Calderonia

‘Another culture’ (A series of seven posts)

Posted on September 15, 2021 by Patrick Miles

Sam2, aka our son James Miles, worked in Japan as a teacher from 2011 to 2014 (his first job when he got back to England was to set up Calderonia!). My wife Alison visited Jim in Japan in 2013. Jim has been urging me to visit Japan myself, and our current plan is to go there together in 2023. Although apprehensive about the long plane journey, I do want to go. I have been ‘engaging’ with Japan through English-language books ever since I bought The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse in 1970; I would like to experience the reality.

‘Japan’

So, the sequence of haiku and senryu above (click on it to enlarge) is literary shots of Japan from the West — that is why the title is in inverted commas. It’s how Japan has affected me without my knowing Japan in the flesh. ‘Wasabi’, by the way, is that green paste made from the Mountain Hollyhock that you have with sushi and takes the roof off your mouth. In the next six posts, which will take us up to Christmas, I shall look at some other glimpses I have gained of Japan through books, and both Jim and Alison will talk about their own experience of the country in separate posts.

I should acknowledge that three of the above poems were published in HQ Poetry Magazine and Blithe Spirit, 2019, but written many years before.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Alison Miles, Blithe Spirit, Calderonia, chrysanthemums, comments, culture, foreign cultures, guest posts, haiku, honesty pods, HQ Poetry Magazine, James Miles, Japan, Japanese literature, koi carp, Masaoka Shiki, Pleiades, saké, Sam2, senryu, sushi, tea, wasabi | 1 Comment

A new photograph of George Calderon

Posted on September 1, 2021 by Patrick Miles

Whilst sorting his family papers, Mr John Pym recently found the photograph below, which undoubtedly shows George Calderon on the right. It is a contact print of a photograph, obviously not in sharp focus, which Mr Pym and I believe was probably taken by his grandmother, Violet Pym (1881-1927), who was a keen photographer.

The back is inscribed as follows in the hand of either Violet’s husband Charles Evelyn Pym (1879-1971) or their son John Pym (1908-93): K. & G. Calderon about 1905. However, the woman sitting next to George is older, much fuller in the face, and less fashionably dressed than Kittie in another photo of 1905, reproduced on page 204 of my biography. Who, then, might this person be, and the lady on the far left?

The previously unknown photograph, c. 1905

John Pym believes that the seat is one from Foxwold that he now owns, but that the massive trunk behind it is not one of a tree at Foxwold; rather, perhaps, that of a cedar planted by Frederic Lubbock (1844-1927) at nearby Emmetts. The seat may originally have been at Emmetts, therefore, and the photograph taken there.

We know from Foxwold’s Visitors Book that there was only one occasion when George and Kittie stayed at Foxwold in 1905, and that was on 27 December in the company of an old friend of the Pyms, the humorous writer Anstey Guthrie. It would be perfectly normal for the Foxwold party to visit Emmetts on that occasion, as Charles Evelyn Pym had married Frederic and Catherine Lubbock’s daughter Violet earlier that year (although the couple were living in Sussex). The person to the left of George might therefore be the then-resident of Foxwold, C.E. Pym’s stepmother Jane Hannah Backhouse Pym (1852-1912). The person to the left of her bears some resembance to Catherine Lubbock (1850-1934).

All this is speculation, however, as the inscription says only ‘about 1905’, there looks to be more foliage on the trees than one would expect on 27 December, and surely it would be odd for George to be wearing a boater in winter? On the other hand, he does look slightly crumpled, and this would accord with his state of health at the time (see pages 202-7 of the biography). On 28 December 1905 Nina Corbet’s son Jim wrote to Kittie that he hoped ‘Uncle George’s’ health was better for having had a Christmas holiday. The alternative date for 1905 is 21 May, when George’s signature appears in the Foxwold Weigh-in Book, but not in the Visitors Book.

I am touched and immensely grateful to John Pym that he has added this photograph to his already generous donations to the Calderon archive. Together with other items of Calderoniana that I have bought or been given since 2019, it will eventually join George and Kittie’s papers at the Houghton Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, boaters, Catherine Lubbock, Charles Evelyn Pym, comments, Emmetts, Evey Pym, Foxwold, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Harvard University, Houghton Library, identification, Jane Hannah Backhouse Pym, Jim Corbet, John Pym, Johnnie Pym, Kittie Calderon, Lubbock family, Massachusetts, Nina Corbet, Violet Pym, visitors books, Weigh-in Book | Leave a comment

‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’: Fragments of a response

Posted on August 20, 2021 by Patrick Miles

When I read the novel for the first time, I was bemused by the in-your-face tone of the narrator, who is even given to exclamatory comments: ‘But that is how men are!’ — ‘But Emma said No!’ — ‘Yes, she sat there!’ — ‘More violent sobs — self-conscious!’ Could one expect anything very profound from such a story teller? But Lawrence knew what he was doing. The tone clears the air and increasingly identifies with Lady C.’s own untrammelled responses to her environment. And as she ceases to be ‘Constance’ and becomes ‘Connie’, so the narrator calms down into that affection, compassion, empathy and understanding of her that are so moving.

* * *

Is it likely that mine owner, ‘first lieutenant in a smart regiment’ and ruling class bastard Clifford Chatterley could become a successful writer of short stories? Well, no; there is nothing in the pre-novel of chapter 1 that suggests he has any interest in or talent for creative writing whatsoever. Lawrence can make it happen before our eyes, however, because he understood so well what made a fashionable writer of his time: ‘That slightly humorous analysis of people and motives which leaves everything in bits at the end’, as Connie sees it, and ‘a display, a display, a display!’ The only examples of Chatterley’s writing that Lawrence gives are letters. ‘He wrote very good letters: they might have been printed in a book.’ Ouch! There is a brilliant example of Chatterley’s literary phoniness, when he writes that ‘sometimes the soul shoots like a kittiwake into the light, with ecstasy’. The kittiwake, poor bird, is used for mere display.

Kittiwake in flight: a beautiful bird, but a flashy image.
(BBC news)

* * *

The depth of Lawrence’s self-belief and seriousness of intent in this novel is borne out by the fact that he forgets to check whether his words could have a farcical meaning. ‘He [Michaelis] couldn’t keep anything up’, or ‘He [Mellors] was a thousand years older in experience, starting from the bottom’, are likely to be construed within the novel’s central context of sexuality rather than the particular context Lawrence intends. In other words, Lawrence has laid himself open to appearing humourless.

* * *

In 1982 I was reading and helping to order the residual papers of the novelist William Gerhardie (1895-1977) acquired by Cambridge University Library. I was particularly interested in any unpublished manuscripts of his relating to Chekhov, about whom he had written the first book in English (1923).

I came across a typescript of his account of visiting D.H. Lawrence at home in 1925 and was incredulous to read that Lawrence had told him he, Lawrence, was incapable of ‘satisfying’ a woman as he suffered from premature ejaculation. What? The foremost writer about heterosexual sex in the English language? Could this possibly be?

Gerhardie omitted the ‘fact’ from his Memoirs of a Polyglot (1931), but in God’s Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age, 1890-1940 (1981) he set it on record and related Lawrence’s condition to the excruciating, almost Expressionist episode in The Rainbow when Ursula attempts to obtain ‘consummation’ from Skrebensky as she lies in the sand hills ‘motionless, with wide-open eyes looking at the moon’.

William Gerhardie, c.1930

I gather it is now accepted that Lawrence suffered from premature ejaculation and could not ‘satisfy’ a woman that way. It would explain his obsession with simultaneous orgasm in Lady Chatterley’s Lover — an odd obsession in today’s world, surely — but also Mellors’s somewhat basic technique. One cannot help hypothesising that Lawrence suffered from p.e. because he saw sex as a sacramental, almost religious act of ecstasy that couldn’t come fast enough, so to speak, once he had embarked on it. The Lawrentian (purely male) conception of sexual climax as sacramental/religious (i.e. virtually spiritual rather than physical) might explain why Skrebensky, Michaelis and Mellors are bitter about their partners not achieving it, rather than blaming themselves (the men).

Mellors’s attention to Connie’s body is wonderful (she herself thinks: ‘he was kind to the female in her, which no man had ever been’). But does Lawrence intend Mellors’s very juicy use of the ‘c’ and ‘f’ words, and the gamekeeper’s penchant for ‘tail’, to imply there is something superior about Mellors’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ brand of sex?

‘He [Mellors] hated mouth-kisses.’ Why? Nothing, it seems, changes more quickly and is more personal than sexual mores; and this makes the novel peculiarly ‘dated’, or historical, and difficult to discuss today. (It’s a sex and gender minefield!)

* * *

Doris Lessing’s introduction (2006) to the current Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is challenging and in my view superb. She relates how she came to see it as ‘one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever written’:

It is not that once having seen how war overshadows this tale, threatens these lovers, the love story loses its poignancy, but for me it is no longer the central theme, despite what Lawrence intended. Two defenceless people, their lives already wounded by war, fly into each other’s arms, fugitives from such horrors, trying to find a little safe place, like small animals fleeing from a forest fire, the wings of flame already close behind them [i.e. of the Second World War].

I admit that, unlike Women in Love, whose narrative ends before 4 August 1914, the First World War is responsible for much of the state of things in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Clifford’s injury, Mellors’s restlessness and extreme alienation, the terrible debasement of values and words apprehended by Connie in the passage quoted first in Damian Grant’s preceding post. Lawrence’s own description and diagnosis of PTSD is masterly. But I don’t agree that the war is the central theme. We are explicitly informed at the end of chapter 1 that Clifford Chatterley had been ‘virgin when he married [unlike Connie]: and the sex part did not mean much to him’, nor had Connie’s sexuality been awoken by her experiences with German men. This was all true of them before the War, and is the crux of the problem. The central theme remains the new, or as Lawrence expressed it, ‘phallic’ marriage that the novel actually celebrates. ‘Where there is real sex, there is the underlying passion for fidelity’ (A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’).

* * *

I have now read the novel twice in swift succession and am struck by the parallels with Women in Love: Clifford Chatterley becomes as ruthless a mine-moderniser as Gerald Critch; Mellors is as anti-establishment, and as big a talker, as Rupert Birkin; the let-out for the lovers, as in Women in Love, is a trust fund that will give them a private income; at the close of Lady Chatterley’s Lover a phoney artist is exposed by Mellors in a way reminiscent of Ursula’s argument with Loerke in the earlier novel. In broad terms, Connie’s and Mellors’s love follows a similar curve to Birkin’s and Ursula’s, and is even described in similar language. When Connie achieves her perfect sexual fulfilment with Mellors, ‘it was the sons of god with the daughters of men’. In Women in Love ‘it was the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God’. One wonders what had happened in the meantime for Lawrence to demote ‘God’ to ‘god’.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, Clifford Chatterley, comments, Constance Chatterley, D.H. Lawrence, Damian Grant, display, Doris Lessing, God, kittiwakes, Lady Chatterley, Lady Chatterley's Lover, letters, marriage, narrators, Oliver Mellors, orgasm, PTSD, sex, Sons of God, The Great War, The Rainbow, William Gerhardie, Women in Love, World War 2, World War I | 1 Comment

Guest post by Damian Grant: ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’

Posted on August 1, 2021 by Patrick Miles

This nineteenth-century engraving of Florizel and Perdita does indeed make them look — to use Lady Chatterley/Connie’s dismissive phrase about the Elizabethans — somewhat ‘upholstered’.

In all the excitement — which has never quite subsided — about the sexual explicitness of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, it has often been overlooked that it is a very literary novel: a product deeply implicated in the high culture it makes a point of traducing. (And the fact that the narrative visits Berlin, London, Paris and Venice makes it almost as cosmopolitan as Eliot’s The Waste Land, published six years previously.) One aspect of this literariness is not even paradoxical, when we realize that Lawrence systematically uses modern culture — especially in its literary aspect — as a sounding-board against which to play out the (re)discovery of sexual reality and fulfilment by Connie and Mellors in the wood. Sir Clifford himself writes commercially successful short stories; Connie’s first lover at Wragby, Michaelis, is a well-received playwright; and conversation among the guests is inevitably intellectual. Lawrence’s narrator even uses other novelists as a kind of shorthand: Mrs Bolton’s conversation is described at one point as being ‘more than gossip. It was Mrs Gaskell and George Eliot and Miss Mitford all rolled in one, with a great deal more, that these women left out’ (third version of the novel, edited by Michael Squires, Penguin Classics, 1994, p. 100).

It is the first sign of her liberation from this world that Connie starts to react against what she sees as the deadness of this culture, which has atrophied language: words themselves.

Connie went slowly home to Wragby. ‘Home!’ it was a warm word to use for that great weary warren. But then it was a word that had had its day. It was, somehow, cancelled. All the great words, it seemed to Connie, were cancelled for her generation: love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great dynamic words were half-dead now, and dying from day to day […] As for sex, the last of the great words, it was just a cocktail term for an excitement that bucked you up for a while, then left you more raggy than ever. (62)

Part of this logic makes gamekeeper Mellors, though perfectly able to speak in the educated language of the time, prefer to use dialect with her; especially in their most intimate moments. And so the symbolic scheme seems to be simple: Wragby = writing, high culture = degeneracy, death; the woodland = nature, spontaneity, in the service of life itself.

But closer reading proves that the system as it works in the novel is not simple at all. The cultural alignment turns out to be far more interesting, far more complex and contradictory. What we have to conclude is that Lawrence the practised writer and passionate apologist manages to have his cake and eat it. It is thanks to Shakespeare, and especially The Winter’s Tale, that the woodland — backdrop to sexual fulfilment — enjoys a win-win situation, as the best of culture comes to the aid of the best of nature, in a convenient realignment.

In chapter 8 of the novel the wood first comes alive for Lady Chatterley, or she herself becomes alive: ‘Connie was strangely excited in the wood, and the colour flew in her cheeks and burned blue in her eyes’ (86). Interestingly, she first has to evade — as it were, to sidestep — two literary quotations, negative contradicting impressions from both Milton and Swinburne (85). But then more positive Biblical references take over (‘Ye must be born again — I believe in the resurrection of the body!’) before Lawrence offers this reassuring summary: ‘In the wind of March, endless phrases swept through her consciousness’ (85). Words are already playing a double game, some shutting out and others leading on. Connie is entranced by the ‘first violets’ in the wood and the daffodils, ‘so bright and alive […] So strong in their frailty’, and she enthuses to Clifford about these on her return to the house, ‘to Wragby and its walls’ (86); walls also made of words, as we have previously seen.

She goes to the wood again next day, and it is on this occasion that she follows the narrow track leading to the clearing and the gamekeeper’s hut, where she meets and talks briefly to a surprised and slightly resentful Mellors (87-90). Another conversation with Clifford ensues, in which as she is putting the violets she has gathered into a vase he exclaims: ‘Sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes.’

Connie reacts negatively to this: ‘I don’t see a bit of connection, with the actual violets’ (91), also showing that she knows her Shakespeare: ‘The Elizabethans are rather upholstered’ (91). Next day, when Clifford himself ventures with her into the wood in his bath-chair, there is another negative reaction to verbal culture when as she gives him some wood-anemones she has picked, he quotes Keats (from the ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’), ‘Thou still unravished bride of quietness’.

She was angry with him, turning everything into words. Violets were Juno’s eyelids and windflowers were unravished brides. How she hated words, always coming between her and life! (93)

The following day, on her third visit to the wood, she sits at the hut and inwardly rejects the word ‘ravished’ and all the ideas it stands for. ‘Ravished! How ravished one could be without being touched! Ravished by dead words become obscene, and dead ideas become obsessions’ (94). This before an edgy conversation with Mellors, who comes upon her there, which sends her home at the end of the chapter ‘in a confusion, not knowing what she thought or felt’ (96).

Here one must pause to point out that of course Lawrence knew his Shakespeare too, and had remembered Perdita’s celebrated speech to Florizel in Act IV, scene iv of The Winter’s Tale; remembered it at the roots of him, rather like the poems that are ‘woven into a man’s consciousness,’ and ‘which after all give the ultimate shape to one’s life’ (‘Hymns in a Man’s Life’, Phoenix II edited by Warren Roberts and Harry T. Moore, London, Heinemann, 1968, p. 597). If we turn back to this speech ourselves, we will recognize that something interesting has been happening in this eighth chapter of Lawrence’s own pastoral romance. Perdita addresses Florizel and the young girls:

Now, my fair’st friend,
I would I had some flowers o’th’spring that might
Become your time of day; and yours and yours,
That wear upon your virgin branches yet
Your maidenheads growing: O Proserpina,
For the flowers now, that frighted thou let’st fall
From Dis’s waggon! Daffodils,
That come before the swallow dares, and take
The winds of March with beauty; violets, (dim,
But sweeter than the lids of Juno’s eyes
Or Cytherea’s breath); pale primroses,
That die unmarried, ere they can behold
Bright Phoebus in his strength […] (lines 112-24).

Proserpina (as Persephone), the winds of March, the daffodils, the violets, the pale primroses, the breath of Cytherea (Aphrodite): all of these are reproduced within one page at the start of this chapter, where Lawrence is working to establish Connie’s intimacy with the wood and all it represents. What we can observe here, then, is the intriguing example of Lawrence rejecting the cultural with one hand — Clifford’s ill-judged quotation from Shakespeare — and embracing it with the other, in the author’s probably unconscious use of the very same passage to convey Connie’s palpably physical experience of the wood. The ‘endless phrases’ that ‘sweep through her consciousness’ in ‘the winds of March’ are as much a part of that experience as the sense impressions themselves — and the only way that Lawrence can convey these to us. In effect, Perdita’s speech acts as a kind of spell, an incantation, to allow Connie’s entry to the wood.

One could even argue that this passage permeates the novel more extensively. The first paragraph of chapter 12 (165) repeats the incantation, when Connie goes to the wood hoping to meet Mellors. ‘It was really a lovely day, the first dandelions making suns, the first daisies so white’; hazel catkins and crowds of yellow celandines greet her, with ‘the triumphant powerful yellow of early summer’. Then we have this sentence: ‘And primroses were broad and full of pale abandon, thick-clustered primroses no longer shy.’ Lawrence’s idea here can only be understood as in dialogue with Perdita’s ‘pale primroses, / That die unmarried’, to emphasize by contrast Connie’s own imminent ecstatic coupling with ‘Bright Phoebus in his strength’. This spell-like, motif-laden paragraph also contains the image ‘The lush dark green of hyacinths [bluebell leaves] was a sea’, which anticipates the powerful sea imagery used a few pages later to describe Connie’s full orgasmic experience (‘it seemed she was like a sea, nothing but dark waves rising and heaving’ (174)), and it is impossible not to relate this motif, again, to the same passage in the play, when Florizel replies to Perdita ‘when you do dance, I wish you / A wave o’th’sea’ (ll. 140-1). The sea returns a third time — like the tide — in the sentence that ends the chapter: ‘As she ran home in the twilight the world seemed a dream; the trees in the park seemed bulging and surging at anchor on a tide, and the heave of the slope to the house was alive’ (178).

We may conclude that the passage from The Winter’s Tale is used by Lawrence in contradictory ways, like a Janus face. At one level in direct quotation, to let Connie make a negative statement about language and culture; but at another more pervasive level it filters back to the water-table of Lawrence’s verbal imagination to inform and generate his own profoundly felt formulations. We can identify two contrary currents, poetic invocation running under rhetorical positioning.

More generally, one needs hardly to be reminded of the extended passage in chapter 15 where Connie and Mellors decorate each other’s pubic hair with flowers (pp. 220-229) to realize that flower imagery is central to the novel: with the creative fragility of the flower, like sexual life itself, perceived in contrast to the death-dealing mechanization all around. Here, the ground-note is sounded by the moving image from Shakespeare’s sonnet 65: ‘How with this rage shall beauty find a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?’ And is it too fanciful to suggest that the concluding couplet (‘O none, unless this miracle have might, / That in black ink my love may still shine bright’) could have prompted the image that concludes the novel, when Mellors writes to Connie that if he ‘could sleep with my arm round you, the ink could stay in the bottle’ (301)? Though admittedly the ink has a different function in each case.

Top row, left to right: wood forget-me-not, columbine. Bottom row, left to right: red campion, creeping jenny. The lovers wind them and other wild flowers onto each other’s bodies.

What we have in this novel is the most substantial and developed instance of a paradox we find underlying much of Lawrence’s work, which reacts against mental activity on behalf of the body — but in a medium which is inevitably the finest product of the mind. Consider the poem ‘Snake’, where Lawrence repents in one line for his action in throwing a log at the snake — ‘I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education’ — and makes the gesture as of a deference to nature in the next: ‘I thought of the albatross’ (Poems, edited by Keith Sagar, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1986, p. 137). But of course the albatross is Coleridge’s albatross, is Baudelaire’s albatross; is a cultivated bird no less than Keats’s nightingale, one of Audubon’s famous prints, or even Yeats’s bird of changeless metal from ‘Byzantium’.

I am not suggesting that the wood in Lady Chatterley’s Lover isn’t a wood, any more than the Forest of Arden isn’t a forest. It is (they are), with all the reality that may be conferred by verbal representation. But we have to acknowledge that it is a magic wood; and part of the magic is, that it also provides a roof-top protest on the prison-house of language.

© Damian Grant, 2021

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Snake', Algernon Swinburne, Byzantium, Charles Baudelaire, comments, Constance Reid, D.H. Lawrence, Florizel, Forest of Arden, George Eliot, High Park Wood, John James Audubon, John Keats, John Milton, Juno, Lady Chatterley, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Mary Russell Mitford, Michaelis, Mrs Bolton, Mrs Gaskell, Oliver Mellors, Perdita, Proserpina, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, sex, sexuality, Sir Clifford Chatterley, T.S. Eliot, The Elizabethans, The Great War, The Winter's Tale, W.B. Yeats, wild flowers, William Shakespeare, World War I, Wragby | 2 Comments

Lady with little dog/Gamekeeper with spaniel

Posted on July 15, 2021 by Patrick Miles

Our guest posts on Women in Love opened an admirable exchange of Comments about all sorts of aspects of Lawrence’s work. I think there was a feeling, however, that we were left with an elephant in the room: Lady Chatterley’s Lover… (I had not even read it.)

Shortly afterwards, veteran Calderonia-contributor Damian Grant kindly showed me a paper that he had written in the 1980s, delivered at a meeting of the D.H. Lawrence Society, but not published. It took up Clifford Chatterley’s quotation from The Winter’s Tale in chapter 8 of the novel and related it to wider issues. It seemed to me an excellent way into a discussion of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and I am delighted to say that it will appear on Calderonia in slightly expanded form on 1 August.

I vividly remember the rush to buy the unexpurgated version of Lady Chatterley’s Lover after Penguin Books won the case to publish it in 1960. All the windows of the rather staid bookshop in my home town displayed copies of it (see cover above left). There was a steady stream of people darting out with something in a brown paper bag. The following year, aged thirteen, I bought a copy myself and disguised it in the carefully excised cover of Penguin’s Mr Midshipman Hornblower. I don’t think I got to page 40. However, a list was circulating at school of the ‘best pages’. My most passionate interest at the time was natural history, so I was bowled over by Lawrence’s descriptions of the wood; what went on there actually revolted me. My copy was stolen by someone and I made no attempt to recover it. Strangely enough, my parents’ copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover also disappeared, and I don’t know anyone who still has their copy from the 1960s. I think the reason is that people were desperately curious to read the nearly banned novel, but were so disappointed that they soon passed it on to others, who passed it on to others.

Nevertheless, I do still have my copy of A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ and Other Essays, which the inside cover tells me I read in 1963. I bought it on the recommendation of our English teacher just down from Cambridge. By the age of fifteen I was much more interested in modern painting than botany and this teacher told me there was a very good essay by Lawrence on Cézanne in this volume. He was right, but the title essay had a very strong effect on me, even though I had not read the novel.

By 1970 I still had not read the novel, but the essay by Mark Schorer in A Propos had acquainted me with the three versions of the novel’s ending and I fancy I had picked up some things Leavis said on this subject, too. It all emboldened me, in an undergraduate essay, to compare the ending of Chekhov’s story ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ with Lawrence’s two rejected endings to Lady Chatterley’s Lover. The comparison was unfavourable to Lawrence, as I felt he had aimed to resolve the ending, to close it, whereas Chekhov’s story is famous for ending with the words ‘they could both see that the end was still a long, long way off and that the most complicated and difficult part was only just beginning’ — the future in Chekhov’s version of the roman adultère is left wide open.

I have recently read Lady Chatterley’s Lover twice (2006 cover top right) and perceive the resemblances between it and ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ to be profound; far greater than the differences. For a start, Mark Schorer actually wrote back in 1963 that the third, authorised version of the novel (the one I have just read) ‘leaves the end in some uncertainty, which is supremely right’. In other words, it is more Chekhovian; closer to the last sentence of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’. Above all, in both works the man’s love is based on compassion and tenderness. ‘There is something pitiful about her’, thinks Gurov after meeting Anna Sergeevna for the first time. ‘He felt compassion towards the life in her, that was so warm and beautiful.’ ‘There was something so mute and forlorn in her’, Lawrence writes of Connie, ‘compassion flamed in his [Mellors’] bowels for her.’ ‘He thought with infinite tenderness of the woman.’ ‘What were they going to do? What[…]? What […]?’ both Mellors and Gurov ask themselves desperately. Both heroines are in their twenties and their lovers at least ten years older. And in both works sex is vital to the relationships that should become a ‘new marriage’. Lawrence famously considered Chekhov ‘a second-rate writer and a Willy wet-leg’, but the first two English translations of ‘The Lady with the Little Dog’ came out in 1917, they were both by people Lawrence knew well, and it’s rather inconceivable that he never read the story.

I am not going to pursue that theme now, or the twenty-three others that I have noted at the back of my copy of this masterpiece (yes, it really is). I will leave Damian to stir up all that in his fine guest post on 1 August, and I sincerely hope followers will pitch in, preferably by Comment, as with Women in Love.

But there is one question that I can’t help asking. Pretty obviously, in both Chekhov’s story and Lawrence’s novel dogs are surrogate human companions for the heroine and hero respectively. Anna Sergeevna’s dog remains at her husband’s home in the grey, grey town of S. In Lady Chatterley’s Lover what became of Mellors’ dog Flossie?

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged A Propos of 'Lady Chatterley's Lover', Anna Sergeevna, Anton Chekhov, Clifford Chatterley, comments, compassion, Connie, Constance Chatterley, D.H. Lawrence, Damian Grant, Dmitrii Gurov, dogs, ends, Flossie, Lady Chatterley, Lady Chatterley Trial, Lady Chatterley's Lover, love, Mark Schorer, narrative endings, new marriage, Oliver Mellors, Paul Cézanne, Penguin Books, Pomeranian dogs, roman adultère, sex, tenderness, The Lady with the Little Dog, The Winter's Tale, William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 15

Posted on July 1, 2021 by Patrick Miles

2 June
I have never known the cow parsley so high in front of my shed…

11 June
We have completed our ‘hardcopy marketing’ for Edna’s Diary. 130 free copies have gone out to stroke clubs, NHS speech and language therapy units, key figures at Stroke Association UK, stroke professionals, popular and specialist publications, and every friend and relation we think would enjoy the book and possibly buy some copies to give as presents. Two recipients of copies promptly made donations to the Stroke Association — an action we had not foreseen. The ‘hardcopy marketing’ is vital, of course, but the social media marketing which we are doing will probably be more effective. As usual, it is totally impossible to predict the sales graph.

16 June
Walking into the centre of Cambridge, I passed the A[mateur]D[Dramatic]C[lub] Theatre, scene of some disasters and (relative) triumphs of my own in bygone days, and saw this banner hanging outside:

Veteran Calderonia followers will have instantly recalled my post of 1 November 2016…where I mention that the ‘chimney-sweepers’ in Shakespeare’s lines ‘Golden lads and girls all must,/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’ are now taken to refer to the decline and death of dandelion heads. The banner is an ingenious use of Shakespeare’s floral image. The only trouble is, the lines come from Cymbeline, not As You Like It. I suppose we must go and see the production to understand the relevance.

18 June
Today is the first night of a World Premiere at the Shaftesbury Theatre, London — Lady Chatterley’s Lover The Musical. I have to say, the posters do not augur well: Lady C. and Mellors look roughly the same age and curiously proletarian/Grunge. The mind boggles at how justice is going to be done to the sex scenes. The temptation with modern film and stage adaptations of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is to focus on one aspect of it: class, pornography (Sylvia Kristel in the lead role, 1981), British industrial relations, naturism, the long shadow of the First World War, romantic love story… I shall be interested to read the reviews, especially as I am going to run a series of posts about the novel from the middle of July to the end of August. Having recently read the whole novel for the first time, I am now reading it again. The writing is supremely alive. So the claim that this musical will ‘reenergise Lawrence’s sensation for a new audience’ seems, frankly, fatuous. However, it is directed by Sasha Regan, whose all-male Pirates of Penzance was brilliant.

25 June

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Sam2 has persuaded me that our next project should be to publish a new edition of my 113-page biography of Chekhov (Hesperus, 2008) — both in paperback and Kindle. It makes a lot of sense. I wasn’t 100% happy with the editing of the first edition, but it was to be one of the launch volumes of the series ‘Brief Lives’ so I bowed to the urgency. Then just as the marketing should have got going, the credit crunch wrecked it. Hesperus sold just over a thousand copies in a year and I took the copyright back.

How I tackle a second edition, however, is giving me a lot of thought. I will work from my original digital version, of course. There are one or two ‘typos of fact’ that sharp-eyed Chekhovians picked up, i.e. dates and spellings that were accurate in my pencil manuscript but had been misread by me when I typed it up, and they will be corrected. But I have just completed a week’s manual and online searching for Chekhoviana published since 2007, and discover that three more volumes of the day-by-day record of Chekhov’s life have come out in Russia, from May 1891 to September 1898. These are usually about three hundred pages long and I shall have to read them…

As well as the three or four additions I already know I want to make, I must weigh up whether I should write something on the areas of Chekhov’s life that some Chekhovians suggested I had neglected in the first edition. But the book was written to a strict 30,000-word limit and if I add more than 2000 words or so its genre and, dare I say it, ‘charm’, will start to evaporate. I must also avoid generalisations about Chekhov’s ‘character’; or generalisations generally. Facts, specifics, specifics, facts. So those are the constraints. A lunch at ‘Polonia’ is called for, to discuss the way forward.

30 June
The last day of National Aphasia Awareness Month. It has been a privilege and pleasure to be involved, and in particular to work with Melanie Derbyshire, Assistant Director – Aphasia, at Stroke Association UK, who graciously allowed Edna’s Diary to travel on her social media. I’m convinced the awareness campaign has been a success.

During the pandemic, stroke clubs have not been able to meet physically, so the copies we have sent their organisers are only just reaching the hands of club members. Even so, I have had some very positive responses from them, and today a long letter from the Head of Speech and Language Therapy at a major hospital saying that she has circulated copies to her team specialising in stroke rehabilitation, who will discuss making a bulk order.

I’m quite hopeful, after this special month of marketing, that my mother’s book will eventually reach a lot of readers and sell steadily. And I’m particularly grateful to those people who have said what a nice little book it is to handle (thanks to designer Sam2).

Click here to buy the book on Amazon.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged ADC Theatre, Anton Chekhov, aphasia, As You Like It, biographies, comments, copyright, cow parsley, Cymbeline, Edna's Diary, Hesperus Press, Lady Chatterley's Lover, marketing, Melanie Derbyshire, musicals, NHS, Sasha Regan, Shaftesbury Theatre, sheds, social media, Stroke Association UK, Sylvia Krystel | Leave a comment

BEING AWARE OF APHASIA

Posted on June 23, 2021 by Patrick Miles

In the last week of National Aphasia Awareness Month, I am very pleased to post these two images sent to me by the Aphasia Alliance:

P.S. Stroke Association UK’s income has dropped by half during the pandemic. The organisation has moved permanently from its offices into remote working. A staff cost reduction of about 12% has to be made in the coming months. More income from donations is therefore extremely urgent, if the invaluable research and support services of the Association are to continue to meet our national needs. Donate here.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged aphasia, Aphasia Alliance, Communication Access Symbol, donations, National Aphasia Awareness Month, research, Stroke Association UK | Leave a comment

National Aphasia Awareness Month: A message of hope

Posted on June 14, 2021 by Patrick Miles

Sam&Sam’s contribution to NAAM. Click on the image to order from Amazon.

This is National Aphasia Awareness Month (NAAM), but the campaign is global. Aphasia is a disorder that impairs the expression and understanding of language, as well as reading and writing. It may be caused by head injury, a brain tumor, infection, or dementia, but the most common cause is a stroke, usually on the left side of the brain. The Aphasia part of the Stroke Association’s website is: www.stroke.org.uk/what-is-aphasia and we have been advised to include the following hashtags in this blog: #Aphasia #AphasiaAwareness #CommunicationAccess.

The thrust of this campaign is both to bring home to us all how common aphasia is and to educate us in how best to interact with people who are affected by it. About 350,000 people currently have aphasia in Britain. Approximately 100,000 people suffer strokes in the UK each year, and almost half of them need speech and language therapy. Stroke Association UK addresses what aphasics need from us here.

But the background to the campaign is incredibly encouraging. The number of deaths from stroke in the U.K. has fallen by 49% in the last fifteen years, thanks to better prevention and great advances in treatment. Above all, attitudes to stroke recovery have changed. Fifty years ago, stroke was seen as an effect of ageing that led inevitably to disability or death; it was treated fatalistically. I witnessed that myself when my grandmother had a bad stroke in 1970. The stroke unit for the elderly was in a workhouse infirmary built in the 1850s. The nurses were caring, but my grandmother had hardly any physiotherapy, no speech and language therapy, and minimal stimulation. Essentially, such stroke survivors languished; it was not thought possible to improve their condition. (My mother brought my grandmother home as soon as possible and organised her own care package.) Today, as a campaigns director of the Stroke Association has put it, ‘The issue is improving rehabilitation: how do we make sure that a good life after stroke is possible?’

Where overcoming aphasia is concerned, the greatest source of hope in my opinion is the miraculous and mysterious life of the human brain. When my mother called me in to her early one morning and I realised she had had a stroke, she spoke to me in long English sentences that made no sense, but she also uttered sentences in what, as the manager of a translation agency, I realised were Dutch and French. I could not believe it, as she certainly ‘knew’ no Dutch and her French was not fluent. Later, however, I learned that this sort of thing is not unusual. (I have been told of a stroke survivor who could not speak Welsh, but had been evacuated to Wales as a child and after his stroke produced Welsh sentences that it was thought he had overheard in the neighbour’s garden seventy years before.) The brain is so receptive, retentive and self-reordering, that — given motivation, intensive speech and language therapy, and the wholehearted involvement of family and friends — we need never despair of improvement in a stroke survivor’s aphasic condition.

My mother was left with only 20% of her language ability after her stroke, but over two years, with the dedication of everyone involved, she recovered a further 69% of it. My grandmother, eleven years after her stroke and at the age of ninety-one, could articulate only basic formulaic statements, but when she was shown her four-month-old great grandson (bawling his head off), she dumbfounded us by smiling and saying distinctly: ‘I think he is very nice.’ Before I spoke to a certain stroke club in 2013, I was advised that the listener in a wheelchair would understand everything I said, desperately want to say something, but suffered from ‘severe aphasia’ that would prevent him. On the day of my talk, however, his carer told me that recently, almost a year after his stroke, there had been a breakthrough. He had been over-confident with his electric wheelchair, had forgotten there were some steep basement stairs behind him in a public place, and reversed onto them, which caused him to shout ‘F—–g a——-s!’ as he thudded down backwards. Not much, you might think, but it suddenly provided light at the end of the tunnel. Since then, he had made slow, but significant progress with his aphasia. He participated in the discussion after my talk with body language and expressive intonations.

The author’s mother, four years after her stroke, laughing at the author’s hat

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged aphasia, Aphasia Awareness Month, AphasiaAwareness, body language, brain, carers, comments, communication, CommunicationAccess, Dutch, Edna's Diary, French, hope, intonation, NAAM, National Aphasia Association, National Aphasia Awareness Month, physiotherapy, Sam&Sam, speech and language therapy, Stroke, Stroke Association UK, stroke care, stroke clubs, strokes, the human brain, Wales, Welsh, wheelchairs | Leave a comment

Edna’s Diary: the background

Posted on May 28, 2021 by Patrick Miles

Sometime in 2012 Harvey Pitcher asked me if I would give a talk the following March to Sheringham Stroke Group, of which he was Secretary. It was an attractive invitation, especially as there is a history of Stroke on my mother’s side of the family. However, there was a problem: Harvey wanted me to talk about growing chrysanthemums and bring some blooms along for distribution afterwards, but by March even my Christmas varieties would be over! What to offer as a subject instead?

My mother had died in 2009, I had just finished sorting her papers, and I decided to talk about ‘My Mother the Writer’. As a child, she had wanted to be a writer and she felt she could have become a professional writer. Her aspiration, however, suffered a devastating discouragement at school: she was always looking for original approaches to the essays set but on one occasion the teacher savaged her essay in front of the class, tore it up, and binned it. My mother told me that after that she only wrote ‘to order’, as she was taught and expected to; and she got high marks…

Between the ages of thirty and seventy she had occasional letters and small notices published in the national and local press, but as far as I know she did not write anything else. For instance, she certainly did not keep a diary, never had done, and found the whole idea boring. Things changed radically in 1999 (when she was seventy-nine), because a local history project in her home town of Sandwich encouraged her to compose her memoirs. These were well structured, written with terrific narrative confidence, and as she finished the chapters she sent them on to me in Cambridge, where we read them aloud round the kitchen table and were delighted.

I thought the members of a Stroke Club might be interested by this story, amused and moved by excerpts from my mother’s memoirs, and I could finish by quoting from the article ‘My Hip Operation’ which she wrote in hospital in 2002 and published in the magazine Yours, as well as from the diary she kept for six years after completing eighteen months of language therapy following her stroke at the end of 2002.

I’m glad to say, the Stroke Group audience did enjoy the extracts that I read from my mother’s memoirs — partly, perhaps, because many of them were not much younger than her and their experience of pre-War Britain chimed with hers. We had a good discussion afterwards, during which I got to know all my listeners and the circumstances of their stroke (sometimes assisted by the carer accompanying them). Stroke Clubs, however, are a network, loosely coordinated by Stroke Association UK, and in next to no time I found myself invited to give the talk to six others in East Anglia.

It may be because ‘My Mother the Writer’ ended with very short, humorous extracts from her post-stroke diary, but I began to feel that the passages I read out from my mother’s memoirs were too long for all of my audience to assimilate, and that what she wrote following her 89% recovery from aphasia was of greater interest to them. When I was invited back to four of the clubs, therefore, I decided to give a talk entitled ‘Edna’s Diary: The Story So Far’, based on my reading to date of half of the total 335,000 words. This talk rollicked along. The story of my mother’s fight to recover her communication faculty, involving both an NHS language therapist, Fleur Taylor, twice a week, and her family and friends the rest of the time, was of great immediate interest to Stroke Club members. I perceived that my mother’s post-stroke diary could be an inspiration to others.

In the intervening seven years, I have often thought about how I would publish a short selection from the diary, but it was lockdown that forced my hand. It is awful that despite all my efforts I have been unable to trace Fleur Taylor and invite her to write the preface, as it was she who proposed the diary to my mother and was my mother’s first editor. However, the Stroke Association have supported the project and here we now are: it is on sale through Amazon for £5, all proceeds will go to the Stroke Association, and publication serendipitously precedes National Aphasia Awareness Month (June).

The image above is of the frontispiece to Edna’s Diary. It is the most vibrant photograph of my mother as a young woman that I know, and it has its own story. It was taken by Erich Reisfeld, but I abbreviated his forename because I thought he might be confused with the ‘Eric’ who features in the first entry of the Diary. Erich Reisfeld was a Viennese Jew born in 1917 who just escaped the Reich before war was declared. He spent several months at the Kitchener Camp in Sandwich with 4000 other Jewish men before moving to his desired destination, the United States. The young people of Sandwich, including my mother, made many friends amongst these refugees. In 1958 Erich Reisfeld returned to Sandwich with his wife, visited his old friends, and took this photograph of my mother (I remember him well). Earlier this year, I discovered on the Web that his papers from 1936-39 are held in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Archives.

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Amazon, aphasia, Aphasia Awareness Month, Clare Ungerson, Edna Miles, Edna's Diary, Erich Reisfeld, Fleur Taylor, frontispiece, Harvey Pitcher, hip operations, Sandwich, Sheringham Stroke Support Group, Stroke Association UK, stroke clubs, The Holocaust, The Kitchener Camp, The Third Reich, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Yours | 2 Comments

There!

Posted on May 17, 2021 by Patrick Miles

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.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Amazon, aphasia, Aphasia Awareness Month, book covers, cardiovascular disease, cerebrovascular disease, Edna Miles, Edna's Diary, independent publishing, publishers, Sam&Sam, self-publishing, speech and language therapy, Stroke, Stroke Association UK, strokes, Tippex | Leave a comment

Nearly there…

Posted on May 10, 2021 by Patrick Miles

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!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Amazon, Amazon KDP, aphasia, Aphasia Awareness Month, book covers, cover designs, Edna Miles, Edna's Diary, proofs, quality control, Sam&Sam, self-publishing, speech and language therapy, Stroke, Stroke Association UK, Tippex | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 14

Posted on April 21, 2021 by Patrick Miles

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.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Amazon, Andrew Tatham, Anton Chekhov, aphasia, Aphasia Awareness Month, Barack Obama, biographies, Black Crow, Calderonia, comments, coronavirus, COVID-19, D.H. Lawrence, diaries, Edna Miles, Edna's Diary, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Harvey Pitcher, high blood pressure, John Pym, Ken Russell, language therapy, NHS, Russia, Sam&Sam, Sam1, Sam2, Sputnik, Stroke, Stroke Association UK, strokes, William Blake, Women in Love | 4 Comments

Some Calderonian footnotes to ‘Women in Love’

Posted on April 8, 2021 by Patrick Miles

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/

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, Battle of the Somme, Breadalby, Catherine Brown, Centre Party, comments, Constance Garnett, D.H. Lawrence, Dwala, elopement, English Review, Ernest Weekley, Fanny Stepniak, Far End, Fathers and Sons, Ford Hueffer, Ford Madox Ford, Frieda Lawrence, Frieda Weekley, Garsington, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Hampstead, Ivan Turgenev, John Worthen, Kittie Calderon, polymathery, revolution, The Edwardians, The Great War, Thomas Sturge Moore, translation, Trinity College Oxford, Well Walk, William Rothenstein, Women in Love, World War I | 9 Comments

D.H. Lawrence’s ‘christology’

Posted on March 22, 2021 by Patrick Miles

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 Rainbow, Women 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 Rainbow, Women 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!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged Birkin, Calderonia, compassion, D.H. Lawrence, Damian Grant, death, Easter, gentleness, Gerald Crich, Gudrun, guest posts, Halliday, icons, Isis, Jesus Christ, John Polkinghorne, John Pym, kenosis, kindness, Laurence Brockliss, Mary Magdalene, mysticism, New Testament, Old Testament, Osiris, resurrection, Russian icons, second presence, sex, sexuality, Sidon, St Gregory of Nazianus, The Bible, The Man Who Died, The Myrrh-Bearing Women, The Rainbow, theology, Ursula, What Can We Hope For?, women, Women in Love | 4 Comments

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

Posted on March 8, 2021 by Patrick Miles

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.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Agnes Gladstone, Ancestry.com, Anna Karenina, Arnold Bennett, Bensons, Brighton, Clayhanger, Colin Firth, D.H. Lawrence, Edward Charles Wickham, Edward Talbot, Edward White Benson, F.R. Leavis, Frieda von Richthofen, George Eliot, Henryck Wieniawski, Isabella Wieniawska, Jane Austen, Janet Catherine North, Jennifer Ehle, John Addington Symonds, Lady Chatterley's Lover, Laurence Brockliss, Leo Tolstoy, Lev Tolstoi, Lucy Trotman, marriage, Middlemarch, novels, Oxford, Pride and Prejudice, prosopographical studies, Robert Cooper Lee Bevan, Samuel Fiennes, Simon Goldhill, social history, The English Novel, These Twain, Winchester, Women in Love | 6 Comments

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

Posted on February 22, 2021 by Patrick Miles

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.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.