Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.
27 December
I was given this book for Christmas and have consumed it by the end of today. To begin with, I was rather disappointed. Three and a quarter thousand Rugbeians fought in the War. An appendix lists the 637 who were killed, including George and his brother Frank. But the rest of the book deals with only 23 Rugbeians, mainly famous people, under chapters entitled ‘The Arts’, ‘The Military’, ‘Sport’, ‘Academia’, ‘Politics & Religion’ and ‘The Victoria Cross’. Only two feature under ‘The Arts’, and personally I could have done without ‘Rupert’ yet again (or at such length). Clearly there is a need for Andrew Tatham’s forthcoming masterpiece I Shall Not Be Away Long, which presents all the war letters of an ‘unknown’ and probably far more typical Rugbeian, Charles Bartlett.
Nevertheless, the book is very moving. To the non-Rugbeian it conveys powerfully what it was about Rugby’s ethos that impelled its alumni to join up. In his Postscript, the current Head Master departs from the drift of the main text, as it were, to home in precisely on the ‘ordinary’ boys who lost their lives. ‘It is their ordinariness, their bad luck, that makes the loss even more profound’, he writes, and tells the story of one such ‘ordinary’ boy, Louis Stokes. If you want to understand the roots of George Calderon’s communitarianism and what a great school Rugby (coeducational since 1976) is, read this book.
29 December
The valedictory opinion of a publisher at a mulled wine and mince pies party:
‘More and more editing has to be done by the publisher because the standard of writing has plummeted. Many authors, in fact, can’t write and this is accepted! Then their editors and proofreaders lose interest about two thirds through the book, you can see that. Publication, reviewing, book-feature writing have all got slower since computers, because the world has become clogged with communication and egos.’
The listeners nod sagely. The idea that life has got slower since computers may seem paradoxical, but people younger than thirty-five don’t realise that in many respects it’s true. It’s true for those of us who remember a world of short, well-typed, answered letters and pithy, audible phone calls (not ‘conversations’) — a world in which not every single person in Europe and America wanted to be a writer.
30 December
I watched what looked like a gnat microlighting through the bathroom. It settled on a towel and revealed itself as this (approx. 2 cm across):
(Image by Wikipedia user Lymantria)
I was able to identify it as Amblyptilia acanthodactyla from my copy of Leech’s 1886 British Pyralides, but he didn’t have much to say about it, e.g. why it was flying around in winter. The Web explains that it has two broods and the later one hibernates as a moth; also, that it’s become much more common in recent years and as well as a variety of wild plants, the caterpillar feeds on geraniums. This probably explains its appearance in the bathroom, as directly outside in the porch below we have some pots of them.
This tiny feathered moth, which I caught and released in the porch, is absolutely exquisite. Whereas in 1886 it had no English name, it’s now called The Beautiful Plume. This instantly reminded me of two of my favourite lines in Pope’s The Rape of the Lock:
(Sir Plume of amber snuffbox justly vain,
And the nice conduct of a clouded cane)
3 January 2020
I went to see John Polkinghorne to wish him a happy new year and report on sales of our book, What Can We Hope For?
I remarked that I had come to see a disadvantage about books whose titles are a question. I sent a deeply religious friend of mine a copy of the book, knowing that he did not ‘need’ to read it, as he knows the answer to the question in its title. In return, he sent me a book by Richard Swinburne (OUP, 2019) entitled Are We Bodies or Souls? Since I (think I) know the answer to that, I am hesitating to read it.
‘Obviously,’ quoth I, ‘the problem with such titles is that if the reader thinks s/he knows the answer to the question in them, they aren’t going to buy the book…’
John’s whole face contorted in a grin:
‘Well, Patrick, it’s a bit late now..!’
6 January
John Dewey‘s funeral takes place today at Poole. We can’t go as we have a holiday booked in Norfolk. I know, however, that during the service John’s translation of Tyutchev’s poem ‘And now the coffin has been lowered’ (see my diary entry for 15 December) will be read, and I wonder how the reader will accent the end of the third line.
Metrically, it reads loath to breathe in; i.e. dum dee dum dee and meaning ‘loath to breath [slight pause] in [i.e. amidst]/The stifling odour of decay’. However, the fact that the line runs over (is ‘enjambed’) means that the temptation is irresistible to accent it loath to breathe in [i.e. inhale]/The stifling odour; i.e. dum dee dee dum. If you read it this way, the feminine ending of the line only visually parallels that of the first line and the end of this third line would sound perilously like doggerel. Is the synchronous possibility of these two readings a case of John Dewey having produced something that he was certainly aware of, ‘poetry that it is impossible to read‘?
I raised this with John in an email in March. He said that he had intended ‘breathe in’ to mean ‘inhale’ all along, and hadn’t noticed the ‘alternative reading and stress pattern’. He then gave two other examples of when he had inadvertently done it in his Tyutchev translations and said he had recently ‘found I was doing that thing with reversing the final foot in a line of verse’ as far back as the 1990s.
It is not metrical incompetence, but the opposite: the spontaneous voice of a real poet taking the metre where it has to go. Gerard Manley Hopkins said in the Preface to his poems that the last foot in a line of verse is ‘never reversed unless when the poet designs some extraordinary effect’, and that is what John Dewey has pulled off, because loath to breathe in perfectly enacts the mourners holding their breath! Reversing the last foot is one of John’s personal hallmarks and I am certain Tyutchev would have approved.
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.
Guest Post: John Pym on the film ‘1917’
In my humble opinion, one shouldn’t read too much into 1917 , which is, essentially, a ‘mission movie’ (the mission in this case being to deliver a letter and avert a doomed attack). The mission is very nearly ‘impossible’, and the main character, although no Tom Cruise superhero, is nevertheless confronted by a string of ever-more-dangerous difficulties, every one of which he overcomes – losing all his army kit by the climax, but sustaining only a bang to the back of his head and a slightly cut left hand…
That’s one way of looking at the film. But Sam Mendes is a more than competent director and the cast (especially perhaps all the cameo performers) do not let him down. It’s a thoroughly gripping story which, apart from its surprising and virulent anti-German tone, goes out of its way to avoid all (or at least many) of the clichés of war movies generally and WW1 movies in particular.
I was once required to review D.W. Griffith’s epic The Birth a Nation (1915) from a horribly scratched 16mm print. The scenes depicting the American Civil War were reckoned for many years to be unsurpassed – and some thought unsurpassable. Well, in the mid-1970s they looked impossibly dated. Now, technologically speaking, you can do almost anything – and the joins don’t show. And in this respect 1917 is a tour de force.
The look of the film is its real selling point – that, the immaculate production design, and the scale of the sets (digitally enhanced though they may be). This is certainly a depiction of trench warfare that seems authentic – and may perhaps be authentic, in some respects. One of the most striking moments for me was the arrival of the two British letter-carriers at the abandoned German frontline and their disbelief at the extraordinary defences the enemy had managed to construct.
A mission movie it may be, but at the same time it’s also a movie reaching for something else – simple and profound – and sometimes managing to grasp it. It has its moments of sentimentality, but these are outweighed by the acerbity and humour of much of the dialogue.
Certainly worth seeing!
My profound thanks to John Pym, faithful follower of Calderonia and for many years editor of Time Out Film Guide, for this superlative e-mail response to my request for his opinion of ‘1917’, a film that I had felt curiously unattracted to seeing. As well as having worked for many years as a film critic, John Pym is the grandson of George and Kittie’s close friends Charles and Violet Pym. Charles Pym and Brigadier-General Sir John Gough, V.C., John Pym’s other grandfather, both served in the First World War, as did his great-uncle General Sir Hubert Gough. I hope followers will find John Pym’s appraisal as useful as I have and perhaps share their experiences of the film in a Comment. PM
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.