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.

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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

Very Old Cambridge Tales 5: ‘Stone’s Story’

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?!

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 27

16 January 2024

Friedrich Hölderlin, c. 1792, by Franz Carl Hiemer

I translated a few poems as a teenager and student (Rilke, Brecht, Hölderlin, Pushkin, Tiutchev, Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, Brodsky), but bothered to see only a couple published. The fact was, I didn’t take verse translation very seriously. I had no desire to translate a series, or all, of a poet’s works. It was a purely experimental activity: I was seized by certain poems and felt an unstoppable urge to ‘write them in my own language’, learning a lot about metre, rhyme, register etc in the process. The original poem was the thing, not the occupation of translating poetry. Gradually the whole activity lapsed. I even came to believe no poem could be adequately created in another language, and that Henry Vaughan was right when he wrote: ‘Those that lack the genius of verse, fall to translating.’

O fallacem hominum spem! From time to time in the last eight years or so, the opening lines of a poem written by Hölderlin in his ‘Madness’ (1807-43) have spoken themselves over in my mind and I’ve gone to the whole poem and read it. There’s nothing particularly strange about this, as I take lots of poets down off my shelves and dip into them, nearly every day. This poem, however, is written by Hölderlin as though it is his lover ‘Diotima’ (Susette Gontard) speaking. It is ‘voiced’, as they say these days, for Susette, who had died at least five years earlier. She is speaking from a kind of Platonic paradise and breaks off in line 3 of verse 13. Very weirdly, I was reading the poem a few months ago when I suddenly ‘heard’ what Susette was going on to say to Hölderlin, and completed the poem (in German, and it fitted the Alcaic metre). This has never happened to me before.

So now the poem, and Susette’s voice, have taken me over and I am ‘translating’ it; writing it in English. The Alcaic (i.e. classical Greek) metre, which Hölderlin was very fond of, isn’t easy and produces weird vocal bendings in English, but that goes very well with the ethereal beauty of the poem, its leaps of syntax, sense and (some might say) sanity. The first two verses came more or less straight out in English, the rest are proceeding at about one every four days… I’m sorry I can’t give a sample, but WordPress finds it too difficult to produce the layout that is necessary to present Hölderlin’s Alcaic stanzas correctly.

I  never remotely expected to be translating this poem — or any others for that matter. After working on it a few days, I begin to feel that what draws me to the challenge is that the whole poem is a tender monologue addressed to Hölderlin by someone dead, it is a supremely convincing female voice (presumably echoing how he knew Susette spoke), but the whole thing seems a dialogue between them, and yet was written by one person, Hölderlin himself — in other words there are, as it were, two utterances occupying the same space. That, I see now, is what Susette’s final words, that just came to me in German, are trying to tell him: that she may be ‘dead’ but they live together in the logosphere (Äther der Worte). I will post an image of my translation at some point…if I complete it!

20 January
Lieutenant-General Jürgen-Joachim von Sandrart, the German commander of NATO’s Multinational Corps Northeast, i.e. guarding Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, has given a long interview about the risk of Russia swiftly occupying these countries ‘a few years after a break in the fighting for Ukraine’ (today’s Times, p. 38). In my view, this could happen either after a ‘successful’ (for Putin) conclusion in Ukraine or an ‘unsuccessful’ one, as in the latter case a Blitzkrieg annexation of the Baltic states could be the price for Putin staying in power. Two years ago, I suggested NATO should always have been ready to deter an invasion of Ukraine by positioning a seriously threatening force in the Suwalki Gap (leading to the Baltic states between Russian Kaliningrad and Belarus) and another in Poland opposite Brest in Belarus. Horrifyingly, General von Sandrart confirms that NATO still is not coordinated enough to do this at the critical Suwalki Gap.

One of the most interesting parts of his interview, though, was when he said:

There is a growing realisation that deterring an attack on NATO soil is not just a job for soldiers, but a task for the whole of society. It’s not a thing we can outsource to the armed forces or the military so that the rest of society can sit back and say ‘they’re already on the case’. Quite the contrary. How resilient are our societies? Are we prepared to fight? I think we need to accept in our societies that we are fighting for our right to argue with each other.

He is absolutely right. Most people in Britain are mentally not remotely prepared for such a war. It reminds me of Churchill after the Munich Agreement coming out on the night streets of London seething with people enjoying themselves, and saying: ‘Those poor people! They little know what they will have to face.’

23 January
We have been on two long train journeys. I had forgotten how maddening the constantly repeated security message is: If you see something that doesn’t look right, speak to staff or text British Transport Police on 61016. We’ll sort it. See it, say it, sorted. The last eight words fall again and again like ball-peen hammer blows on your head. Slowly it dawns that it is effective because it is so maddening and the voice so in yer ear. The only problem is, the speaker does not dentalise the d in the last word, he glottalises it, and he thins the preceding e sound to a dull i, so that the word sounds like an imperative: See it, say it, sorti[t]. In other words, the message seems to be concluding with ‘sort it yourself’ — which is not what we want to hear, and the very opposite of the message’s intended meaning, I would have thought.

In 2019 and 2021 Hexham in Northumberland was voted on Rightmove the happiest place to live in Britain. Having just visited it, I can actually believe this. Everyone whom we had anything to do with was nice, polite, welcoming, their own person, unstressed and unintrusively conversive. Such a contrast, I felt, to the earnest ideological self-consciousness of Cambridge’s chattering classes. Perhaps it has something to do with Hexham’s smallness (about 13,000 people), the presence of deep history, its proximity to the rural way of life. The people somehow felt all at ease with it, and that was catching.

This calm sense was palpable in the Abbey, founded by St Wilfrid in 674; as present wandering around it and being helped by volunteers as at an evening Eucharist with about twenty in the congregation. The Abbey contains artefacts from the whole range of its history — and earlier. This is an image of the Flavinus Stone, nearly two thousand years old, which you see as you go in, before (I seem to recall) any Christian imagery:

Click the image to enlarge.

It’s a memorial nearly nine feet high to a Roman Standard bearer, with the inscription To the Venerated Departed: Here Lies Flavinus A Horse Rider of the Cavalry Regiment of Petriana Standard Bearer of the Troop of Candidus Aged 25, of 7 Years’ Service. Probably it had been used by St Wilfrid’s builders as part of the foundations. I won’t present the arithmetic, but Flavinus could have been born within a decade of Christ’s crucifixion. It was somehow very moving to see this young man commemorated — as it were included — in a great church of the Christian era.

30 January
With bitterness and frustration, Sam 1 (Russia) and I have decided we cannot, after all, have a Sam&Sam stall at this year’s British Association of Slavists and East European Specialists (BASEES) conference in Cambridge. We were booked for the 2020 one but that was cancelled by Covid, and for the 2022 one but that was cancelled by the invasion. This year the conference itself has not been cancelled, but we have had to pull out for a tangle of reasons. Our Russian books would (we have this on good authority) be boycotted by a hard core of Ukrainophile and Russophobe delegates. This could mushroom into an ‘incident’ which, if it got into the media, could cause Sam1 problems in Russia. In any case, he and I accept that quite apart from the active boycotters the stall would probably be regarded as in bad taste by far more delegates, and avoided, so we would hardly sell any books. We agreed in three brief emails  that ‘people now look upon anything Russian with disgust. It’s a catastrophe for genuine Russian culture’. The Sam&Sam stall has been ready to go since 2020. We must simply pack it all up again and wait for peace. Some BASEES officers are more optimistic about this than I am. In the meantime, we can only hope that an advertisement in the conference literature might lead to us selling us some books online.

3 February
People ask me what my ‘frightening realism’ about Russia is based on. Well, I did live there for two and a half years under Communism; I have been reading Russian literature in the original since the age of nineteen; as a professional requirement I have had to study the whole of Russia’s history. But, essentially, I have tried to confront the full zhut’ that I objectively know the country is capable of. Just as there is hardly a concept in English to express vran’e (pathological self-deceiving mendacity), so zhut’ cannot be adequately expressed in English: it’s a combination of extreme, casual, mindless violence and treating human beings as literally things, not flinching at robbing, raping, torturing, destroying them. Understanding Russian claustrophobia and paranoia also helps.

Today I decided to post on Calderonia next time my very old (1977) Cambridge tale ‘Stone’s Story’. I was never going to, as it attracted criticism from friends at the time and I recognise it’s not a strong story, but it was specifically written to try to convey to Brits how irrational and simply deadly Russian life can be (the fact that it is set in Brezhnev’s Russia is irrelevant). There are, I promise, no more Very Old Cambridge Tales after this…

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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

A stunning discovery

Mr Garry Humphreys is writing a major book about the English composer Arthur Somervell (1863-1937), as well as compiling a catalogue raisonné of Somervell’s compositions. On 6 September last year he emailed me to ask whether I thought a typescript entitled The Blue Cloth — Abu Nâsi: A Wordless Comedy, accompanying a full score of Somervell’s incidental music to the work, was the same as George Calderon’s ballet libretto The Red Cloth: A Comedy without Words.

From the very words Abu Nâsi (which refer to a tame donkey in the script and appear to mean in Arabic ‘Father of Clarification’), I was able to say that the text Humphreys has seen at the Royal College of Music is a version of the ballet libretto The Red Cloth, which I discuss on pages 338-39 of my biography George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. The question is, of course, whether The Blue Cloth is an earlier or later version of The Red Cloth. On Garry Humphreys’s advice, I ordered a copy of the text from RCM’s archive at the end of October. Not having received it by the end of November, I reordered it and for good measure inquired about a copy of Somervell’s music as well. I am still waiting…

On the typescript that Humphreys has seen, George’s address is given as 42 Well Walk, Hampstead, whereas on the typescript that belonged to Kittie, and of which I have a copy by courtesy of Mr John Pym, the address is Heathland Lodge, Hampstead Heath. Since George and Kittie did not move from Heathland Lodge to 42 Well Walk until the end of 1912, one might conclude that The Blue Cloth is the later, even ‘definitive’ version. But Kittie’s copy, The Red Cloth, which she described as ‘very valuable’, contains changes in George’s hand as well as his manuscript cartoons accompanying the typed text, which suggests to me that it postdates The Blue Cloth and is the ‘master copy’.

George’s cartoon of the Sheikh, who thinks he has caught his wife’s lover in the coffer he is sitting on.

My theory about why the ballet was renamed The Red Cloth is that on Kittie’s copy she had written ‘This was going to be produced by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1914 when the War came’ and red would be far more attractive in a Russian title, as krasnyi (scarlet) has always been Russia’s favourite colour and used to mean ‘beautiful’. Originally, the libretto was created by George for Michel Fokine and West European performance. Because Kittie’s copy had the Heathland Lodge address on it, I concluded George had written it in 1911 or early 1912. In June 1912, however, Fokine resigned from Ballets Russes and did not come to London with the company, hence George’s offer to the Moscow Arts, which was perhaps facilitated by George’s admirer and correspondent Vsevolod Meyerhold.

The gratifying thing for me is that my hypothesis of the date of composition of The Red Cloth, as presented in the biography, and Kittie’s account of a planned 1914 Moscow Arts production (which when I first read it in the 1980s seemed implausible), are validated by this paragraph from Arthur Somervell’s as yet unpublished memoirs, written in 1935, which Garry Humphreys has most kindly shown me in his transcription:

In 1912 George Calderon called on me with a wordless play to which he wished me to write music. The scene was set in a Harem, and the action was quick and very amusing, the end being a climax of absurdity, which was very much heightened since the audience knew what the end would be before the discomfited husband, and they watched his disillusionment with ever increasing delight. Calderon said there was no hurry, as he hadn’t got the promise of a performance, but early in 1914 he told me that he had got a promise from the Moscow Arts Theatre, and that the production would take place in October of that year. I had already made a start and played him some of the beginning. Then he went to the War, and though we hardly expected it could be played in October, I went ahead with it and it was finished and scored by the middle of the month. Alas, Calderon never returned! He was reported ‘missing’ in the autumn and was never heard of again; so The Blue Cloth went on to the shelf. We were very much shocked about Calderon’s death, he was one of those men for whom I felt a real affection, although I knew him so slightly.

There is, of course, a factual error here, as George was not ‘missing’ after his wound ‘in the autumn’ at Ypres; he recovered, was reported missing after the Third Battle of Krithia, and is now known to have died at Gallipoli on 4 June 1915. But Somervell’s memoir of George, as ‘one of those men for whom I felt a real affection’, is invaluable.

Obviously, now that we have the complete music to George’s ballet The Blue/Red Cloth for Michel Fokine, and George’s complete illustrated libretto, it could be performed for the first time! (No music is known to have been commissioned for the other four ballets or ‘mimodramas’ that George wrote originally for Ballets Russes.) The Blue/Red Cloth is indeed set in ‘the Harem of the SHEIKH’s house in Cairo; early 19th Century’, its plot probably derives from one of the Tales of the Arabian Nights (although I’ve not been able to discover which), and it is a comic version of Fokine’s sensational and trail blazing ballet Scheherazade, which George must have seen in London during the 1911 and 1912 Ballets Russes seasons. I hope to return to the subject of a future premiere of the Calderon/Somervell collaboration — giving a full account of the plot of The Blue/Red Cloth — when I have received copies of the libretto and music from the Royal College of Music.

I cannot thank Garry Humphreys enough for contacting me, and wish him every success with his work on Arthur Somervell, which I am sure will be definitive and shine needed light into further corners of British music in the Edwardian period. I would hope to write about it one day on this blog. I am also deeply beholden to the trustees of Arthur Somervell’s estate for giving me permission to quote the above passage from his memoirs.

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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

NEW YEAR

Tough Christmas chrysanths

Whether you are stalwart subscribers to Calderonia since 30 July 2014, or casual callers from across the globe to posts on, say, limericks, John Hamilton, paradoxes, the Third Battle of Krithia, dogs or Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I wish you a very happy new year.

Like a lot of people, I suppose, I remember many sermons throughout my life. But I remember each of them for one thing, not their detail: Michael Ramsay booming a long passage of Euripedes down the nave of the University church in Greek, for instance, or the local priest telling how as a curate in a women’s prison he found himself standing next to one of Britain’s most heinous killers, whose name I can’t even bring myself to write. The only sermon I recall in some detail was delivered hastily from some very small sheets of paper, standing on the sanctuary step, by Rowan Williams when he was but a curate at another local church. Its subject was ‘Freshness’.

He was glossing God’s words in Revelation 21:5 ‘Behold, I make all things new’. Of course, Williams related them to Christ’s transformative message and resurrection, but he concentrated on the sheer power of ‘newness’ and ‘freshness’ as concepts. I think the meaning of these words is really so mysterious that perhaps it can only be defined by reference to their opposites. It would take a Socrates to identify the Ideas behind ‘new’ and ‘fresh’. They are extremely potent ideas, though, and we surely recognise that in the commencement of a new year. Thank goodness, a year is a cycle, a circle, so there is always the opportunity of a new one — a new start, new events, fresh hope.

There will be at least two major new events in my life this year. First, my Anglo-Russian publisher Sam&Sam will at last have a stall at the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies international conference at Robinson College, Cambridge (5-7 April 2024). Our 2020 appearance with my Russian co-publisher, who had already bought his air tickets and visa, was cancelled along with the conference because of Covid; the 2022 conference was cancelled because of the invasion; last year’s was held in Glasgow. Our appearance this year is not without risks, because there are plenty of extreme Russophobes about and my co-publisher’s position in Russia itself is delicate. Obviously, he cannot himself attend, and I don’t want to field questions about him. But I simply have to go forward and confront these risks, as we need to sell books. I would like to sell at least thirty copies of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius at a discounted Conference price of £20 each and, say, fifty of our books in Russian: http://www.samandsam.co.uk.

Secondly — deep breath — I shall be blogging less frequently this year and closing Calderonia on 30 July 2024. To be precise, I shall cease blogging personally on that day, but the site will continue to be viewable and if there are any significant new discoveries about George’s life beyond that date I will post about them. In effect, Calderonia will turn into a text of over half a million words, a research tool, a kind of website, for interested future readers and biographers. I do hope this will not be a massive disappointment to any of you, who have been magnificently loyal followers for so long. There are many reasons for stopping now, but essentially (I hope you will agree) ten years is a pretty good run.

As King Lear (Act V, sc. 2, l. 11) puts it: ‘ripeness is all’. Or perhaps I should say ‘freshness is all’. Or as Mandel’shtam put it: ‘Flowers are immortal’. Newness is never old.

Fresh Freesias

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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

Short story: ‘Crox’

                                                                                                    In memoriam John Baddeley

A dripping mass of leaves and twigs slapped across the window. The bus began very slowly to take the hill.

Near the top, in an oval of meeting branches, a horse and rider were visible, reduced to immobility by the distance, the drizzle, and the drops on the glass, as if fixed with a few blobs on a miniature.

The bus growled closer. He could see that the rider must be a girl. The animal’s bright hooves flopped through the puddles and steam fumed from its sides. But she sat completely straight, her head slightly raised, her thighs gripping firmly. As they passed, the boy glimpsed a pale, finely chiselled nose, blue eyes, and short fair hair beneath the helmet.

Lone rider!.. Dare he turn?

‘Smoking a bit heavy aren’t you, son?’ said the gaffer in the seat in front, and moved further off.

Half-term seemed really long, even if they were going back the day after tomorrow. Just a few days off, and you began to relax, to live ‘properly’, to take some pretty unusual things for granted. That blonde bombshell, for instance.

But there was the cathedral above the shingle roofs, here he was clambering down from the upper deck, now he was about to set off into the city centre to do his ‘shopping’, and –

He frowned. Opposite the bus station was the side entrance to a department store. He knew that it had an amazing modern bookshop. He looked round casually, crossed the road, and half an hour later emerged with a copy of Brave New World.

He set off in the direction of the old, unbombed part of the city, where his mother had told him to buy a new pair of black shoes at a half-timbered shop called Hartley & Brown. But then he stopped. What was wrong with buying them from Wisemans, which he had just come out of? They had a whole floor of shoe shops, strip-lit, glassy, and open plan. It would mean he need not go near the cathedral, whose presence he found oppressive. He was already a bit behind, so going back into Wisemans would buy him time.

He walked out of the lift, turned right into the footwear department, and the first thing that caught his eye was the words ‘For the Teenager’ on the wall in a far corner. He made for it over new, seemingly perfumed carpeting.

A girl, or, well, a young woman, was sitting to the right of the till with her legs stretched in front of her, her hands together in her lap, her eyes open, but apparently dreaming. He approached. With a little jerk of the head, she stood up, smiled, and came towards him. She had short, wavy black hair, a thin line of lipstick, and wore black trousers, a light-grey top, and black open cardigan, beneath which he registered small, young, but perfectly formed breasts.

‘Can I help you..?’

She smiled even more, with her bright dark eyes, and looked at him comfortably but very directly. In a flash he realised that she was only a year or two older than himself.

‘Yes. Thank you very much. I’m looking for a pair of black shoes – ’

Suddenly a large, florid man erupted through the curtain to the left of the till.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ he effused, adding: ‘That’s all right, Anita, just watch.’

‘Yes, Mr Brimley.’

‘I’m looking for a pair of black shoes for less formal occasions…’

‘Certainly, sir. And what size would that be?’

‘Nine and a half.’

The man actually closed his eyes, wrung his hands, and cocked his head in ecstasy at the ceiling.

‘We have just the shoe for you, sir. Anita, fetch the gentleman a pair of Crox size nine and half, and make them snappy, hahaha!’

The girl darted through the curtain, darted back, and handed her boss the box. He removed the lid with a flourish, rustled apart the tissue paper, and presented the creation on his open palm.

‘There we are, sir, the very latest in teenage fashion. Crox from Liverpool!’

The boy eyed them critically. They weren’t actually black, but a very dark, night blue. It was matt with sort of contour lines visible in the leather; you couldn’t polish it. And they were gussetted; no laces. They looked rather tapered, and their black rubber soles were fiercely serrated, hence, presumably, their name.

‘Can I try them on?’

‘Of course, sir, of course!’ The manager beckoned him to a foot-rest and gently, professionally fitted one for him with a horn. He pressed the toe.

‘There you are, sir, plenty of growing room, they will fit perfectly. Put the other one on, would you, and try walking about… How do you find them?’

‘Very comfortable. Very comfortable.’

‘I thought so. They suit you, sir, in fact if you don’t mind me saying so they are you!’

The boy ruminated. They were not, perhaps, what his mother had in mind, but you were allowed to wear gussets in the sixth form, and he was sure they would cost less than the money she had given him. And he would be able to wear them outside school. The bloke was right: they were ‘him’, they were slightly sneakerish and mod, his friends would ask him where he had bought them.

‘Thank you. Yes, they’re excellent. I’ll take them. How much do they cost?’

‘Anita, that will be three pounds nineteen and sixpence from the gentleman, please.’

The girl bobbed, smiled with both mouth and eyes, and went round to the till. This was more money than the boy was expecting, but even so he would be bringing his mother plenty of change. He paid. The bloke reassembled the box, slid it into a paper bag, and thrust it out.

‘There we are, sir. It’s been a pleasure to serve you!’

He had hardly walked eight paces when he heard Brimley say something to the girl about ‘butter up’. He half-glanced behind him. Brimley was disappearing through the curtain, but the girl gave the boy her nice smile.

With his two paper bags, he ambled to W.H. Smith’s and bought a German newspaper. He read it ostentatiously over lunch in an unpretentious café he knew, then smoked a miniature cigar with his coffee.

The bus home filled up rapidly. At the first village a bulky middle-aged couple got on. There were only two empty seats downstairs. The woman made it to the back seat, the man gripped the rail and swayed there with a stick.

‘Why don’t you sit down?’ she said to him.

‘I will do, when this cowboy has moved!’

The boy started. He was blocking the window seat. Presumably the bloke was referring to his artificial leather jacket. The boy got up and stood in the gangway. With a dramatic sigh, the bloke struggled to the window seat.

The boy resumed reading Brave New World, which was to be a set book. Suddenly, he remembered the shoes. He put the book back in its bag, manoeuvred the lid off the box on his lap, and parted the tissue paper. The natural light accentuated the contour lines on them and brought out the blue. They were distinctly pointed…and he wasn’t sure he liked the jagged soles after all. Crikey, now he looked at them more closely, had he made a terrible mistake? But no: they were allowed more relaxed shoes in the sixth form, and these shoes would definitely go with what he wore among his friends. No, they were what he wanted. But what would his mother say?

She caught him as he was passing through the kitchen, and exploded.

‘Those are aw-ful! What on earth were you thinking of? Or were you thinking at all in that head of yours? I can’t believe it! I gave you six pounds ten to buy a good pair of black leather lace-ups from Hartley and Brown, and you come home with winkle-pickers! Where did you get them?’

‘At Wisemans…’

‘A cheap and nasty department store! Why? Why? You can’t possibly wear those to school – ’

‘But we are allowed to wear gussets and less formal things now.’

‘Well you’re not going to! You flatly ignored what I told you, and have made me buy you a pair of vulgar winkle-pickers. They’re not even black! Why do you do these things to me?! You won’t be able to wear them at weddings, funerals, or anything else – everyone will think you’re a teddy boy!’

‘They won’t think I’m that…’

‘Well. You can take them straight back. Tomorrow. I don’t know who managed to sell you this rubbish, but you can go straight over there, demand my money back, and then go and do what I told you to.’

Drained and almost trembling, he went up to his room. Dammit…perhaps he hadn’t thought carefully enough before he bought Crox. He definitely wanted to keep them, though. He got out his National Savings book and counted the money in his wallet. He couldn’t afford them, given his other expenses. But he was in despair at the idea of persuading that fat arse Brimley to give him his money back – and he was sure Brimley had nothing ‘For the Teenager’ that he could exchange for them, so what was he going to do? It was an impossible situation. Tomorrow would be like going to the scaffold. Maybe if his mother took the shoes back, she’d be able to persuade Brimley… But she would never do that.

When the boy entered the shop in the middle of the afternoon next day, Brimley was attending to a mother and son and did not acknowledge his arrival. Anita, however, noticed him and smiled.

After an agonizing wait, Brimley saw his satisfied customers off and his eyes lighted on the boy. He beamed.

‘Well well, sir, have you come back for more? What can we do for you?’

The boy went over to the two of them and tendered the shoebox to Brimley on both hands.

‘Er, I’m afraid there is a bit of a problem, Mr Brimley… I haven’t worn the shoes, because my mother doesn’t like them.’

‘Your mother doesn’t like them?’ He was genuinely taken aback.

‘No. You see, she sent me out to buy some shoes and I bought the wrong ones. Now she would like you to take them back and…refund her money.’

‘Oh no, son, I’m very sorry, we can’t do that. I thought you were buying the shoes, not your mother! Don’t you like them?’

‘Yes, yes. I do. But you see, she gave me the money to buy a pair of black leather lace-ups…for school. And I rather forgot… My mother is… She doesn’t understand shoes like Crox.’

‘I see – I think. Where is the receipt?’

‘I…I can’t find it anywhere, Mr Brimley. I think I lost it…’

‘Well, I can’t give you any money back, and we don’t sell school wear, but I might just be able to help you. How much is your mother prepared to spend?’

‘Yesterday she gave me six pound ten and I’ve brought the change with me.’

‘Right, son. Wait here. Put the shoes over there and I’ll see if I can fix something up with one of my colleagues. I can’t promise anything. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Anita, watch the shop.’

He adjusted his tie, put on an important-morbid expression, and sailed away.

When he had gone, Anita sat down beside the till and looked across at the boy. She stretched her legs out and placed her hands in her lap as she had yesterday. In her concentration on him, however, she slid her hands down the sides of her groin. She bent forward slightly and even moved her hands up and down in the creases.

‘Good grief, what’s she doing, that’s her pubic hair, her mons Veneris,’ thought the boy in shock, but instantly knew he could never think of such a girl in that way. 

She leant further forward, smiling at him with her beautiful, sensitive mouth and her dark eyes, which were as wide as wide, as still as still on him. He felt she saw directly, unwaveringly, lovingly right into him.

‘What happened?’ she asked him softly.

© Patrick Miles, 2021

Happy Christmas to all our readers!

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 26

7 November 2023
Ukraine must win. There is no alternative, because Putin will never offer a true peace, only a breather before making another attempt to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign state then torture, murder, deport and imprison its people. Many people still have not understood that this is what the madman wants to do. ‘Stalemate’, a ‘frozen conflict’, would be a variant of the same: a not-peace. Despite the palpable wavering in American opinion, I agree with Garry Kasparov and other voices that the defence of Ukraine is the defence of the democratic West and its values, so the West must throw everything into it. Did we learn nothing from Hitler’s predations? It is the defence of ourselves, against both Russia and China, as the latter is undoubtedly awaiting the outcome of Putin’s ‘special military operation’ before unleashing its own on Taiwan. We know that at their recent summit Putin and Xi agreed that they were going to ‘change’ the post-1945 world order ‘utterly’, which means terrorize and totalitarianise it. Russia’s war has been disastrous for Russia so far, but reports from Ukrainian generals indicate that Ukraine is running out of troops below the age at which Calderon tried to sign up in 1914 and was considered too old (45). Yet only outright Russian defeat could remove Putin and give us true peace.

I realised today that my views on what we have to do to help Ukraine win would probably shock a lot of my friends, so I had better be careful how I express some of them publicly. First, if (God forbid) Trump wins the presidential election, Europe will have to go it alone in ensuring a Ukrainian victory; again there will be no alternative, and we shall all have to hike our defence spending far above the NATO minimum of 2% GDP. It would be war by any other name, but Europe could not look itself in the face again if it let Ukraine down. Second, I agree with the White House’s former Russia director, Matt Dimmick, that it is no good ‘drip-feeding weapons into Ukraine, allowing President Zelensky’s forces to defend territory but not giving them an advanced enough armoury to defeat Russia’: we must give them the most sophisticated weapons we have, and which Russia has not, in order to save Ukraine’s young blood and win the war as fast as possible. (Dimmick rightly said as well that ‘Ukraine would be in a much stronger position if all the weapons systems the US was providing now had been dispatched at the beginning of the war’.) Third, we must call Putin’s nuclear bluff (there would probably be a revolution in Russia if he used nuclear weapons, and he knows it). We have been far too frightened of him. You may remember me saying at the beginning of the war that we should have threatened him by bringing a serious NATO force up to the Kaliningrad Gap, and positioned another opposite Brest threatening the thug Lukashenka. We should do something similar now, without setting a boot on Russian territory (that is always a fatal mistake). We have not, militarily, been anywhere near resourceful, proactive and threatening enough. I won’t elaborate.

Meanwhile, communications with Russia have become more dangerous than ever. The other day a friend of over fifty years standing simply emailed me a beautiful recent photograph of Chekhov’s and Olga Leonardovna’s graves at Moscow’s Novodevichii Monastery, with no message, no caption, sans mots, but I knew what he meant. I emailed back this image that we took last month on the seafront at Ventnor (as usual, click on the image to magnify):

The juxtaposition of Scott’s Waverley and Turgenev’s Fathers and Children on the house front is felicitous. On the other hand, as Stephan Roman puts it in his book about the Isle of Wight and Russia (p. 126): ‘Turgenev feared the power and destructive nature of Bazarov [the novel’s Nihilist hero] from the moment that he had summoned him into existence.’ Turgenev was right: Bazarov is a quintessential force of Russian chaos.

12 November
Remembrance Sunday. Always the saddest day of the year. As Owen wrote: ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.’ Nothing approaches the sacrifice that they made for us. For our freedom. For our future. Men and women. Ukraine knows it well.

Recent subscribers may not know that between 2014 and 2018 we lived the First World War practically day to day with George Calderon and his set, and we often discussed the experience on this blog. The commemoration of the centenary was eviscerating, and I wonder whether those even closer to it than I was, for example Andrew Tatham and Clare Hopkins, feel that it has moulded their attitude to Remembrance today. For  myself, I can’t say that 2014-18 was a catharsis, but I somehow feel more at peace with the tragedy now. I simply feel that George and his fallen comrades will be ‘aways with me’.

At the same time, the terrifying, incomprehensible self-destructiveness of the human race, and the unrecoverable loss that wars inflict on us, slay me now worse than ever. During glasnost’ and perestroika many Russian intellectuals, scholars and commentators felt free at last to talk publicly of the ‘possibly irrreparable damage to the gene pool’ inflicted by the Civil War and Stalin’s genocide — literally, the loss in mental intelligence to subsequent generations of the Russian people. We can, perhaps, see some truth in that…

20 November
Another sign of age: picking up pristine GPO rubber bands from the pavement for one’s own use. When I was a boy, I used to think the old men I saw doing that sort of thing must be hopelessly demented. But I haven’t taken to wearing a flat cap yet.

26 November
The mention of Walter Scott above was not just felicitous, but fortuitous: we have been in Edinburgh this week and Scott was everywhere. In Princes Street Gardens a massive Christmas Market was in rude action right up to the plinth of the Scott Monument, but the remarkably good statue of Scott by John Steell in the base of the Monument was the still eye of the storm. ‘What would he think of it all?’ someone asked.

I decided to read my first unabridged Scott novel, Rob Roy. It has been an extremely slow read (380 pages), although in places the plot moves like lightning. The source of the slowness, it seems to me, is the very art of Scott’s long, syntactically sealed and rather heavily punctuated sentences, which I imagine are simply beyond the patience of readers to parse today, hence the decline in his popularity. But strain as you might, you couldn’t ever accuse these sentences of redundancy. Every word he uses seems the only right word. The impression is of a great rationalist — a Scottish Rationalist, presumably. His English is perhaps far too rational for us today. Yet that sense in his style of ‘what you see is all there can be, and that’s the highest function of language’, is offset by the sheer Gothic energy of his dialogue in Scots. The alternation of the Rational and the Gothic is irresistible, and often very funny. Scott’s writing seems to me the perfect foil to Jane Austen’s.

The ‘get-in’ at Nicolson Square Theatre, 1974, and the same site today

We also visited 21 Hill Place, which we occupied as Nicolson Square Theatre during the Edinburgh Fringe of 1974-76 with productions such as Ivanov and The Cherry Orchard. The improvement in the property as shown by the images above cannot be put down purely to colour photography. Unbeknown to us at the time, it was an old and distinguished building: https://www.edinburgharchitecture.co.uk/21-hill-place-royal-college-of-surgeons-edinburgh. The young company was wonderful, but standing outside the locked doors of the building today I found the memories of mounting eight productions in two years provoked not so much nostalgia as neuralgia!

4 December
As I announced in May, I wanted to give Calderonia followers a foretaste of my 2024 book of short stories, now called The White Bow/Ghoune, by posting some this year. The last story will be ‘Crox’, to go up on 18 December. To me, at least, it seems appropriately upbeat for Christmas. A couple of words of background may help. Like nearly everything in these stories, it is based on my own experience and observation. A boy in the Lower Sixth at the grammar school I attended fell in love with a ‘shop girl’, as she was then referred to, they married, she accompanied him to university, and they lived happily ever after. I did not know them personally, but it was the talk of the school and town.

A slightly worrying aspect of this story, however, is that, as the sheet from my 1978 notebook shows, and indeed the unfinished start of the story from 1979, I invented the brand of ‘Crox’ 45 years ago, but everyone now knows the shoes that are called Crocs, whose company, I gather from the Web, was founded in 2002 and is litigiously protective of its name. As far as I can see, my Crox have nothing whatsoever in common with their Crocs. But it will be interesting to see if at some point they snap at me. Everyone, of course, will assume I stole the name from the very successful American shoe company, but I have no intention of changing the story’s title, because (a) I can prove it predates Crocs by 24 years, and (b) I want Crox in my story on account of its similarity to crux.

The dedicatee of this story is a school friend who died four years ago. As fifteen/sixteen-year-olds we played Jonathan Routh-style pranks on a number of shoe shops in Canterbury and Margate by inquiring whether they sold ‘Berkers’ — an imaginary brand of heavy black shoe that made the wearer look a berk. This certainly taxed our powers of improvisation, but it also led to hilarity and meeting a number of nice ‘shop girls’.

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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

Cambridge Tales 8: ‘Black Tie’

                                                                                                                     For Julian Bates

Some Ph.D. theses start from a highly specific topic and finish (are completed) with it, others start from a rather broad theme which narrows with time until it is specific. Jonathan Palmer’s thesis was of the latter type; which tend to be longer in the completion. He had begun research three years ago with the theme ‘Culture and Communication in Dante’s Commedia’. By the end of his second year, this had settled to ‘The Significance of Forms of Address in Dante’s Purgatorio’. However, the narrowing of his thesis topic had necessitated acquainting himself with swathes of linguistics, semiotics, structuralism, and even anthropology. Whereas he should have been writing up his thesis in the third and final year of his grant, he was doing that only now, in his fourth year, when the money was running out…

His income came from occasional translations and regular teaching for all the colleges. His own college had helped him by giving him free accommodation in one of its houses in return for being the ‘M.A. in Residence’ there. This brought no formal duties, it simply meant keeping an eye on the six undergraduates who lived there, in particular watching out for drug-taking and any mental problems. On the other hand, living with undergraduates had its strains. If a party raged in one of the rooms beyond midnight, it was tricky bringing it to an end single-handed. Three young women also came and went from the house. On one occasion Palmer had walked into the bathroom to have a shave, looked in the mirror as he lathered up, and beheld a pair of naked lovers in the bath behind him.

This morning, which was a dull damp one in February, he went to the kitchen to make his breakfast only to discover that the enormous communal table had been stolen. An amused undergraduate told him that it was on the roof of a nearby college hostel. He then had to deal with the bedder, who regarded him as her ally and insisted on keeping him au courant with her family matters. Today her son was ‘in the thrones’ of moving. After that, and after the five medics had left for lectures, he was able to get on with writing at his huge College desk in an alcove looking onto the garden. Then there was a quiet knock on his door.

He set down his pen, strode over to the door, threw it open, and stood rooted.

It was Peter Cathercole, the only arts student in the house. He was short, whiskery, with a thinning crown and large vivid nose. He looked at Palmer but did not speak. Palmer knew Cathercole smoked pot, and put his unusually blotchy complexion and watery blue eyes, which shifted quasi-humorously, down to that. But Cathercole said:

‘Hi. I’m sorry to bother you. Really. Last night I heard that my brother died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage. He worked at the station. They knew I’m at the College, so they contacted my tutor, and he told me after Hall – ’

For a second, Palmer was lost for words. He just managed to say:

‘That’s terrible… I’m sorry – ’

‘Yes, there was no warning…no-one suspected. The people he worked with say that one minute he had a headache, the next he collapsed unconscious and died… My tutor rang my parents, then I talked to them, and I got back late…’

‘I see…how awful…I’m glad you were with your tutor. I’m shocked…’

‘The thing is,’ continued Cathercole, and again his eyes watered and shifted almost humorously, ‘my parents are arriving today and I wondered if they could stay the night here, in the front room.’

‘Of course, of course… It’s empty, but I think it’s pretty clean.’

‘They say they will bring sleeping bags.’

‘Are you sure? We could get mattresses, and sheets…’

‘No no, it’ll be fine. My mother will organise it all. They might need to stay tomorrow night as well?’

‘No problem – as long as they’re happy sleeping there…’

‘Thanks. Thanks. I really appreciate it.’

‘I’m shocked, and really sorry…’

‘I still can’t believe it’s happened of course. It makes no sense…’

Palmer returned to his desk and looked out at the wintery garden. Cathercole’s parents must live a long way away. How come his brother was in Cambridge too? How come he worked on the railway? Had anyone known that before? Perhaps Peter and his brother were very close…

Just before one, Palmer heard Cathercole go out. Then a car arrived late afternoon with him and his parents. Before formal Hall, Palmer emerged holding his gown and met them. The father was erect, wore a pale grey suit, tie and glasses, and seemed constantly on the verge of saying something, but did not. Mrs Cathercole was short, bustling, and red-faced. Palmer expressed his condolences to them and apologised for the lack of a table to eat at.

The kitchen table materialised during the night. At breakfast, all the medical students were subdued, moved quietly about the kitchen, and promptly left for lectures. The Cathercoles breakfasted in their room.

They must have had a lot to do. They appeared in the kitchen around tea-time, when some of the medics had got in from rowing and were ravenously consuming toast and jam. It was awkward. Mrs Cathercole smiled amiably at them – to her, perhaps, they were just ‘boys’ – and Mr Cathercole hung back silently in his suit. They were in their own world. They took their son out for supper, but Palmer could hear them still coming and going from the front room when he turned his light off.

At lunchtime the following day Peter Cathercole called to say that his parents had left, having arranged the funeral, and were very grateful to him for allowing them to stay in the college house. The funeral was in three days time. Palmer decided he should go.

Although nearly twenty-eight, Jonathan Palmer had never been to a funeral before and did not possess a black tie. It was only the day before the funeral that he realised he should wear one. He did not want to shell out for one, as he could not envisage wearing it again for years. He hit on the idea of going to see Joe, the Kitchen Manager, and asking him if he could borrow one of the black ties that the white-jacketed College waiters wore. To his surprise, the request was met with gravity by Joe and the senior waiters whom he happened to be briefing for a private dinner. It was an expensive-looking woollen tie, and had to be returned immediately.

The funeral was at three o’clock. Palmer, Peter Cathercole and three of the medics gathered in the hall just after two. The three students wore ordinary ties. There was a very good sense of supporting Peter. At 2.15 a hearse glided past the end of the hedge-lined drive and a limousine stopped in the gap. Mr Cathercole appeared. Peter sighed, and with a droll twinkle said:

‘Well, this is it… I suppose I’d better go.’

Ten minutes later, a taxi came to the front door for the others.

They arrived at the Victorian chapel of the City cemetery just as the coffin was being taken from the back of the hearse. ‘Hold onto the pram!’ one of the undertakers barked at a gangly chinless youth, presumably their apprentice. They then rolled it with a rumble onto the concertina contraption whose handle the youth was gripping.

There were about twenty-five mourners, of whom eight were the dead man’s workmates from British Rail, wearing uniform. The family included two sisters. There was no sign of Peter’s tutor, so it occurred to Palmer that he was representing the College. The three students were very quiet.

The service was the most basic Prayer Book one possible, with no tributes and only a concluding hymn. It occurred to Palmer that the reason was that the Cathercole family couldn’t ‘take’ more. Within fifteen minutes they were all following the coffin out for the committal.

And this is when it hit him. They trundled the ‘pram’ between rows of tombstones over grass that had patches of wet earth between. They had fifty yards to go, the ramshackle thing bumped and pitched, the chinless youth brought up the rear, and he was hanging his head right down on his chest whilst trying to control compulsive laughter about something. Palmer noticed that the idiot’s white shirt collar was frayed and his suit greasy. Peter’s mother was beside herself with weeping and his father was holding her up. When they reached the open grave, it was surrounded by slithery peelings of brown mud. The word ‘excremental’ sprang to Palmer’s mind. The hole was like a drop. Suddenly he thought that the students, being medics, must have seen plenty of dead bodies; but their faces were pale and sombre. Then the priest started to intone and it was blatantly obvious that he said it with no feeling, that it was all cold and mechanical on account of this being the sixth time he’d taken the service that day, for someone he had never known, could feel nothing for, did not personally care anything about…and wonderfully, weirdly, outrageously, at that very moment a plane started droning overhead, climbing above the airport, and its droning merged perfectly with the priest’s droning.

Palmer was appalled. The disrespect of the chinless youth made him want to clout him. The resemblance of the mud to faeces turned his stomach. He could not bear Mrs Cathercole’s loud sobbing. The unfeelingness of the priest enraged him. He had never met Richard Cathercole, he did not know what he looked like, he wouldn’t have known who he was if he had clipped his ticket at the station, but wasn’t he worth more than this? As so often, Palmer involuntarily thought of Dante; in this case his piety, the sublimity of his religion, his art… These white shirts and black ties, the chief undertaker’s top hat and tails, the fat brass handles on the coffin and the priest’s unironed surplice were so tawdry, cheap, phoney, Victorian… It was as horrible and absurd as Richard Cathercole’s death itself.

Fuming, Palmer collected himself and walked back with the others to the chapel forecourt, where the return taxi was to meet them. Peter Cathercole came over and told them that there was going to be a ‘wake’ at the University Arms Hotel, to which they were all invited. They thanked him. The taxi arrived. The Cathercoles were shaking the hands of their son’s workmates in turn, and there were evidently some relations or friends of theirs who hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Palmer did not want to keep the taxi driver waiting, nor did he want to be the first to arrive at the wake, so after a decent pause he and the others piled into the taxi and he told the driver to drop them at the marketplace, from where each could make his way to the University Arms when he liked.

As the taxi bowled along, he furiously debated his position. There was no denying, it would be polite to go to the wake. But he wouldn’t actually ‘know’ anyone there, and no-one would know who he ‘was’. Might it not look as though he and the others were there just for the food? He recalled a wedding reception in a court of the College, where the students invited had disgraced themselves by falling on the food before ‘family’. He winced. God no… But to attend the wake was an accepted mark of respect. Might his presence, representing the College, even bring a crumb of comfort to Mrs Cathercole? He would be pleased to talk to her. But would she regard him as incidental, even superfluous, and not want to talk to him? And he just hadn’t known her son, he hadn’t known him; so would his respect seem empty, forced, completely bogus? Just how many of these funeral formalities was one obliged to observe? The funeral itself was ghastly – wasn’t that enough? Yet he knew only too well that all cultures require a wake, some ‘epulary act’ to round off the funeral rites, to bring closure… Hadn’t Bakhtin written that the banquet following Hector’s cremation was ‘the true completion’ of The Iliad, because eating was ‘the triumph of life over death’? Ah, but this wasn’t going to be some Rabelaisian feast, for goodness’ sake, it would probably be egg sandwiches and cups of tea… With waiters. Yes, there would be hotel waiters in white jackets and black ties… He remembered the source of his own black tie and shuddered. The tie was culinary, not funerary. It was a badge of servility. If he wasn’t actually mistaken for a waiter, wearing this tie at Richard Cathercole’s wake would make him feel like one.

The taxi drew up in the market rank. Palmer paid and tipped the driver, as he had before, they all got out, and the medics dispersed. He took off the tie, folded it, and returned it to the College kitchens. He did not go to the University Arms.

© Patrick Miles, 2020


Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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

Very Old Cambridge Tales 4: ‘First Love’

Morning placed his misty paws on the window sill and peered in through the latticed casement.

Stephen May (2 yr Maths) was asleep with his mouth slightly open like a baby. He groaned, awoke, and looked at the ceiling. Then, with a heavy sigh, he turned over – and touched something.

Instantly a smile of utter contentment caressed his face, a golden glow dawned behind his eyes, warmth and intimacy rippled through his whole body… The soft little thing beside him stirred. He slipped his arm awkwardly beneath her head and was about to draw her towards him, when (O wonders!) she nestled closer in her sleep, and her lips pouted into a kiss… He closed his eyes blissfully. Could anyone be happier?

In these Elysian Fields, however, he was visited by spectres.

The tubercular pink cover of The Freshman’s Manual of Reproduction, Contraception and Family Planning floated up before him. It was sent free to everyone in their first week. He opened it, and the pen drawing that leapt from the front page put him off all thought of girls for the rest of the term…

Now titles in fat red letters crawled across his brain: NAUGHTY COALMEN – SWEDISH MONIKA 7 – DO YOU WANT TO REMAIN A VIRGIN FOREVER?..

He hadn’t been able to get out of going to one of them with Big Ernie, Pete and the Maths crowd.

He sat in the tense darkness and watched blankly, as though they were the writhings of strange machines… It was more than an eye-opener – it was a thunderbolt. Was that what people actually did?! Was this what was expected??? Overcome by heat and smoke, he stumbled out into the foyer and was sick in a Fire bucket.

Poor spotty Philip Potter. Now his chinless form appeared before him, in graph-paper shirt, greasy tie and jacket, his hands round a cup of coffee. When Stephen stopped going with the Maths lot, Philip was the only one who came to see him in his room – evening after evening…

Not, of course, that there was anything wrong with men’s company. It wasn’t as though he wanted to ‘get off with’ somebody as everyone put it – on the contrary, he gulped at the very thought of what that might mean. But…couldn’t you just meet girls? Couldn’t you just talk to them? One day he had a strange experience: plodding up Petty Cury, he suddenly stopped in his tracks, as it came home to him how sweet a girl’s voice sounded, literally – sweet…

But now the bed seemed to fill with icy water as he slept. He saw all those Sunday afternoons alone in his ‘attic’, with the bells ringing out over an empty city, and one Sunday in particular when he took a desperate step: he wrote a ‘Hello-how-are-you-getting-on’ letter to Fiona Flytes, whom he’d gone out with once at school. Mercifully, mercifully, she didn’t answer; and when he was home at Easter he heard she’d got engaged to an accountant.

So a whole bright Cambridge Spring came and went.

What had happened between then and June, what??? Watching it unroll again in his dream was like flying over endless tundra…

Potter called every evening, to talk with emaciated mien of one thing: exams, exams… And he saw more clearly than ever now that the way he had ‘existed’ the term before had gradually settled into a pattern, then a habit, and then a norm; and he’d come to accept this daily round so completely that he couldn’t conceive of life being any different after the exams, or indeed ever for the next two years…

But he was wrong. After the exam, Withers (their Director of Studies) gave a sherry party.

He jumped in his sleep as the well-packed seat of a pair of jeans thrust into his face – and another… Then the gentlest tickling rose through his throat and nose as he saw Her sitting beside him, in her fawn jumper and flowered shirt-collar, holding her glass in her lap. And he re-heard his first, hesitant words:

‘Hel-lo…erm… Horrible about Potter wasn’t it?’

Yes, there she was as he saw her for the first time! Short, a tiny bit plump, but with the darkest dark blue eyes, such as babies have. He had turned round – and there she was! And somehow they had hardly got onto Paper 24B and how long it took her to bike to lectures, when everyone was queuing up to thank Mr and Mrs Withers, she was whisked away by a friend, and it wasn’t until he was brushing his teeth that evening that he suddenly, vividly recalled her voice, and her small, soft-looking mouth, and understood that, without knowing it, he had been doing exactly what some months before (when was it exactly?) he had longed for so much!

It was simply destiny, then, when a week later Chubb threw a wine and cheese party and there she was again. Goodness knows what gave him the courage – maybe it was Chubb’s claret – but all of a sudden he invited her to a play…

When they returned that evening, there was a May Ball on in the college.

It was quite weird, dodging the staggering couples everywhere – and the men in their black and white all seemed so tall – but how marvellous it was sitting in the ‘attic’ with the music wafting in from below, and agreeing how strange Cambridge was really!

And now the events of the last few weeks rolled themselves into one brilliant, dazzling ball: tea in her room on the first Saturday of term – then the river, bleak and deserted, with large leaves floating down delicately into it – then their first kiss – feeling her warmth against him – Big Ernie shouting out in the college bar ‘How’s your sex life, then, May?!’ and Pete crooking his arm and leering ‘Whoooor!’ – and, finally, discovering last night that for some reason the porters had clanged shut the gates at one – deciding that she would have to stay – and writing out as if in a dream: Dear Mrs King, Please do not disturb. Thank you. Stephen.and…

Suddenly (you don’t meet this word very often in modern stories, but life does still have its surprises!), suddenly…there was an unmistakable knock at the door.

They woke up staring at each other.

‘Mr May! Are you in there?’ called a gruff voice.

‘Y-yes…’ Stephen replied faintly. ‘The wardrobe,’ he whispered to her, ‘the wardrobe!’

She jumped out of bed just as she was, crouched inside, and Stephen closed the door. Trembling all over, he found his glasses, put on his dressing gown, and opened up. Two college workmen were standing there.

‘Sorry to bother you, sir,’ began the first, touching his cap. ‘It’s the new furniture… We’ve come for the wardrobe.’

Morning smiled to himself, turned from the curtains, and swirled off to where another thousand lovers were awaking – or, at least, a couple of hundred…

© Patrick Miles, 1979

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 3 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 25

27 September 2023
There can be no surer sign of age than picking up litter on the way to buy the daily newspaper… I have done this for the last four mornings, including a banana skin.

2 October 

Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41): not a friend of dictatorship

I have just read in the New York Times of 20 September an interview with Sauli Niinistö, President of Finland, who has met Putin ‘numerous times’. Niinistö says that

In their meetings before the invasion in February 2022, Mr. Putin was focussed, aggressive and well informed, even obsessive, about Russian culture. Niinistö decided to test Mr. Putin by asking him about Mikhail Lermontov’s poem on the death of Pushkin, Russia’s greatest poet. Mr. Putin spoke for more than half an hour. “He knew everything about that — for him it’s Russia, Russia overall,” Mr Niinistö said.

Putin explained about the Russian odic tradition, comparing the general resemblances between Lermontov’s ‘Death of a Poet’ and Pushkin’s own ‘To the Slanderers of Russia’, then examining in detail the madrigal form of each and Lermontov’s use of alexandrines, pentameter, tetrameter and even trimeter. He commented perceptively on Lermontov’s rhetorical devices. He pointed to Lermontov’s incomparable use of adjectives, especially in the inverted position. With evident admiration, he drew Niinistö’s attention to Lermontov’s subtle transformation of Pushkin’s ‘bays’ into a ‘crown of thorns’. Lermontov’s excoriation of the chern’ (corrupt oligarchs) — ‘You stranglers of Freedom, Genius and Fame,/A horde of reavers standing round the throne!’ — drew Putin’s particular praise, and he concluded with an analysis of Lermontov’s impure rhymes.

No, he didn’t, of course. He did none of this. Putin didn’t ‘know everything’ about Lermontov’s poem, he just ‘knows everything’ about ‘Russia’. The event of Lermontov’s famous poem was a trigger for Putin to rant for half an hour about ‘Russia overall’, i.e. his, Putin’s, vision of a Russian empire. I have read several personal accounts of him doing this and he becomes as possessed as Hitler. Angela Merkel rightly said after meeting Putin, ‘He lives in a world of his own.’ That world has nothing to do with Russian culture.

9 October
As long-term followers of this blog know, Percy Lubbock (1879-1965), who was Kittie Calderon’s nephew by marriage, played a significant role in both her life and George’s. He wrote the first biography of George Calderon. I thought I knew all Percy’s books, but our stalwart follower Mr John Pym, who is Percy’s great-nephew, has generously lent me these two small volumes (17.5 x 12 cms) which I had never seen before:

They are in prime condition, beautifully designed and printed. The latter is not surprising, I suppose, as the verso to the title page tells us that the Manager of Cambridge University Press in 1913 was C.F. Clay and the verso to Percy’s Prefatory Note that the Printer was John Clay, M.A. — brothers both to Richard Clay II, who in 1877 founded Clays of Bungay, printers of my biography of George and today arguably the best in Britain!

As for the contents, knowing the period and its schools I was expecting a high imperial canon — say, Malory, Elizabeth I, Francis Drake, Southey’s ‘Death of Nelson’, Carlyle, Lord Macaulay, perhaps George’s friend Henry Newbolt, some ‘charming’ writers, and none of the visceral, more anti-establishment writers from our past. Not a bit of it. Percy’s selection of over seventy writers includes Malory etc but also Bunyan, Milton’s ‘The Danger of interfering with the Liberty of the Press’, Hobbes, Defoe (twice), Swift (twice), Sterne, Dickens (twice), Ruskin, as well as a good national diversity and excellent representation of women writers from Lady Mary Wortley Montague to Charlotte Brontë (twice). I never expected actually to read these two books, but I have devoured them both. The first volume was ‘Arranged for Preparatory and Elementary Schools’ and is 140 pages long, the second was ‘Arranged for Secondary and High Schools’ and is 181 pages. Percy’s notes are brilliant. It may sound strange of a school text book, but it is a masterpiece, to set beside Percy’s Earlham, The Letters of Henry James, or The Craft of Fiction.

And there is a very interesting proof that the quality of his chrestomathy has been recognised. Search as I might, I could not find any copies of the 1913 first edition for sale on the Web, or any printed later in the twentieth century, so I assumed that, mangled by use, they were all binned by schools and it was never reprinted, especially as taste would have changed radically. But in 2007 the book started being reprinted! The process culminated in Cambridge University Press producing a quality edition at £29.99 each volume in 2012, almost a century after the first. Extraordinarily (to my mind), the title pages of the new CUP edition still refer to Preparatory, Elementary, Secondary and High Schools, as though nothing has changed in our education system since 1913. Evidently the need for a really good reader in English prose has not changed and Percy’s is unmatched.

14 October
I’ve been agonising over whether to post my last surviving Very Old Cambridge Tale, to go with the other three. It is called ‘First Love’ and could be construed as dodgy. Actually, it is almost an imitation of Chekhov’s early comic stories, which I was researching, indeed translating, at the time. The influence, I see now, extends to its punctuation, punchline ending, and possibly salacious element (for which the young Chekhov was well known). I have a sentimental attachment to ‘First Love’, however, because (a) it was inspired by two real events (no spoilers, but I am willing to say what they were afterwards if requested), and (b) I ended up framing the beginning and ending with something entirely my own. So I haven’t changed anything in it since 1982 and will be posting it on 30 October. But I promise that the next two stories I post will have been written in the last two years. The first will be a Cambridge Tale proper, the second just a Short Story. They will be quite long, posted in two instalments, and take us up to Christmas… I hope we shall be bringing out the book of twenty stories, entitled The White Bow/Ghoune, in the Spring.

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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

Very Old Cambridge Tales 3: ‘Reflected images’

It was the Saturday of the fourth week of the Michaelmas Term.

Half Term.

As he stepped purposefully from the steakhouse on Trinity Street, where he had feasted on the 10/6d gammon menu, Roger Johns suddenly realised that he had no pressing work to do. He turned up the street and, for want of anything else, wandered into Rose Crescent.

The November air was slightly gauzy – but somehow this made the lamps of the short pedestrian thoroughfare all the more luminously revealing. A couple tumbled towards him from a little restaurant to his left and he caught the ripe vermeil of the girl’s lips and the hard white of her teeth as she threw her head back; while the silk of the boy’s neckerchief and the ringlets of his long black hair seemed to whisk across Johns’ throat with a tickle.

A completely different figure approached him on his right. It was a student of about his own height wearing jeans, an unbuttoned bright red guardsman’s tunic complete with gold braid, over a lumberjack’s shirt, and a grubby green headband. The beard and moustache were blonde and straggly. Behind his circular, gold-rimmed glasses, their owner seemed to be lost in thought. But suddenly, as he drew level with Johns, his head lifted, his eyes focussed on him, and he smiled thinly.

Roger looked sharply away. No, he could scarcely believe it: there was that ‘Cambridge smile’ again!

Time after time in the past four weeks he had chanced to fix his eyes on some university figure coming towards him apparently lost in thought, when this person had suddenly looked him in the eyes – or was it through the eyes? – and smiled knowingly. And he was totally confused by it. Were they actually smiling inside their own little world, at some suddenly seized perception, at some solution achieved in precisely that second to a particularly knotty metaphysical or mathematical problem, at some brilliant aphorism recently heard at high table or a party and casually recalled? The irony that played round the lips as their gaze met his seemed to say as much. Yet Roger’s initial reaction had been that they were smiling mockingly, with a super-subtle, razor-fine Cambridge irony, at him… For although the gaze was indisputably through you, it was certainly directed at you in the first place. Were they smiling at his face? What did his face look like, then? He thought his expression was relaxed, normal, non-committal; but perhaps it was serious, intense, or ridiculous to them? Or was it something to do with his hair? His shirt? His clothes generally?

As he had found himself doing increasingly over the last few weeks, he glanced at himself in the nearest shop window. He veered closer. People passed behind him. He stopped.

In the viscous black pool of the optician’s shop he saw a solid, pinkish, but not jowly head, with tufty reddish hair and eyebrows. It seemed much the same as ever. The eyes were a trifle larger, perhaps, and more owlish, but there was nothing peculiar about that. His blue Terylene shirt collar was plain, but not dull. The same could be said of his woollen tie and close-fitting tweed jacket; even though, he acknowledged, the grey flannel trousers were a bit conventional, unmistakably schoolish. But surely it was the appearance of the others, of the vast majority, that was conspicuous, that made you stare?

As figures passed in the window, he remembered the incredible ‘type’ (there was no other word for him) whom he had passed in the street last week. He was obviously just an undergraduate, but he was wearing a tailored black frock coat, detachable starched collar with bow-tie, a Homburg hat and pince-nez, was carrying an ebony cane, and had a waxed red moustache and a Louis Philippe beard! For a moment, it was like having an hallucination. The type seemed utterly oblivious of his dress and those around him, however, so Roger stared and stared.

And the black bushy beards and military berets, sometimes even accompanied by cigars? The rashes of goatee beards? The occasional ‘imperial’ beards, with swept back hair and gold-rimmed glasses irresistibly reminiscent of Trotsky? Here was a Palestinian head-shawl, carelessly draped round a dirty-green battle jacket. There was a big fluffy Russian hat surmounting a World War I gas cape. He saw once more the undergraduate in Boots who had scrutinised a bottle of shaving lotion through a monocle on a black cord. There, too, was the one who came out of W.H. Smith’s wearing a deerstalker and kalabash pipe…the pink paisley waistcoat and the mustard one…the chap with the stalactitic shelalagh…the formless, long black émancipée dresses…that guardsman’s tunic again…

Among all this rich and weird variety, how could he possibly stand out so much as to warrant that subtly quizzical regard? Surely ‘Louis Philippe’, or Gawain Bumpus-Pearson, say, who had displayed a tendency to affectation while still at school and could now be seen striding about the College in full Regency rig, claimed that as their object and their right?

A very thick magnifying glass, some advertising cut-outs, and tiers of spectacle frames slowly materialised before him. He remembered where he was. He took a last, steady look at his form in the dark mirror, walked on up the precinct, and disappeared into the thickening mist on the market square.

Back in his college room, Roger Johns unhurriedly made himself a cup of cocoa, flipped through History Today, then re-read the essay he had written for next Wednesday’s supervision. His recent ruminations returned to nag him. It was still three months, however, before he grew those bushy ginger sideburns of his and acquired from an Oxfam shop the battered pith helmet in which he delivered his notorious speeches at the Union and hosted the sumptuous weekly dinners in his rooms. By then he was known to all by his second name, Morton, and to the hoi polloi of the University as ‘Raffles’.

© Patrick Miles, 1978

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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

Guest post by John Pym: One of my first Communists

The first edition of Yvonne Kapp’s biography of Eleanor Marx (1972 and 1976)

Patrick Miles named me the dedicatee of his story My First Communist published here in two parts in the spring, so let me return the compliment with this ‘sketch from memory’ of the redoubtable Yvonne Kapp – one of my own first communists.

Yvonne Kapp (1903–99), translator, novelist and trades-union speech-writer, was the author of the first major biography of Eleanor Marx, youngest of Karl Marx and Jenny von Westphalen’s four daughters. Published in two dense volumes, four years apart, it was Kapp’s magnum opus. Eric Hobsbawm, her friend and comrade, summarised Kapp’s life – taking their political belief as an unarguable given – in an obituary published in The Guardian on 29 June 1999, and for those curious about Yvonne but knowing nothing of her it’s a notably succinct and sympathetic starting point.

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

For Yvonne in her own words, there’s a posthumous book of ‘Memoirs’, Time Will Tell, edited by Charmian Brinson and Betty Lewis. This illuminates, in particular, the years of the author’s peripatetic European bohemianism (and subsequent political awakening) up to the opening of the Second World War, and was published by Verso in 2003 (the cover photograph above was taken in the 1930s). Verso also has on its website Yvonne’s vivid conversational account of the trials and joys of an amateur historian researching and writing her first and only full-scale biography.

Yvonne Hélène Mayer was born in Tulse Hill, South London, in 1903 into a middle-class Jewish family with roots in the Rhineland. The Mayers’ prosperity came from the vanilla trade and Yvonne endured (as she might have put it) a privileged Edwardian childhood that took in a class-bound girls’ college in Harley Street and ended at a Swiss finishing school. She neither sat nor passed, she was proud to tell anyone who’d listen, a single public exam.

She was a friend of my parents from the time of my boyhood in North London in the 1950s and, I suspect, closely involved during those post-war years in the opaque activities of the Communist Party of Great Britain, as was my mother Diana, who was also, incidentally, schooled in Harley Street. Both my mother and Yvonne held fast to their political beliefs until the end of their lives despite what many might now regard as the unanswerable lessons of Hungary, Czechoslovakia and the collapse of the Soviet Union – among much else. ‘It was like a religion,’ my father Jack, who was a socialist but not a Party member, remarked of his wife’s faith.

Yvonne was far removed in character, background and outlook from that of the father deftly outlined in Patrick’s story. Here is how she elegantly (one might say, judiciously) described herself on the flyleaf of Volume II of her biography of Eleanor Marx (Lawrence & Wishart, 1972 and 1976):

Despite a varied career – Literary Editor of Vogue in Paris during the late nineteen-twenties; full-time worker for refugees from Nazi persecution during the ’thirties; Research Officer for the Amalgamated Engineering Union throughout the ’forties; and employed in the industrial field by the Medical Research Council in the early ’fifties – Yvonne Kapp has never ceased to be a writer since the age of seven. Her first work to appear in book form, Pastiche: A Music-Room Book, written under the name Yvonne Cloud to accompany drawings by her husband, Edmond X. Kapp, was published exactly fifty years ago.

Edmond Kapp (1890–1978), whom Yvonne married at the age of 19 (a daughter, Janna, was born in 1924, but the marriage lasted only briefly), was in his day a distinguished caricaturist and war artist. Among his many portraits was a black-chalk study of Sir William Rothenstein (1931), the friend of George and Kittie Calderon, which can be viewed on request at the V&A museum in West London.

Edmond survived a gas attack while serving as a lieutenant in the British Army in France during the First World War and Yvonne kept one of his portraits (was it a self-portrait?) in the airy sitting-room of her small Georgian terraced house with its handsome garden at No. 39 North Road, a few steps from Highgate Village. Horticulture was a bond that Yvonne shared with my maternal grandmother, Dorothea, Lady Gough, a widow of the First World War, who lived in the house next door to us on North Hill, a few hundred yards down the hill from Yvonne. Roses thrived on the clay soil of Highgate – and I can remember the two ladies with opposed political views in conversation about such matters as pruning and spray-pumps.

Here is not the place for a full-bore critical re-evaluation of Yvonne’s biography of Eleanor ‘Tussy’ Marx (1855–98) who, in the publisher’s words, made ‘a significant contribution to the British and international working-class movement in which she was greatly loved and is still remembered’, except to say that this immensely readable work of nearly 1,100 pages can justly claim to be groundbreaking and remains, by its own lights, ‘definitive’. Eleanor, her father’s favourite child, led a relatively short but notably full and varied life. She had that unquenchable Victorian ‘need to be doing’ – and among her many achievements was the first English translation of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (see Vol. II, ‘The Crowded Years’, p. 96).

Kapp was a full-time worker for refugees from Nazi persecution in the 1930s. In this (as illustrated above) she was joined by her partner Margaret Mynatt.

The Welsh historian Gwyn A. Williams described Kapp’s biography as ‘immaculately documented, immensely scholarly and positively hypnotic […] in scores of deft, almost imperceptible touches she brings the Marxes to life’. Claire Tomalin, who was then working on her own first biography, of Mary Wollstonecraft, called Eleanor Marx ‘never less than fascinating’; and Michael Foot, writing in The Evening Standard (a newspaper to which Yvonne contributed as a young woman), exclaimed, ‘Since [Kapp] relies only on properly sifted evidence and abjures all the resorts of a novelist or the Freudian biographer, the feat of achieving so complete a portrait is the more amazing. It is a work of scholarship but also a work of art.’

There were, however, dissenting voices. Frederic Raphael, for one, gave the biography both barrels in the closing paragraph of his review (The Sunday Times, 23 January 1977 – from an envelope of press-cuttings kept by my father):

It is without any wish to deny the epic quality of these things that I am bound to say that Mrs Kapp has allowed herself a complacent prolixity, not unstuffed with sententiousness, heavily damaging to her book’s pretensions to the status of art to which some critics were quick to promote the first volume. There is splendid and affecting material here, diligently researched, enough to halt any middle-aged drift to the Right in its world-weary tracks, but the mixture of grandiloquence and scholarship is not enough to persuade one that hagiography and style are any more happily married than Eleanor and [her partner] Edward.

Hobsbawm later observed in Kapp’s obituary: ‘After 60 unwavering years as a communist, “everything about Yvonne”, an admiring visitor noted, “is elegant, from her literary vocabulary to the delicious cake she offers with afternoon tea”. In spite of all the temptations of bolshevism, in her happy great-grandmotherhood she remained recognisably what her family in the Rhineland would have called “eine Dame”.’

The Yvonne I remember was a short, slightly stooped lady with a helmet of white hair and strikingly enquiring eyes behind thick round spectacles. A powerful untipped cigarette burned permanently between her fingers. She listened intently and spoke only in finished sentences, with wit and irony never far away; she relished argument, but could also, to my knowledge, be extremely thin-skinned and quick to see offence – despite being a woman who had, in Hobsbawm’s phrase, an ‘oxhide’ toughness. She gave abundant encouragement to the young – as I discovered when, aged about 15, I showed her a story of mine published in the school magazine and she offered a discreet opinion on it – it was, for me, a red-letter moment!

One day, soon after I left school in 1965, or possibly during a university vacation, Yvonne invited me to join her on a research expedition. We drove from Highgate to the West End and parked near Waterloo Bridge. Inside Somerset House, then still the repository of all English paper records of births, marriages and wills, I was required to act the hod-carrier, lugging several huge volumes to an ill-lit desk where Yvonne scrutinised the inked copper-plate lists through a magnifying-glass, pencil in hand.

What was she looking for? I can’t be sure, but I think it was some aspect of the obfuscated record of the life of Edward Aveling, the scapegrace common-law husband of Eleanor Marx. (On the title page of Vizetelly & Co.’s 1886 edition of Madame Bovary you will read ‘Translated from the French Édition Définitive by Eleanor Marx-Aveling’.) A few tiny facts, in any event, required exact verification from a primary source.

Title page of the first edition of Eleanor Marx’s translation, 1886

For a few years I had an intermittent correspondence with Yvonne and one of her letters, I remember, came from East Berlin where she was engaged on more Eleanor research at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism. (Unlike Karl Marx’s notorious scrawl, Yvonne’s beautiful longhand was a perfection of legibility.) She was treated by the state as an honoured overseas member of the nomenklatura. But unfortunately, at the very start of her stay, while crossing a street in the drab half of that then still divided city, she tripped over a pedestrian barrier and smashed up one of her knees.

She found her subsequent five-month recovery in the GDR hard to take, and, to her credit, said as much – in private, at least. She was hobbling around, she wrote to me, like the Commendatore from Don Giovanni. Could she please have (my mother reported the request) a copy of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, to occupy her mind and to remind her of home. Later, in her ‘Memoirs’, Yvonne would summon up, for amusement, a passage from Tristram Shandy on the tendons and ‘what-not’ connected with the knee – very much the worst bony part of the body to smash up.

When I first met her, Yvonne shared her Highgate home with Bianca Margaret Mynatt, daughter of an Austrian mother and an English musician father. Volume I of Eleanor Marx is dedicated to Margaret – and she was another of my first communists.

Margaret was manager of the Communist Party bookshop, Central Books, on the Grays Inn Road, where I had my first paid job, stocktaking in the basement and running errands to the Marx Memorial Library in Clerkenwell. Later she became a director of the Party’s official publisher, Lawrence & Wishart, and editor-in-chief of the many-volume English edition of the collected works of Marx and Engels. She was in several ways, and certainly outwardly, an even more formidable figure than Yvonne. Margaret appeared somewhat mask-like, watchful and withdrawn, while Yvonne’s default setting was an open, loquacious effervescence. They were a devoted, unforgettable couple.

Announcement of the founding of Central Books by the Communist Party of Great Britain (Source: ‘spitalfieldslife.com‘)

Margaret Mynatt left Vienna, the city of her birth, in 1929 and settled in Berlin in her early twenties where she became an active member of the German Communist Party and simultaneously a member of the intimate circle of Bertolt Brecht. From Nazi Germany in 1934 she moved to England. Thirty-five years later I accompanied Margaret and Yvonne to a London stage performance at the Saville Theatre of The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, a transfer from the Glasgow Citizens’ with Leonard Rossiter, like a coiled spring, as the Chicago mafioso of the title. Neither Margaret nor Yvonne entirely approved of Michael Blakemore’s direction; and afterwards as they dissected the performances and mise-en-scène in minute detail (the substance of which, I’m afraid, I can no longer recall – but I fancy it was along the lines of ‘the Brechtian method was not to be monkeyed with’) it was as if 30 years rolled back and Brecht was standing beside us, smiling at the argumentative nit-picking, rubbing his unshaven chin and trying perhaps to get a word in edgeways.

Leonard Rossiter as Arturo Ui, 1959

Search for Margaret Mynatt on the Internet and you’ll see she had some eight ‘aliases’ in her Berlin days and that, once settled in London, she was suspected of acting as an undercover Moscow courier. I’ve no idea if this is true. A deep and abiding regret of Margaret’s life, Yvonne told me, was that circumstances prevented her from pursuing, in the footsteps of her father, a career as a professional musician. (Her father, incidentally, ‘italianised’ his own English name for professional purposes to Giovanni Carlo Minotti.)

I visited No. 39 North Road in 1977 when Margaret lay on her deathbed at the back of the sitting-room. The family GP had recently reassured her, Yvonne said, that no patient to whom she’d prescribed morphine had ever become an addict. Beside Margaret’s bed on a small table lay an unframed black-and-white photograph of the young Bert Brecht. Yvonne confided sotto voce that they’d engaged a very capable Irish nurse to help them. The nurse had asked if she could say a prayer for Margaret. Yvonne, a devout atheist, had offered no objection, but was upset that the nurse had placed a hot cup on the polished surface of one of her good pieces of furniture.

Edward Aveling abandoned Eleanor Marx in 1898 to marry a younger woman under an assumed name. This was too much for Eleanor and shortly afterwards she committed suicide. I once had the temerity to offer Margaret, who smoked almost as incessantly as Yvonne, a tipped American cigarette. She refused with an exclamation of disgust that stays with me to this day. It was as if I’d offered her a vial of the prussic acid that Eleanor purchased to ensure her end.

*

Postscript. Before Margaret’s funeral at Golders Green Crematorium, Yvonne asked me to perform a task of the utmost secrecy. After the ceremony I was to drive to an address Yvonne would reveal only when we were on the road. She did not wish to meet any of the mourners. And no one was to know whither she’d disappeared.

Mindful of my assignment, I sat beside Yvonne on the aisle at the end of a row near the front of the non-denominational ‘chapel’. The tall, spidery, instantly recognisable figure of Eric Hobsbawn, who was to deliver the eulogy, was displeased to be told that I had a very good reason to be sitting in the seat he’d earmarked for himself. I conceded the place, of course, and budged up beside Yvonne. We sat through the ceremony squeezed together, not very comfortably, with me between the two most eminent personages of the proceedings. The coffin entered bedecked with the Red Flag and the Comrades rose to the strains of ‘The Ode to Joy’. (La Pasionaria, had she been present, might have cried from the back of the room ‘¡No Pasarán!’) At the conclusion, after Hobsbawm’s moving and intimate address, the coffin approached the flames and ‘The Internationale’ sent us all on our way. (Or was it ‘The Internationale’ first and Beethoven at the close? Memory plays tricks.)

In the getaway car, Yvonne directed me to East London and the Thames. It would be some years before the district was gentrified. And Eleanor Marx would certainly have recognised the few still working docks, the narrow cobbled streets and the tall forbidding warehouses. We stopped at one of these industrial buildings, rang a bell and ascended an uncarpeted staircase to a shadowy and seemingly disordered artist’s studio. A large unkempt man appeared in an unbuttoned shirt, a friend of Edmond and Yvonne’s younger days: Edward Wolfe, the famous South-African-born painter, now a Royal Academician. The two embraced. ‘I’ll stay here for a week and then go home,’ were Yvonne’s parting words. ‘Then I’ll be quite all right – I recover quickly, you know.’ Yvonne Kapp lived another twenty-two years but, alas, that was the last time I saw her.

© John Pym, 2023

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 24

29 July 2023
As followers may recall, I always believed that the Russian Army was less than enthusiastic about Putin’s war — which is one reason he and Shoigu had to use private armies — and that eventually military opposition would break out which would have to depose Putin or be crushed by him. But I draw no hope whatsoever from Prigozhin’s so-called rebellion or the purge of military figures who have criticised the conduct of the war, since all of them are even more fascistic than Putin and his military cronies. These critics vocalise their scorn for the lack of a Russian advance, and call either for greater competence from Shoigu and Gerasimov or more brutal methods of winning the war. If there is a silent majority in the Army who are opposed to the whole campaign and Putin’s entrapment of them in it, where are they? Well, they can’t of course vocalise fundamental opposition of that kind, or they would be rounded up. But in my opinion they do exist. How long will it take before they act? What military developments would drive them to act?

3 August
For the last couple of months, I have been reconditioning old entomological storage cases (one probably Edwardian), and sorting out a set of 417 butterflies caught sixty years ago in British North Borneo (today Sabah, Malaysia) by a friend who was a licensed naturalist for Singapore’s Raffles Museum (today Lee Kong Chian Natural History Museum). I relaxed 180 of them when, aged fifteen, I was given them, I set those on special boards, and stored the rest carefully, but I feel now is the time to put the whole collection in order and place it in an appropriate institution. For one thing, it could be very revealing to compare this butterfly snapshot of the area taken in 1962-63 with the situation there today. I should mention that at the time not much detailed work had been done on butterflies in this part of Borneo, which is why my friend was sampling them, but he did not have time to conserve them himself as his main brief was to study the birds and reptiles.

Parthenos sylvia lilacinus Butler, ‘The Clipper’

Identification is sometimes fiendishly difficult, because butterflies in this part of the world are evolution in action, they create sub-species before your eyes, as it were. My friend was convinced when he gave me the collection that he had discovered one or two new sub-species, and I think he was right. The professionals will have to decide. What is wonderful to me is to open one of the folded papers in which the dead butterflies were preserved in the field, and to discover (see above) that the insect is still, sixty years later, in pristine condition including its antennae. Live butterflies are considered synonymous with ephemerality, yet dead butterflies when they are kept in darkness do not even fade.

14 August
Another day in the campaign to put my correspondence since the 1960s in order. I am on archive box 6 and have sorted about 7000 letters up to 2010. They are arranged by decade alphabetically by correspondent and chronologically within each correspondent’s file. I am hoping there will be far fewer letters for the last decade, because of email.

It’s slow work, which is why I can only do it for a day every so often. The letters were already filed by writer in suitcases etc, but there is a lot of official and teaching stuff, which I laboriously weed out. What slows me down with the other files is the need/temptation to read them; and some of them become, one might say, too absorbing. I made the decision years ago not to destroy any letter, however embarassing or painful, but even so…

I am constantly reminded of Pushkin’s short poem in iambic alexandrines and tetrameter entitled ‘Memory’, the last two lines of which I translated back in 1968 as: ‘I bitterly complain, and bitter tears I shed,/Yet do not smudge those lines of sorrow.’ (The verb for ‘smudge’ here, smyvat’, is almost always rendered in English as ‘wash away’, but the image is surely of Pushkin’s tears falling on the writing, which it would therefore be so easy for him to smudge out with his hand or sleeve; the Russian verb is the one used in such expressions as ‘the rain smudged her eye shadow’, not ‘washed her eye shadow away’.)

Reading one’s own past can be excruciating. In the programme for the RSC’s current production of As You Like It, however, Charles Fernyough has a stimulating essay on the subject that concludes:

It turns out that this relationship with our own remembered pasts is central to a journey we are all embarked upon. Researchers are starting to understand how looking back at one’s own past from the vantage point of later life — what is known as ‘life review’ — is an essential part of gaining acceptance of one’s own self and its voyage. Those who are happiest in their autumnal years are not those who judge their past actions from the viewpoint of hindsight, where all too often the only possible response is regret. Healthy ageing seems to be about re-experiencing past moments of crisis and decision in a flexible, creative, imaginative way, testing out those decisions again and understanding how they were made […] at the time.

Pushkin was right: one must never deny one’s often toe-curling past.

21 August
I write off to another publisher putting the case for them to bring out a book of our stalwart follower and contributor Damian Grant’s shaiku — strict 5-7-5 haiku versions of all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets. This time it’s the publisher of:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Like the above, a book of Damian’s shaiku should be small, though not too thin. I have already tackled several publishers, and doubtless will submit the idea to more, as I passionately believe in what Damian has achieved here. He has spent about twenty years playing creatively with his modern, miniature expressions of the sonnets, and the results are witty, moving, emotionally intense, always surprising. A third have now been published in prestigious British poetry mags and it is certainly time to bring them all out as a book. Here is a sample published in this year’s May issue of Long Poem Magazine.

I felt that the publishers of all the small, but good compilations of Shakespeare on sale in the RSC shop at Stratford should be tackled first as a matter of course, but the point has been made by one of them that they would have to print the sonnet itself verso and the shaiku recto, as a two-page spread, making a very long book. Or if you printed two sonnets to a verso and two shaiku to a recto, you would have to use a too-small font. I had hoped that the Shakespeare publishers could rely on their readers to refer to their own copies of the sonnets as they read the shaiku, but evidently not. Personally I think it would be best to print two shaiku to a page and set them out as in Long Poem Magazine — prefaced by the opening line of the sonnet. That, however, presupposes a poetry publisher tout court. Very difficult. A poetry collection can take an eternity to find a not-self publisher.

In the meantime, both Damian and I feel the answer is simply to tell as many people as possible that his completed SHAIKU: Shakespeare’s Sonnets in Seventeen Syllables exists and seeks a publisher. Tell all your friends! Bruit it about!

25 August
Believe me, I hesitated over publishing the ‘unsophisticated’ stories written by me in the late 1970s/early 1980s that have been perpetrated on this blog — I hesitated for forty years! By the 1990s I regarded them as juvenilia and destroyed the manuscripts (except Crox, which was unfinished). Somehow, though, I couldn’t bring myself to destroy the typescripts; probably I felt sorry for all the effort I had put into bashing them out.

Looking at them a couple of years ago, when I was already writing new stories, I saw them differently. It seemed to me that their themes hadn’t dated, and that the lack of sophistication might have a certain charm. So my stories on Calderonia now fall into three categories: Cambridge Tales (written in the past three years from ideas going back to 1978), Very Old Cambridge Tales (written 1978-1982), and Short Stories (being written now). Warning: the next story to be published here will be a Very Old Cambridge Tale…

Meanwhile, our veteran subscriber and contributor John Pym was nudged by the story My First Communist into writing a sketch from memory of one of his own real first Communists and this will form our next post, to go out on 11 September. I assure you, it’s a mesmerising read.

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

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

The magnificent Mary Ann

Long-term followers of Calderonia will recall that I had always had a theory that the person who taught George to speak Russian credibly before he set out for St Petersburg in 1895 was a ‘Mrs Shapter’, but in my biography she remained ‘the mysterious Mrs Shapter’, as I could find no Russian link in the Shapters I came up with on the Web. It was entirely thanks to Russianist Michael Pursglove, my indefatigable genealogical researcher Mike Welch, and the living descendants of Mrs Shapter, especially Andrew Jones (great-great-grandson) and his wife Sally, that we traced ‘Mrs Shapter’ to Mary Ann Gibbs, a lady who lived the first nineteen years of her life (1816-35) in Russia and in 1839 married John Shapter QC, the brother of the author of the famous account of a cholera outbreak in Exeter, Thomas Shapter MD.  Mary Ann’s father Harry Leeke Gibbs had had a distinguished medical career in Russia, both in the navy and as a personal physician of the Tsar, before returning to Britain for good in 1835. For the full details, see here.

But until now, we never knew what Mary Ann looked like. I am delighted — nay, overwhelmed — to say that Andrew and Sally Jones have tracked down a series of photographs of the lady at the National Portrait Gallery, of which I think this is the best:

Mary Ann Shapter, photographed 31 January 1861 by Camille Silvy, no. 1989, Ax51379 © National Portrait Gallery, reproduced by Creative Commons Licence

As with most women photographed in this phase of Victorian fashion, the bell tent dress makes Mary Ann look formidable beyond her years (she was only forty-three), but I think I read alertness, intelligence, self-possession, perhaps some irony in her face, and a definite grace in her hands, her posture, the way she wears her dentelle. Just the person, one imagines, to engage at over seventy with the bouncy twenty-something George Calderon.

But that is not all. We had known that Mary Ann’s elder daughter Mary Gibbs Shapter was an artist (which is why she corresponded with P.H. Calderon), but Andrew and Sally Jones have now discovered a really remarkable sketchbook of hers at the Museum of the Home in London that is a coloured and annotated inventory of personal possessions in the family home. By very kind permission of Andrew and Sally, I reproduce below two pages from this sketchbook that have a direct bearing upon George’s relationship with Mary Ann.

If you click on the first, immediately below, you will see in the bottom left hand corner two pictures by P.H. Calderon RA that were given to Mary Gibbs Shapter by P.H.’s mother, i.e. George’s grandmother. On the right, in the middle, you will see a ‘view in Holland’ by John Evan Hodgson RA, a member of P.H.’s ‘St John’s Wood Clique‘ of painters. George played golf as a young man with Hodgson’s son Evan, and Andrew Jones has most pertinently pointed out to me that John Hodgson’s father was a member of a distinguished Newcastle family who did business in Russia. J.E. Hodgson himself had lived in St Petersburg as a child.

The second image brings us even closer to George and Kittie. If you click on it, you will see that the object at the top is captioned ‘Toddy ladle 15 inches long. Gave it to George Calderon Nov[embe]r 1900’. All the captions are by Mary Gibbs Shapter. The reason her drawings on this page are in grey (except for handles) is that the objects are silver — and the diagram above George’s ladle with ‘Lion passant’ specifically identifies it as solid silver.

Although I have seen numerous pieces of silver that belonged to George and Kittie, the whereabouts of the ‘toddy ladle’ are currently unknown (if anyone spots it, please let me know!). It would certainly have appealed to George, as he was partial to whisky. But the most important point is the date written under it. It was given to George as a wedding present. George and Kittie were married on 10 November 1900, which is why I say it belonged to both of them. The following year, aged eighty-four, Mrs Shapter died.

Both images © Sally and Andrew Jones, 2023. Acc. No. 19/2013, Museum of the Home, London

I think you will agree, these discoveries by Mary Ann’s assiduous and meticulous descendants throw fascinating light on some aspects of George’s life and career.

First, if Mary Gibbs Shapter knew both George’s father and grandmother, the family connection was of far longer standing than we had imagined. It was not just a case — as I thought when I wrote my biography — of P.H. and his wife Clara happening to know someone English who spoke fluent Russian and could help their son George bring his systematic knowledge of the Russian language alive in preparation for his immersion in a ‘language bath situation’. It seems possible that George knew ‘Mrs Shapter’ long before he made the fateful 1891 decision, described by Laurence Binyon, to specialise in Russia.

Second, it transpires that the Calderon family’s circle included even more people with Russian connections than we thought before: we can now add the Hodgsons and Shapters to the Yeameses, Whishaws and Franckes. We really have to ingest the fact that in Victorian times it was normal to know people whose families had occupations and businesses in Russia that had flourished for generations. The reason it always comes as a revelation is simply that that part of the ‘cycle’ of Anglo-Russian relations, as Harvey Pitcher recently called it, has not really come round again since 1917. Harvey’s own The Smiths of Moscow is an eloquent testimony to the historical facts.

Third, George used code words in his letters to his parents from Russia for subjects that were politically sensitive, to fool the censor, so was it for similar reasons that he refused to name his spoken-Russian teacher when asked by Russian officials, and referred to Mary Ann only as ‘a Russian lady’? It seems to me possible. Mary Ann’s father, who was obviously a protégé of Alexander I, may well have been out of favour in the reign of his successor, Nicholas I, which has been described as ‘proto-totalitarian’; or he may have decided to get out of Russia whilst the going was good. With relations between Britain and Russia tense in the 1890s, and the high profile Tsarist agent Olga Novikoff muddying the waters in London, it may have been better for George never to mention the Shapter link.

Finally, the new information about ‘Mrs Shapter’ makes one reflect on how much George and the British theatre owe her. Without her and another woman, the young Manya Guseva in St Petersburg, George might never have acquired the contemporary Russian ‘oracy’ that enabled him to translate the dialogue of Chekhov’s plays with such authentic colloquialism compared with Constance Garnett’s woodenness. And clearly ‘Mrs Shapter’ remained George’s friend for the rest of her life. Without Mary Ann we might not have had The Seagull at the Glasgow Repertory Theatre in 1909. Her indirect contribution to Russian Studies and the theatre was magnificent.

I extend my profoundest thanks to all the descendants of Mary Ann and John Shapter who have contacted me and made this post possible. Alison and I greatly look forward to visiting the Museum of the Home soon.

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Cambridge Tales 7: ‘The Folding Party’

                                                                                                              For Laurence Brockliss

Chris Hardie and Julian Slawianski took over the editorship of the poetry magazine Helios at the end of their second year, when its founders graduated and left Cambridge. Unfortunately, they could not find anyone to do the same for them, so the mag would not be coming out again.

No-one particularly minded about this. They had had a good stable of contributors, many of whom would be staying on in Cambridge, but four years was more than respectable for a student poetry mag. In fact it was long enough for a magazine to become ‘fixed’ and slightly passé. Poets were more attracted to the fold-outs and slim card-covered booklets of the next wave of mags, with titles like Reanimator, Tilde, and Curiously Strong.

Hardie was a major student poet. He had a range of registers that evoked admiration and envy. His ‘Blue Pagoda’, for instance, was beguilingly romantic:

The turquoise breeze lingers in the porch
and trails of dust snake brownly
through the distant groves of jade
tinkle tinkle the leaves sing
the dry waves
pound in silence on the pirates’ shore

and another opened magically ‘I trust I shall tryst with you in Tintagel’. Yet he could also be abrasively New York:

Oh the blues was in my cornflakes,
Yeah, and sadness in my bread.
I am pinned on the Christmas tree of life
its Hegel tapping on Marx’s cracking window

Slawianski, who had short brushed-back hair and usually wore a jacket, clean shirt and tie, was the production manager of the magazine, but also a poet. His ‘Bedroom’ had created a sensation:

i traced that grey shadow on the wall
to its beginning
                          but fail with
that rainbow refraction
                                      on the white door

However, ‘i am a dead leaf’, which continued ‘shake me off your branch/die and let die/even the cacti you gave me are dying’, was felt to be so explicit that he might be writing himself out.

The exams were over, the summer was halcyon, parties were raging everywhere, so they sent a note round to all their contributors: ‘Helios is folding. Come to say goodbye at Chris’s room, F4 Cowley Court, this Friday after Hall. Some wine and food provided, PBAB.’

Hardie had half packed. (‘But I haven’t done the infantry on your room!’ his bedder protested.) Several trunks and a mattress lay in the bay window, he had cleared his shelves, and there were cardboard boxes and piles of paper beside the sofa. But his large work table was spread with cheeses, grapes, crackers and pâté from the International, he had opened several bottles of College claret and Piesporter, and he had three more boxes under the table. He and Slawianski put on a Simon & Garfunkel album, poured themselves glasses, and waited.

First to arrive were Nick Button and Ginny Dolun, the most prominent pairing on the Cambridge poetry scene. He was tall, thin, bearded, and slightly hunched at the top. His eyes were always far away. Dolun was short, thin, hard-bodied. In her frilled polyester dress she could have been taken for a twelve-year-old, except that her steel-wool hair was greying and she appeared to have walnuts under her bodice.

‘Hi! Great to see you! Thanks for coming!’ the hosts greeted them. Slawianski poured them glasses and they started to fill their plates.

‘I saw they reprinted two of yours in Carcanet,’ Hardie said. ‘Congratulations!’

‘Um…’ Button began very softly.

‘Yes. We made sure they acknowledged first publication in Helios,’ the girl stated definitely.

‘That was good of them,’ remarked Slawianski, lighting a Gitanes. ‘What are you doing in the Vac.?’

‘Er…’ Button started.

‘We’re staying in a cottage in Devon,’ Dolun told them.

‘And then we’re hitch hiking in the South of France,’ breathed Button with a slight jerk of the head.

A.J. Beaton strode in. He startlingly resembled John Cleese in stature and flatness of head. He always wore a black jacket and orange tie.

‘This is a sorry occasion. But I must say, you’ve had a fair run. Thanks for inviting me…it’s good of you. And thanks very much for publishing me.’ He tucked in. Slawianski filled the glasses.

‘Almroth…’ Hardie began. ‘I know this is a bloody awful subject, but…do you know more about Garth Nightingale? He was a first year at your college, wasn’t he?’

‘Mm. Yes, he was. I met him once or twice. A nice chap, very fresh face…angelic even. He was translating Hölderlin. Apparently his bedder found him – fully clothed – flat out on his sofa with his arm dangling. Overdose. He’d definitely been trying LSD. I’m told he didn’t do any work for his Part I Modern Languages, though he’d come up as a Scholar…which made it worse, I suppose. A friend of mine who lives on the next staircase heard his bedder and another one talking in the court, and apparently Nightingale’s bedder said: “He’s back in bed already. He said he looked at the question on the exam paper and wrote: ‘Yes’. That’s all he wrote: ‘Yes’, and walked out.” Dear me…’

‘God…’ snorted Hardie.

‘Wha-what are you doing next year?’ Button asked Beaton.

‘Well there’s the rub. I want to do a Ph.D. on F.T. Tryng and Ned Haworth, but since they are still alive I don’t expect the Faculty – ’

Tryng?!’ roared a voice. ‘Hello you Bazzas…and Sheila!’

Dolun looked at the wall. It was the Antipodean poet Les Gough, a postgraduate who had taken Cambridge by storm and was published everywhere.

‘You can’t read Tryng, it’s like watching television!’

Everyone looked down.

‘Sorry! Sorry! There’s nothing wrong with television: I’m starting a job with TW3 in September myself!’

Dolun grabbed Button’s arm.

‘Come on, Nick, there’s a mattress over there.’

Chris Hardie absented himself to put on a Pink Floyd record.

‘What about Nightingale, eh?’ asked Les Gough through a kind of half-grin set on his face. ‘I suppose the writing was on the wall with those gnomic quatrains of his in Journeyman. “Suicide/Is making the world/Realize/That you’re dead.” Shouldn’t it have been “letting the world know you existed”? And he really ought to have changed his name, for poetical use at least!’

‘Come over here, Les…’ Beaton beckoned to two armchairs. Gough grabbed a bottle and followed him.

More poets were arriving, and attacking the food and drink: Jeremy Trift (disciple of Ferlinghetti), Carol Brookes (translator of Tsvetaeva), Kevin Morse, E.B. Knox, the haiku-writer Martin Helm, Sue Glenn…

Button lay on the mattress with his back to the bay window and was slowly rolling a joint. Ginny Dolun was kneeling beside him, talking at him fast and gesticulating. He ignored her.

Slawianski went over to Naomi Lewis, who was standing in the centre of the room with no-one to talk to. She had shiny black hair, large dark eyes, and wore a flax-blue jumper with a bright gold Star of David on a chain. They had printed two of her poems in the last issue, one of which, Slawianski recalled, ended: ‘I remember/The gift of your living,/The gift of my loving.’

‘What are you doing after Cambridge?’ he asked.

‘I’m hoping to go into publishing. But first I’ve got a part-time job at the New Statesman.’

‘Fantastic!’

‘And what are you going to do? You’re an engineer, aren’t you?’

‘Ah… I’m going into the family business.’

‘Really? What is it?’

‘Cars!’

He asked her if she would like some free copies of Helios, and took her over to a neat pile of them on a half-moon table.

Suddenly, there were raised voices from the mattress. Ginny Dolun had stood up.

‘Right, that’s it, you bum! I’m leaving you!’ she shouted with clenched fists and flashing eyes.

Button exhaled a cornet of smoke and said audibly:

‘Hurt is both a transitive and intransitive verb…’

She stormed out. No-one took any notice, as their relationship was well documented in Button’s poems. Button got slowly to his feet and followed, waving vaguely at everyone.

The party was going well. Les was on his second bottle and chain smoking. He cracked one brilliant linguistic or surreal joke after another at A.H. Beaton, who never entirely reacted. Kevin Morse, however, the author of some modern nonsense poetry, was squatting on the carpet before them, paralytic with laughter. Sue Glenn listened, glass and fag in hand, from a safe distance.

A veil of smoke floated, ash was getting well trodden into the carpet, a long Leonard Cohen tape was playing, and the conversation flowed.

‘…but then came Roger Woof’s article about Tryng in the latest issue of Frank Voices…’ E.B. (Edgar Barry) Knox informed Carol Brookes. He too wore a black jacket and orange tie.

‘…Steiner was arguing that it’s got Feminist posture at base…’ said Chris Hardie in all seriousness to Naomi Lewis.

‘…so then I wanged my donger…’ Les told his audience.

At 11.15 people started to leave. Kevin Morse announced that he had become a bird, and then a dolphin, but he remained manageable. There was an amiable upwelling of thanks and good wishes for the future.

‘What are you doing, Chris?’ asked Jeremy Trift.

‘Don’t laugh, I’m going to be a civil servant! You?’

‘I start at ICI next month!’

Not many home addresses were exchanged, as everyone knew that if they wanted to they could stay in touch through their old colleges. Hardie and Slawianski saw them out onto the landing, then went back in, gathered up bottles and food, stacked the plates, emptied ashtrays, and lightly hoovered.

Let’s have a drink, Jules,’ sighed Chris, grabbing the remains of a bottle of Médoc and sinking into an armchair.

‘Bloody good idea…’ Slawianski lit a Gitanes.

‘The million dollar question is, what are we going to do with the…literary remains? The Poetry Bookshop have got plenty of copies, our contributors have got plenty, we’ve left some in JCRs, but there’s four unopened boxes of fifty there from the printers, and that bale of editorial papers, rejected poems, other mags.’

‘The mill pool?’ suggested Slawianski.

‘Brilliant! You see that old blue trunk over there, with the broken handle…’

The following day, Slawianski came to lunch, they packed and locked the trunk, and deposited it outside in a corner of the college bike shed. At dead of night, they met and carried it to Silver Street bridge. They swiftly manhandled it onto the balustrade with fifty feet of rope through the good handle, and let it down slowly. When it was half submerged, Chris released his end and the trunk disappeared with barely a swirl. Julian coiled up the rope, which was from the boot of his car.

‘So cartons of sensibility fell through a hole in the river…’ improvised Hardie.

‘Yes. Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new!’

© Patrick Miles, 2021

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Guest post by Harvey Pitcher: Melikhovo 2004

The house at Melikhovo (winter 1973)

This recollection goes back almost twenty years, but it does not seem that long ago. As I grow older, time does not slow down, as one might expect, but races away at an alarming rate. Chekhov had died in 1904 and in the summer of 2004 a Conference was being held at Melikhovo, his onetime home, to mark the centenary. I was due to read in Russian the eye-witness account of his death given by a young Russian student, Leo Rabeneck, in an article entitled ‘Chekhov’s Last Minutes’.  To almost all the delegates, and certainly all the Russian ones, who had grown up in Soviet times, this graphic account was completely unknown, as it had been published in Paris in 1954, the fiftieth anniversary of Chekhov’s death, by which time the young Russian student had become a prominent member of the Russian émigré community.

The reading was introduced as the concluding item in the Conference, although, as the organiser, Vladimir Kataev, pointed out, it might also have made a fitting opening. Living through those last moments for themselves, the audience was unusually quiet and attentive: ‘you could have heard a pin drop’ was no exaggeration. I’d added some details of my own about the Rabeneck family and knew the text well, as my translation had appeared in the TLS under the title ‘Chekhov’s Last Moments’, so I was not worried that I might stumble over any of the Russian words, but there was one point at which I feared I might not be able to control my voice. This was when the German doctor, who’d been looking after Chekhov in Badenweiler, asked Leo Rabeneck, who was only twenty-one and had never seen a death before, to break the news to an unsuspecting Olga Knipper that Chekhov was not resting comfortably on his pillows but had died. I was relieved when I managed to keep calm and negotiate the danger area. Afterwards one of the Russian delegates came up to thank me and said he’d found the account very moving, ‘especially the moment when your voice broke’. How had he heard that? I thought it hadn’t happened. Are Russians more finely tuned to other people’s emotions than we are?

I haven’t been back to Russia since 2004, and in retrospect that moment at Melikhovo seems like the high point in my involvement with that maddening country: a moment of genuine cultural exchange. Chekhov had provided me with an absorbing interest throughout my adult life, and in return I was giving something back in their own language to those Russian scholars who’d been quietly keeping his spirit alive during the previous century and preserving a part of Russian culture for future generations. The good times in Anglo-Russian relations that we enjoyed around the turn of the century now seem a distant memory, and those of us who lived through them can congratulate ourselves on our good fortune. Will the good times come again? Maybe they will, since Anglo-Russian relations have always been cyclic, but not, I fear, in my time.

© Harvey Pitcher, 2023

Comment Image


ADVERTISEMENT

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Front Cover

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Click here to purchase my book.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 1 Comment