There!

To our astonishment, Amazon suddenly announced to the world that Edna’s Diary had been published on 6 May — which was before they had told us it had been accepted!

So here it is, folks, fully available now in ‘real time’:

Click the cover to find the book on Amazon.

I can let Calderonia followers in on a secret. When we eventually received our first copies from Amazon, we could see that the removal of their ‘Not for Resale’ band from the four previous proofs revealed some disconcerting brown blurs on the front and back covers (they are Tippex on the original manuscript). We want to dim these, which will also necessitate tweaking the Introduction to explain what they are, but we daren’t risk that until we have received our full 75 copies for the advance publicity, which have to go out this week. So about a week before the start of Aphasia Awareness Month, i.e. June, the front and back covers on bought copies should be clearer — roughly as above. I’ll then blog a bit more about the background to this book.

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

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Nearly there…

We have now signed off our fourth proof of Edna’s Diary from Amazon. Really, the last two proofs were necessary only to tweak the back cover. I think this is often the case: you can rapidly get the contents right, i.e. the text, but the number of spatial variables on the back cover raises the chances of misalignments etc there, so you just have to keep rejigging and resubmitting it until you are satisfied. That is the stage we reached last week. Assuming Amazon themselves now approve the book for printing, the complete cover (without the barcode) should look like this:

Unfortunately, though, I have now noticed the two faint brown patches at the top of the front and back cover, which in the proofs were obscured by Amazon’s thick overprint ‘Not for Resale’. Aaaargh! Perhaps no-one else will notice them, but perhaps Amazon’s quality control (which is good) will say they are flaws… To be honest, I jumped to the conclusion that they were smudges from Amazon’s own printing of their overprint band. But they are not. They are where my mother used Tippex to white out words and write over them. The Tippex, of course, was white, but after twelve years’ fading and the imposition of a blue ground they have come out brown!

This has necessitated a long discussion between Sam2 and me about what we are going to do when we receive our sample of the book and can see just how conspicuous the smudges are. Since the whole point of the cover design was to show what a diary written by a stroke survivor looks like ‘warts and all’, I am in favour at the moment of leaving them there (if Amazon permits) and adding a few explanatory words to the Introduction apropos of my minimal tampering with my mother’s text.

We paid Amazon £30.87 for the four proofs sent ‘expedited’ — which meant that we received them back within three days — and I think that is reasonable. If you don’t go for ‘expedited’, the proofs can take up to a week. The ‘expedited’ service means that we have got ahead of our original schedule and I am bringing the official publication date forward. It will finally be determined by Amazon, but could be as early as 15 May. That will give me plenty of time to send out copies in advance of Aphasia Awareness Month — June.

Watch this space for the publication announcement!

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

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From the diary of a writer-publisher: 14

1 February
I received an email from Sam1 (Russia) in a Moscow hospital. His whole family has gone down with COVID. The others are coping with it at home, but he was rapidly losing lung capacity and had to be admitted to hospital. He has been there five days, responded well to treatment, and been told he will be able to go home soon.

What a relief. As Chekhov put it, ‘Russian life beats a man till not a damp mark remains’. Sam1 (Russia) has had such a basinful in his life, most of it lived under Communism, that it’s hardly surprising he has underlying health issues at the age of 75. They must have made him more vulnerable, as he had taken stringent precautions not to catch COVID.

Other sources tell me that most Russians are instinctively wary of their government’s vaccine ‘Sputnik’, so won’t have it, and whereas the official figure for deaths from Black Crow across the country is 57,000, unofficially it’s nearing half a million.

8 February
The first in my series of guest posts about D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love has gone out today — John Pym’s critical look at Ken Russell’s 1969 film version of the novel.

‘Excited’ is somewhat over-used these days, but it would certainly be true to say that I am ‘suspensed’. Lawrence, I hope, is still contentious, this novel particularly, and the demographic of Calderonia is such that probably half of our subscribers saw the film when it came out. I have read all three guest posts, of course, and each is very different and admirably challenging. Moreover, we have all put a lot of time into contacting people who might be aroused into Commenting.

Without Comments, is it worth carrying on with Calderonia? Every few months, I ask myself whether, after seven years, it’s time to bring it to a graceful end.

Its original purpose was to raise awareness of George Calderon and the fact that I was writing the first full-length biography of him. That phase lasted nearly four years till the biography came out in 2018, but thank goodness I took Andrew Tatham‘s passionate advice to continue the blog as a marketing tool. In the first week after publication we sold 50 copies to subscribers to the blog, and we have now shifted 65% of the imprint. Next April, all being well, we shall at last be able to have our Sam&Sam stall at the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies international conference in Cambridge, after which I expect to have more or less sold out. I have decided, then, to continue with Calderonia until at least this time next year.

— As long as I can still find things to blog about and people still leave Comments!

14 February
I’ve just received this photo from Sam1 (Russia), proving that he is alive and back home (in the country outside Moscow). He looks groggy, but is evidently well protected:

He tells me that for the first few days he was so tired he could hardly walk. When he finally went just outside the back door he looked at the thermometer and it showed -30 C. This is unusual in a Russian winter these days, as is the amount of snow they have had. Even the starlings, I am told, no longer fly south for the winter, as they can survive on the heat and food generated by city rubbish tips.

Sam1 (Russia) has completed two books during self-imposed lockdown. I think the first will be a Sam&Sam production, the second published by a Russian firm. It delights me that we — Sam1 (UK) and Sam2 (UK) — have now been able to assemble in Cambridge copies of all Russian and English Sam&Sam titles still available, provide them with summaries, and offer them at https://www.samandsam.co.uk/

March
Our guest posts on Women in Love have had very good viewing figures and a spinoff for me has been re-reading Lawrence’s stories ‘The Ladybird’, ‘The Fox’ and ‘The Captain’s Doll’, as well as reading ‘The Man Who Died’ and a fair chunk of Blake. The clash, interplay, modulation, call it what you will, of Comments, has been magnificent.

But my main activity this month has been typing up, editing and re-editing a selection of entries from the diary my mother (1920-2009) wrote after recovering from a stroke in 2002. It left her with only 20% of her language faculty, but after two years of NHS therapy that had increased to 89%. Part of the therapy was to write a diary — which she had never done in her life before (she had found the whole idea boring). To begin with she needed more than an hour to write a few lines, but gradually the diary took off and she wrote 335,000 words over five years!

The idea of Edna’s Diary: Writing again after Stroke (a pocket-sized book of 40-odd pages and costing no more than £4) grew out of an invitation I had from Harvey Pitcher to give a talk to Cromer Stroke Club in 2013. I spoke about, and read from, the memoirs that my mother had written in her seventies, and just touched on her post-stroke diary. In next to no time, I was invited to give the talk to five other stroke clubs in East Anglia. Realising that it was precisely the diary that was of most interest to stroke-survivors, I got up a talk devoted to it, and set off around the stroke clubs again.

Finally, the penny dropped that not only was my mother’s diary entertaining, but a little book of selections from it, with an introduction, could encourage aphasia sufferers to have a go and improve their communication skills this way. The obvious people to print such a book are Amazon. Sam2 (UK) suggested that we donate our income from the book to the Stroke Association, which was a very good idea, and we were off. The official publication day is 10 June 2021.

In January I started working on the selection from those 335,000 words; this has been the most difficult bit. It has gone through countless variations. There were other issues too, such as changing the names of most people mentioned in my mother’s diary, but getting permission from the descendants of her closest friends to leave their names untouched. By the middle of March I was able to hand the book over to Sam2 (UK) for typesetting.

To my mind, there is everything in these diaries from pathos and politics to flowers and farce, and the shortness of the extracts is a strength. My mother could also be wry and very frank, but it does no harm to shake readers up occasionally. Here are four examples of the extracts (spelling and punctuation unchanged):

10th June 2006. My eighty-sixth birthday. Patrick did the shopping and met Muriel at the Co-op, so they came home together in her car. She is the same age as me. In the window of her car she has a sticker that says: ‘Better an old fart than a young dickhead!’

1st March 2005. At 12.15 I went to Age Concern for lunch. Geoffrey and Mary were there, and Richard. Richard doesn’t usually sit with us. He is a small man with a humpback. He lives on his own. He has epilepsy. During lunch he had two small spasms, and fell, dropping his lunch over the table. He said he would clear it up, but Geoffrey knew that Richard would find it very difficult. I used to think Geoffrey a bit stuck up. But I must say I admired how quickly quietly he managed the situation.

26th December 2004. Everyone enjoyed the Boxing Day meal. N.B. I was quite surprised about Roderick. He has expanded so much. He eats more than his wife and brother and is rather round. He says he does not drink alacocohol, but he made a hole in the brandy butter and trifle.

8th November 2006. The doctor came to see me about 4 p.m. He had a red face. I suspect he has High Blood Pressure.

5th November 2008. Today History was made because the first black man was elected President of the United States. His name is Barack Obama.

20 April
People are understandably divided about Amazon (see 22 May 2020: James Bloodworth), and I keep a weather eye on its practices and ethics. I even wonder whether it will eventually collapse under the weight of its own expansion into so many areas of our lives, including publishing. In the meantime, however, I really have nothing but praise for how Amazon facilitates indie publishing (so far only in paperback).

You bear the cost of typesetting the book, but thereafter the Amazon deal is excellent, in my experience. You can order from them as many proofs as you like (at a nominal price plus postage) until you have got it as you want and give them the green light for actual publication. Then you get all the benefits of their marketing and sales, whilst reaping around 25% of the sale price of your book.

This was our very first go at the back cover. The somewhat strange-looking space in the bottom right is where Amazon puts on the barcode, so it needs to be kept clear of anything ‘important’! — Sam2

As Sam2 (UK) has explained, the above was our first attempt at the back cover. Amazon then put in their rather large barcode panel and we discovered we would have to cut down the text on the back cover as well as enlarge the font. We did that, tweaked the colour and background, as well as certain things on the front cover, ten days ago, but are still waiting for the second proof. That’s the only downside: you can’t predict how quickly such a huge organisation will respond. But they do communicate: we heard two days ago that the second proof will be with us by the end of this week. That will be fine, as the plan is to get copies out to the Stroke Association in May ready for Aphasia Awareness Month, June.

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Some Calderonian footnotes to ‘Women in Love’

George Calderon was public-school, Oxford, backed by his wife’s unearned income, rather patriotic, perceived as conservative; D.H. Lawrence was a miner’s son, self-supporting and often penurious, rather oikophobic, perceived as revolutionary. What could they possibly have had in common?

They were both Edwardians.

Admittedly George was seventeen years older than Lawrence, who was only sixteen when Edward VII came to the throne, but if one accepts (as I do) Lawrence’s view that the Edwardian period ended in 1916 with the Battle of the Somme, then it’s Lawrence who lived through the whole of that period, not George.

Of course, we regard Lawrence as far more modern than George, but there are plenty of people who prefer the ‘early’ Lawrence as a writer, say before 1919. As well as being a Late Victorian, George could be described as an Early Edwardian, and Lawrence as a Late Edwardian. One might argue that it was the very ferment of discourse, society, politics and science under the Edwardians that could produce a Lawrence. George and Lawrence share the quintessential versatility, polymathery and self-belief of the Edwardians.

In chapter 8 of Women in Love, ‘Breadalby’, which relates a summer lunch party at a country house similar to Garsington or Far End, we are told:

There had been some discussion, on the whole quite intellectual and artificial, about a new state, a new world of man. Supposing this old social state were broken and destroyed, then, out of the chaos, what then?

If the Breadalby symposium took place in 1912 (as Catherine Brown’s Comment of 6 March would suggest), we can say that these are precisely the subjects that George himself was debating in public at that time (see chapter 12, ‘The Trouble with Trade Unionism’, in my biography), including even the creation of a Centre Party.

In his satirical science fiction novel of 1904, Dwala (highly original cover featured above), George had depicted the collapse of the Edwardian state and suggested the country could be saved only by an atavistic leader with a popular mandate. I suspect Lawrence had something far more revolutionary and socialistic in mind. But we know from William Rothenstein’s memoirs that George, drawing on his knowledge and experience of Russia, deplored the ‘disintegrating menace of revolutionary tendencies’ anywhere.

 *               *               *

Another topical theme touched on in ‘Breadalby’, and which would have amused George, is the popularity of Russian literature and the uneven quality of its English translations.

After lunch, the company take coffee outdoors — ‘in lounge chairs’. The Contessa suddenly looks up from her reading and says: ‘There is a most beautiful thing in my book. It says the man came to the door and threw his eyes down the street.’ Everyone laughs. The book, it transpires, is ‘Fathers and Sons, by Turgenev’ (correct translation Fathers and [their] Children), and the ‘man’ is Bazarov, its Nihilist hero.

It is some decades since I lectured and supervised on Turgenev’s novel, so perhaps my memory deceives me. But two pretty close scans of the Russian text have also failed to retrieve such a phrase. It would be interesting to hear from Calderonia’s follower Michael Pursglove, the eminent recent translator of Fathers and Children, whether a Russian original for the sentence ‘Bazarov came to the door and threw his eyes hurriedly down the street’ occurs in it, and if so how he translated it himself!

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

The cause of hilarity in the quoted sentence is the concreteness of the clause ‘threw his eyes’. I would have thought that to cast one’s eyes down a street was just about possible then in English, though ‘cast a glance’ would surely have been more natural (and a closer translation of the Russian brosat’ vzgliad).

Knowall Rupert Birkin, without even looking at the title page, declares that the Contessa’s book is ‘an old American edition’, and this piece of mansplaining is trumped by Hermione Roddice’s brother:

     ‘Ha! — of course — translated from the French,’ said Alexander, with a fine declamatory voice. ‘Bazarov ouvra la porte et jeta les yeux dans la rue.’
     He looked brightly round the company.

However, the editors of the CUP edition of the novel, I am kindly informed by Damian Grant, annotate this passage thus:

The sentence does not appear in any extant edition [Presumably they mean English-language] of Fathers and Sons (1862) […]; the American edition of 1867 was translated directly from the Russian, and had no connection with the first French edition of 1863.

It seems, then, that the sentence is a spoof by Lawrence, and given George’s views on English translations of Russian literature before Constance Garnett (see pages 22 and 157 of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius) one could be sure he would have enjoyed it.

But this masterly little dialogue does not end there. Immediately after Alexander has ‘looked brightly round the company’ for appreciation of his cleverness, Ursula puts her finger on the really interesting word in the ‘American translation from the French’:

     ‘I wonder what the “hurriedly” was,’ said Ursula.
     They all began to guess.
     And then, to the amazement of everybody, the maid came hurrying with a large tea-tray. The afternoon had passed so swiftly.

‘Hurriedly’ is hilariously redundant as an adverb with ‘threw’, although I suppose ‘cast a hurried glance’ is just about possible in English (‘quick’ would be better) and there are equivalent Russian adverbs to ‘hurriedly’ that could go with the straight Russian verbs for ‘look’ and ‘glance’. But this passage is not really about translation or the popularity of Russian literature amongst the Edwardian intelligentsia. The point is that as usual no-one notices Ursula’s intelligence and superior ability to provoke dialogue…

*               *               *

Could George Calderon have read, or even met D.H. Lawrence, before he (George) left for Flanders in October 1914 and Gallipoli in May 1915?

Certainly; but there is no evidence that he did. As a regular reader of the English Review, edited by Ford Hueffer, whom George had entertained at Heathland Lodge, George must have seen Lawrence’s poems appearing in it, and especially the story ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ (1911). But I have never seen George’s name amongst those Hampstead writers to whom Hueffer introduced Lawrence around that time.

Truth to tell, most of these writers were well on the left politically, and (however highly he thought of Constance’s translations) George particularly did not mix with Lawrence’s friends the Garnetts and Fanny Stepniak, who flirted with Russian terrorism. Lawrence himself briefly took up residence in Hampstead, with his wife Frieda, at 1 Byron Villas, but only after George’s death in June 1915:

The intriguing possibility exists, however, that George and Kittie met Frieda, then Frieda Weekley, sometime in 1912. For her parents-in-law lived at 40 Well Walk, next to the Calderons’ new house, 42, which George and Kittie bought in 1912 and moved into in December, as the Weekleys were moving out of 40 to make way for the Sturge Moores, whom George already knew. Kittie certainly visited 42 Well Walk several times before they moved in. A mention of the Weekleys in one of George’s letters to Kittie suggests that he had met them. Their daughter-in-law visited them at 40 Well Walk, finally leaving her two daughters with them when she eloped with Lawrence from Charing Cross on 3 May 1912. The least one can say is that by December 1912 George and Kittie must have heard of the scandalous end to the Weekleys’ son’s marriage.

The definitive account of Hampstead’s connections with D.H. Lawrence is by John Worthen and our follower Professor Catherine Brown at https://catherinebrown.org/lawrences-hampstead-a-walking-tour/

Comment Image


George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

D.H. Lawrence’s ‘christology’

This post is dedicated to the memory of
JOHN POLKINGHORNE
scientist-theologian
16 October 1930 – 9 March 2021

‘The Myrrh-Bearing Women’, Russian icon, c. 1475

My thanks know no end to John Pym, Damian Grant and Laurence Brockliss for their superb posts on Lawrence’s Women in Love, the novel and film. They absolutely rose to the occasion of addressing the questions that I found myself left with after watching the film and reading the novel back in January. Their posts have had well above average viewing figures, and experience shows that guest posts are some of the most regularly visited (from all over the world) on the Calderonia site. I seriously hope that readers will not be shy to continue to leave Comments on these deliberately challenging essays.

*              *               *

A subject that I was not expecting to come out of this exercise is Lawrence’s attitude to religion, Christianity, and Jesus Christ in particular. I will touch on just a few points here, based on my readings of The RainbowWomen in Love, and ‘The Man Who Died’ (1928).

I was amazed at how many allusions to the Bible there are in The Rainbow, predominantly but not only to the Old Testament. Damian Grant must correct me if I am wrong, but it seems to me that the whole novel is entangled with that text. ‘In everything she saw she grasped and groped to find the creation of the living God’, we are told as Ursula sits alone after her miscarriage at the end of The Rainbow, and the last paragraph opens with a pastiche of lines from Genesis 9: 11-17 that is so good one could be forgiven for thinking it was a quotation: ‘And the rainbow stood on the earth.’

By contrast, Women in Love seems a New Testament work, rather obsessed with Jesus. Birkin is referred to by others as ‘the Sunday school teacher’, ‘a preacher’, ‘really a priest’, and in the priceless grand guignol chapter ‘Gudrun in the Pompadour’ he is actually said by Halliday to be ‘as bad as Jesus’, to which another Bohemian adds: ‘He is a megalomaniac, of course, it is a form of religious mania. He thinks he is the Saviour of man.’ Even as the debunking of Birkin proceeds, however, we are aware that it is a travesty of the man. The effect is to clear the superficial, parodic resemblances of Birkin to Christ and leave one real, very powerful one: resurrection. ‘This marriage with her’, Birkin sees, is his ‘resurrection and his life’ — a quotation from Christ’s words to Martha at St John 11: 25, ‘I am the resurrection, and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet shall he live’ (used as the first words of the Church of England funeral service). Well, perhaps Lawrence saw the whole of Women in Love as the story of Birkin’s and Ursula’s ‘resurrection’, following her near-death at the end of The Rainbow and his state of being ‘quite dead-alive’ at the beginning of the sequel?

I had never been attracted to reading Lawrence’s fifty-page story ‘The Man Who Died’, as I gathered it was about Christ surviving crucifixion and being ‘resurrected’ by a nubile priestess of Isis. It did not sound promising. I have recently read it three times, however, and find it a masterpiece. It is complex, the delicacy with which Lawrence uses just enough Biblical language is amazing, there is none of that ejaculatory over-writing which in my view mars Women in Love, and I defy anyone not to find the evocation of the priestess’s world on the shores of Sidon poetical in the truest sense, convincing, and deeply moving.

There are a number of features to Christ that are stressed in this story and amount to Lawrence’s christology (here, at least). First, there is the same paramount focus on resurrection as in Women in Love. To the peasant who shelters him, and to the myrrh-bearing women, this Christ says he is alive because ‘they took me down too soon’, implying that he revived in the tomb. But both he and Lawrence repeatedly state that he died, so he can’t have been merely resuscitated. Moreover, the extraordinary description of his awakening from death suggests that there is an ulterior force behind the act, not just the recovery powers of his body, and that as a resurrected person he is not going to die again but has before him ‘an eternity of time’ (‘I am with you alway’, St Matthew 28: 20).

It is very noticeable how often Lawrence’s Christ feels ‘compassion’ — for the Roman soldiers asleep by his tomb, for the peasant people, but strangely enough not for ‘Madeleine’ (Mary Magdalene) or the other women. ‘The power was still in him to heal any man or child who touched his compassion.’ He also smiles, laughs, and connects with people by speaking ‘gently’. He can ‘read’ people and a situation intuitively. His teaching, it is suggested, had ‘offered only kindness’, that’s what it came down to.

Lawrence’s argument is with Christ’s kenosis (utter pouring of himself out). ‘I gave more than I took, and that also is woe and vanity. So Pilate and the high priests saved me from my own excessive salvation.’ Risen from the dead,

he had realized at last that the body, too, has its little life, and beyond that, the greater life. He was virgin, in recoil from the little, greedy life of the body. But now he knew that virginity is a form of greed; and that the body rises again to give and to take, to take and to give, ungreedily.

Now he will discover the ‘phenomenal world’, which we are told he had never ‘seen’ because ‘I was too much blinded by my confusion within it’. ‘Nothing is so marvellous as to be alone in the phenomenal world’, this Christ tells himself, and Lawrence’s own imagination of him experiencing it is marvellous. The culmination for Christ, ‘who had never known a woman’, is his sexual ‘healing’ by the young virgin priestess of Isis In Search who has been waiting for her Osiris all her life, and conceives by him. For my taste, at least, it is beautifully described.

Lawrence is right: the question of Christ’s sexuality is rather important. When I was interviewing John Polkinghorne for our book What Can We Hope For? he referred several times to St Gregory of Nazianus’s dictum ‘what is not shared is not redeemed’, explaining: ‘As with his death, if Jesus is the son of God and came to share and redeem human nature, then he has to share in all human experience’ (p. 57). I put to him the objection that Jesus didn’t share in all human experience, because ‘he didn’t know erotic, sexual love’. I never saw John so angry. ‘No,’ he shot at me, ‘and he didn’t murder anyone, either!’ But then he added: ‘Nor did he know the radio, or drive a car!’ It was not my function as interviewer to pursue this, so the subject dissolved in laughter.

There is no doubt in my mind that Christ did love a number of women, and that they loved him. More than that, it seems, we cannot say.

*               *               *

The frequency of epiphany, transfiguration, revelation, and what Lawrentians see as ‘prophecy’ in Lawrence’s work, inclines me, after my reading of The RainbowWomen in Love, and ‘The Man Who Died’, to see Lawrence as a (secular) religious writer. Even sex in these works is a ‘mystic’ experience rather than one of lovemaking. And all through, there are what I would regard as religious insights. For instance, at the very end of Women in Love Birkin contemplates the frozen corpse of his friend Gerald Crich and thinks:

Those who die, and dying can still love, still believe, do not die. They live still in the beloved. Gerald might still have been living in the spirit with Birkin, even after death. He might have lived with his friend, a further life.

But Gerald was ‘the denier’. Earlier, he had ‘let go for ever’ his ‘warm, momentaneous grip of final love’ on Birkin’s hand and left Birkin’s heart ‘cold, frozen, hardly able to beat’. Consequently, Gerald could not be a ‘second presence’ for Birkin. He, Gerald, was now nowhere for Birkin; an emptiness. Ursula comforts him:

‘You’ve got me,’ she said.
He smiled and kissed her.
‘If I die,’ he said, ‘you’ll know I haven’t left you.’
‘And me?’ she cried.
‘And you won’t have left me,’ he said. ‘We shan’t have any need to despair, in death.’

This is very modern theology.

*               *               *

HAPPY EASTER!

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Guest post by Laurence Brockliss: The Historian, Middle-Class Marriage, and ‘Women in Love’

I have always been puzzled by Tolstoy’s apodictic statement about happy and unhappy marriages at the beginning of Anna Karenina. How on earth did he know? Even today when the state and the media have penetrated deeply into our private lives, the inner workings of most marriages remain a secret to all but the couple involved, and unions which hold fast until death are frequently dismissed from the outset by outsiders as doomed to fail. In Victorian and Edwardian Britain, the government inspector and the nosy journalist understood that the front door was the entrance to a sanctum that none could cross uninvited, unless there was a suspicion of foul play or ill treatment of minors. As a result, marriage was an institution about which guardians of the nation’s morals might pontificate but hardly any had concrete knowledge, apart from their own and their parents’ relationships.

Victorian and Edwardian novelists, of course, and not just Tolstoy, offered their readers carefully crafted examples of marriages of all kinds, but however realistic their setting, are they anything more than the figments of an often moralising imagination? Can they be used as a source for understanding the marital lives of our ancestors, any more than they can be used to understand class relations or religious sensibilities? Social historians remain highly sceptical, despite being told for the last fifty years that their precious documents are as much the product of human contrivance as any novel, and have no intrinsic veracity. They remain for the most part convinced that a laundry list and a furniture inventory will bring us much closer to the reality of marriage in the long nineteenth century than Pride and Prejudice, Middlemarch, or countless other masterpieces of Leavis’s ‘Great Tradition’. And to be fair to the English novel, its main driving force from Austen to Lawrence is courtship not marriage. The marriages that are depicted tend to be seen as mutually unfulfilling and the result of bad and unnecessary choices. In an age when divorce was a possibility only for the very rich, the middle-class novel became a device for teaching the young how to choose wisely. We seldom learn how the ‘perfect’ choice — Elizabeth and Darcy, Dorothea and Ladislaw, Ursula and Birkin (why do we still always refer to the men by their surnames?!) — panned out later in life; hence the modern penchant for sequels. There is only one great English novel, These Twain (1916), the final part of Arnold Bennett’s underrated Clayhanger trilogy, which wholeheartedly attempts to portray what the ‘happy ever after’ is actually like for an ordinary couple that have ‘found’ each other and settled down to domestic bliss. And their life is not a bed of roses.

Colin Firth and Jennifer Ehle as Darcy and Elizabeth Bennett (BBC TV, 1995): Did they live happily ever after?

My collaborative ongoing study of four generations of some 800 professional families in Victorian and Edwardian Britain, drawn from nine distinctive provincial towns, has been referred to in two earlier posts. Our database contains the reference to some 5000 marriages contracted across the long nineteenth century. Thanks to the abundant material available on Ancestry, the basic details of every union are easy to uncover. In the majority of cases, we know the couple’s names, background, age, and place and date of marriage. We also know the number of children they went on to have, and the length of time their marriage survived: some unions lasted only a year or so before one or other of the partners sadly died — death in childbirth was uncommon, but it was not unknown — while some couples lived to celebrate their golden wedding. It is much more difficult to cross the threshold of the family home and decide whether the unions were happy or unhappy, as Tolstoy claimed to be able to discern. The most obvious source of information would be memoirs, diaries or letters — and this has been the usual point of entry for historians seeking to penetrate the secrets of the domestic hearth (and bedroom) from the Tudor Age to the present: see Simon Goldhill, A Very Queer Family Indeed: Sex, Religion and the Bensons in Victorian Britain (Chicago, 2016), an account of the family life of an Archbishop of Canterbury. But surprisingly few individuals in the database left any personal record of their marital life, and the one who specifically wrote an account of his relations with his wife, the aesthete John Addington Symonds (1840-93), was as tortured, and therefore as unrepresentative a soul, as Edward White Benson. Symonds, the son of a successful Bristol doctor of the same name, was a frustrated homosexual who was forced to resign his Magdalen fellowship when one of his friends in another college was caught soliciting a Magdalen chorister. Encouraged to cure his ‘unnatural’ inclinations by taking a wife, in 1864 he married an MP’s daughter, Janet Catherine North, and they had four children. Five years later, even before the birth of his final child, he and his wife came to an arrangement that allowed John Addington to spend long periods abroad with male lovers ostensibly researching the Renaissance, while she brought up the children. Symonds wrote at length about the deceits and compromises of his married life, and his continual deep love for his wife, in an autobiography that remained unpublished until long after his death. What Janet Catherine thought about their relationship remains a closed book.

John Addington Symonds

The absence of more obvious sources, however, has not precluded a deeper understanding of our 5000 marriages. There is more that can be inferred from the existing digitised material on Ancestry than might seem at first glance. In addition, there are other downloadable personal documents, above all wills, which often throw a great deal of light on the warmth of a husband and wife’s affection for each other in later life. As this is a post principally about the utility of the great English novel to the historian of the family and marriage, I will limit my discussion to the information these and other sources provide about the theme that particularly exercised Lawrence and his predecessors — finding and choosing a partner.

It might be expected that many middle-class couples in Victorian and Edwardian Britain would be either blood relations, the children of friends of their parents, or men and women who had known each other since childhood and worshipped Sunday after Sunday at the same church. This is certainly the impression received from the Victorian provincial novel, which is set in closed worlds where everyone is interrelated and expected to marry within the community: hence the possibilities and dangers when strangers like Darcy, or Lydgate and Ladislaw, turn up. In fact, however, these provincial worlds were remarkably open. Only a handful of the 5000 couples in our database were cousins, hardly any had been acquainted for any time, and a large proportion found partners who were born many miles from their own place of residence and usually still living there at the time of the marriage. The 800 professional men in the 1851 census, who formed the starting point for the study, married at the dawn of the railway age, when mobility was still constrained. Nonetheless, at least a quarter married someone from a different county from the town in which they were raised and worked; in succeeding generations the fraction was much higher. In fast growing Brighton, one of the nine towns surveyed and in easy reach of London from 1841, more than 40 per cent of our cohort who were based there and born in the local county found a partner beyond its borders; among their sons born in Sussex, the figure was 80 per cent. In other words, the majority of unions in the database were contracted by couples whose parents were very unlikely to have known one another. Moreover, the parents can have had little influence over the decision, even if they did: most men married around the age of thirty; a quarter by then were fatherless; and very few brides were still minors.

How the majority of couples came to meet is the real mystery. Some met on holiday. Symonds bumped into his future wife in the Alps. Some were the relatives of college friends. Edward Charles Wickham (1834-1910) was a long-serving tutor of New College from a modest Winchester family with medical roots, whose marriage to Gladstone’s daughter, Agnes, in 1873 would eventually lead him to the deanship of Lincoln. Rather like Kittie Calderon and her first husband who met at an Oxford ball, the pair were introduced at a party in fashionable North Oxford, in the house of Edward Talbot, the first warden of Keble. Talbot’s wife was Agnes’s cousin.

Edward Charles Wickham

But the meeting place of the large majority is veiled from view. How did Wickham’s uncle, for instance, the Winchester surgeon William John Wickham (1798-1864), end up marrying Lucy Trotman, the daughter of a Northampton clergyman, born and living in a rural parish more than a hundred miles away? There is not the slightest evidence that the two families were previously connected. William’s surgeon father came from outside Winchester and his mother from Kent: they had married in London; while William John could not have met Lucy’s elder brother, Samuel Fiennes, either at school or university, as their educational odysseys were entirely different. Nor could they have met at an Oxford party. Three of William’s brothers went to Oxford, but Samuel Fiennes went to Cambridge. Yet meet they somehow did, and when Lucy was still young and presumably chaperoned, for they married two months before her eighteenth birthday.

However couples met, what is clear that most chose sensibly. Mésalliances were uncommon. Partners were normally found from families of the same status and wealth. One of the richest men in the database, the wealthy banker Robert Cooper Lee Bevan (1809-90), a senior partner at Barclays, who was living in Brighton in 1851, illustrates the point to perfection. Robert, the son of another City banker with a small estate at Walthamstow, married twice: his first father-in-law was an admiral, the second a bishop. With one exception, the fathers of his sons’ wives were equally respectable. Two were in finance, two in the army, one a barrister and one a landed gentleman. Three were titled, two became MPs, and they all died staggeringly rich, apart from the most blue-blooded of them all, a younger son of the Duke of Bedford, who left a mere £5374. The one black sheep among the Bevan brood was Hubert Lee (1860-1939), who was also the only brother to rest on his laurels after going down from university. While the others went into banking or academia (one had the chair in Arabic at Cambridge), Hubert never had a career. In 1889 he married the very un-English sounding Isabella Wieniawska. Isabella appears to have been born in Russia in 1865, although she was baptised an Anglican at Gravesend shortly afterwards. Her Polish father, Henryck, who died in Moscow in 1880, was a travelling musician and composer of some renown. Her mother, Isabella Bessie née Hampton, was a native of London who had married Henryck in the British embassy in Paris in 1860.

Robert Cooper Lee Bevan

The last point alone is enough to conclude that Women in Love, whatever its quality as a novel, has nothing to say to the historian about middle-class courtship, let alone marriage. Liberated daughters of craft teachers, in the years before the First World War, did not form permanent relationships with mine owners’ sons or gentlemen of independent means masquerading as school inspectors. And where did the money for their liberation come from? Only a miner’s son who claimed through his art to have risen above class and who had run off with a German aristocrat could have created such an implausible background for Gudrun and Ursula, and worse was to come in Lady Chatterley. Bennett, Gissing and Galsworthy created less soul-searching fictional couples, but their inventions are of much greater interest to the social historian. Best leave Lawrence and his Nottinghamshire to those who specialise in the history of dialect or the history of the environment.

© Laurence Brockliss, 2021

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 6 Comments

Guest post by Damian Grant: ‘Women in Love’ — the novel as prophetic book

Photograph: Bettmann/Corbis

Lawrence always reminded the novel of its promise to offer something new. In his essays, where he insists that the novel ‘has got to present us with new, really new feelings, a whole line of new emotion, which will get us out of the rut’ (Phoenix, ed. Edward D. McDonald, London, Heinemann, 1936, p. 520). In his letters, as we shall see below. And of course — proof of the pudding — in the novels themselves. The last paragraph of The Rainbow tries its best to persuade us that people will ‘cast off their horny covering of disintegration, that new, clean, naked bodies would issue to a new germination, to a new growth, rising to the light and the wind and the clean rain of heaven’. This was Lawrence’s optimistic new testament — delivered before the world disintegrated into war.

It is in Women in Love nevertheless that he really delivers his promise, despite the catastrophe of the war, which he saw as a kind of death-wish of western civilisation. Here we can observe, almost scientifically, how this ‘wonderful and terrible novel’ (letter to E.M. Forster, November 1916) emerges iridescent (a favourite adjective) from the carapace of the established fictional form. Jane Austen had proposed that a novel should ideally present two contrasting couples in a country town, and Lawrence does not disdain this structure; and it was George Eliot (he remarked approvingly) who first ‘put the action all inside’, a procedure he is happy to follow. But here the superficial similarities end. The experiences of Rupert Birkin with Ursula Brangwen, and of Gerald Crich with her sister Gudrun — not to mention the relationship between Rupert and Gerald themselves — are as far removed from those between Elizabeth Bennet with Mr Darcy and her sister Jane with Mr Bingley in Pride and Prejudice as could be inferred from the century that separates the two novels. And George Eliot would not have recognized what goes on inside Lawrence’s characters: the strange fields of force — electric and magnetic — that govern their thoughts, moods, and actions. (Perhaps Mary Shelley might have understood better?)

It is not just that Lawrence takes us deep into the earth (with the coal mine and the lake) and into the thin, upper air of the mountains; not just that there is love and death in equal measure. It is what happens underneath what happens that counts; the patterning of forces that work on the characters and lead them, through a precarious social life perceived likewise with unusual intensity, to their inevitable destiny. As Lawrence wrote in the (unpublished) Foreword, ‘I should like the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters’ (Women in Love, eds David Farmer, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen, Cambridge, CUP, 1987, p. 485; all subsequent page references are to this edition). This bitterness is just one of the ‘forces’ involved. Lawrence had provided the prescription for his novel in the famous letter to Edward Garnett in June 1914, as he was setting to work on The Sisters (which would develop into The Rainbow and Women in Love). He tells Garnett that ‘that which is physic — non-human, in humanity, is more interesting to me than the old-fashioned human element’, and elaborates this in a remarkable image which functions as a divining rod to lead us through what is to come in Lawrence’s fiction:

You mustn’t look in my novel for the old stable ego of the character. There is another ego, according to whose action the ego is unrecognisable, and passes through, as it were, allotropic states which it needs a deeper sense than any we’ve been used to exercise, to discover are states of the same single radically-unchanged element.

Here, then, is where the newness of Lawrence’s project declares itself; which will guide him in the ‘period of crisis’ he was living through. And where, it is safe to say, readers tend to divide into those who have confidence in the author, and are prepared to ‘exercise [that] deeper sense’ to follow him, and those who become impatient, hankering still for the well-trodden ways of fiction, where things go on happening all the time but where we are not invited to explore the patterning that gives coherence and meaning to these things.

Lawrence’s potent symbol of the phoenix in its CUP incarnation

The ground rule of Women in Love is that the ground itself is continually shifting; there are no rules, except for this one. Everything in the universe is always in flux, in motion. Lawrence wrote in a poem (‘Fidelity’) of ‘the wonderful slow flowing of the sapphire’, and this creative flow, this permanent deliquescence and renewal, acts on his characters too and their relationships. Both couples function on a polarized axis between attraction and repulsion, love and hate; terms which are set up immediately, in each case. Development takes the form of alternation rather than alteration, as the ‘two poles of one force, like two angels or two demons’ (p. 199) wrestle with each other. Under the magnifying glass of Lawrence’s vision, the tremulations of ordinary, socialized life are recorded as storms, tempests. Again, this is a feature that critics of Lawrence fail to register, or to understand: that what he ‘sees’, and presents to us, is a heightened and enhanced account –the reverse of slow motion, though with the same intensifying effect — of what is at once truthful and (as he had warned us) unrecognisable: human emotion as we have never experienced it in fiction before — though we are used to it in poetry. (I am thinking in particular of the poetry of William Blake, whose prophetic books surge from the same depths to a similar clash of opposing energies.)

We may well ask ourselves the pertinent question: with all this radical instability, these tremors and convulsions, how do we make sense of the characters and keep up with their relationships at all; in a word, how do we read the novel? My answer would be that Lawrence creates coherence in Women in Love as Shakespeare does in his plays, by the structural use of imagery. It is through consistent, contrasted images that he maintains the difference between Birkin and Ursula on the one hand and Gerald and Gudrun on the other. Each couple has an imagistic signature, which remains indelible throughout the upheavals of the text.

From the beginning, Ursula is associated with light and flowers, organic growth and integration: ‘underneath, in the darkness, something was coming to pass’ in her (p. 9). She represents (for Birkin) ‘the perfect candour of creation’ (p. 368). Whereas her sister Gudrun is and feels shut out from this system, an ironic and resentful onlooker. Significantly, she is always the more visualised of the two, in her startling outfits of bright, even strident colours. Gudrun is ‘the more beautiful and attractive […] Ursula […] more physical, more womanly’ (p. 83). The adjectives come from different orders, different worlds, and imply the different trajectories of the two different young women. These trajectories are made possible by the partners Lawrence assigns to each — partners who are created to live out their own complementary fates.

Ursula is drawn to Rupert Birkin via an instinctive antagonism (and readers may well understand her initial reaction to this awkward and opinionated schoolmaster). It is Birkin whose reflections and arguments lead us into the novel’s exploratory centre; he whose awkwardness derives from an impatience with conventions and received ideas. He resists ‘the old way of love […] as a bondage, a conscription’ (we note the latter term; p. 199); he insists on seeing humanity as a stage in the evolutionary process. Ursula’s antagonism transforms gradually into a recognition and a need; a need which is reciprocated by Birkin himself, and beautifully expressed in what is effectively a proposal: ‘There is a golden light in you, which I wish you would give me’ (p. 249). Birkin has reflected, earlier, that he ‘can’t get right at the really growing part of me’ (p. 125); it is the rooted Ursula who enables him in this respect, as the two are progressively grafted together.

‘Pity’, colour print by William Blake, c. 1795, illustrating ‘pity like a naked newborn babe,/Striding the blast’ from Macbeth, Act I, scene 7. © Tate Gallery. Cf. Birkin to Ursula in chapter 14: ‘I want love that is like sleep, like being born again, vulnerable as a baby that just comes into the world’. The image of the ‘naked infant’ is used three times in less than a page.

Gudrun’s disposition by contrast attracts the interlocking attention of Gerald Crich, son of the local mine-owner. Gerald has the mark of Cain, having killed his brother in an accident with a gun in childhood, and being responsible for the death of his sister by drowning at his party. He tries to compensate by applying his dominant will to the efficient running of the mine, and (as the novel opens) by forming a relationship with Gudrun to fill the vacancy of which he is afraid in himself.

The key chapters for these two counterpointed relationships are 23, ‘Excurse’, and 24, ‘Death and Love’. Occurring two-thirds of the way through the novel, they are as it were the tipping point from which there is no possibility for either couple of reversal, return. In the first of these, Birkin and Ursula spend a day out together, negotiating a fearful quarrel in which Ursula denounces Birkin for all his faults, and walks away, throwing at him the rings he has given her; before returning some moments later with a flower as a peace offering. The day turns on this hinge. ‘Everything had become simple again, quite simple, the complexity gone into nowhere’ (p. 310); and after an idyllic high tea en amoureux, the lovers find consummation under the trees in Sherwood Forest (p. 320).

But in the contrastive chapter that immediately follows, the logic of the images closes in fatefully on Gerald and Gudrun. Fearful of the void after his father’s death, Gerald bears down on Gudrun encumbered with mineral images of iron and stone. (At one point, he is even described as ‘radio-active’ (p. 332).) The scene where he comes uninvited into her bedroom, and is momentarily calmed by her complicit response — which leaves her, who has previously sought this knowledge of him, ‘destroyed into perfect consciousness’ (p. 345) — is an anticipation of the final scene in the alien cold of the mountains. Here, as Gudrun peels away from him under Loerke’s influence, he panics, and finally lapses out of life after a violent expression of his own inadequacy. Gudrun then simply disappears; which also fulfils the logic of the novel, since her tale is told; leaving Ursula and Birkin to conclude with yet another loving argument.

‘The Ghost of a Flea’ c.1819-20 William Blake © Tate Gallery.
Cf. ‘There passed through Gudrun’s mind Blake’s representation of the soul of a flea. She wanted to fit it to Loerke’ (chapter 30).

Conscious of the stylistic peculiarity of his novel, Lawrence defended in his Foreword ‘the continual, slightly modified repetition […] this pulsing, frictional to-and-fro, which works up to culmination’ (p. 486). But this authorial witness doesn’t quite prepare the reader for a recurrent and revealing feature — enacting the ‘to-and-fro’ — that composes sentences in a certain way, and then structures these sentences into paragraphs and larger units. So ingrained is Lawrence’s determination to see things in terms of polarity, dynamic and creative opposites, that sentences come ready seeded with qualifications and adversitives (such as ‘but’, ‘yet’, ‘still’, ‘however’, ‘nevertheless’, ‘at the same time’), which create an atmosphere of such uncertainty, possibility, that the reader is kept continually on their toes. It is unnecessary to offer examples, since they appear on almost every page; but the thirty pages of chapter 8, ‘Breadalby’, provide a switch-back ride through all points of the emotional and intellectual compass. (It is curious, almost amusing, that towards the end of the novel Gerald replies to Birkin’s question is he all right? with an attempt to short-circuit the system, saying ‘All right and all wrong, don’t they become synonymous, somewhere?’ (p. 439).)

This stylistic reflex it is, also, which doesn’t allow one point of view to dominate. As Lawrence maintained in an essay: ‘If you nail anything down, in the novel, either it kills the novel, or the novel gets up and walks away with the nail’ (Phoenix, p. 528). Women in Love is written with such openness and ambiguity, such tentativeness in reaching forward, that it does indeed walk away with the nail.

© Damian Grant, 2021

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 8 Comments

Guest post by John Pym: ‘Women in Love’ and Glenda Jackson’s Oscar

In London in the 1970s and 80s I used to review movies for the British Film Institute’s Monthly Film Bulletin. That serious, no-frills journal, founded in 1934, aimed to cover every feature film released in UK cinemas. Some of the films that came my way for review – decades before the Internet opened the gate to explicit pornography – were slapdash crudely censored soft-core sex pictures. Each MFB review, whatever the merit of the film, required a one-paragraph plot synopsis and a one-paragraph critical assessment. Payment was based on the length of the second paragraph. And in the case of the sex films, this rarely exceeded three or four lines. Penelope ‘Pulls It Off’ (UK), Emmanuelle II – L’Anti-Vierge (France), There’s No Sex Like Snow Sex or, in the original, Beim jodeln juckt die Lederhose (West Germany).

I was reminded of the hours I once spent in tiny underground Soho viewing theatres – diligently recording what balding Kurt did to nubile Inge – while seated the other day in the comfort of my own home watching a Blu-ray disc of the BFI’s re-mastered 4K restoration of Women in Love (1969), and by one scene in particular that I’ll come to in a moment. The movie was directed by Ken Russell: the cherubic enfant terrible of the era who was then beginning to shift his so-called ‘appalling talent’ away from TV arts biopics to feature films. The, to my mind, over-literal script, drawn from a famous novel by D.H. Lawrence, once considered ‘pornographic’ but now a set text, was by the American playwright Larry Kramer. Kramer was also the film’s producer and moving spirit. A number of other film-makers, including Stanley Kubrick, declined to direct the script before Russell threw himself into the job with gusto.

Released by United Artists, Women in Love made a big splash on its well-advertised first run in the dying months of the Swinging Sixties. Word spread. Stark naked men were to be seen grappling on a carpet – a polar bear pelt having been dramatically hurled aside! Glenda Jackson, the young actress from the Royal Shakespeare Company who a few years earlier registered a claim to future stardom in the role of Charlotte Corday, the assassin of Jean-Paul Marat, in Peter Brook’s sensational stage production of the Marat/Sade, was said to disrobe in a way that would make the eyes pop right out of your head.

The wrestlers – Gerald Crich (Oliver Reed, left) and Rupert Birkin (Alan Bates)

In the movie, Mr Brangwen, a modest grammar school craft-instructor in a Midlands colliery town, has two lively daughters, Gudrun and Ursula, freethinking women in their radiant twenties who are preoccupied with the question of marriage. This was Lawrence’s principal theme: How, precisely, in these modern times, are we to live together, woman and man, man and man, woman and woman? But what, I would suggest, strikes today’s reader of the novel Women in Love most forcefully is Lawrence’s volcanic, convoluted desire to write about sex in a new and more honest way – and his failure, despite every effort, to make the act of sexual intercourse between healthy young people in any way convincing. Violent – essentially, embarrassed – passion seems to sweep everything else aside. Isn’t sex on the page supposed to be, at the very least, sexy? Not here.

Lawrence circles and circles and defers and defers. The flow of stock imagery, the self-acknowledged repetitious language, the reach-me-down adjectives and weak adverbial modifiers render these passages at first enervating, then annoying, and finally downright ludicrous. Not wholly unlike, but in a different register, those soft-core scenes of Bavarian ladies, free at last from their bust-constricting dirndl, gripping their large self-satisfied men in feathered hats and shiny lederhosen as they sledded down the mountainside emitting shrieks of delight.

The film is handsomely shot by Billy Williams, who was nominated for an Academy Award for his work, and is a memorable symphony of contrasting tones – an ominous night-time lake, the dark surface pricked by the reflection of Chinese lanterns; the mellow wood-panelled room where the wrestling match takes place before the blazing fire; the eye-dazzling sequence in the snowy landscape around Zermatt where matters come to a fateful climax. The four main players, Jennie Linden and Glenda Jackson as Ursula and Gudrun Brangwen, and Alan Bates and Oliver Reed as their respective lovers, Rupert Birkin, a preening intellectual school inspector, and Gerald Crich, a depressed colliery magnate, do their best with all the ponderous talk of highfalutin ideals. But in the end, it seems to me, very little of this talk strikes the viewer as authentic. One longs, sometimes, for the simple uncomplicated sound of real human conversation.

In a movie dotted with deliberately caricatured secondary players, it is perhaps Vladek Sheybal, the Polish-born character actor, who stands out as the most clear-sighted caricature. He plays Loerke, a gay German artist (with an arch blond boyfriend straight out of Central Casting – though the actor who plays him was in fact straight as a die), who’s inserted into the Zermatt sequence to demonstrate to Gudrun that there really is a life of art that’s separate from (and unquestionably superior to) any self-defeating quest for love. And at one point he laughs with strikingly honest cynicism at the posturing of these half-blind English folk – and also perhaps at the pretension of the film itself. His laughter, however, earns him a flattening Marquess of Queenberry punch from the affronted Gerald.

Gudrun (Glenda Jackson) and Loerke (Vladek Sheybal)

Birkin and Ursula at long last seek sexual relief – and this was the scene that jogged my memory: the frantic struggle to undress; the waving grass, teasing like a burlesque girl’s ostrich-feather fan; bodies floating in air as in a gauzy dream; a soft-focus slow-motion tone of utter unreality. Consider too the scene in which Birkin, having been struck on the head with a glass paper-weight by Hermione Roddice, his former lover, sheds his clothes and wanders through the woods in concussed delirium touching the birch trees, rubbing his body with bracken, and then collapsing prone on the soil. All that’s lacking to bring matters to a climax is one of those ripe figs that Birkin so naughtily described (from a later Lawrence poem), in order to shock the ladies, at one of Hermione’s white-linen lakeside luncheon parties. It’s hard to know, sometimes, whether Ken Russell, the enfant terrible, ever completely removed his tongue from his cheek.

Blissfully floating free – Rupert and Ursula (Jennie Linden) in Ken Russell’s orientation

After his despised father has died, Gerald Crich sets out into the night, his mind in turmoil. At his father’s grave, he plunges his hand into the freshly turned soil and squeezes a handful of mud. He then proceeds to the Brangwens’ terraced house. The front door is not locked. He enters, passes a dozing Mr Brangwen in the parlour, and ascends the stairs. He opens the door to Gudrun’s room. A large study of a female head, redolent, perhaps, of The Rite of Spring, decorates the wall behind the bed. Gudrun awakes and calls her sister’s name. But there stands Gerald, with his muddy boots and his muddy fist. What would an artist such as Picasso have made of him? He’s not exactly a spry mischievous satyr with panpipes. Gudrun sits up, surprised but unshocked. She’d already kissed Gerald in the narrow night-time tunnel where the miners have their trysts and told him she finds his large square face beautiful. This, now, is not unexpected. She’s sexually curious, unafraid and unabashed.

Then comes the moment above all others, I’d say, that clinched Glenda Jackson’s Oscar for Best Actress of 1971. The eyes of the voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences must indeed have popped right out of their heads. ‘What do you want from me?’ Gudrun asks. Pause. She then lifts off her nightdress in a single fluid gesture and looks straight at the camera without shame or embarrassment. (An unanswerable riposte, today’s film scholars might say, to the dreaded Male Gaze.) But what follows, alas, is another ludicrous passage of febrile love making, after the interminable unlacing of Gerald’s boots, that ends – none of the sex in this film is touched by any discernible tenderness – with the not inconsiderable bulk of Oliver Reed falling insensible, as men do, on top of poor Glenda Jackson. Gudrun awakes early next morning giving the impression of having had nothing less than a comfortable night’s sleep. Now, however, it’s time for Gerald to put on his muddy boots and go home before the Brangwen household wakes up for breakfast.

*

But this is not quite the whole story. Larry Kramer, the American producer/scriptwriter of Women in Love, who went on to become one of his country’s leading gay activists and a controversial but notably successful campaigner for the rights of people with HIV/Aids, saw an opportunity in this film to expand on D.H. Lawrence’s underdeveloped theme of ‘Men in Love’. At the end of the famous wrestling match, Gerald and Rupert lie side by side on the carpet, shoulders almost touching, spent and exhilarated – looking, in fact, as if they’ve just had sex, and actually enjoyed it. Rupert suggests they might, like those German knights of old, swear an oath of undying brotherly love. But since this is the twentieth century, he implies, they need not actually mingle their blood. Gerald is taken aback: he’ll have to think about that, he says. But in the event, as the future unfolds, and his relationship with Gudrun disintegrates, Gerald fails to act on Birkin’s suggestion. Out of ignorance, cowardice or simple lack of self-knowledge – who knows? Yet the offer was clearly made – and there it lies, at the end of the film, waiting as it were for another generation to take it up.

© John Pym, 2021

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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‘Hurtler’ Brangwen, woman in love

Let me explain what lies behind the next three instalments of Calderonia, which are distinguished guest posts taking us up to 8 March and beyond.

As part of our lockdown season of old films, Alison and I watched a DVD of Ken Russell’s 1969 Women in Love, which I first saw in 1970. To my pleasant surprise, the acting still seemed superb. But to my utter surprise, I found that my perception of the film had swung through 180 degrees. The experience of watching it fifty years on was a kind of dawning revelation, almost an epiphany.

It is difficult to believe now, but in 1970 D.H. Lawrence was a guru amongst Britain’s younger generations. This was the result of Penguin’s mass re-publication of his works, the popularity of F.R. Leavis’s writing on Lawrence, and the failed 1960 ‘Trial of Lady Chatterley’ on a charge of obscenity. I would go so far as to say that some of the embeardification of university students at the time was inspired by Lawrence.

His values and ideas, particularly regarding sex and marriage, profoundly influenced us. Our focus was on those, not on his amazing art as such. I think my own case was typical. By the age of twenty I had read three of Lawrence’s novels, most of his short stories, almost all of his poetry, selected essays, selected letters, Mornings in Mexico, and  Penguin’s volume A propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. But it was Lawrence the critic of English life that most grabbed me. Consequently, as I watched the film in 1970 I blithely thought of Birkin as Lawrence (Alan Bates had the beard), I approved of everything Birkin said, and cheered him on. I regarded him as the hero seeker after truth.

Fifty years later, it was quite different. I immediately identified with Ursula Brangwen. She is by far the most empathetic person in the film. Where she listens, asks questions of an other, feels, thinks, reasons, and above all loves, Birkin mansplains, preaches, rants, shows off, gratuitously offends, and is most interested in himself. I particularly enjoyed the scene of their big row: as far as I am concerned, everything Ursula says of Birkin is true, and the passion and emotional intelligence with which she says it are magnificent. Her ability to give love makes her luminous. Her instincts and intuition are right. True, Birkin is on a quest, we see him develop and learn, he even has the last word. But he learns from Ursula. In 2020 I saw the film as about her: her growth, the power of her love, her as the superior seeker after truth. And in the last scene I agreed with her, not Birkin.

I then made a very embarrassing discovery. After watching the film, I wanted to check a few things in the novel. I went to the copy that I had bought in 1970, the Penguin edition with Jennie Linden and Alan Bates on the cover as above, and found, beyond all doubt, that I had never read it… I had only ever seen the film! Well, there and then I began reading the novel Women in Love, and could not put it down.

Our stalwart follower, guest-poster and poetic commenter Damian Grant is a lifelong Lawrentian. He really knows his Lawrence. His fundamental work, A Thematic Index to Phoenix and Phoenix II, is published in A D.H. Lawrence Handbook, edited by Keith Sugar, Manchester University Press, 1982, pp. 329-447, and is described as

an index of an original kind, in which 37 terms, pairs of terms, or opposing terms are indexed, with a brief quotation to provide the context. The words chosen relate to Lawrence’s underlying ideas, his ‘philosophy’; his vision of reality itself and the place of the elemental human being within that reality.

I mentioned to Damian that I was ‘in love with Ursula Brangwen’, having never read the novel before. His response was: ‘I am glad you are in love with Ursula Brangwen. She is the right kind of girl.’ He then explained that Ursula literally is the protagonist of Women in Love, because Lawrence had originally conceived of a single ‘Bildungsroman’ exploring her physical and spiritual growth over three decades. This had split in two, and The Rainbow dealt with the earlier part of her life. I plunged into reading it. Straight after, I read Women in Love for a second time, and watched the film for a third.

This experience solved a few problems — for example, the chapter ‘Gudrun in the Pompadour’, omitted from the film, hilariously distances Lawrence from Birkin — but it left many more questions hanging in the air. Has Russell’s film as a film stood the test of time? How faithful is it to the book? Does it flirt with pornography? What are we to make of Lawrence’s descriptions of sex in the novel? What do things like this mean‘this was neither love nor passion. It was the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God, the strange inhuman sons of God who are in the beginning’? Why are there absolutely no medical details of Birkin’s numerous illnesses, or indications of the source of his ‘about four hundred a year’ (£35,000 at today’s prices) which enable him and Ursula to become people of leisure? Why are emotions monotonously referred to in terms of electricity and magnetism? Why are there two references to the 1914-18 War in the novel, yet it ends before the War begins? Is there any substance to Birkin’s critique of contemporary marriage, or is it guff? Were there no happy Edwardian marriages?

Suddenly it occurred to me that Calderonia has three long-term followers who could tackle such questions much better than me! John Pym is a film critic, Damian Grant a Lawrence critic, and Laurence Brockliss has made a prosopographical study of Victorian and Edwardian England. They all immediately accepted my challenge, for which I am hugely beholden to them, and their guest posts will appear on these dates:

8 February: ‘Glenda Jackson’s Oscar’, by John Pym

22 February: ‘Women in Love — the novel as prophetic book’, by Damian Grant

8 March: ‘Love and respect in the Victorian and Edwardian marriage’, by Laurence Brockliss

Women in Love is still a contentious novel. Most of our subscribers, I imagine, have read it or seen the film. Please, then, communicate your views, your reactions to the several expert posts, by leaving a Comment, however short, long or vituperative (rather than emailing me personally). I am hoping that we can really get a dialogue going over this major work of twentieth century English literature. Is it, even, its greatest novel?

If anyone would like to do a further guest post on an aspect of Lawrence’s novel, after 22 March, please contact me. I shall eventually blog about connections between Lawrence and Calderon in life and literature.

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Guest Post: James Miles, ‘TLS Adverts A and B’

Last December we put an advert for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius in the Times Literary Supplement and, naturally, as the resident typesetter and “designer-ey” type on the Sam&Sam team, I was the one who made it. It was a lot of fun and in this article I want to talk a little about the process.

The starting point was pretty much this:

It is a handwritten design template by Sam1 with the key points he wanted to include in the ad.

The first thing I did was to get these details into a basic design shell on the computer so we could visualise how they would look. We quickly realised that space on such an advert is deceptive, and it becomes cluttered very rapidly. Here’s a printout of that first mock up with red pen notes by Sam1.

But this was still great progress! We were in fact almost there at this point — it just needed colour, tuning, and a lot of polish.

The first idea was to incorporate this image of the Kremlin somehow.

The reflection on the glass in the frame meant I had to take it at a somewhat awkward angle, where you miss the very bottom of the image, but we weren’t interested in that part anyway and I was able to neaten it up a bit and extract this:

Which led to the following design, with the image as a sort of “faded watermark”:

I actually really like this one, and having a chance to share it is the main reason I asked Sam1 if I could write this article. I thought Calderonia readers would find it interesting!

However, the more we looked at it, and compared it with the adverts in an actual copy of the TLS, the more we felt we needed to try something else, at least so we could then choose between “A” and “B”, as it were.

Looking through the TLS, the advert that really stood out to me as being the cleanest, clearest, most no-nonsense and — crucially — the most fitting with the style of the paper itself was the following:

So naturally I mocked up a George version employing a similar design, but with the red that Sam1 advised as being most associated with Calderon.

We really tried to streamline it!

Much as I like the Kremlin variant, this is what we ended up choosing and I think we made the right decision.

This article isn’t a technical “how to” guide, like my typesetting series on here, but I will mention that the software I used for all of this is “GNU Image Manipulation Program”, essentially a free-to-use Photoshop that I find increasingly excellent for all manner of graphics work. When designing these adverts, we have each element as a “layer” which can be moved and tweaked to match whatever our feeling is. I say “feeling” because there was a lot of instinctive decision-making, with both Sam1 and me sitting at the computer adjusting elements here and there. Something I was particularly pleased with was the program’s “Drop Shadow” filter, which gives the book that…well that “drop shadow”! It’s something you almost don’t even notice, but if that shadow isn’t there then the entire advert looks completely amateur. Now I come to think of it, perhaps if I had put the drop shadow on the Kremlin one we would have felt it was a better contender? Anyway, learning little details like this is one of the things I find most satisfying about my Sam&Sam work.

Thank you for reading. If you have any questions about designing an advert like this, feel free to post a comment and I will reply!

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 13

18 December

‘Bewildered of Cambridge’

It feels like a new record: a week has passed since our, in their own words, ‘very striking’ advertisement of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius appeared in the TLS, and it hasn’t brought us a single sale!

The line between self-justification and rational analysis is very thin in such cases… But I did say when we decided on the ad. that the only way to find out whether they work was to do it, so what lessons can one draw?

It appeared in an issue supposedly devoted to Russia (there was a ghastly portrait of Stalin on the cover). My rationale, therefore, was that it would be read by every professor of Russian Studies in the country, and perhaps further down the subject’s Table of Ranks too, as well as picking up some ‘normal’ readers. Every Russianist in the country should read the book, as it will reveal to them where they have come from and perhaps where they are at. But I know from a lifetime’s experience that these people are extremely slow off the mark. Perhaps some sales will dribble in when they have pierced the plastic on their mailed copies in a couple of months time.

Meanwhile, there were five or six ads from other smallish publishers in the same issue. What could their motive be? Well — obviously — even if their ad. doesn’t sell many copies, it must raise awareness of their very existence. At least 32,000 people will have seen it (and in our case it was very prominently positioned on a recto with the issue’s main article). In terms of raising profile, then, it has to be worth it. This is in fact the first time an ad. for Sam&Sam has appeared in a national newspaper in the U.K. or Russia.

Decision: we will advertise in the Russian issue of the TLS next May, but this time it will showcase Sam&Sam the publisher and push four or five separate English/Russian titles.

The background to this whole experience is that independent publishing has gone viral since 2018 and especially during lockdown. The market is flooded. I would advise anyone publishing a book of theirs that is in any way ‘specialist’ to print no more than 200 copies. (Clays printed 459 copies of George and we have shifted 58%).

If a small but apparently reputable publisher takes on your book with a subvention from yourself, be very wary about being drawn into a second edition. I know people who have paid their subvention to the second edition, the publisher has then pretty soon announced they are going to remainder, and the authors have felt bound to buy back say 400 copies and sell them themselves; which is difficult and not helped by the fact that there will be plenty of copies available by then on Amazon and ABE.

22 December
I bumped (metaphorically) into a neighbour who was delivering his Christmas cards. His mother, aged about ninety and in a care home, is very fed up with the latest Christmas restrictions. Although he has been able to visit her for 30 minutes once a week, she cannot see her family over Christmas itself. His response was robust: ‘Never mind, mother: think of March! The days will soon be getting longer and we must all just think of Spring!’

He didn’t tell me how she reacted, but he is right: the worse it gets, the harder we must think of Spring, which only cosmic disaster can prevent coming. In that spirit, I offer a sequence written in Russia forty-six years ago to celebrate the event there:

 

Note that these were written in the early days of English haiku, when the syllable count was flexible. On this occasion I decided not to capitalise the sulphurous butterfly. Haiku 4 was published in Presence 35, May 2008, p. 16, and the crow in 5 seems prophetic!

30 December
I had the huge honour of reading two pre-publication electronic versions of Andrew Tatham’s I Shall Not be Away Long: The First World War Letters of Lt Col Charles Bartlett, but the experience can’t compare with a slow reading of the final superbly designed and produced book published last month. This reading, which has taken me five weeks, has significantly altered my appreciation; greatly deepened it, I feel.

When I originally read the book, it was still in the context of our national experience of the centenary of the ‘Great War’. Followers of this blog will know what I mean: our personal empathy and agony day in day out. My foci, therefore, were (1) the military narrative of the Battles of Loos and the Somme as told in Bartlett’s letters, (2) the life stories of the men he commanded, knew, and loved, but who were slaughtered around him.

This time I found myself concentrating on Bartlett’s own story and character, his wife Margaret’s story and character, and the story of their relationship. This may sound more like reading a novel — being absorbed by psychology and a love interest — but there is no conflict here with the twin foci of the epic military narrative. The latter are as integral to Tatham’s ‘novel’ as the psychological development. Think of War and Peace.

Where personality and personal relationships are concerned, these letters constantly prompt you to speculate — and that is hugely enjoyable, even if you know you may be wrong and that you will never know the truth. For instance, this slow reading produced a strong feeling in me that I understood why, despite all his credentials, Charles Bartlett was never permanently promoted to Lieutenant Colonel of the 8th Berkshires at the Front (a fact which depressed him no end). His attitude to the war was simply not that of the stereotypic upper class officer. He says things in these uncensored letters that stiff-upper-lipped officers were not supposed to say. Nor does he care that his superiors are reading them. But (such is my theory) his superiors concluded he wasn’t ‘sound’. In fact his letters demonstrated that he wasn’t ‘one of us’. Remember that at the time of most of the following excerpts he was acting CO of the battalion:

‘It [Loos] has been a ghastly business too awful to describe. […] God what a sight it has been’ (p. 83).  ‘We have had another dusting and done no good’ (p. 107). ‘The strain and reaction is telling and I cannot eat or sleep’ (p. 116). ‘I have several men who are trying to get out of going into the trenches with various excuses […] Personally I hate going’ (p. 132). ‘Am just fed up to the teeth with soldiers’ (p. 226). ‘I don’t think I am any more efficient now to command a Battn than I was [six months ago], in fact I think less as I am more frightened than I was’ (p. 240). ‘I am sorry to say I am FED UP with this bloody war’ (p. 246). ‘Our new tin helmets have saved any amount of lives, and it seems a pity we did not have them before’ (p. 283).  ‘The Battle of Loos was nothing to this [Somme] and you cannot imagine the noise stink or number of dead about. It is awful, & rather gets on one’s nerves’ (p. 290). ‘I am rather disappointed with my new men […] but carrying heavy loads in pitch darkness when one has had no experience must be a bit trying, & I am sure I should chuck my load down & run for the nearest shell hole if I had to do it’ (p. 333). ‘I feel so depressed about the show I don’t know what to do’ (p. 343). ‘Am sorry I have not given you much news lately but when one is living in mud up to one’s knees & doing only what one is forbidden to talk about, it is rather difficult to say much’ (p. 365).

But it is vital to stress that he also NEVER GIVES UP. In the Battle of Loos only two of his 20 officers and 184 of his 900 Tommies are left standing, but ‘we made our objective […] and if others had done as well we should have gone further on’ (p. 82). Though he hates going into the trenches as much as his men do, ‘I don’t say and [I] pretend I like it’ (p. 132). The noise of the artillery drives him mad, he can’t wait for leave, but he always returns to the task. He is freezing cold, soaked to the skin, up to his waist in mud and water, infested with lice, forced to defecate in his own trousers, plagued with lumbago, prey to all the trench infections going, deeply depressed, shocked and nauseated, but he still goes on and right to the end his concern is the state of his men and the performance of the battalion. I would never describe Bartlett as a ‘war hero’, but to hate the whole show as much as he does and yet fight on with utter dedication is, surely, heroic-grade grit. It’s this combination of normal uncensored responses that any of us would be capable of, with dogged determination that I’m sure I wouldn’t, which makes him so likeable.

My slow reading has also made me see Margaret (‘Peggy’) differently. She never joined the Red Cross and worked tirelessly in a hospital in France, say, because, I now realise, being ‘the Colonel’s wife’ was a full time job. She had to communicate with the families of her husband’s soldiers, even visiting bereaved parents in various parts of the country; she had to send a constant stream of food parcels to Bartlett and his officers at the Front, along with clothing, medicines, reading matter, daily letters and news; she had to meet returning officers and take them out to lunch; she had to negotiate with her husband’s superiors at home over such delicate matters as his lack of promotion and securing a cushier posting… I had not previously realised that ‘the Colonel’s wife’ was as much a full time job, and expected to be, as being ‘the vicar’s wife’. Like a vicar’s wife, Peggy is not paid a penny for it, but seems never to complain.

There was another expectation of ‘the Colonel’s wife’ that she fulfilled perfectly, too: she was ten years younger than him, attractive, always fashionably dressed, well manicured, and sexy. As befits ‘the Colonel’s wife’, when she is photographed next to her husband and with other officers on the Promenade des Anglais at Nice in 1917 you can see that she is ‘the centre of attention’ as Tatham puts it (p. 377).

Why Bartlett had a fling with another woman once when he was home on leave, and why his very vibrant-seeming marriage broke up in 1922, I find myself speculating about endlessly; and that is another pleasure of Tatham’s creation. With some knowledge of the Edwardian theatre, I am tempted to think that Peggy (a starlet of London musicals) thought Charles a better financial catch than he turned out to be. One could come away from the letters thinking she was manipulative, spoiled, contrarian and impossibly demanding… There is a suggestion in one letter (p. 46) that she was having to fend off men’s attentions herself; but she may also have been a compulsive flirt… Then there is the suggestion (p. 150) that she wanted more babies; but, argues Bartlett, ‘I fail to see how you can say it is my fault’… Did communication, affection, even sex, eventually fail between them because the Bartlett who had been through the war was an utterly different person from the one who had set out for it?

All life and death is in Andrew Tatham’s two masterpieces, A Group Photograph and I Shall Not Be Away Long. Read them in that order. They are the English War and Peace of the 1914-18 catastrophe.

5 January 2021

Today I started my second reading of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in three months. The reasons for this will emerge in my next post, on 1 February. We are going to devote five posts from that date to Women in Love, which some people consider the greatest English novel of the twentieth century (1916). The first guest post will be by film critic John Pym about Ken Russell’s 1969 film of the novel, the second by seasoned Lawrentian Damian Grant about the novel itself, and the third by historian Laurence Brockliss about what Edwardian marriage was really like. Expect fireworks.

A very happy New Year to you all!

Patrick Miles

The haiku-accompanying icicle image came from this Icicle of the Day entry on “Christine’s blog”, the butterfly image is by Calderonia-follower Katy George, and the hare below it is from this Wildlife Trusts entry.

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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A Christmas Story by George Calderon

THE ACADEMY OF HUMOUR.

BY GEORGE CALDERON.

Woodham Daintry, Essex: October 15.

MY DEAR UNCLE, – I do not wonder at your surprise on hearing that I have again entered at an educational establishment, and I believe you will be still more surprised when you hear the kind of establishment it is. At the age of twenty-eight, as you very justly observe, a man has generally finished with that sort of thing, and is old enough to educate himself. What will you think when I tell you that two of my fellow pupils here are over sixty?

You must not suppose that I have abandoned my long cherished ambition of at last securing the Chair of Metaphysics in one of our Universities; not for one moment! And do not wrong me by imagining that the comfortable competence which has fallen to my lot through the generosity of poor Aunt Susan’s testamentary dispositions is sufficient to divert me from the principal object of my life. After one term here I intend to resume my independent researches in Ontology, and mean to be heard of at last. Cambridge itself will ring with my name; alma mater shall have no cause to blush for her alumnus.

As it is a great gratification to me to give you the fullest confidence, and impart to you all the details of my circumstances and aspirations, I will tell you the whole story of my new departure in full.

First I will premise that the establishment at which I am now residing, amongst the pleasant fields of Essex, is Professor Larrion’s Gelæological College, or Academy of Humour. Gelæology – the word, as I need hardly point out to you, comes from the Greek γελοϊος – is the science of the laughable, or ridiculous; and Professor Larrion, who has made a philosophical study of the subject, undertakes to teach to any man of good understanding the art of being humorous and amusing in the short space of some ten weeks. The College is only just opened; but from what I can judge of Professor Larrion on so brief and acquaintance, I feel sure that it is bound to be an extraordinary success. His hopes are very high; so also – I may be permitted to add – are his charges. (You see that the humorous atmosphere of the place is already beginning to tell on me, and I am commencing to make little jokes of my own.)

Now for the reason of my coming here. When I went down in September to stay with your friend, and, I venture now to add, my friend, Admiral Timminer, for the Chelmsford ball, it was still my intention, as it always has been from my Cambridge days, to remain single, in order the better to devote myself to the arduous pursuit of Mistress Metaphysics. But by what strange chances is a man’s fate altered! As soon as I set my eyes on Miss Kitty Timminer, all my plans were upset. Chairs of Metaphysics had no longer any charms for me, if Miss Kitty could not share them with me. (Is not this another joke?) If any one had described her to me beforehand I should have said at once that she was the last person in the world with whom I need have feared that I should fall in love. I never met anyone less interested in serious things in the whole of my life. You know her, of course; you must have seen her when you visited the Timminers at Chelmsford; so I need hardly describe the many particular beauties whose synthesis is so utterly bewitching. I really cannot write about her; whatever adjective I find is so hopelessly inadequate and tawdry. I cannot understand how any one who has seen her, even for a moment, can ever think of marrying anyone else.

However, to return to my subject. I pursued her with the most strenuous attentions. I was cheerful with her and even gay. At times I thought that she felt some little touch of what I felt, and I was on the point of declaring my passion. But something checked me. There were other men staying in the house, lively creatures, without a glimmer of intellect. When we were all together they cracked jokes and were always merry; she laughed and talked with them, while I sat glum and silent in the corner. I soon saw that one of these men, a certain Captain Bunching, of the Essex Light Infantry, was as deeply in love with Miss Kitty as the shallowness of his nature would allow. I was jealous; I envied him. Why, I thought to myself, why has this fat, brainless creature the art of making her rock with laughter while I, with fifty times his intellect, can bring nothing but the faintest of smiles to her lips? I listened to the conversation of these men and made mental notes of what they said; there was nothing in their ideas beyond my range of thought. Much of their success, it seemed to me, depended on the confidence of their manner. I strove to imitate them. I made attempts at saying funny things; but when, after much effort, I blurted them out a little late in the conversation, people looked at me blankly, with bewildered faces, and I sank back in my chair, hot, and blushing with mortification.

I saw my great defect. I was not humorous. I had been so long occupied with serious things that I had lost the art of being amusing.

Walking along the streets of London or any other city on a Sunday, I have often noted the happy faces of lovers that frequent them on that day. The man whispers two or three words in the girl’s ear, she throws down her eyes, and blushes and laughs delightedly. What is this secret of conversation, I wondered, that these common people have and from which I am excluded? Had I whispered three words in that girl’s ear, putting all my intellect into the effort, would she have laughed? I think not. I doubt whether she would even have blushed.

I determined to begin at the very beginning. I saw that in order to make any girl fall in love with me, I must first of all learn to be funny. Returning to London, I confided much of my trouble to Jack Sloper, a young barrister who was up at Trinity with me. He said he knew the very thing I wanted. Larrion, the man who had got him through his law examination, was giving up ‘cramming’, as it is called, for the bar, and was setting up an Academy of Humour in Essex, only a few miles from Chelmsford. I jumped at the idea, put myself into communication with Mr. Larrion – his title of Professor is only assumed for business purposes – and here I am!

Mr. Larrion is a man of powerful analytic intellect, and, I am told, very amusing. I have as yet heard no jokes from him myself, at least, not that I know of. His face wears such an air of imperturbable gravity that it is often hard to know whether he is being funny or not. When I arrived, he called the boot-boy to take my portmanteau, saying: ‘What ho, within there! Go, scullion, bear this traveller’s baggage to the donjon-keep.’ We none of us smiled except the boot-boy; he roared. I think very likely it was only a quotation.

In person Mr. Larrion is short and broad. He has a very large and muscular face, clean-shaven, and quite inscrutable.

His career has been a varied one. Finding his early years at the bar unremunerative he took to literature; he was the author of a series of articles called ‘Topsy Turtledove, by the Last of the Joneses’, which appeared in a paper known as the ‘Pink Un’. The sketches are very clever, I am told; I have not read them myself. However, literature proved no kindlier than law. He went to Paris and lived a chequered life, getting along as best he could with English lessons &c. I hear that at one time he was even a waiter at the Café Boulanger. Two years ago he returned to London and was very successful in preparing a certain class of law students for their examinations; he made them work only an hour a day, and fixed the leading cases in their minds under the form of amusing little stories and jingling rhymes. Now he has set up this Academy, and he has, I think, a real career before him.

I can best convey to you some notion of the daring and originality of his intellect by giving you an extract from one of the extremely sensible letters which he wrote to me when I first thought of joining him.

‘To the careful observer of the intercourse of men,’ he says, ‘nothing can be more patent than the Uniformity of Humour. To him it is plain that below the shifting surface of humorous conversation lie certain immutable principles or laws to which all Jokes conform. I have made it my task, by patient comparison and inference, to discover what those laws may be; to find a scientific basis for one of the most important arts of life; to save that art from being the privilege of the few, and even in their hands an instrument of uncertain success. My aim, like that of the Sage of Verulam, is to establish a method which shall be able exæquare ingenia, to make the fool and the philosopher equally good fools. That, Mr Jones, is what you want… You may often hear people say, ‘It was only a Joke’, as though a Joke were a trivial thing beside a serious remark. Those who speak in this way show a lamentable misapprehension of the position of Jokes in the scheme of nature. The philosopher, knowing that he has no excuse for existence but as a member of Society, sets himself to cultivate that faculty which is to win him his diploma of membership – the faculty of Rational Intercourse. Now of Rational Intercourse there are three kinds, consisting in the communication respectively of facts, of theories, and of Jokes. To communicate theories is the function of the intelligent bore; to communicate facts is the function of the unintelligent bore; nous autres, my dear Mr. Jones, we must crack our Jokes. The bores must still play a part in conversation; we cannot have conversation without theories and facts; these are the boughs on which the golden fruit is to hang. I shall have three or four paid bores at my Academy to start conversations and to act as the whetstones of our wit.’

Mr. Larrion’s household is in a very topsy-turvy condition at present; for all the pupils, myself included, were in such a hurry to begin, that we arrived three days before the time appointed – all except one, that is: he is expected tomorrow; I haven’t heard his name.

The servants are in such fits of laughter all day at what we do and say that they are quite incapable of work. Knowing the purpose of the Academy, they are prepared to find humour in everything. When the boot-boy awoke me the morning after my arrival, I said, ‘I shall want some hot water to shave with.’ I have never seen anybody laugh like he did; he knocked over the jug and rolled about on the floor. I also laughed, but not so immoderately, being in bed. Half an hour later, finding that no water came, I rang the bell. When I took the boy to task for his forgetfulness, he defended himself by saying that he ‘did not know I was serious’.

There are eleven pupils in all: three City men, five cavalry officers, two High Church curates, and myself. There are also six bores, i.e. people paid to be quite serious. They spend the morning reading the ‘Times’ and ‘Standard’, besides things like ‘Whitaker’, Encyclopedias &c. Two of them are specialists; one of these got a First in History at Oxford. Another is a decayed man about town; he takes in ‘Truth’ and the ‘Morning Post’, and knows an immense number of interesting things about people in London. In the afternoon we poke fun at them and play practical jokes on them. I am very glad I am not a bore.

You can have no conception of the gaiety of this place – apple-pie beds night after night, and booby-traps on every door. Mr. Larrion says he will lead us to higher things once we can get our studies ‘under way’.

Once a day we all go for a walk together. We walk in threes, with a bore in the middle of each trio, and a pupil of the Academy on either side. Of course we don’t keep to this order, but get running about in the open, knocking off one another’s hats, and all that sort of thing. The country people fly with every sign of terror when they see us approaching, for somehow or other the absurd rumour has got about that Mr. Larrion’s Academy is a private lunatic asylum.

However, it is getting late, and I must close this long letter, as Mr. Larrion has given me a number of anecdotes and puns to learn by heart before I go to bed.

Your loving Nephew,

Bilbury J. Jones

II.

Woodham Daintry: October 18.

MY DEAR UNCLE, – I am delighted to find that you are so much interested in the Academy, and that you so heartily approve of my coming here. I have, as you say, always been conspicuously wanting in humour; no man can feel it more keenly than myself. It is by no means for lack of effort; I have always tried my best, and now we shall see what a little study can do for me.

Imagine my disgust when Captain Bunching, of the Essex Light Infantry, the very man that I am studying to emulate, turned up yesterday at the Academy and entered himself for the term. I do not think it is fair that people who are already so humorous as he is should come here. However, I am not afraid of him; his presence will be an additional incentive to industry; I feel as if I were a boy at school again, preparing for the examination at the end of the term – but, oh! What a prize awaits the successful one! As soon as the course is over I shall fly into Chelmsford and bombard Miss Kitty with jokes. Captain Bunching, I feel certain, will do the same; we both have the same end in view. We shall sit on either side of Miss Kitty, plying our wit, and we shall soon see who is the better man!

Mr. Larrion’s first two lectures, on the History of Humour, have been profoundly interesting. I have made copious notes, and am sure that you will be interested to learn what he said. It may make you humorous too if I keep you ‘posted’ in his lectures; not that I mean for a moment, my dear uncle, that you are in any way wanting in comicality; but, with Christmas coming on, you may be glad of a little help.

Mr. Larrion began with Aristotle. I quote from my notes.

‘Aristotle defined wit as a mean between buffoonery and stolidity; but inasmuch as people are far too fond of jokes,’ says he, ‘buffoons are generally called wits.’ In all these philosophical writers there is to be noticed a certain shade of bitterness when they speak of the humorists. Hobbes, in speaking of the cause of laughter, says: “That it consisteth in wit, or, as they call it, in the jest, experience confuteth; for men laugh at mischances and indecencies wherein there lieth no wit nor jest at all.” One can scarcely help thinking that someone must have stolen his clothes while he was bathing.’

The professor was still more interesting when he launched into wider generalizations of the History of Humour.

‘Laughter being the distinctive characteristic of man, the more human we become, the more we shall laugh; and inasmuch as we must have something to laugh at, the progress of civilisation will be always accompanied by an advance in the Art of Humour. Taking Humour, in accordance with this theory, as a criterion of the civilisations of the past, many archæologists have been disappointed at finding no traces of it in the records of the Egyptians. Taking it as a criterion of the future, there are some who go so far as to believe that, in the course of evolution, the lower animals will learn to laugh; and that the jokes of today will in the end be relegated to the lowest orders of creation, sponges and the like; that the quip which used once to rouse the laughter of kings will at last shake the sides of the jelly-fish… The circumstances of life are always altering, and each new combination affords an opportunity for a new joke. Even language changes; twenty years ago it was impossible to make a Volapük pun.’ I shall certainly learn Volapük when I have finished the course.

He also made a very interesting calculation that if every male person in the British islands were to make a joke on coming of age we should have 150,000 new jokes every year. If these were all passed round we should hear 480 new jokes every day – Sundays, of course, excluded.

As you may well imagine, all this was Greek to Captain Bunching. He did not even take notes, but kept scribbling caricatures in his exercise book and winking at another of the military men. I don’t think he will have a chance.

Much as I admire Mr. Larrion’s intellect, I cannot fully agree with all that he says. He quoted a remark of Sydney Smith’s today as one of the best impromptus on record. On seeing a little girl stroke a tortoise one day, Sydney Smith observed that what she did was like stroking the dome of St. Paul’s to please the Dean and Chapter. I really must confess that I see very little point in this, for I am sure that the present Dean, at any rate, would be quite the opposite of pleased if he knew that anyone had been taking such a liberty with the building.

Your loving Nephew,

Bilbury J. Jones

III.

Woodham Daintry: November 12.

MY DEAR UNCLE, – Thank you for your letter. I will try to make up the joke you want and will send it as soon as it is ready.

I have been a little uneasy this afternoon, for Captain Bunching drove away in his dogcart as soon as lunch was over; and Pawley, one of the bores, who has become a great friend of mine, tells me that he has gone over to Chelmsford – to the Timminers’ of course. I do not think it is fair his going there like this in term time, because he knows that I am not yet far enough advanced to compete with him. What a beast he looked as he drove away! With his hat on the back of his head, and a great cigar sticking out from the middle of his fat red face!

Mr Larrion was very interesting this morning in dealing with the principles of joking.

‘We may roughly define a joke,’ he said, ‘as a thing which provokes laughter. Laughter is an intermittent, inarticulate sound due to the expulsion of breath through the larynx by a series of nervous convulsions of the diaphragm; and the humorist must always bear in mind that it is this phenomenon, and this alone, which he is endeavouring to produce.’

He recommends constant practice. ‘If you are not in form one evening, persevere. You will perhaps inadvertently say something funny; you may discover a joke if you cannot invent one… You must begin with the simplest form of joke, the joke which is made in answer to another person’s remark. Your answer must be pertinent in form, but impertinent in matter.

‘If, however, there was any personal animus in the remark addressed to you, you may best express your contempt for the speaker by a rejoinder which makes no pretence to relevance, such as “You go and dye your hair”.

‘A lone-joke is made on the same principle as a joke in answer.

‘You must always be ready with answers to the commonplace openings of conversation, especially to weather-gambits. For instance, if anybody says “The rain is coming down!” your best answer is: “Did you expect it to go up?” If an old gentleman, a friend of your father’s, say, observes to you, “I think I’ve seen your face before”, you should reply, “You didn’t expect to see it behind, did you?”’

After the lecture we practised latent gambits; that is, given a commonplace, to joke in two moves. I made up one or two and tried them on the bores, but somehow I could never get them to give the right answer to my first remark, so they didn’t come off.

To my great relief Captain Bunching has just come back from Chelmsford, looking very glum, while I write. What a beast he is! How I hate him!

I have a hedgehog that I am going to put in his bed to-night. Of course he will have no right to be angry, as it is only a joke. I hope he will hurt himself.

Your loving Nephew,

Bilbury J. Jones

IV.

Woodham Daintry: November 20.

MY DEAR UNCLE, – I hope to have your joke ready in a few days.

There has been a little unpleasantness in the house since I last wrote. Captain Bunching must have found out beforehand about the hedgehog. When I got up to my bedroom in the evening and opened the door – it was quite dark in the passage – a whole pailful of potato-parings came down on my head, and I narrowly escaped being hit by the bucket; and when I got into bed, there was the hedgehog there! I pricked my feet in the most abominable way. Naturally, I was very angry; and the Captain and I had words at breakfast. Larrion, in the most unjust way, took the Captain’s side; he said that of course it was a joke, not a first class joke, but quite good of its kind – and appropriate. Certainly I did not agree with him; it is not the sort of joke that amuses me. I thought of leaving the house at once, but I stayed on and swallowed my wrath for her sake, for Miss Kitty’s sake. What would I not give for the term to be over!

Four of the pupils and two of the bores have already left. Some of the people here seem quite unable to understand the difference between humour and horse-play.

The servants have got so used to humour that they never take the least notice of it now. The boot-boy doesn’t raise the ghost of a smile when I let off my most screaming jokes at him. This seems to me a pity. I think the servants ought to be discharged once a month. Of course we don’t laugh much at one another’s jokes, and it is not to be expected of the bores; so that one hardly realises how funny one really is.

Our lecture this morning was on Style, which is much more important than many people think.

You complain that you have as yet had no opportunities of seeing what progress I have made. I must acknowledge that I still find it difficult to make actual jokes, but with the Professor’s lecture on Style in view, I think I could be humorous, or funny in the narrower sense of the word. It is, of course, rather difficult to do it without having any very definite subject to apply one’s methods to, but I will do my best.

Now I will be humorous.

‘Here goes! Tittup my hearties! How are you, old Cocky? As the monkey said when he met the parachute. How’s your delectable boko today? Not too catawamptious, but just catawamptious enough? That comes of the beamish bottlemilk. Then the coal-dust came down on the giddy pantechnicon.’

This is, of course, not as funny as I could have made it if you had given me a subject. But don’t you think it is rather amusing? It is in what Mr. Larrion calls the ‘Happy Chappie’ style; next time I will try to show you something in the ‘New Humorous’ line.

Your loving Nephew,

Bilbury J. Jones

V.

Woodham Daintry: November 22.

MY DEAR UNCLE, – I am exceedingly sorry that you take the humorous part of my letter amiss. I assure you that I had not the least intention of being offensive. You know how sincerely I respect you. Perhaps it was rash of me to try to be funny before I was further advanced. I will promise not to write funnily to you again, since you dislike it so much. Many thanks for your advice about Miss Kitty; but I can assure you that it was, in a way, superfluous: I had no intention of endeavouring to engage her affections by that particular vein of humour.

You will hardly believe how eager I am now for the end of the term. We are going to wind up on the last day with a ball, at which we are all going to be screamingly funny. A committee of pupils – I am not a member of it – has been formed to devise a few good practical jokes, to be played off on the guests; and we are all working very industriously on private jokes about the floor, the music, &c.

The fame of this institution has gone abroad, the rumour of our ball has spread like wildfire through the country and everybody is clamouring to be invited. Of course I asked the Timminers as soon as I heard of the ball; but I was disappointed to find that they had already accepted an invitation from Captain Bunching. Never mind! On that night I will do or die. Even Larrion himself shall be dazzled into silence by the scintillation of my wit. I shall not use any of the jokes that we have learnt during the term; I shall make up mine on the spot, one after another.

Your loving Nephew,

Bilbury J. Jones

P.S. – I enclose the joke you wanted. It was Pawley, the bore – he is one of my most intimate friends now, you know – who first thought of it. I have only worked it up a little.

VI.

Chelmsford: December 20.

MY DEAR UNCLE, – The end of term has come at last, and I am the happiest man that ever lived. Oh, if only I could tell you one tenth of what I feel! Life hasn’t been life till now. I can’t imagine how I could have endured it. I can hardly sit still even to write to you. Isn’t she the dearest, sweetest, loveliest creature you ever saw? To think that Kitty should be mine after all!

The ball the day before yesterday was a complete fiasco. Larrion is in despair; he as been tearing his hair and cursing and swearing like a madman ever since. He says his business is ruined, and I expect it is. When the guests went away that evening – as they did before half the programme was finished – he got up and said that we were the stupidest lot of men it had ever been his misfortune to meet with; he said there wasn’t a spark of humour or a grain of common sense in the whole pack of us.

We collected in the drawing-room at eight, all rather nervous. We none of us liked to talk, for fear of letting out one of our jokes, which would, of course, have been common property at once. We walked up and down, putting on our gloves and looking at the pictures on the walls – Punch cartoons, and comic valentines by Larrion, of which we were already sick to death. The bores were the only members of the party who seemed at ease. They chatted gaily, and made jokes amongst themselves; of course they were allowed to do as they pleased that night. They were not to dance round dances, however, unless there was somebody sitting. Both the High Church curates came down to dance. I noticed one of them going about with a placard saying: ‘Beware of the dog’ on his tails. He didn’t know. It was most amusing. Later on I found that I had a paper on my back saying ‘This style 18s. 6d.’ I think I can guess what humorist did that; but I can forgive him now.

During the first three dances people simply yelled with laughter the whole time; one really couldn’t hear the music at all. But I think everybody was too excited to be really funny. The men jumped about rather boisterously in the Lancers. I was too nervous even for that. I was so nervous that, to tell you the truth, I did not get off a joke the whole evening. In fact, one of my partners mistook me for a bore.

Practical jokes, Mr Larrion had arranged, were not to begin till supper time; so we had supper early on purpose. There was a tremendous turkey at one end of the big table. Captain Bunching – he was one of the Practical Jokes Committee – asked Admiral Timminer to carve it. As soon as he put the fork into it, it exploded with a loud report; it was made of inflated india-rubber. The Admiral was very indignant; so was Kitty. Bunching had secured her for supper, but she left him and went to another table. Here she was still more unfortunate, for one of the curates, next to whom she found herself, offered her a little scent bottle from the table, asking her if she was fond of stephanotis. As soon as she opened the top of it, a stream of black ink ran out of the bottom, making a very ugly stain down the front of her dress.

After supper Captain Bunching somehow got her to dance with him. I think he threw the blame of the turkey on somebody else, or said he didn’t know. He took her into a little bower which had been made in the conservatory, and asked her to sit down on a thing like an ottoman. As soon as she sat down she tumbled into a box; the top was only a sham. She tore her dress very badly on some nails there were at the sides.

This quite destroyed all the Captain’s chances with Kitty. I have never seen anybody so angry as she was. She came running up to me in the dancing-room, and led me away by the arm into another room. She said, ‘You, at least, will not be funny, Mr. Jones’; and, to tell the truth, I really wasn’t.

She said that she had never been to such a ghastly entertainment in her life; ‘ghastly’ was the word she used. She said that the perpetual stupid jokes, idiotic riddles, and facetious answers that she had had to listen to perfectly sickened her, and she hoped she would never meet a funny man again. I comforted her as best I could; the conversation became more and more intimate, and suddenly I found that I had proposed and been accepted.

I saw the Admiral about it next morning. He consented, and invited me to stop over Christmas.

I have sworn never to make another joke as long as I live. Last night, towards the end of dinner – the Admiral had been talking in a very interesting way about the proposed new international code of marine signals – he said, ‘Will you have some port?’ I replied, ‘No, thanks, Admiral; I should prefer a little starboard.’

For a minute or two I could hardly realise the full force of what I had said. There was no effort; it simply dropped out. A long pause followed. We all seemed to be gasping for breath.

Imagine my utter astonishment when Kitty suddenly jumped up, pale and trembling, from her place at the table, and said, in a low, firm voice:

‘Bilbury, if you ever make a joke again I shall break off our engagement.’

I did not seek to fathom her motives. I was ready to make even this sacrifice for her sake. I promised her I would never make another. And I never will! So you must not depend upon me for the future.

Your loving Nephew,

Bilbury J. Jones

This story was published in The Cornhill Magazine for April 1899, when George and Kittie were in the second calendar year of their engagement following the death of Kittie’s first husband. They were married on 10 November 1900. As Calderonians will know, ‘Jones’ was the name of Kittie’s dog.

In a letter to Kittie of 11 February 1899, George wrote that he was ‘awfully afraid of becoming a bore. I have the makings of a bore in me’. Kittie knew him to have a tremendous sense of humour and wit, but this story seems to suggest he had also ‘researched’ the subject of laughter. At least two reviewers later called him a ‘laughing philosopher’.

Here are a few Notes that may be useful:

a young barrister who was up at Trinity with me’: George, of course, was an alumnus of Trinity College, Oxford, not Cambridge.

‘Topsy Turtledove…the Last of the Joneses…Pink Un’. I am unable to explain ‘Topsy Turtledove’, or what Jones’s involvement could be, but ‘the Pink Un’ was the Sporting Times (printed on salmon paper).

‘the Sage of Verulam’: Francis Bacon (1561-1626).

‘exæquare ingenia’: ‘to level out capabilities’. A phrase from Bacon’s Novum Organum on the scientific method.

‘apple-pie beds’: beds made with a single bottom sheet doubled back to look like the top sheet, so that victims cannot cannot stretch their legs. Thought to come from French, ‘nappe pliée’.

‘buffoons are generally called wits’: Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, chapter 8.

‘That it consisteth in wit…’ Hobbes, The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic.

‘Volapük’: the ‘international language’ created by Johann Schleyer in 1880.

‘On seeing a little girl stroke a tortoise’: a ‘true anecdote’ of Sydney Smith (1771-1845), but it seems the commonest version concerns a turtle.

‘a round dance’: a ballroom dance such as a waltz in which couples move in circles round the ballroom.

My heartfelt thanks to Sam2 (aka James Miles) for illustrating the story so aptly.

AND THANK YOU ALL OUT THERE FOR FOLLOWING ‘CALDERONIA’ INTO ITS EIGHTH YEAR!

HAVE YOURSELVES A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS

IN ALL CIRCUMSTANCES

AND A HEALTHY, SAFE AND PROSPEROUS 2021!

Comment Image


George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment

Hello chronotopia old friend..?

‘Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards’, said Kierkegaard. Regrettably, this is of course true. We are like maggots, chewing our way relentlessly forwards  through Time, but we are thinking maggots who constantly need to look back and make sense of their lived life, what they have left behind them… It is a regrettable truth, however, because if we are living life forwards we are always at a different point in Time when we turn round to look at our past life, so it will always look different; which means it can never be understood. (Except, who knows, at the moment of death.)

Personally, I had resisted looking back to the beginning of Black Crow and trying to make sense of it all, until now. The present phase is so static, so boring, so unrelenting and apparently prospectless, that one’s mind turns idly to reading it all forwards in the memory (or in this blog) and trying to make sense of it that way.

The first phase, as I recall it, was marked by frenetic activity within sudden spatial limits. When Lockdown 1 was declared, anyone with any creative urges threw themselves into production. Very often, I think, it was of things that they had been putting off for years. I have never, ever, been sent so many manuscripts: four longish books, three plays, about a hundred poems, six short stories, numerous articles…

The second phase, when Lockdown 1 was lifted and we could travel about a bit, is associated in my memory with fine weather, sparkling day-visits to Norfolk, a long weekend in Bungay where enormous chub lazed in a sunlit mill stream, another weekend at a hotel for senior citizens, with spectacular sunsets over the marshes…

The third phase, the one we are in now, began with a definite event — 12,000 students returning to Cambridge — and initially had forward propulsion, a narrative: they milled about a bit, they gave each other Black Crow rather than the usual start-of-term glandular fever, the University rigorously clamped down, so successfully that according to BBC Look East the Government congratulated it. Cambridge was spared being put in Tier 2, although statistically it should have been. But then Lockdown 2 began and each day began to resemble another, ‘nothing happened’, life became a daily round, week in week out of the same. All narrative seems to have gone. Linearity has been replaced by the circle. Time has become cyclical…

Contemplating this, I suddenly realised that it is how Bakhtin describes the ‘chronotope’ of stories by Gogol, Turgenev, Flaubert or Chekhov set in a provincial town: ‘Time here is devoid of event and therefore seems to have almost stopped. In this form of time all people do is eat, drink, sleep, play cards…’ (Bakhtin, you will recall, took Einstein’s concept spacetime and applied it as timespace (chronotope) to literature, in order to describe the fusion of time-form and space-form that characterises a particular genre.)

Each phase of Black Crow as I’ve experienced it has had its own chronotope. The first was that urgency of creation combined with unwonted spatial confinement. I think it had burned itself out by June, but in any case it was superseded by the second chronotope, which was a relaxed time of enjoyment of the wider world enabled by newly permitted travel. The third chronotope, our present, is repetitive time+spatial immobility. Has one ever had to live through three distinct chronotopes in eight months before?

The thing that these three chronotopes have in common, though, is that we haven’t chosen them; they have been imposed upon us by Black Crow (or, some would say, the Government). These chronotopes are products of unfreedom. That’s what makes them so irksome, I think, and not just the fact that we have had to live through more changes of chronotope than we are used to. I therefore propose a second variety of ‘chronotopia’ to the one that long-term followers of Calderonia will be familiar with. It seems that the psychosis called ‘chronotopia’ afflicts us not only when we have to juggle two different forms of time in our brain simultaneously, but when we have to cope with one distinct form of chronotope following another and imposed upon us arbitrarily.

                                                                *               *               *

What has one achieved during two lockdowns?

Well, I have read, i.e. reported on and edited or proofread, four longish books, three plays, about a hundred poems…and even been paid as the consultant to one book.

But all this was other people’s creativity. What have I created myself?

When I come down to it, my most prolonged creativity has been this blog; dare I say it, I’m particularly proud of my unpublished article for the Spectator

However, I am still privately staggered that between 19 March and 23 August 2020 I finished ‘Making Icons’, the poem in 34 stanzas that I began in 2008 and had written only 26 stanzas of by 4 April 2019. Thank you, Black Crow, for something.

It has taken me twelve years to write a poem of 408 lines. To put this into perspective, it also took Dante twelve years to write the Divine Comedy — but it has 14,233 lines!

I am very pleased to offer here, then, the last three stanzas of ‘Making Icons’. The icon of the Pantocrator, made and painted at St Seraphim’s church in Walsingham, has been completed, including being varnished with olifa (special linseed oil), and has been taken in February to an Anglican chapel where the Cambridgeshire and Norfolk Fens meet, for consecration in a service performed by a Russian Orthodox priest and choir. My first image below is of the icon, the second is of an officiating Russian priest, the third is of the ‘master’, the iconographer Leon Liddament, and the fourth is of oak tree branches. For some information on the verse form, see here.

‘He gef vs to be his homly hyne,/And precious perles vnto his pay. Amen. Amen.’
(Pearl, ll. 1211-12)

32

Skiwanken slightly, an oak-tree stands
in sallow grass beside the path.
We notice stubs of leaves, some stags,
as, silenced, we approach and pass
into the porch…which opens on fast-
ness of Saxon white, grey diamonds,
dark rafters hewn into lissom arcs!
The master is here, he clasps his hands
in prayer for his icon laid on its ambo.
We file onto tough rush chairs, we spy
space fill with folk: friends, locals, and
an -ov and an -aya, -eva and -sky.

skiwanken: a Norfolk word meaning ‘crooked’.
stags: dead branches in the crown.
ambo: a kind of lectern with sloping front.
-ov, -aya, -eva, -sky: i.e. Russian people.

33

Skywards the censer sears, ‘Glory!’
the choir soars, we all rise agleam,
‘For ages of ages!’ Taut priest tones the story
of Christ’s first icon that Abgar healed,
of how homage and love ascend to their home.
‘…endue with power, that we before it
may pray,’ he whispers, and three times
swishes across it, thrice bows, thrice thuri-
fies human work, then sings his tropari:
‘O good One, you filled all with joy
when you came, O Saviour, to save the world,
raised on a Cross against the sky.

swishes across it: asperges the icon with holy water.
thurifies: perfumes it with a censer.
tropariChurch Slavonic for ‘troparion’, a hymn in one stanza.

34

Skywards we look to you through your pure Icon.
Forgive our transgressions, send your grace
upon us, O Christ God, and heal all division.’
He slowly bows and kisses the Face.
Glory and alleluia thrice!
Veils of very beauty they sing us
in lovely lines of Jesus’ kondak.
‘…for he loves mankind’ ends the dismissal.
Some kiss a corner of the image.
Outside, the priest blesses us. I see
the master climb into his Hillman,
and branches rooted in the sky.

Jesus’ kondak: the first kontakion and ikos of the canticle ‘To Our Most Sweet Lord Jesus Christ’.
blesses us: individually.

Comment Image


George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Guest Post: Andrew Tatham, ‘The Pursuit of Uniqueness and Originality in Self-Publishing’

I have just been asked for advice about self-publishing from someone who has come into the possession of a First World War soldier’s original memoir. It’s hundreds of pages long and includes many photographs and colour drawings. Obviously such a thing from that era has value as a view of an extraordinary time, but whether it is worth the toil and expense and risk of self-publishing it as a large colour book is a whole different proposition. As a self-publisher you do not have the advantages of a major publisher with their financial clout and publicity machine, so your book has got to really make an impact in order to get noticed and have people talking about it. So I asked him the question: ‘What does this material say (or allow you to say with the way that you present it) that is unique and original, that will make it stand out from all the other books about the First World War?’

Being on the verge of publishing my own large colour book after three years of work and with a print run costing £29,000, I realise that that question is one that I also have to answer. I Shall Not Be Away Long is based on the First World War letters of Lt Col Charles Bartlett. The letters provide an immediate and uncensored portal into the life and times of a rather roguish infantry officer, full of humour and surprises as he attempts to navigate the challenges presented by the war and his marriage. On their own they make fascinating reading but to really make use of them to transport you to that time I have presented them visually to give the idea that you have opened them yourself and I have included images that evoke the circumstances in which they were written. I can’t recall seeing another book that has done this in this way, nor one where nearly every person and item and event mentioned in the letters has been investigated to be able to present the wider context of the main story in the letters. In particular, the lives that have sailed alongside Charles Bartlett’s, some for only very brief times, have in many cases got quite incredible stories attached to them. Just as with the people that we meet in our own lives, there are secrets that are hidden from contemporary view. Sometimes these have not escaped the historical record and so we end up knowing more about Charles Bartlett’s acquaintances than he probably did. We also get to see what happened to them all and get some idea of the long-term effects of the War. All of this gives context as does the benefit of hindsight to be able to take the views and beliefs that were held at a particular time and compare them with what we know now to have been the case. This is nowhere more starkly shown than in his comment one week after the start of the Battle of Somme (albeit from 13 miles behind the lines) that ‘The news seems very good and everyone seems very pleased’. If there is anything to be taken from all this it is that there is always a story beneath the surface and we would do well to question our assumptions about most things – and indeed it is only by asking questions and seeking answers that we can make progress, whether that be in self-publishing or in life in general.

You can get an idea of the contents of I Shall Not Be Away Long from this flick through the book:

Find out more and order your own copy from www.ishallnotbeawaylong.co.uk

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 12

26 September
Today I suddenly realised what life under Black Crow reminds me of: living in the Soviet Union. It would be unfair to compare Britain at the moment to the view from a window in Moscow University’s Stalinist hostel in the winter of 1970…

…but it feels similar. And the reasons aren’t difficult to find. You prepare yourself to go out into a hostile environment (on some days, western students I knew in Moscow didn’t get further than that). You have to wear special headgear, people keep their distance and stare straight through you, there’s only one subject on everyone’s mind anyway: how awful the regime(n) is. You return to your room with a deep sigh of relief, because it’s the only place where you feel FREE. You can think freely, even talk freely (to yourself, not the microphones). Unfortunately, of course, if the inside of our own houses is the only place we now feel at liberty, we don’t have it. We have to curtail our freedom for the sake of our physical health and we shall get our freedom back, but in the meantime it doesn’t surprise me that Russians’ mental health suffered so much under communism.

12 October
Dahlias are vibrant, but chrysanthemums are the great survivors. ‘Lates’ come into flower in November and can last a month either outdoors or in a vase. Dahlias still breathe summer, chrysanths fight against winter with their subtler shades, forms and smell. No wonder they are synonymous in the East with happiness and long life. My own chrysanths are only just coming out, but I’ve certainly been cheered by this brilliant new book:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

It covers nearly four thousand years of growing and showing, is full of riveting detail, and superbly illustrated with everything from blooms of infinite variety to paintings, pottery and cigarette cards. I was particularly fascinated by the working class origins of much chrysanthemum-growing in this country and the penultimate chapter, ‘A Literary Bouquet’, which amongst other things looks closely at John Steinbeck’s short story of 1937 ‘The Chrysanthemums’. As you would expect of a garden historian whose most famous book is about garden gnomes, it is all enhanced by Twigs Way’s hilarious dry wit. She closes her book with a haiku by Bashō:

When the winter chrysanthemums go,
there’s nothing to write about
but radishes.

21 October
Some bestselling writers have complained on television that their sales are being undermined by the recent explosion of indie publishing. Rose Tremaine diplomatically implied that many of these books were of poor quality and shouldn’t be published…

But many should, and never would be by your bestselling publishers. Does Ms Tremaine actually not want competition? Is she against a free market? Because that is what digital self-publishing has created in the teeth of the commercial closed shop.

Moreover, the ‘explosion’ has made it more difficult for everyone including self-publishers. Most people would be stupefied to contemplate the obstacles to publication and selling copies that, say, Andrew Tatham has to confront. It takes real grit.

Speaking personally, publishing and marketing my own book has been a never-ending learning curve because the last book I published in this country as Sam&Sam was in 1987. One learns the hard way. For instance, the late John Dewey assured me from his own experience that a review in the TLS was worth a hundred copies, because that many readers and librarians throughout the world took their cue from it. It was a very long fight to get a review there. When it appeared, completely out of the blue, it omitted the Web address from which copies should be bought. Consequently, TLS readers went straight to Amazon and ABE, where it sold out before we could get more copies up ourselves. For that reason, I think, we sold only one copy through the Sam&Sam website.

It’s all a question of learning fast and spotting opportunities. Because of the pandemic, commercial publishers have been producing fewer books and advertising less in the TLS. Consequently I’ve just secured an amazing deal for an ad there in the Russian issue of 11 December, and I’m delighted to say that the paper itself has complimented Sam2 on his ‘striking’ design:

We might sell a hundred copies, we might sell none, but the only way to find out whether advertising in the TLS is worth it is to do it — and at a time when COVID has pushed the price down. A bonus is that this ad will in effect be one for both my book and Sam&Sam generally. So we are reorganising the website to showcase all our books Russian and English. Watch this space for an account of the results!

Comment Image


George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

John Baines: exemplar of a young officer

Available priced £10 including postage from joannaps2015@gmail.com

‘Exemplar’, not ‘exemplary’, because John Stanhope Baines, son of the Herbert Stanhope Baines who features in Laurence Brockliss’s recent guest post, would not have wanted anyone to regard him as an exemplary young officer of World War I. When he is invalided home from Ypres with a light wound in July 1915, and his nerves are suffering, he almost falls out with his fiancee-to-be Elisabeth Wicksteed over this very issue:

I felt that she admired me an awful lot & I couldn’t help feeling that it was the good she saw in me she was loving […] and that she mightn’t care so much about me if she realised that I wasn’t a hero after all. (p. 115)

Moreover, coming from four generations of the Baines family to edit the Leeds Mercury, he clearly had journalism in his blood: he described a military action so well in a diary he sent Dear Mother that she could not resist sending it to The Times as a more accurate account than their own, and when they published it he was hauled over the coals by a General (p. 71). He later got into trouble with the censor, too, for describing his billet in ‘highly dangerous’ detail (p. 103). He liked his whisky, he liked his pipe, he played bridge for money, winning at one point nearly £400 at today’s prices (p. 159), and in 1918 he even became, as the editors of his letters interpret it, ‘tired and disenchanted’ (p. 222).

But an exemplar he is. Born in 1894, he was a classical scholar at Winchester, went from school into the Royal Engineers (‘Sappers’), and at the age of twenty was a lieutenant on the Western Front. Here he shows himself to be a complete professional, hard-working, always retaining his humour, brave on perilous ‘wiring’ expeditions, sociable, very able at managing his men, given to attending church, curious about everything going on around him. In three adjectives, he is clean-living, gallant and stalwart. I cannot recall ever reading a better portrait of the archetypal young British officer of the Great War.

The editors of this 270-page volume, John Baines’s grandchildren Andrew Baines and Joanna Palmer, have done a magnificent job in presenting his letters: on the right hand page you have the letter, on the left hand a whole article about something touched on in its text, and these are very readable and entertaining in themselves. Their subjects range from bully beef, trench construction, military chaplains and malaria to…the recipe for traditional Yorkshire parkin, ‘wire obstacles’, and Raphael Kirchner’s pin-ups (illustrated). Those articles that explain the military campaigns John Baines is part of, and the wider background of the war as it unfolds, are outstandingly lucid and informative. In short, this book is not only about John Baines, it is a whole education in the realia of the 1914-18 War.

For me, two aspects of the book were a revelation. First, as reviewer Angela Holdsworth has put it, this is ‘at last a book outlining the dangerous and vital work of the Sappers, so often overlooked in accounts of the war’. I now understand their mind-boggling contribution to warfare. Second, I had always thought that the Salonika campaign, aimed at breaking the Germans’ Macedonian front, was another failure like Gallipoli, but this book shows it was quite the opposite. With maps and brilliant analyses on the left hand pages, Baines’s letters detail a crushing endgame that in Ludendorff’s words ‘sealed the fate of the quadruple alliance’, i.e. precipitated the armistice.

Having married Elisabeth Wicksteed (‘my Betsy’) whilst on leave in April 1916, John Baines was posted to Salonika in 1917 for the rest of the war. Here he was engaged less in frontline sapper work than building a network of roads behind the lines. These were a vital element in the eventual rout of the Bulgarians facing the British section of the Macedonian front. If anyone thought soldiering is not about people, this part of the book would convince them otherwise. Baines displays an extraordinary ability to get on with the local mixed races and organise and pay large numbers of women, men and children to construct his roads. The post-war tributes paid to the conduct of the British troops are glowing. Here is Baines writing to his mother on 26 May 1918:

A lot of my women bring their babies to work with them and leave them under a hedge somewhere. The hail was rather rough on the babies & the Sappers put their own coats over them as far as possible. The women were awfully pleased and brought them eggs next morning. Some of the Sappers are just like the head of a large family — say 20 wives and 20 daughters — and their family is very fond of them. They bring flowers for them and sometimes make them little bead purses or similar things to send home. (p. 217)

After the Bulgarians surrendered, John revisited the Turkish village he had been based at in Macedonia and was very honourably received. The villagers feared greatly for their future under post-war Greek rule. A panel on the opposite page explains that they were right to: the terrible history of Macedonia in the twentieth century was concluded by independence only in 1991. Despite the fact that Turkey was our war enemy, Baines had come greatly to admire the Turks, started to learn Turkish, and wanted after the war to continue with it at the London School of Oriental Languages so that he would be ‘in a position to agitate strongly for a job in some place inhabited by Turks’ (p. 243).

Local women breaking stones for road making 1917 (IWM Q32693)

A final quality to mention of John Stanhope Baines — one that we don’t perhaps associate with young public school officers in World War I — is empathy. It is tempting to think he acquired it as a result of losing his father when he was two and developing very deep relationships with his mother Elizabeth and sister Honor (who is the other recipient of his war letters published here). He seems to be able to tell his mother anything, for example that some of the Kirchner ladies ‘in various stages of dress or undress’ are ‘really rather nice’, and that he is ‘wildly in love’ with an 18-year-old called Salonina, who has ‘very nice hair’, depicted on a Roman coin he has dug up! This is well after his marriage to the rather severe-looking Betsy, to whom none of his letters seem to have survived. He sends his mother hefty chunks of his pay and winnings. When she protests, he writes: ‘You shouldn’t write that you’ve “no one to bring your troubles to”. What else is a son for?’ (p. 213).

Dearest Mother is both militarily and humanly a dramatic narrative, and I am not surprised that a successful theatrical entertainment has been made from it:

The editors, Andrew Baines and Joanna Palmer, appearing as John and ‘Dearest Mother’ in a presentation of their book in the Guildhall, Windsor, as part of The Windsor Spring Festival 2016

The book is a wonderfully fresh and readable contribution to the literature of World War I and I’m delighted to have come across it long after completing my own research on George Calderon’s war. Dearest Mother was published by Helion in 2015, the first edition sold out, and the second is now obtainable directly from the editors at joannaps2015@gmail.com

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George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

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.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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