‘Will you be going to Russia again?’ I asked Stone as we arrived back at his rooms from the college dinner he had stood me.
‘Not if I can help it!’ he retorted, unlocking the door and walking straight across his sitting-room to a corner cupboard from which he produced a bottle and glasses. ‘I’m fed up with ’em. I’m fed up with Dos-toy-evsky, I’m fed up with Stalin and…and Mandelshtam and Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn! Actually,’ he called from the gyp-room, ‘it’s one of the reasons I’m glad I’ve been made Director of Studies.’
He was thirty, had completed a Ph.D. on Dostoyevsky at twenty-five, was rumoured to know seven or eight modern languages, and had lived in most of the countries of Western and Eastern Europe.
‘Ice?’
‘Water, please.’
He handed me a golden tumbler and we subsided into his low armchairs.
‘Well, you know – it’ll help me to move out of things Russian. Things Rah-shen… I can stop being The Bloke Who Knows All About Russia and become just an English Modern Linguist.’ He smirked: ‘I fancy working on Pirandello, say, and going to Italy a lot.’
From a morbid curiosity, I asked him if it was true that the recent death of someone in my own faculty, P.H. Jones, had occurred in Russia.
‘Quite.’
‘You mean old Jones died there?’
‘I mean he did, I can just imagine it, and it would kill me if I had to go back there.’
‘But it’s the last place you would ever associate with Jones! I can’t imagine him ever going abroad, even. He was notorious in the Faculty for his bon mot “Travel narrows the mind”…’
‘Oh, absolutely.’
Stone finished his glass and swirled the ice around in it at arm’s length. He mused.
‘Actually, Philemon Jones, the Grover Reader in Aesthetics, was agreeably surprised by Moscow – ’
I laughed. It was the tone of one of Stone’s ‘anecdotages’ as he called them, fantastic improvisations that he occasionally perpetrated in company and also attributed to his sojourns in Eastern Europe.
He got up and poured himself another large whisky. His face positively bubbled.
‘No, seriously – you know he was a Fellow of this college, don’t you?’
‘Go on.’
‘Well, he was agreeably surprised by Moscow when he arrived there, because…because the same afternoon, even, he had been sitting by the Philadelphus bush outside his rooms here, reading, occasionally lifting his Pimms from the little flap fitted to his deckchair, and recalling the stories he had been told about Russia at high table. He looked up, oblivious of the tourists ambling by, stared long into the sky above the court, where the black swifts were wheeling, and reflected tensely on the Aeroflot ’planes with rattling wings, the brutal confiscations at Customs, the soap-less hotels… Then, er, there was the political aspect so distasteful to him: the mythopoeia of the Left, the bogus cult of The People…’
I snorted at the unashamed hyperbole of Stone’s technique.
‘ – yet here he was, he reminded himself, and even the journey had been less barbaric than he feared. At two o’clock Eden, the Head Porter, had rung through to say that the taxi was waiting and they had put his bags in the boot. His hand hovered for a moment before drawing a stick from the stand, then, with the Burlington Magazine under his arm, he slipped out of his rooms, across the lawn, and two hours later was at Heathrow. How puzzled some of the Fellows would be to hear him praising the socialist airline, explaining that he was offered chilled lager and there were even seat-belts! His reception at Customs was unexpected, too. As he half-sauntered into the brightly lit hall, he noticed a blonde in grey uniform and white high-heeled shoes chatting to one of the customs men. At that precise moment, she looked up, stopped talking, and came over.
‘“Meester Jonns from the British Academy?”
‘He gave one of his boyish, rather endearing sniggers.
‘“Yes, I – ”
‘“You will come this way pliss.”
‘He sniggered again, but actually something in his mind gave way… Fortunately, though, the girl had been sent as his interpreter and introduced herself as Natasha. He was delighted. The customs inspection was perfunctory, a car was waiting, and he filled with fresh buoyancy at the prospect of his stay. He remembered that he had sensuous, Italian lips – ’
‘Jones?!’ I queried. ‘He was the son of a Welsh miner. Cut himself off from his parents the day he arrived in Cambridge with an Open Schol., and all that. At least, that’s what I’ve always been told. Isn’t your narration becoming un peu exagéré?’
‘No no!’ laughed Stone. ‘I swear that’s what the undergraduates in his dining society said of him! They had got this idea from his features that he had Italian, possibly Florentine blood in him.’
‘All right, all right, perhaps I never looked closely enough. The bit about his snigger was quite good, though. Go on.’
‘He remembered, then, that he had sensuous, Italianate lips and would be all on his own in this foreign country where nobody could possibly know him. However, as he held the front door of the car open for the girl, he was shocked to see long black hairs on the backs of her legs.
‘There followed the most exhilarating experience of his visit so far. The journey from Cambridge had been tedious and fatiguing. Essentially, though, when he stepped from the ’plane he felt as though he had hardly gone anywhere at all. He felt he could blink his eyes and there would be the honey-brown stone of the college court still, the fragrant Philadelphus, and his rooms. But once they were clear of the airport he was plunged into the sensation of real travel. The driver handled the car like a post-chaise, a coach-and-four! A long wall of slender, enamelled tree-trunks zoomed by, then low forms that, as he bounced about on the back seat, he took to be wooden houses; whole dimly lit villages; a jungle of tower-blocks; a single, deserted, gleaming wet street with winking neons; and suddenly they shot out into a vast square with a tractor chugging slowly across it – the centre of Moscow itself…
‘This was too much. He looked out of the back window with a humorous smile, as if to see where they had left the airport, and forgot about England altogether.
‘Of course, it was peeving and ridiculous to have to wait about to be “registered”, disturbing even to have one’s passport taken away, but what were these compared with the view from his hotel room? He gazed through a vast black window at fantastical spires, whorls and cupolas of silver, green and gold, a red flag spotlit high in the night… It was delightful. Magical!’
Stone frowned, and got up from his chair. He fetched a box of long Dutch cigars, offered me one, lit up, and walked up and down for a while, thinking.
‘Next morning P.H. rose rather late. He had a two-hour breakfast in the restaurant. At the end of it, Natasha appeared, and he stood about whilst she made ’phone calls. It seemed that the Tsar Alexander III bookplates he had come to look at did not exist. Then they existed, but could not be found. Curiously, though, he could not…mm…find it in himself to be annoyed at this uncertainty and inefficiency. He sat in the stuffy hotel lounge, wandered through the endless tourist bureaux and shops, and stood for a long time in front of a poster of a church, mysteriously captioned THE PEARL ON THE NERL. He vacantly acquiesced in the pleasantest feeling of suspension, almost as though he were slowly levitating. Then the books with the correct ex libris were found. They would be on a special desk for him, Table 44, around three o’clock. He returned to the restaurant, and by half-past two was ready to set off with Natasha to the Rumyantsev Museum.
‘Of all the unexpected things, it was terribly hot outside. Even under the brims of the Panama hat he had brought with him it was ridiculously hot, and not just hot but torrid, dry; it was a sucking kind of heat. A light haze hankered wherever you looked, and this lent things an oddly different appearance from the night before. An old woman crossing the other end of the immense square loaded down with bags, seemed to crawl along the edge of the world and disappear like a steamer or mirage over the horizon. Were the numbers on that clock-face gold? He could have sworn that last night they were electric blue. As for the red tomb of the Great Cham himself, it hardly bore looking at, it jumped so painfully into and out of the tomato-juice wall behind.
‘This “defocussing” trick, he decided, kept catching you out. That faery castle, now that he saw it in daylight, wasn’t it in fact the bastion of the new imperialism? And the strident vulgarity of the political advertisements everywhere!
‘They were walking through a dark tunnel. Forms passed, staring at his white suit and Panama from the gloom.
‘And yet, he reflected, as they came up the steps towards another huge placard, perhaps the Kulturgeist of the place could be comprehended in terms of a…a poetic of austerity, so to speak, a synthesis of Sparta and the imperial vision, a “reverse-aesthetic” in the neo-Kantian sense… The thought pleased him. After all, there was something aesthetic, in a deeper sense, about the well-pressed khaki tunic of the Communist. In a way, he ventured, his own moral sensibility was essentially Spartan, too; he would almost feel at home here wearing one…
‘However, it was now so sweltering hot that the elastic of his bow-tie was irking him. To make matters worse, strands of thick white fluffy stuff were floating on the air of the street, tickling his nose and somehow conspiring to clog his throat. They entered a dusty, bare-earth courtyard.
‘“Your objective, sair,” announced Natasha, and pointed to a low whitewashed building with a bright green roof. They negotiated a rickety revolving door. He handed over his hat and stick. The girl explained his papers to a policeman and a wizened little creature in a glass case at the barrier, pointed out the direction of the Rare Books Room and cafeteria, ushered him gently through, smiled, and was gone.
‘Philemon Jones, the Grover Reader in Aesthetics, took three steps into the Museum – and turned back. When was she going to meet him again? Where? He made towards the barrier, but the policeman moved in front, smiled, and wagged his finger. Through the revolving door our friend could just see the girl disappearing out of the gates with a young man in a white shirt.
‘A trickle of sweat seeped under his collar. He dabbed his brow, swallowed, and walked in the direction of the cafeteria.
‘There, at the end of a narrow corridor, was a bilious-coloured crypt with tables, chairs, and a muddy, pitted floor where tiles had come out. It was oddly subdued. People carrying buckled aluminium trays stopped and looked at him as though in disbelief. A few more, fainting footsteps towards the opposite doors, through them, and…he halted.
‘Inside a much smaller room than the first, a crowd – it could hardly be called a queue – of about thirty bodies was pressed up against a tiny counter, where figures like washerwomen moved in and out of swathes of steam issuing from a fissured espresso. These…bodies were unimaginably seedy-looking, abominably dressed, and coarsely-featured. They all looked like peasants, or miners. From the way that they stood and the pasty immobility of their faces, it seemed that they were quite used to their outrageous predicament. It was stifling. The deep double-glazed windows were tightly sealed against the winter, condensation streamed down the walls past a bewildered cockroach onto the concrete floor, and each emission from the hissing machine seemed to squeeze a fresh tincture of cabbage from the remaining air. A tree festooned with fluff gazed in the window from the grey courtyard.
‘“Chivovysmotrite?!” bellowed one of the washerwomen at him suddenly.
‘It was not the heat, or the fizzling racket, or the suffocating miasma that overwhelmed him. It was everything at once: the foetid smell of bodies, the steamed cabbage, images of a time long, long ago.
‘His knees were giving beneath him, but he must make it to that chair for dignity’s sake.
‘“Arglwydd arwain,” he heard flooding through his brain, “…stranets…of our own bowels, Phil boy… In Sparta once…”
‘His neck was being bound in fluff, by a snake of cotton wool, tighter and tighter. He desperately tried to unbutton his collar, but something gave a little “pop!” in his chest like a plastic cap coming off, and the last thing he saw as he swooned was a flock of swifts, wheeling slowly and so gracefully far above him.
‘Six weeks later, the body of the Grover Reader arrived back in England. When they took the lid off the zinc container, it was discovered that the corpse’s trousers had been stolen. His legs lay there stiff and white like two new broom-handles. And for years the story was told with great relish at high table, whenever the subject of Russia arose.’
I guffawed.
‘Very good, Mervyn, very good. How well, in fact, did you know Jones?’
‘Not that well at all, really.’ Stone pursed his lips and poured us some more whisky. ‘He said to me during the last election that he thought the National Front were the only genuine non-bourgeois party…’
© Patrick Miles, 1977
Note: Chivovysmotrite?! means Wodderyerstaringat?!
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
George Calderon: A complete new work surfaces
Garry Humphreys, author of a forthcoming book on Arthur Somervell (1863-1937), and I have now received from the archives of the Royal College of Music a link to the score of Somervell’s music for George’s ballet libretto The Blue Cloth (which means the music is now in the public domain), as well as digital copies of the typescript-manuscript version of the libretto from which Somervell worked.
Now that I have read The Blue Cloth, I can say that a number of my suppositions in the earlier post were wrong. Its title page bears the typed address ‘Heathland Lodge’, which we know was where the Calderons lived until late 1912, but that address is crossed out and ‘Well Walk’ handwritten in. Consequently, the typescript of The Blue Cloth must have been created before the Calderons moved to 42 Well Walk, Hampstead, but George worked with Somervell on the ballet after they moved. The typescript The Red Cloth, which was previously the only known copy of the libretto, bears only the typewritten address ‘Heathland Lodge’, so it must predate the version that George and Arthur Somervell worked from, namely The Blue Cloth.
This might suggest that The Blue Cloth is the ‘definitive’ text of the ballet’s libretto, but that too would be wrong! It is, in fact, simply something entirely different. The Blue Cloth is a many-times expanded version of The Red Cloth, divided into numbered acting/dancing passages with gesture-by-gesture descriptions by George and a timeline down the right-hand margin in minutes. In other words, it is the working copy for Arthur Somervell to compose his score from and this is borne out by Somervell’s jottings of bars on the typescript as in the image that follows.
Page 6 of the libretto The Blue Cloth
Moreover, we can say that The Blue Cloth is George’s working copy of the libretto too, as nearly every page (and particularly the ending) contains cuts and changes in his hand. Thus it is hardly the definitive libretto text, more a work of stagecraft-in-progress for his collaboration with Somervell. Despite the fact that The Blue Cloth postdates The Red Cloth, it isn’t a finished work for publication. The latter, ironically enough, is the almost clean typescript The Red Cloth, with George’s careful illustrations. Being earlier (1911-12), The Red Cloth must be the version he worked on with Michel Fokine and which, we know from later events (see George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, p. 434), was going into the book of George’s ballet libretti for which Fokine offered to write the preface.
To sum up, The Red Cloth (1911-12) is the slim libretto of the work, almost its barest ‘treatment’ as a ‘Comedy without words’ (its subtitle), and The Blue Cloth (1912-14), subtitled ‘A wordless Comedy’, is the full production libretto. One could say that The Red Cloth is the Ballets Russes libretto, as they were the company that it was intended for under their choreographer Fokine, and The Blue Cloth is the Moscow Arts libretto, as both Somervell and Kittie attest that the Moscow Arts was going to stage it in October 1914. I was therefore quite wrong to suggest the title was changed from ‘Blue’ to ‘Red’ because red in Russian traditionally meant ‘beautiful’; more likely it was changed from ‘Red’ to ‘Blue’ because in the Russia of 1914 red was the colour of subversion. On the front page of Somervell’s copy of the libretto, Red is crossed out of the title The Red Cloth and replaced by Blue, but to complicate matters a square label proclaims the title as ABU-NÂSI, the name of the ‘young donkey’ who plays a vital part in the plot, and ABU-NÂSI is the only title given on page 1 of the typescript of The Blue Cloth. Perhaps George’s use of an Arab word is further evidence that the ballet is a parody of Scheherazade.
Even though The Blue Cloth is a greatly expanded and sometimes radically changed version of The Red Cloth, one cannot say it is a ‘completely new work’ by George Calderon. But taken together with Somervell’s score signed and dated ‘October 1914’, it certainly qualifies as a ‘complete new work’ by George because it is so different from the text of The Red Cloth and thanks to Somervell was finished and ready to be staged.
The last page of Arthur Somervell’s score for The Blue Cloth
Plot of The Red Cloth. Setting: the harem of a Cairo sheikh in the early nineteenth century. The Sheikh (40) comes down to breakfast and is conducted to a divan by his wife Hanesha (20), who makes a fuss of him. He eats a ragout that makes him feel queasy, but still goes off to work. Hanesha and her Odalisques make merry. They take a red cloth from a coffer and wave it from a window. Hanesha’s lover Shemseddîn sees the signal and appears. Jubilation and merrymaking. Suddenly they hear the Sheikh returning with stomach gripes. Shemseddîn departs. The women tend the Sheikh, leave him sleeping, and go off to market. Enter a servant to tidy the room. He takes the red cloth, which has been serving as a table cloth, and shakes it out of the window. Shemseddîn reappears, the Sheikh rouses, chases Shemseddîn round the room, bundles him into the coffer, locks it, and goes off to seek justice from the Pasha. The women return, hear Shemseddîn’s knocking, release him, fetch the pet donkey Abu-Nâsi, talk into his ear, put him in the box, and relock it. They hear the Sheikh returning with the Pasha and executioners, and run into the garden with all their wares from the market. The Sheikh describes dramatically how he fought with Shemseddîn. The women return as if from market and Hanesha is flung before the Pasha. The Sheikh opens the coffer imprisoning his wife’s lover, to reveal it is only a donkey. ‘Everyone is astonished and then indignant with the Sheikh’, but the Odalisques explain the Sheikh’s ‘hallucination’ by ‘indigestion’, he ‘laughs heartily at his own mistake’, and the red cloth is spread on the table for celebratory food.
Plot of The Blue Cloth. The setting is still the Sheikh’s harem, but the period is later: his wife smokes cigarettes. She is called Zillah. The set is different and the blue cloth ‘hangs over gallery balustrade up R’. The Sheikh’s entry is more portentous and Zillah ‘blandishes him’. Preparation of the ragout takes up much more stage business, during which the donkey ‘wanders on’. The women are directed to act ‘Abu-Nâsi! Abu-Nâsi! Abu-Nâsi! Honour and glory to Abu-Nâsi! His bells jingle. They surround him and talk to him’ and there is even more business with him. When the Sheikh has left, feeling queasy, the women take the blue cloth from the balustrade and wave it out of the window. When Shemseddîn appears, Zillah kisses the blue cloth, spreads it on the table, and the women have a party. The Sheikh returns. After much ado and a lullaby, he falls asleep and the women go off to market. The servant shakes the blue cloth out of the window. Shemseddîn reappears.There is much more business for him this time as he plays up to ‘Zillah’ on the divan, who is actually the Sheikh. It ends the same way: the Sheikh imprisons Shemseddîn in the coffer, goes to fetch the Pasha, the women release Shemseddîn and replace him with Abu-Nâsi. They rush off with their ‘marketings’ before the Sheikh appears with the Pasha. On their reappearance ‘from market’, there is more business before the coffer is opened, the blue cloth is spread on the table for a feast of fruit, and all ends in ‘General Dance’.
One must admire Arthur Somervell for finishing the music despite never seeing George again after 4 August 1914. Mind you, he wrote in his memoirs that the action was ‘quick and very amusing’, so he must have enjoyed it (according to George’s timeline, the ballet should have lasted about 30 minutes). Somervell completed it by the middle of October 1914. At that time George was on his way to a hospital at Dunkirk to be treated for a benign enlarged prostate. He was wounded at Ypres on 29 October 1914 and returned to London on 1 November. It’s surprising that, so far as we know, he never contacted Somervell again, but we know that George’s commitment to the Front overrode so much else.
When war was declared, Martin Shaw had finished the music for George’s and William Caine’s pantomime The Brave Little Tailor but the project had to be dropped because something based on a German fairytale was no longer performable in Britain. Somervell’s commitment to George and the future of The Blue Cloth is moving: if he hadn’t kept George’s libretto and completed his own music after the outbreak of war, we would never have known The Blue Cloth existed. Let us hope that the music will be given its first performance soon, and one day the ballet.
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SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.