Calderonia

Explanatory notes to ‘Thunderer’

Posted on July 2, 2020 by Patrick Miles

I give here some of the facts from my and my team’s experience that lie behind statements I made in the preceding post, whilst preserving the anonymity of most of the offending institutions because I think to name them would be a distraction.

‘Be prepared for nobody to answer your emails.’ See below under ‘Archive tourists don’t work in archives’ and ‘Attempts to communicate with an archival manager’.

‘Be prepared for…promises to be broken.’ The most common promise made by archivists when an item is donated to holdings is that they will contact you when the material has been curated, and invite you to view it. In our experience this never happens. I sold a collection of rare books, some inscribed and annotated by Russian Chekhov scholars, to a university library who told me that the provenance and nature of the books would be indicated by a bookplate and note in the catalogue. Neither ever happened.

‘…binned as a duplicate.’ This is V. Pokrovskii’s Anton Chekhov’s Life and Works: A Collection of Literary-Historical Articles. At 1062 pages, it was by far the most important source of contemporary Russian writing about Chekhov’s work. As you can see from the image below, George owned a copy. He annotated it, and his annotations are particularly significant for his views on The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard. George’s copy was found in a provincial bookshop by the first Professor of Slavonic Studies at Cambridge, Elizabeth Hill, and donated to the Slavonic Library there at some point between 1936 and 1955. In 1983 I persuaded the then professor, Lucjan Lewitter, that it was historically too valuable to be left on the open shelves, should be replaced by a reprint that was just coming out, and transferred to Special Collections at the University Library. Professor Lewitter, who was a very efficient administrator, arranged for this to be done. After a decent interval, I decided I should check where it was, but no record of its location at the University Library could be found. The late and greatly lamented Russian Librarian there, Ray Scrivens, then frantically searched for it and discovered it buried in a wicker basket labelled ‘Duplicates’ about to be trundled out of the Library… To be honest, I suspect the same happened to many of the collection of inscribed and annotated books I referred to in my first paragraph, viz. the fact that they were inscribed and annotated was completely forgotten by the receiving library, catalogue checks were made to see if they ‘had’ these books already, and if they had that title, the annotated copy was binned.

Photocopy of the half-title of George’s copy of Pokrovskii, 1907

‘Be prepared for… cataloguing never to happen’ and ‘they disappeared without trace.’ In my experience, smallish military archives are particularly bad in these regards. Regimental museums, for instance, seem to be managed mainly by volunteers, who are good at dealing with inquiries from the public, enjoy that and the razzmatazz around family donations, but get irretrievably behind with their cataloguing. When an item has been acquired, ‘accessioned’, but not then catalogued (whether on paper or online) and a researcher needs to see it, it often cannot be found. The euphemism is that it has been ‘mislaid’. Doubtless archivists justify this to themselves by thinking ‘I know it’s here somewhere’, but that is delusional: it’s lost.

In 1987 I was presented with the massive bronze Chekhov Centenary Medal by the head of the Soviet delegation to the colloquium ‘Chekhov on the British Stage’, Aleksandr Anikst. It was not awarded to me personally, but to the British hosts of the event, which I organised and which was a significant development in the early stages of perestroika. Indeed, Anikst explained to me afterwards that he had been directed to award the medal by Gorbachev himself; Oleg Efremov, the Artistic Director of the Moscow Arts, also told me that Gorbachev had been in touch with him about the importance of attending the event and another in Oxford at the same time. The Cambridge host of the colloquium was the University’s Department of Slavonic Studies, so the medal was passed for safe keeping to the Slavonic Library and thence to the ‘reserved’ section of the Faculty Library. Ten years later it could not be found. Ray Scrivens informed me that valuable donated and framed manuscript letters held in that library had disappeared around the same time whilst being ‘transferred’ to the University Library.

Of course, it is a great mistake to try to control something once you have given it away, but it’s still disappointing when people whose job is to conserve it, lose it.

Whilst researching my biography, I regularly trawled the Web for new references to George Calderon. In 2009 an excellent brief description of the archive of George’s composer friend Martin Shaw (1875-1958) popped up on the website of Bernard Quaritch Ltd, who were selling it. The archive included ‘a rare manuscript by the young playwright George Calderon’. Actually, this is the only known manuscript of a play by George, so the news was sensational. In February 2011 the Martin Shaw Papers were bought by the British Library. I am glad to say that, following labryrinthine email correspondence, a curator was able to find the uncatalogued George manuscript and let me see it (in an obviously uncurated state). It turned out to be the 134-page autograph of the ‘musical play’ The Brave Little Tailor, which George wrote with William Caine. So it wasn’t lost in the sense that it could not be found by the people who now owned it. But there was no trace of it on the Web between 2011 and 2018, when it was catalogued. Can no-one at the British Library see that in effect all the Martin Shaw papers were lost to researchers for the whole of that period? It is, whatever the cause, indefensible that it takes seven years to catalogue an acquisition, but failing that the Library could at least have put out to the world a short announcement of the fact that they had acquired it and what it contained. It is good practice, followed by some archives, to produce a skeleton list of a collection as soon as it is received (something that takes at most a morning, I should think), put it straight online, and even make clear that materials can be ordered and consulted on the basis of this list, but that they will not be fully catalogued until date x.

‘Customer care…was surreal.’ I had come across the letters in the invaluable University of Reading Library Location Register of 20th Century English Literary Manuscripts, a publication known, surely, to British archivists. I corresponded by email with a very efficient Historic Collections Administrator at the given library, and she informed me that the items would be transferred for me to the Manuscript Reading Room two days before I was coming from Cambridge to look at them.

The person at the Reading Room desk cast a cursory glance over her shelves and told me the ordered file was not there. She offered no further action. I explained how and when I had ordered the letters. She denied it was possible, and asked how I knew that the library possessed them. I referred to the Register, but she said she had no knowledge of it. She would engage in no further dialogue. I pleaded that I had come all the way from Cambridge to see the items and she intimated I should go all the way back. Fortunately, I insisted on calling out the Administrator I had dealt with by email. The young woman came and seemed to understand the situation immediately. The lady at the desk had, I gathered, spent a part of her life cataloguing the large collection which contained George’s letters, and was determined to control who had access to it. She had concealed my file in another one that a reader was working on at that moment. It occurred to me that as well as misguided possessiveness, her motive might be misandry.

Of course, this is a very sad story. One can well understand that archivists may, over a long period, develop extreme tunnel-vision and paranoia. However, it is up to their managers to intervene long before that. The case of this lady archivist is really one of appalling line management. The buck should never have been passed to me, the user.

‘An archivist’s mission is to collect…’ I am aware that archivists will disagree with me. The modern criterion for acquiring archives, possibly foisted on traditional archivists by uninformed consultants, is ‘research value’. As far as I can tell, this is ‘measured’ by the ‘public impact’ that the acquisition has, the number of requests to view it, etc, and may be entirely dictated by fashion (a recent top priority has been ‘gender studies’). However, ‘research value’ must mean ‘value to researchers’, if it means anything, and no-one can predict what that will be. Any experienced researcher could give examples of acquisitions that nobody looked at for decades but whose significance was suddenly realised. I will give only one. Eleonora Duse’s archives were thought to have been lost. In fact her papers and her richly annotated library, which she described as her ‘artistic wardrobe’, had been given to New Hall (now Murray Edwards College), Cambridge, by her daughter in 1962, mainly, I suspect, because she lived across the road from the college. There, in effect, the collection mouldered for fifty years. But it is enormously to the credit of New Hall’s librarians that they did not throw it out on account of its ‘proven low research value’. It was eventually ‘discovered’ by theatre historian Anna Sica from Palermo University, who realised that it showed Duse’s intellectual evolution, her erudition, her meticulous preparation of her roles, indeed exactly why she made such a profound impression on contemporaries like Chekhov, Stanislavsky and James Joyce. The impact of Sica’s subsequent book cannot be measured. Had New Hall not had such an eclectic, comprehensive and inclusive acquisitions policy — had it not collected, I would say — none of this would have happened. Similarly, some libraries have the inspired policy of collecting ‘ephemera’, such as posters, menus, or product packaging, whose research value cannot be predicted.

‘Archive tourists don’t work in archives…’ Obviously archives should be open to the general public and display their holdings. There is a world of difference, however, between visitors and the professional researchers for whom archives principally exist and always have. One or two archivists have complained to me that having to set up ‘back-to-back exhibitions’ is a distraction from their ‘real’ work. Worst, though, in my experience, is the effect that archive tourism can have on archivists’ communication. We had an enthusiastic approach from a major library about buying the Calderon Family Papers. The archival manager wanted to view the Papers as soon as possible, but was ‘heavily committed to an exhibition we have opening in the Library’ and therefore had to postpone his inspection for a month. Indeed, I visited the exhibition incognito and saw him hugely enjoying performing to a large group from the Townswomen’s Guild. Despite two emails and a letter, I could never catch his attention again. It occurred to me that perhaps he was really unhappy as an archivist and should have been an actor. But the idea, seemingly beloved of PR consultants and accountants, that archives and libraries exist to provide public entertainment, is grotesque. If it is entertainment, why not charge for it?

‘Attempts to communicate with an archival manager.’ Everyone I know who has wished to donate or sell papers to a major archive has complained about the difficulty of communicating with the right person and about the latter’s complete inability to manage their emails. There is usually no obvious portal to a process for making such offers to the archive. I would have thought the process should be a top-down-and-back-up line of management. But if, faute de mieux, you tackle the top person about donation/sale, you tend to get referred to a middle archival manager who wields power of life and death over whether your inquiry goes any further. Most people will find it is not answered. The top person will not hear about it again unless they ask. One colleague found that her emails to an archival manager about her donation of a serious collection of papers were simply blocked. The reason email communications about donation/sale prove tenuous may not just be that archivists don’t know how to manage their in-boxes, it may be that the archival manager has his/her own agenda and is simply playing politics. Internal archive-politics seem to be vicious because the stakes are relatively small.

‘A 68-page manuscript of Jane Austen’s.’ This is the fragment of The Watsons bought by the Bodleian Library in 2011 at Sotheby’s for £993,250. The Bodleian’s deputy librarian told the press: ‘We will make the manuscript available to the general public, who can come and see it as early as this autumn, when The Watsons will be a star item in our forthcoming exhibition.’ Good entertainment, then, but surely low research value, as the manuscript was first published in 1871 and has been available digitally for some time.

‘But perhaps you want to sell the papers you have inherited?’ This subject is the core of my experience and quarrel with British archives. The whole of my next post, on Monday 13 July, will be devoted to it.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Aleksandr Anikst, Anglo-Soviet Colloquium 'Chekhov on the British Stage', Anna Sica, Anton Chekhov, archival managers, archive donations, archive sales, Bernard Quaritch Ltd, British archives, Cambridge Modern and Medieval Languages Faculty Library, Cambridge Slavonic Library, Cambridge University Library, cataloguing, Chekhov Centenary Medal, collecting, comments, communication, conservation, customer care, Eleonora Duse, Elizabeth Hill, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Jane Austen, Lucjan Lewitter, Martin Shaw, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murray Edwards College, New Hall, Oleg Efremov, Ray Scrivens, Sotheby's, Special Collections, The Bodleian Library, The Brave Little Tailor, The British Library, The Great War, The Watsons, V. Pokrovskii, William Caine, World War I | Leave a comment

‘Thunderer’

Posted on June 22, 2020 by Patrick Miles

Curate your own

stuff – British archives

can’t cope

PATRICK MILES

Thinking of depositing your family papers in a public archive? Be prepared for nobody to answer your emails, promises to be broken, cataloguing never to happen, and to discover a few years later that your papers cannot be found.

Such has been my and my friends’ experience whilst working on the life of Edwardian polymath George Calderon, who was Britain’s first modern Russianist, introduced Chekhov’s plays to Britain, and was killed at Gallipoli.

Calderon’s annotated copy of a 1907 Russian book about Chekhov is of national importance, so I negotiated its transfer to Special Collections at a famous university library. When it got there, it was binned as ‘a duplicate’. A friend donated his grandfather’s Gallipoli photos to a military museum, where they disappeared without trace. The British Library acquired composer Martin Shaw’s archive, containing a sensational Calderon manuscript, but they never mentioned this acquisition on their website in the seven years they took to catalogue it.

Customer care at a famous London archive was surreal: when I arrived to read previously ordered Calderon letters, I was told by the curator that she knew nothing about them, the published description of them did not exist, and I should go home!

Our archives are failing us and we are always told the reason is underfunding. I don’t think so. From my point of view, an archivist’s mission is to collect, conserve, catalogue, and communicate. Accountants and PR consultants, however, have persuaded our archivists that they must ‘sell’ their institutions through the media, conferences, and endless exhibitions. Although this raises archives’ public profile and may be rewarded with more funding, it is not strictly speaking productive because archive tourists don’t work in archives, only researchers do. Judging by the amount of self-publicity that archives now generate, I doubt whether their employees spend half their time on what matters most to researchers: curating the collections and facilitating access through prompt cataloguing.

But perhaps you want to sell the papers you have inherited? Even if you succeed in your attempts to communicate with an archival manager, these salaried process-driven folk believe you shouldn’t be ‘making money’ out of family papers. It is your duty to donate them. In any case, our archival institutions always have ‘no money’. This is because they are addicted to celebrity (£1.1m for Harold Pinter’s papers, £32,000 for Wendy Cope’s emails). They need to buck this trend and free up money for less pretentious purchases. What is the point, in the digital age, of spending all your funds on a 68-page manuscript of Jane Austen’s?

Fortunately, there are ways of avoiding tangling with Britain’s hopeless archives. First, you could become a ‘citizen archivist’ and curate your papers on your own website. Second, you could sell them to one of the impressively managed American institutions, whose motto tends to be: ‘More Product, Less Process’.

Patrick Miles is a freelance writer and the author of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius (Sam&Sam, 2018).

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, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged accountants, Anton Chekhov, archives, archivists, biographies, biography, British archives, cataloguing, celebrity, collecting, comments, conferences, conservation, curation, Dardanelles, exhibitions, funding, Gallipoli, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Harold Pinter, Jane Austen, Less Process, Martin Shaw, More Product, PR consultants, The British Library, The Great War, The Watsons, Third Battle of Krithia, United States of America, Wendy Cope, World War I, Ypres | 2 Comments

Health Warning

Posted on June 15, 2020 by Patrick Miles

The Calderon Family Papers, Cambridge, February 2019

I have decided I must go public about the nine years of frustration that the owner of the Calderon Papers and I endured as we tried to find a permanent home for them in a British archival institution. It was one of the worst experiences of my professional life. I need to get it off my chest, but my account of it might also be useful to Calderonia’s readers and I shall of course welcome Comments on it from all quarters.

As followers will be well aware, the experience of researching and writing my biography of George was one of sheer pleasure, marked by a blessed serendipity at every stage and a host of wonderful new acquaintances who helped me in every possible way. My experience of dealing with British archives on behalf of a vendor has been merely the black lining to that silver cloud. I must hereby issue a health warning, however, that my anger about how we were treated is intense and, I believe, justified. My words in the next four posts will doubtless seem to some readers very hard; possibly unbelievably so. But I stand by them.

I hasten to emphasise that my criticisms are not directed at how I was treated as a user by the thirty-seven archives I had dealings with in the course of researching my book. On the contrary: whether working in their space, buying copies from them, or corresponding with their staff about specific questions, the service I received from over 90% of them was highly civilised, informed and efficient. The trouble, for both me and my team, concerned issues of safe keeping, cataloguing and communication that arose from our donations to archives or attempts to sell to them.

I have written a 450-word piece for the ‘Thunderer’ column of The Times that will be reproduced in my next post whether the newspaper publishes it or not (I fear they will not regard archives as a subject to set the world on fire!). That will be followed by a third post in which I flesh out the points I make as a Thunderer. Last week I wrote a 1500-word article for The Spectator, and that will be reproduced in my fourth post whether published or not. In a final, short post, I shall attempt a summing up, for example naming the kind of British archives that I think perform best. Personally, I never want to donate or sell anything to a British archive in my life again.

The Calderon Family Papers arrive at Harvard University, 9 April 2019

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Thunderer', archival management, archive donations, archive sales, archives, biography, British archives, Calderon Family Papers, Cambridge, cataloguing, comments, communication, conservation, customer care, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Harvard University, Kittie Calderon, The Spectator, The Times | Leave a comment

‘People are reading an awful lot…

Posted on June 9, 2020 by Patrick Miles

…and many booksellers are doing mail order,’ writes Susan Hill in The Spectator. I should say they are! Click the prompt at the bottom of this post to buy my blockbuster biography from Sam&Sam while stocks last!

Obsessed with self-image, spin, media, travel, sport, new technology, feminism, the trade unions, relations with Europe, populism? Yes, that’s us! But it was also true of our ancestors the Edwardians — the Brits who lived in that very turbulent channel in our nation’s history, the Edwardian Age of roughly 1897-1916.

There has never been a period in the life of Britain when democratic discourse was as vibrant, exciting and individualistic…it very nearly blew the country apart, writes Patrick Miles. It was the time when the modern nation was born. To understand the Edwardians is to understand more of OURSELVES.

There are very few books that can take you into the Edwardians’ mindset as effectively as Patrick Miles’s George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, because George Calderon (1868-1915) was the quintessential Edwardian — an all-rounder, a man for all seasons, a polymath of genius, or what we would call today a master of the portfolio career.

Using George and Kittie Calderon’s archive discovered by him in a Scottish attic, Patrick Miles has seamlessly reconstructed the action-packed story of Calderon’s traumatic time as a journalist in Russia, his clandestine courtship, his comic novels, his nervous breakdown, his life on Tahiti, his brilliant reviews for the TLS, his Communitarian political activism, his career in the New Drama, his determination to fight at the Front in 1914 despite being over age, and his death at Gallipoli. The book also focusses on Calderon’s heroic wife and her lifetime relationship with another woman.

George Calderon is best known as the first modern British Russianist and the man who introduced Chekhov’s plays to the British theatre; but the mission of this first full-length biography is to show that ‘there is far more to George Calderon than his Chekhovian legacy’. As a Russianist, writer and theatre man himself, Patrick Miles has what one reviewer has called ‘a natural empathy for his subject’ — an empathy with Edwardianism.

THE STORY OF GEORGE AND KITTIE IS ONE THAT HUNDREDS HAVE ALREADY FOUND AS ABSORBING AND ENJOYABLE AS FICTION. TO BUY A COPY OF THIS FINE LIMITED EDITION CLICK ON THE LINK THAT FOLLOWS THESE EXCERPTS FROM REVIEWS:

‘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, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged activism, Anna Karenina, Anton Chekhov, biographies, British Expeditionary Force, Dardanelles, Edward VII, Gallipoli, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Kittie Calderon, Middlemarch, New Drama, Nina Corbet, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, polymathery, portfolio career, publicity, Russia, Sam&Sam, self-isolation, Susan Hill, Tahiti, The Edwardians, The Great War, The Spectator, Third Battle of Krithia, Times Literary Supplement, World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 10

Posted on May 22, 2020 by Patrick Miles

7 April
Walking home the three quarters of a mile or so from the centre of Cambridge, I saw six people and no cars. As in Georgio de Chirico’s surreal paintings, people are now weirdly visible even from a distance by their sheer verticality…

Something small but significant has happened in the local side streets. A squirrel hopped unhurriedly across the road right in front of me, then two Jays flew out of a garden and settled in another front garden, only feet from the house and someone watching them at the window. The Jay is such a woodland bird and so exotic-looking, that many urbanites would surely not know what they are looking at.

Jay illustration from RSPB.org.uk

The natural world has begun to creep back as the streets and skies fall silent and humanity retreats. A neighbour has long-tailed tits nesting in his front hedge flush with the pavement, which in my experience is unprecedented for such a nervous bird. Other people report seeing hedgehogs for the first time in years. I have never seen goldfinches and chaffinches at our bird-bath before, and the dawn chorus seems much louder.

I don’t find anything sinister about this, but it does bring home to you with a jolt how other to human existence the life of the natural world is. A great naturalist once said to me concerning over-anthropomorphic attitudes to conservationism: ‘We have to remember that the animals don’t know they are dying out.’ Either for religious, philosophical, or Darwinist reasons, we feel continuous with the organic world, so it is a jolt to see it getting on without us. But it’s not such a jolt as when people talk of COVID-19 being ‘the planet fighting back’. We think of the Earth as living, but this phrase implies it is inanimate, alien to us and hostile — which we don’t really like to think it is, since it is our home. Is it right to identify COVID-19 with ‘the planet’, when viruses aren’t organisms?

21 April
It suddenly occurred to me that I don’t recall Kittie Calderon mentioning the ‘Spanish flu’ (which killed 100 million people) once in all the extant correspondence of hers that I have read for 1918-19. Then I remembered that Charles Evelyn Pym (‘Evey‘) bracketed that flu and Kittie in a letter to his young wife Violet on 29 October 1918:

I am so distressed to hear of Jack [their ten-year-old son] getting this beastly flu. I do trust you will keep him thoroughly warm for a long time and I hope they [Ludgrove School, where Jack was a boarder] have got a good doctor. I am sorry you are going to Kittie now, as Hampstead must reek of it. I got your two letters together this evening and do hope you will get good news, and that it is a mild form.

Violet and Kittie were very close and Violet would occasionally stay with her at 42 Well Walk in the heart of Hampstead whilst visiting London. Presumably Violet was hoping to collect Jack from the school, which in those days was at Cockfosters. Evey was writing from the huge military camp at Etaples, Pas-de-Calais, where he was Assistant Provost Marshal. As Catherine Arnold writes in Pandemic 1918: The Story of the Deadliest Influenza in History, Etaples is ‘a strong contender for the birthplace of Spanish flu’, although its epicentre is thought to have been China.

As ever, I am indebted to John Pym, Jack’s son, for showing me his grandparents’ correspondence back in 2011 and allowing me to quote from it here.

29 April
Referring, I fancy, to three uncommon words and a neologism in the sample of ‘Making Icons’ that I pushed out to sea in my last diary-post, a loyal follower quotes to me in an email the first verse of a poem by Hilaire Belloc that I did not know:

I mean to write with all my strength
(It lately has been sadly waning)
A poem of enormous length —
Some parts of which may need explaining.

It so happened that, although I regard Notes as an admission of defeat, I had decided only the day before that ‘Making Icons’ would need a few. Well, three quarters of the poem doesn’t need them, but it’s a different matter when you get to the eight stanzas that engage with the long process by which this:

[seasoned lime]

becomes this:

[unfinished icon by Leon Liddament]

For instance,

To author, he easters from praise and prayer
his hearted image, in slow, soft strokes.
Himation…book…halo and hair…
with pencil, then scribed on space. An acre
of gold he lays on bole’s yellow ochre:
leaf lifted on squirrel tuft through the hushed air
and suddenly sucked to sturgeon’s lock,
then burnished and buffed, basted with glair.
He puddles raw umber, indigo, terre
into cut-outs of colour like late Matisse.
Such basal abstraction might make us stare,
seeing an icon where nothing fays.

(This kind of verse is ‘concatenated’. The last line of each of the four stanzas in a set ends with the same rhyme, which may be the same word or a variation on its sound, and the same word/similar sound must start the first line of the next stanza. In this particular set of four the last words are fays:faith:face:Face and the first words of the last three stanzas and first one of the next set are faze:phaseless:facings:to face.)

However, I’m very grateful to my correspondent for also quoting to me a footnote that Belloc himself appended to the first verse of his poem (‘Dedicatory Ode’):

But do not think I shall explain
To any great extent. Believe me,
I partly write to give you pain,
And if you do not like me, leave me.

7 May
The social distancing observed in the queue outside our local greengrocer’s is admirable: people stand four metres apart in a line stretching across the shopping court, so that others heading for shops beyond can pass precisely two metres between them. However, the greengrocer’s itself is small and allows four customers at once. There are also up to two staff in it. This means some very tight choreography if you are to observe distancing inside the shop. The other day, seeing a short but well built woman charging at me, I was about to move to one side but noticed just in time that I’d be coming perilously close to a third person, so I performed a two-hop manoeuvre, smiled at the woman and warbled: ‘You do the hokey-cokey and you…’ Not a flicker of response.

If you do go out, people who would normally just wave insist on gassing at you from an ever-diminishing distance. This happened to me this morning. A neighbour crossed the road to talk to me, standing in the road to my right whilst I remained on the pavement. To my left was a seven-foot privet hedge. Suddenly a couple appeared twenty yards away walking towards me on the pavement. Without wishing to offend my neighbour, I had to move further up the pavement then step into the road infront of a parked car two metres from him and two from the pavement. However, as I moved a bloke came out of his drive in front of me back first, sweeping stuff into the gutter. Trapped! I executed a pirouette and double chassé, smiled and did my hokey-cokey thing, but again no-one responded.

Has this virus killed the Great British Sense of Humour, or is it just me?

14 May
As an example of one of the unpredictable spinoffs of the pandemic, my brother-in-law told me about a first-year university student who, when his course was abruptly suspended, got a job at an Amazon warehouse and enjoyed it so much that he decided not to go back to university. Apparently the young man could not praise highly enough Amazon’s observance of COVID precautions for its staff, enjoyed the working conditions and money, and persuaded himself that a ‘real job’ like this was for him.

The story pricked my conscience. Back in December, I posted about the Morning Star attacking Amazon as the worst violator of workers’ rights in Britain. The newspaper’s claim disturbed me not because I use Amazon much (I positively prefer shops), but because we had just published our first book with Amazon. Stalwart Calderonia-follower Clare Hopkins then described in a Comment feeling ‘sickened’ by reading the section on Amazon in James Bloodworth’s newly republished Hired: Undercover in Low-wage Britain and I replied that I would ‘definitely investigate Bloodworth’s book’. I didn’t, but I have now. Ironically enough, Bloodworth sells his book on Amazon:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

The book is described by the blurb and its author as an ‘exposé’, ‘revelations’ and ‘research’. Anyone expecting those activities from the 66-page section on Amazon will, I fear, be disappointed. Bloodworth does not even tell us how long he worked at the Amazon centre in Rugeley, Staffs. To describe something as ‘research’ that is based on four fragmentary interviews with people who have worked there and an inexplicably undetailed account of his own experiences, betrays an ineptness with English words that is woefully visible throughout. Only three of the chapters in this section are actually about Amazon, the other two concern Rugeley and its mining past.

Maybe I have missed something, but I have read this section three times and could not put my finger on anywhere that Amazon broke British labour or health and safety laws. Bloodworth makes much of the penalties for going to the loo whilst working at an Amazon centre, but the ‘bottles of urine from employees too scared to take bathroom breaks’ on page xvi become ‘on one occasion I came across a bottle of straw-coloured liquid perched inauspiciously on a shelf’ on page 50. Bloodworth has been compared to George Orwell, but I am afraid this is absurd, as Orwell showed and Bloodworth merely tells.

Nevertheless, I agree with Clare that the regime at this Amazon centre is sickening. There may be nothing illegal about it, but its robotic and totalitarian essence is completely alien to our own work culture. Bloodworth is certainly right to identify it with Modern Times maniac Frederick W. Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management. For me this is the point. British manual workers never have accepted the culture of the American factory, and never will: ninety per cent of the workers Bloodworth describes at the Rugeley centre come from Eastern Europe and feel they have no choice but to work for Amazon, whilst British locals hate the idea. Immigration is a serious theme of this section. Another is the truly disgusting iniquity of the agencies who control Amazon’s workers, regularly pay them late, regularly underpay them, and regularly fiddle their payslips. These agencies should be investigated, prosecuted and stopped.

I am sorry to say this, but the book as a whole is a bit of a fraud. Bloodworth tells us as much on page xi of his introduction, but does not seem to realise it. The book is marketed as an exposé etc of zero-hours contracts and the gig economy, especially at Amazon, and Bloodworth tells us himself that he ‘set out to write about the material poverty that often accompanies such work’, but ‘quickly realised that it was just as important to write about the British towns I was living in’. Consequently half of the book is about these towns, present and past; particularly past. Bloodworth is steeped in the socialist writers of the 1930s, whom he regularly quotes, and loves nothing so much as to spend an evening at a social club listening to reminiscences of the glorious days when miners were ‘rich’ (p. 59) and had a belligerent union fighting for them.

Although Bloodworth warns several times against ‘romanticising’ the ‘working-class’ past, his book is built around an academic nostalgia for it. So powerful is the nostalgia that it, together with Bloodworth’s matchless command of left-wing clichés and his tendency to rant, filled me with yearning for the good old days of Dave Spart’s column in Private Eye.

20 May
Let’s be honest, this diary is pretty boring, cerebral stuff. If you want to know the really exciting things that have been happening in our lives during lockdown, go to Mrs Miles’s new blog at: adiaryofdoing.wordpress.com. I can’t compete!

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, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Making Icons', Amazon, Catherine Arnold, Chaffinch, Charles Darwin, Charles Evelyn Pym, China, Clare Hopkins, comments, concatenation, coronavirus, COVID-19, Dave Spart, Etaples, Evey Pym, George Calderon, Georgio de Chirico, Goldfinch, Hampstead, hedgehogs, Hilaire Belloc, icons, Jack Pym, James Bloodworth, Jay, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, Long-Tailed Tit, Ludgrove School, mining, Nature, pandemics, Private Eye, Rugeley, social clubs, Spanish Flu, squirrels, The Earth, The Great War, Violet Pym, viruses, working class, World War I | Leave a comment

Weighty Calderonian matters

Posted on April 27, 2020 by Patrick Miles

The above is described in an auction catalogue of 2001 as ‘A Victorian set of jockey scales by Youngs of Bear Street, London WC on oak stand with spiral-turned supports. Width 3ft’. The auction in question was of ‘The Residual Contents of Foxwold, Brasted Chart, Westerham, Kent’.

For fans of Merchant Ivory’s 1985 film of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View — and there are very many — Foxwold is better known as ‘Windy Corner’, the Surrey residence of Lucy Honeychurch (Helena Bonham Carter), her mother (Rosemary Leach) and Tiggerish brother Freddy (Rupert Graves):

But to followers of this blog Foxwold is dear as practically Kittie and George’s second home. For most of the time covered by my biography of them Foxwold was owned by Charles ‘Evey’ Pym, who was married to Kittie’s niece by her first marriage, Violet née Lubbock, to whom Kittie was devoted. The Calderons regularly spent weekends or parts of their holidays at Foxwold, most memorably George’s last Christmas (1914).

Violet and Evey’s grandson, the film critic John Pym, to whom the whole Calderon project owes so much, has emailed me to say that he was recently ‘glancing through The Foxwold Weigh-in Book’ when he discovered:

and:

Sensational! There is a wealth of explicit and implicit biographical detail in these two pages! In fact, they are probably the most interesting new Calderon documents to have come to light since my biography was published in 2018! I am deeply beholden to Mr Pym for alerting me to them, allowing me to post images of them, lending me the catalogue of the 2001 auction, and providing me with his family gloss below.

The explicit detail, of course, is George and Kittie’s weights during this 1904-05 period, which help me picture more accurately what they looked like at the time. I don’t know whether this matters to all biographers, but it was always very important for me to ‘see’ George and Kittie, hear their voices, know their facial skin texture, as it were, and almost smell them. I laboriously calculated from a 1901 photograph of George standing in a doorframe of standard dimensions that his height was five foot ten; I subsequently discovered from his enlistment form of 1914 that he gave it himself as five foot nine and a half. Altogether, I had got the impression that he was on the slim side, even underweight, as in her memoirs Kittie said that he hadn’t the physique for sustained manual work.

But on 30 September 1904 we see that he weighed in at twelve stone, which on the height/mass chart given me by my G.P. places George just short of the ‘You are beginning to get fat’ area. Put that together with the Army’s note in 1914 that his ‘general physical development’ was ‘good’ and that he had a four-inch chest expansion, and he doesn’t seem so slight after all. He is the third heaviest of the seven men whose weights feature on these two pages. Mind you, we don’t know the others’ heights and they all seem remarkably light by today’s standards.

I have never found a record of Kittie’s height, but from photographs of her standing next to George I estimate she was at most five foot five. According to my weight-watcher’s chart, this would mean that at ten stone twelve she was just inside the ‘beginning to get fat’ boundary. This may explain why there are no further records of her weight in the book!

At the end of September 1904 George was lingering at Boulogne with his doctor, Albert Tebb, and the latter’s son, Christopher, on a recuperative holiday. He was desperately missing Kittie, who had been with him earlier but was now staying at Emmetts, the Lubbocks’ home near Foxwold. He felt he could not leave the others, as they were both ‘sickly’, but he hoped to join Kittie at Emmetts before she returned to London. In my biography (p. 192) I wrote that it seemed unlikely the party left early enough for George to join Kittie at the Lubbocks’. There is no extant Visitors Book for Emmetts, but ‘The Foxwold Weigh-in Book’ proves that he did get there in time.

The next two entries for George look alarming. Three months later, on 31 December 1904, he had lost three pounds. Five months after that, on 21 May 1905, he had lost another four pounds and was down to eleven and a half stone. However, on 30 December 1905 he weighed in at eleven stone thirteen, meaning that he lost seven pounds in eight months but put six of them back again within eight months. Clearly he had some reason for weighing himself each time he visited Foxwold over these fifteen months, and one assumes it wasn’t that he was slimming. The decline in his weight perhaps corroborates the course of his nervous breakdown 1904-06 that I suggested in my biography. Incidentally, Kittie and George shared Christmas 1905 at Foxwold with the Punch contributor Anstey Guthrie, whose couplet was inscribed by Evey in the front of ‘The Foxwold Weigh-in Book’:

A better, aye, a bulkier man, this earth has hardly seen:
He was the first that ever burst a ‘Try your Weight Machine’!

Why, though, did these Edwardians use the machine and religiously enter their weights in ‘The Foxwold Weigh-in Book’?

It seems that the custom came in during the eighteenth century, when you could weigh yourself at a coffee house or wine merchant’s, for instance, but many homes possessed stand-on scales anyway for verifying the weight of produce. Given the number of ‘wasting’ diseases about, I take it that monitoring your weight, and particularly your children’s, could be important. Where the jockey scales at Foxwold are concerned, John Pym gives the following explanation:

I think Horace Pym (1844-1896) acquired the scales because he (like many Victorians) was fanatical about weights and measures and keeping properly scientific records. Horace was the first to make an entry: 16st 11lbs in June 1886, and 17st 9lbs in September 1887. The man who was always rumoured almost to have burst this ‘Try Your Weight Machine’ was Horace’s cousin R. Ruthven Pym, who recorded 19st 12lbs…

Patrick mentions the film A Room with a View. Many of the objects, books and pictures that were used as set-dressing at Windy Corner would have been familiar to George and Kittie — and had they seen the movie they might have smiled ruefully at the scene, shot at the foot of the main staircase at Foxwold, in which Lucy breaks off her engagement with Cecil Vyse (Daniel Day Lewis). After he has received the bad news, Cecil sits on the stairs and puts on his shoes. If he had then taken two steps forward (to the right) he could have sat on the jockey scales and been reassured that although he’d been rejected in love he was at least not overweight.

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, Personal commentary | Tagged A Room with a View, Anstey Guthrie, biographies, biography, body weight, Boulogne, Catherine Lubbock, Charles Evelyn Pym, Christopher Tebb, comments, Daniel Day Lewis, Dr Albert Tebb, E.M. Forster, Emmetts, Foxwold, Frederic Lubbock, George Calderon, height, Horace Pym, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, R. Ruthven Pym, Violet Pym, visitors books, weighing machine, weighing machines, Windy Corner | 3 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 9

Posted on April 6, 2020 by Patrick Miles

Common Brimstone Butterfly by Charles J Sharp

22 March
A very sunny day and I saw the first Brimstone butterfly flying in the garden; in fact two at once, both males (the females are a greenish white). This is something of a relief, as a local insect spotter emailed me ten days ago to say he had seen a Peacock and Comma in his garden ‘but still no Brimstone’, and in the old days you usually saw a Brimstone long before Nymphalids like the Peacock, Small Tortoiseshell and Comma. My theory is that Brimstones actually need bright sunlight, as their colour perhaps suggests, but all that the brown and furry jobs need is a certain warmth. The spotter saw his Peacock and Comma on a day when the air temperature was high (I saw a Small Tortoiseshell flying on the same day), but the sun was not bright. Also, I remember some discussion on Autumn Watch last year of reports that Peacocks and Small Tortoiseshells were now going into hibernation a month earlier than before.

Last year there was a male Brimstone flying around on 22 February:

february sun
everyone’s talking of
the brimstone they’ve seen

(An example of the difficulty of writing haikus in English: you are supposed not to use capitals any more, but ‘brimstone’ suggests a local volcano eruption or a daytrip to Hell.)

26 March
I went to deliver John Polkinghorne’s post at the care home he went into for respite before Black Crow came over all the land. I discovered the home was self-isolating and all I could do was hand the package over at Reception. As always, there were a few ladies sitting at the tables in the foyer chatting, knitting or reading the paper. I say ‘ladies’ because although perhaps in their early nineties they are all immaculately turned out and have impeccable manners. It seemed only polite to say good morning to them and remark on the beautiful indoor temperature of the home. They all turned their heads and smiled radiantly as they returned the greeting. They looked like zinnias:

Image from plantsofdistinction.co.uk

The mystery, though, is why you never see any men partaking of the communality of this foyer. I invite explanations in the Comments column. Obviously, there are men in the home. John is waiting for delivery of a motorised wheelchair before he can get about.

30 March
A journalist has written that during times of plague Shakespeare’s theatre was closed down and ‘he could not write his plays’. Au absolute contraire, surely: if he had any sense, which he did, he must have used every moment of self-isolation to get ahead of the dramatic game for when the theatres reopened. Not only that, tied to his desk during the plague of 1593 he wrote his first long poem, Venus and Adonis, which became a best seller and must have considerably made up for loss of earnings.

I have decided to try to follow his intimidating but very inspiring example. In 2008 I started a poem (‘Making Icons’) that is in two parts of seventeen stanzas each and each stanza has twelve lines. I see from the pencil manuscript that I finished stanza 22 on 3 August 2011…eight years later I had got as far as stanza 26…in the last ten days I have written two more… Great William, stand over me and urge me on.

It’s a tricky subject and taxing stanza form. For reasons best known to the poem, it’s both alliterative and rhymed (assonantal). The only sample I can think of that may be comprehensible out of its context is:

The rage-raked branches by the sea
lie still, like cerebrums of coral,
their wiry line seems hardly leaves,
so punched and packed by weather’s worry,
a fierce frisure, not fioritura,
the sheer survivance of a tree,
while ‘watercolour sky’ of Norfolk
clouds out the curlew and the seal.
Brandish and bray what you may feel,
time like the tempest, rain and sun
transmutes it into topiary:
something has died, some thing lives on.

Having just read that again, I can’t help thinking the last line describes the state of the country (‘some thing’ is meant to be two words). And I had intended to keep this post as bright and springtime as its images!

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 Autumn Watch, Black Crow, Brimstone, butterflies, care homes, Comma, COVID-19, Gonepteryx rhamni, haikus, hibernation, icons, John Polkinghorne, Norfolk, Peacock, Small Tortoiseshell, Venus and Adonis, William Shakespeare, zinnia | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 8

Posted on March 17, 2020 by Patrick Miles

13 March
Within seven hours of my last post going up, the organisers of the 2020 conference of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) emailed everyone to say they were calling it off. Only an hour or two earlier I had emailed Sam1 in Russia that I thought cancellation was inevitable, given the momentum of both the virus and the, well, perhaps not panic, but societal proactivity… He, Sam1, replied that he thought Britain had one of the lowest incidences of Black Crow in Europe, and that he was quite happy still to come to the UK, even though he would have to self-isolate for a fortnight when he got back to Russia. What he did not know was that by then British epidemiologists were estimating there were already another 10,000 cases in the country.

Sam1 has a son who helps him with the computer side of Sam&Sam Moscow — indeed, he designed the Russian poster for our stall — and I am proposing referring to him as Sam1(a). Our younger son Jim does exactly the same for Sam&Sam Cambridge, of course, and I propose referring to him as Sam2(a). As a result of the cancellation, Sam2(a) and I (Sam2) will be having lunch at our favourite Polish restaurant this week to start designing a new website for Sam&Sam in the West. It will be much more like an online bookshop, based on the actual copies in stock here in Cambridge.

It may seem far off, but I have already committed to the next BASEES conference in Cambridge (2022). The poor organisers deserve every crumb of comfort one can offer them. When Black Crow has passed over, I would be extremely grateful for any suggestions from followers and viewers about where we could profitably mount our stall this year and next, bearing in mind that most of our books are in Russian.

14 March
Because Alison and I have had sequential colds all week, it feels as though ‘self-isolation’ has already begun. Bring it on! Living indoors takes one back to the unheated, very quiet, almost Trappist home life of the 1950s… Editing 200 pages of translations of Sergei Esenin for a friend, reading a long biography of Esenin and attempting to read a sociological work entitled Arts, Politics and Social Movements in the Fields and in the Streets, filing down haikus for submission to a magazine, researching the finer points of painting icons — suddenly I was about a week ahead with it all. Unprecedentedly, my reading pile was empty. What was I going to do, re-read Chekhov and Proust?

I stared at the books on my shelves that I had recently paid more than their auction value to have rebound, and decided it was time I read:

[William Blackwood & Sons, 1874]

My last acquaintance with George Eliot was in 1957/58 and roughly 1960/61, when I read abridged versions of Silas Marner and The Mill on the Floss without even knowing that they were by a woman.

Middlemarch has been a complete revelation. I can’t put it down. From the two-page ‘Prelude’ alone I realised I was in the presence of a very fine nib indeed. Her choice of word is flawless. Her irony is ‘broader’ than Jane Austen’s, I think, but Eliot hasn’t stumbled once on that tightrope between showing and commenting. I love, for instance, her use of ‘theoretic’ rather than the modern ‘theoretical’:

[Dorothea’s] mind was theoretic, and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own role of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness, and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects […]

In my reading so far, Eliot has used ‘theoretic’ only twice, but as a word it is definitive, speaks volumes. It should be reintroduced. There isn’t a superfluous word in this, either:

She was disposed rather to accuse the intolerable narrowness and the purblind conscience of the society around her; and Celia [her sister] was no longer the eternal cherub, but a thorn in her spirit, a pink-and-white nullifidian, worse than any discouraging presence in the ‘Pilgrim’s Progress’.

Not to mention the wisdom of the local minister’s wife, Mrs Cadwallader:

These charitable people never know vinegar from wine till they have swallowed it and got the colic.

I have 571 more pages to go. I may have to ration myself. Can anyone suggest the next George Eliot I should read?

16 March
As one becomes more certain of one’s opinions on every subject, the temptation to dash off letters to newspapers becomes irresistible… But it can be resisted by having a blog!

A couple of weeks ago Matthew Parris had an article in The Times denouncing Edmund Burke, in which he said that Burke was ‘not a philosopher’. I happened to be reading Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful at the time, in a coverless 1812 edition that I had had bound in the same batch as Middlemarch, and was all for riposting to The Thunderer that this is utterly philosophical. In any case, one can’t deny that Burke was a political philosopher, whose Reflections on the Revolution in France have had enormous influence down to our day…

Last week’s Spectator contained a review of Archie Brown’s The Human Factor: Gorbachev, Reagan and Thatcher and the End of the Cold War by a British ambassador to Russia in the Gorbachev era. Both Brown and the ambassador think Gorbachev was wonderful. Gorbachev was imbued with ‘courageous optimism’, he ‘confronted ossified thinking throughout the Soviet machine’, he ‘refused to spill blood to preserve Soviet power’, he ‘ended nuclear confrontation’. There is truth in these assertions, but they overlook the vital fact that Gorbachev never believed in democracy. He repeatedly said in 1988 that there would never be ‘multi-party parliamentarianism’ in Russia. This now looks like a prophecy that came true, but what he meant at the time was ‘over my dead body will there be Western democracy in Russia’. How could he believe in real democracy if he was a communist party general secretary? I don’t think that, as an establishment man and an elitist, he ever regarded democracy as other than a threat, and I doubt whether he believes in it now. He certainly hasn’t spoken up for democracy against the ‘managed’ and ‘sovereign’ so-called democracy of the endless Putin monocracy. The ambassador’s idea that Gorbachev ‘hoped for democracy’ like ‘the rest of us’ is therefore laughable.

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, Archie Brown, BASEES, BASEES Conference, Black Crow, coronavirus, COVID-19, democracy, Edmund Burke, George Eliot, Marcel Proust, Matthew Paris, Middlemarch, Mikhail Gorbachev, newspapers, parliamentarianism, philosophy, quarantine, Rodric Braithwaite, Sam&Sam, self-isolation, Sergei Esenin, The Spectator, The Times | 2 Comments

Bloggering on!

Posted on March 13, 2020 by Patrick Miles

Dress rehearsal for our stall

It is such a long time since I blogged, that followers would be excused for forgetting why the previous post has been up for five weeks.

The reason is that we have been preparing for Sam&Sam’s Moscow-Cambridge stall at the 2020 conference of the British Association of Slavonic and East European Studies, 3-5 April at Robinson College, Cambridge, and as part of the campaign for that we decided to put up a comprehensive statement about the book until after Easter.

Every Monday for eight weeks I was getting things together for our stall, from the Russian books (17 titles) and their correct pricing, the English-language books (5 titles), acrylic book stands, a drape with our logo, and the right-sized screens, to posters for these screens, captions for the displays, an iZettle widget for card payments, advertisements, blurbs, book lists and a cash bag. Meanwhile, my Russian publishing partner, with whom I founded Sam&Sam in 1974, has had his time cut out using my official invitation to buy a visa ($300) and plane tickets.

Finally, a fortnight ago, it was all ready for the 500+ delegates. Then along came the Virus, or as I call prefer to call it CORVID-19 — Black Crow…

At the time of writing, both here in Cambridge and there in a village outside Moscow, we are still hoping and expecting to take part in the Conference and sell lots of books. However, in case it doesn’t happen, I just wanted to squeeze into Calderonia and Twitter a photographic testimony to the fact that we were ready to go!

Watch this space, then. I was quite looking forward to resuming blogging after Easter, but it may now be sooner than that. I think I’ve got a few juicy themes in store. If this year’s BASEES conference is cancelled, Sam&Sam will attend the next one in Cambridge in 2022.

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 BASEES Conference, biographies, comments, coronavirus, COVID-19, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Harvey Pitcher, John Polkinghorne, marketing, Moscow, pandemics, publishing, Robinson College, Russianists, sales, Sam&Sam, Slavists, What Can We Hope For? | Leave a comment

Guest Post: John Pym on the film ‘1917’

Posted on January 30, 2020 by Patrick Miles

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

‘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, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged '1917', American Civil War, Brigadier-General Sir John Gough V.C., Captain Charles Evelyn Pym, commemoration, comments, D.W. Griffiths, films, General Sir Hubert Gough, George Calderon, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, messengers, mission films, production design, reviews, Sam Mendes, The Birth of a Nation, The Great War, trenches, Violet Lubbock, war films, World War I | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 7

Posted on January 20, 2020 by Patrick Miles

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

‘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, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Pope, Amblyptilia acanthodactyla, Andrew Tatham, Are We Bodies or Souls?, biographies, biography, book titles, Charles Bartlett, comments, communication, Daniel J. McLean, editing, Frank Calderon, Fyodor Tyutchev, George Calderon, John Dewey, John Keats, John Polkinghorne, Louis Stokes, plume moths, proofreading, prosody, publishers, publishing, Richard Swinburne, Rugby School, Rupert Brooke, Sir Plume, The Beautiful Plume, The Great War, translation, What Can We Hope For?, World War I | Leave a comment

Resolution

Posted on January 7, 2020 by Patrick Miles

A VERY HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL OUR SUBSCRIBERS, OTHER FOLLOWERS, AND CASUAL VISITORS!

2019 was a good year for Calderonia, with a slight increase in views despite the fact that the book has now been out for sixteen months. I would say I have enough themes in me to carry on writing the blog until the end of 2021; indeed, I’ve got one or two mega-important subjects to raise in this new year of 2020…

However, I have not so much made a New Year’s Resolution as been seized by resolution: the resolution to sell at least 100 more copies of my book in the next four months. Why four months? Our biggest sales opportunity seems to be the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies Conference 3-5 April in Cambridge, and that’s what we shall be working towards. The original Sam1 will be coming over for it from Moscow and we shall be selling our full range of English and Russian books.

Why 100 copies of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius? Well, we have to date ‘shifted’ only 49% of our total imprint of the book. ‘Shifted’ is the word independent publishers use when they want to refer accurately to the number of copies they have parted with since publication day rather than the total actually sold… The fact is, we still need to sell 140 copies before we break even, let alone go into profit (I use the word loosely, you understand). A hundred copies by the end of April, given that the Conference will have 800 delegates, seems feasible.

Rush then to buy your extra copy of the fine limited edition George Calderon: Edwardian Genius whilst stocks last! Buy it most conveniently online at http://www.samandsam.co.uk

The big difference that this resolution will make to Calderonia is that for much of the next four months the top post will be a description of the book, quotations from reviews, and a link taking you straight to buying it. This is because we suspect some people are having difficulty finding the Sam&Sam website through Google, whereas Calderonia very quickly comes up and at the moment is not obviously dedicated to selling the book.

When this selling storm is over, I assure you I shall return to blogging with a vengeance!

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 BASEES, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, independent publishers, marketing, New Year, new year resolutions, sales, Sam&Sam | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 6

Posted on December 29, 2019 by Patrick Miles

6 December
Our post office is inside the local supermarket, and next to the queue is a stand with all the British newspapers. In an Orwellian spirit of studying what people across the whole political spectrum are thinking, I occasionally buy the Morning Star, but it is as thin as Pravda and at £1.00 must represent the worst value for any daily — unless, of course, you value it by weight of ideology. However, as I stood there today I was astonished to see that it was twice as thick as usual, so I pulled one out to discover why and found that (see above) it was a special edition and FREE!

The front page story is ‘A Britain that Works for All: Labour Lists Worst Firms as It Promises to Protect Workers’. Top of Labour’s ‘list of the worst violators of workers’ rights’ is Amazon. In the past year, we are told, ‘ambulances were called to one of its warehouses once every two days to deal with electric shocks, bleeding, chest pains, major trauma and pregnancy and maternity issues resulting from “appalling” health and safety standards and extreme workloads’. At an Amazon warehouse in Scotland, ‘workers slept in tents in freezing weather as they could not afford to travel’.

I think Orwell would want to probe behind the phrase ‘one of its warehouses once every two days’ and the curious quotation marks around ‘appalling’. Personally, I am very surprised that I have not read about these cases in the other daily newspapers I buy. They are serious accusations and as someone now publishing with Amazon I take them seriously. I certainly find them credible, because my instinct tells me that the terrific deal and quality that Amazon gives Sam&Sam are possible only by, as the euphemism has it, cutting corners. Amazon is surely rivalling Gazprom as the biggest business in the world and therein, I fear, lie the seeds of its collapse. Gutenberg, Caxton and others invented the printing press, but they did not set out to print, market and sell all the books in the world.

15 December

John Dewey

I have received an email from John Dewey’s son Chris to tell me that his father died last night; ‘peacefully, with family beside him’. Chris adds that John was ‘smiling until the very end’. I can utterly believe that, because I have never known anyone for whom the smile, ironical comment and chuckle were so integral to his incredible fortitude. John’s illness put him through a very long, debilitating decline. I met him only once, last March, and admit I was shocked as he inched his way down the hall on a Zimmer frame to greet me. But the next two hours, as he half-reclined on a sofa and we all partook of Dorset scones and cream, were a riot of reminiscence, laughter, gossip and quotation.

My tribute to John’s achievements has preceded his death. I have nothing to add to that, but I can summarise it thus: as a Russianist, as someone contributing to English culture’s ever-deepening understanding of Russia’s culture, John was the real thing. It was not a job, it was his life. He made a conscious decision to stay out of Academe. Whilst impacting on the lives of thousands as a teacher in secondary schools and Lecturer in German and Russian at Bournemouth and Poole College of Further Education, he sourced his research and his translations from his own time and funds. Which British biography of a Russian writer can stand comparison with Mirror of the Soul, his life of Tyutchev? He approached everything with complete integrity. As his wife has told me, John spent ‘evening after evening’ searching for ‘the right words’ in his verse translations.

I owe John an enormous personal debt. I first contacted him four years ago to ask his advice about self-publishing in the IT age — advice that he richly gave and which helped lay the foundation for my own excursion with George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. This developed into a vibrant e-correspondence about reading Russian at Cambridge in the 1960s, the problems of writing biography, the poetry of Pushkin, Tyutchev, Esenin, Brodsky… I cannot express how much I shall miss our dialogue. In addition, John became a great fan and supporter of Calderonia, penning amusing Comments, contributing his own guest post, and writing a terrific unsolicited review of my book on Amazon.

Last year, John sent me a finished typescript, ‘Four Funerals and a Tyutchev Poem’. It begins by examining the biographical context of Tyutchev’s poem ‘I grob opushchen uzh v mogilu’ (And now the coffin has been lowered’), its music and and philosophical import, but touches on subjects as varied as Protestantism, the circumstances of Tyutchev’s own funeral, birds, Schindler’s List, and The Wizard of Oz. In the penultimate paragraph, John describes an experience similar to Tyutchev’s: after attending a very austere Lutheran funeral in Germany and emerging from the ‘bare cemetery chapel’ into an ‘epiphany’ of ‘warm spring sunshine, blue sky and birdsong’, John found himself recalling lines from Tyutchev’s poem and felt that ‘Tyutchev’s vision of the absolute as manifested in nature offered me, an agnostic, far greater comfort than the words and liturgy of the Christian ceremony’. In the final paragraph, John describes how delighted he was when his wife suggested that Tyutchev’s poem be read at his own funeral. Indeed:

I am grateful to her both for that and for sending me back to the poem itself, thereby helping to spark off the new thoughts on it outlined above. I very much hope Tyutchev’s little masterpiece will provide as much pleasure and illumination to others as it has to me over the years.

Here, in John Dewey’s translation, is Tyutchev’s untitled poem of 1833:

And now the coffin has been lowered…
And all around in packed array
Crowd mourners: jostling, loath to breathe in¹
The stifling odour of decay…

And by the open grave the pastor —
A man of learning and repute —
Begins his funeral oration
In words well-chosen and astute…

He speaks of man, ordained to perish,
The Fall, Christ’s blood that washes sin…
Each listens to these words of wisdom
And weighs them for himself within…

And all the while the sky so boundless
Shines with a pure undying light…
And all around us birdsong endless
Sounds from the blue unfathomed height…

John Dewey’s article ‘Four Funerals and a Tyutchev Poem’ is published in the New Year 2020 issue of ‘East-West Review’, the Journal of the Great Britain-Russian Society.

¹ I shall discuss this line in a future post – P.M.

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 agnosticism, Amazon, And now the coffin has been lowered, biographies, biography, birds, Calderonia, death, East-West Review, eschatology, Fedor Tiutchev, Four Funerals and a Tyutchev Poem, I grob opushchen uz v mogilu, John Dewey, Labour Party, Lutheranism, Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Tyutchev, Morning Star, obituary, Protestantism, Russianists, self-publishing, translation | 2 Comments

Christmas in St Petersburg, 1895

Posted on December 21, 2019 by Patrick Miles

St Petersburg,
27 December 1895 (N.S.)

English Christmas Evening I spent at the Wildings: of the guests were Mr and Mrs Alfred Whishaw, Dick Whishaw (18) and Miss blank Whishaw (say 19); James Whishaw (V.C., not the cross but Vice Consul) & wife; also eldest girl (say 15/16); two young Wylies, the elder a don at Brazenose (I like him & see him sometimes; very juvenile; knows Charlie Fletcher and the Trinity dons). Turkey and plum pudding with methylated spirits, crackers, caps (mine was labelled costume Tartare but was unseasonable and not true to nature), charades and Anglo-American relations over our cigarettes; also ‘Clumps’ and a wild game where you all sit in a circle and make insane gestures in chorus. It was very hot. This evening Mrs James Whishaw asks me to the Russian Xmas; but of course I can’t. Today we have 15 degrees of frost Réaumur [-19 deg. Celsius]. There are one or two fires down our street where the cabbies and passing boys warm themselves. Logs of firewood lie at the side for who will to put on. Looked in at the skating ground at 10 p.m. and found it empty save for two who are practising for the race next month; one of them clad in white, flannels & sweater; they were tearing round the islands on skates about 18″ long. […] I am going to disport myself on the icehills with Dick Whishaw on Sunday [29 December] afternoon.

This is from a letter from George to his father two days after the English Christmas and ten days before the Russian Christmas according to the Julian Calendar. If anyone can throw light on the ‘methylated spirits’, please Comment! George could not accept Mrs Whishaw’s invitation as he was already committed to celebrating Russian Christmas with the Francke family on a country estate. My image is of St Petersburg’s Old Stock Exchange and Rostral Columns (beacons), about a mile and a half from where George lived.

A VERY HAPPY CHRISTMAS TO ALL OUR SUBSCRIBERS AND VIEWERS, AND THANK YOU FOR FOLLOWING CALDERONIA INTO ITS SIXTH YEAR!

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 Alfred Whishaw, charades, Charlie Fletcher, Christmas, Clumps, Dick Whishaw, Francke family, George Calderon, icehills, James Whishaw, Julian Calendar, methylated spirits, Miss Whishaw, Mrs Alfred Whishaw, Philip Hermogenes Calderon, plum pudding, skating, St Petersburg, Trinity College Oxford, Turkey, Wylie family | 4 Comments

A signing

Posted on December 17, 2019 by Patrick Miles

Alison baked a perfect Victoria sponge and last Wednesday we took it along for tea with John Polkinghorne and his carer. He likes a nice cake (foregrounded in the photograph below). The five of us had a very lively conversation with him for 45 minutes. Sam2 (Jim Miles) looked up on Amazon how many copies had been sold and John came straight back with: ‘Sales are very important. Every home should have a copy!’

John Polkinghorne signing Sam2’s copy of What Can We Hope For?

John had not seen Jim for months, and was profuse in his thanks to him for all that he did, from transcribing the interviews to typesetting, designing the covers and dealing with Amazon. ‘Without you,’ he said, ‘we could never have brought our book out.’

The left cover can be found on amazon by clicking here and the right cover can be found on amazon by clicking here.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Alison Miles, Amazon, book launch, Jim Miles, John Polkinghorne, sales, Sam&Sam, Sam2, signing, tea, typesetting, Victoria sponge, What Can We Hope For? | Leave a comment

Guest Post: Alison Miles on ‘What Can We Hope For?’ from the edge of the epicentre

Posted on December 10, 2019 by Patrick Miles

John Polkinghorne lives near us and we have known him for many years. In 2015 the Church Times published an interview in which he answered questions about science and religion put to him by my husband, Patrick. It celebrated John’s 85th birthday.

Patrick is neither a mathematical physicist nor a theologian so to prepare for interviewing John, he read many of John’s books as well as doing additional research on topics relevant to John’s lifetime’s work. Patrick and John recorded their discussions and our son, Jim, transcribed them. Jim had transcribed recordings during his Year 10 work experience, using a transcription kit with pedal. This time he wrote some software to enable him to manage and pace the recording while typing the text. Patrick edited the typed version ready for John to give feedback, then they completed the final stages ready for submission to the Church Times.

A short while later, John invited Patrick to read his recent books about ‘eschatology’ and discuss them. So the new topic was ‘the future’ of us and the universe. At the time, Patrick was also working on his biography of George Calderon, which was coming up for publication under the Sam&Sam banner. Patrick managed that project and Jim was the technical supremo, including typesetting the book ready for printing by Clays of Bungay. So they were both occupied with the first book when the second began, but ‘If you want something done, ask a busy person’!

The new series of discussions between Patrick and John started; they usually took place on Thursday mornings lasting about an hour. Patrick’s questions were submitted to John a week in advance. Over thirteen months they covered a huge range of aspects of our human and cosmic ‘future’. Again, it was all recorded on our small dictaphone which Jim downloaded after each session. He transcribed the interviews word for word including hesitations, interjections, duplications etc.

Once the transcription was complete it was time to review what was there and decide on the next steps. Seven years ago John said he had ‘written his last book’ but here was a different text that could become a short book. He agreed with Patrick that it was worth going ahead with this as a real viva voce script rather than a ‘set piece’ philosophical dialogue. So together they edited down the transcript of 60,000 words into one of 31,000 words in five chapters. John proposed the title What Can We Hope For? and Patrick the sub-title ‘Dialogues about the Future’. The result was a ‘manuscript’ that they both liked, so the next step was publication.

Many publishers were approached. John and Patrick agreed that the book needed to be reasonably priced and there was a feeling that it should be produced relatively quickly, ideally for John’s 89th birthday (16 October 2019). Commercial publishers could not match these requirements so Jim and Patrick investigated Amazon ‘print on demand’ and agreed that, for a book of this size, it was a definite possibility. As before, Patrick was the project manager and Jim the typesetter (to find out more about what he did go to ‘How to typeset a second book’). The book went through seven sets of proofs including being read by me (someone has to be ‘keeper of the comma’ – but all I found was one inconsistent indentation!).

At the point when the project moved to Amazon print on demand, Patrick moved straight out of his comfort zone and Jim moved quickly into his. Patrick is very familiar with the traditional ‘Gutenberg’ publication process (manuscript/typescript/proofs/print) while Jim understands how online processes work. They both looked into Amazon’s terms and conditions and the procedures for print on demand. As a result they decided to go ahead. This included finishing off the book (cover, spine, back page author blurbs and photos, ISBN etc) before submitting the pdf to Amazon.

In his blog post ‘A Tale of Two Front Covers’ Patrick describes what happened as he and John discussed and chose the cover(s). I remember him arriving home with a print of Naum Gabo’s Opus 9 from Kettle’s Yard. At the time (as with so many art, poetry and drama references) I hadn’t a clue who Naum Gabo was and promptly forgot his name! That aside, from 1 December we have had two editions available to accommodate the two authors’ cover preferences.

Celebrating the publication of the ‘second’ (Gabo) edition

Then there were the ins and outs of the Amazon printing process. The overall impression that I have, as the spectator on the edge of the epicentre, is that Amazon has set up an interactive process that (for the IT savvy, i.e. Jim) makes it relatively easy to submit a book, to make amendments after submission if required, to set a price (£5 as opposed to one publisher’s suggestion of £12.50) and to check the product, all before (and, amazingly, also after) going live. Jim regularly comes round to our house with author’s copies that he has ordered on Patrick’s behalf from Amazon. Initially the proofs had ‘not for resale’ printed on them, and Patrick and Jim went through them with a fine-tooth comb for any errors etc. A few changes had to be made because one or two layout issues turned up and also Amazon requested 100 pages if there is text on the spine. This led to production of about twenty copies of the first edition with additional blank pages headed ‘For Notes’. These copies are now rarities as those ‘extra’ pages have become an appendix containing the full initial texts of the Church Times interview. Various interesting facts have emerged. Printing seems to happen anywhere, for example some copies have come from Poland. Author copies can take at least a week to arrive but normal copies, printed by Amazon UK, arrive very quickly, particularly for Amazon Prime users. For me insight into this automated and hugely efficient production process has been fascinating. Whatever we all think about Amazon’s monopolistic, exploitative qualities it is clear that they have nailed almost every aspect of print on demand for paperbacks, at least for a relatively straightforward one like this.

The book is now well and truly published, so all that remains for me is to make the celebration cake for the tea party we are having with John, in a week or so.

The left cover can be found on amazon by clicking here and the right cover can be found on amazon by clicking here.