr Zelensky I would never be in the same building as Putin, let alone the same room. And in any case: is it possible to meet the madman who is responsible for killing thousands of your own people and devastating your country? I certainly couldn’t do it. Putin doesn’t do negotiating, only dictating, and if Zelensky personally made a deal with him which was then rejected by the Ukrainian people in a referendum, Zelensky would surely have to resign, which would be a victory for Putin and disaster for Ukraine. Let Zelensky’s negotiators negotiate it, and Zelensky stay in his Kyiv office. He need ratify it only after it has been approved by the referendum.
31 March
Some people may think Zelensky and his team are weakening. First he told the world three weeks ago that ‘we have to accept we are not joining NATO’, and this week he has offered Russia ‘neutrality’ after a peace settlement. These are not symptoms of weakening, they are using reality for Ukraine’s purposes. Even before the Russians invaded, Ukraine was in a position where it ‘was not joining NATO’, because one of the terms for joining NATO is that a country should not be in a border dispute with any of its neighbours. But that is very different from ‘will never join NATO’, as no country can allow itself to be threatened, blackmailed, bullied and raped into declaring it will never do something. That would be for the democracy Ukraine to surrender unconditionally to the autocracy Russia.
Given that there is no immediate prospect of Ukraine qualifying to join NATO, Zelensky is right to offer Russia (and the West) neutrality. But he is demanding military guarantees of that neutrality from Russia and western powers. Here, again, he is absolutely right: it would be rectifying the shameful situation I referred to in the first paragraph of my previous post, when the West gave Ukraine ‘assurances’ of its security after brokering the nuclear demilitarization of Ukraine, but they were worthless, as they contained no deterrents (threats), and did not prevent this war.
However, I am afraid to say that neutrality guaranteed by Russia and western powers (the U.S., obviously, but the U.K., France and Germany have also been mentioned) would create the severest danger of a third world war to have emerged from the whole crisis, because it would create a situation analogous to Europe in 1914. Think: is Putin capable of being as mad as the Kaiser, dismissing the guarantees of western powers as ‘a scrap of paper’, and invading a neutral state? Yes, he is.
2 April
The West is still behaving as though Putin were ten foot tall. At the beginning of this war he made a bloodcurdling threat to use nuclear weapons if we interfered, he put his nuclear arsenal on a higher alert, and now he has sent nuclear submarines into the North Atlantic. Therefore, the general feeling is, we must not do anything that could possibly annoy him. Biden says Putin ‘cannot stay in power’ and the West’s diplomats howl that this is handing Putin ‘the propaganda narrative’. Forgive me, but you have handed Putin the narrative already. The man is not ten foot tall, he is a ranting psychopathic gambler like Hitler and his army a crime against humanity. It is time for us to get a grip like the Ukrainians and understand that we have nothing to fear but our own fear.
ADVERTISEMENT
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.