Calderonia is an experiment in biography through a blog. It tells the story of George and Kittie Calderon’s lives from 30 July 1914 to 30 July 1915 from day to day as it happened, but exactly 100 years afterwards. It therefore feels like a biography in real time. When no facts were known for a particular day, the author posted on subjects ranging from the Edwardians, recently published biographies and his own problems as a biographer, to translating Chekhov and the Commemoration of World War I.
The blog-biography can be accessed in various ways. To read it from the beginning, go to the top of the column on the right and click the appropriate link. You can then read forward in time by clicking the link at the end of each post. If you wish to start at a particular month, scroll down the column on the right to Archive at the bottom. Posts can also be selected through Search Calderonia and the Tags on the right. An update on the complete biography of George Calderon always follows this introduction.
25/1/16. As many have said before me, the agony of ‘writing’ is the fight to the death between what you think you want to say and…the writing. It is draining, torturingly slow, and I’ve had weeks of it with ‘White Raven’, the sixteenth and last chapter of my biography of George Calderon. Now it’s over. Today I ‘finished’ the book. All that I have to do is revise it (164,000 words), add about 800 words, write the Introduction and Afterword, Acknowledgements and Bibliography, etc., which will probably take two months! Despite the nervous exhaustion, I cannot help but feel light-headed.
A blog-visitor asks me whether ‘completion’ will leave me feeling ‘as if you are missing something close to you’. I have thought about this and I believe the answer is no. I have been writing the biography sensu stricto for four and a half years, but one way and another I’ve been in a dialogue with George and Kittie for over thirty. They are locked in my heart and mind; the key is lost; they will be there for ever.
But I cannot pretend that I have said goodbye (in writing, at least) to Kittie today without a deep sadness — a malaise quite different from the terrible, senseless wrench of George’s death at Gallipoli two chapters before. Thanks to her three diaries and the far more extensive documentary material than in George’s case, I had been living and dreaming her life at White Raven — a house I know well — almost day by day between 1934 and 1944. It is sad that she gave herself so completely to other people in this period, some of whom appallingly exploited her, that she kept the ailing Elizabeth Ellis on as her housekeeper through thick and thin, took Elizabeth to Hove with her, even, where they died eighteen months apart in the same nursing home, that hardly anyone was present at Kittie’s funeral, and that we don’t even know where her ashes were scattered. Yet this is how she planned it. There can be no doubt that her last years were a determined kenosis.
During the war, when she could not sleep at night because of the air raids, she sat in an armchair by her bed ‘very tightly wrapped up in a travelling rug’ (Edward Hamilton), going through all her and George’s boxes of papers, dividing them into those to be burned and those to be saved for posterity. She captioned most of her 525 photographs and wrote explanations or comments on many of the 884 letters. These explanations are clearly addressed to someone unnamed who will be listening — someone in the future. Against all the odds (for by 1950 George was publicly almost forgotten) she believed someone would hear her. I feel endlessly honoured to be the first such person.
About fifteen times whilst writing this last chapter I considered heading it with a quotation from a letter of Percy Lubbock’s written in 1944. Percy had been exiled from Italy with his wife Sybil since 1940, Sybil died in Montreux at the end of 1943, and Percy was left alone there for the rest of the war. Kittie had sustained him with her regular letters evoking Lubbock family news and life at Foxwold more vividly, visually, he told her, than anyone else. He and she had a pact that if he could not cope as Sybil’s tropical disease worsened, Kittie would fly to Switzerland immediately; but in the event, this was militarily impossible. On 26 April 1944 he wrote to her: ‘I clearly see you from afar, but you are a long way off.’ This exactly expresses my own feeling as I was writing the end of the book. But epigraphs like this can be toxic. I decided against it.
After a break, I shall start ‘re-writing’ the book I have just ‘finished’, and I will be posting weekly on a wide range of topics.
This is the most recent ‘Watch this Space’ post. For the archive of ‘Watch this Space’, please click here.
Related
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon c.1901
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George Calderon, 1912
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Captain of the 11
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Watch this Space
Calderonia is an experiment in biography through a blog. It tells the story of George and Kittie Calderon’s lives from 30 July 1914 to 30 July 1915 from day to day as it happened, but exactly 100 years afterwards. It therefore feels like a biography in real time. When no facts were known for a particular day, the author posted on subjects ranging from the Edwardians, recently published biographies and his own problems as a biographer, to translating Chekhov and the Commemoration of World War I.
The blog-biography can be accessed in various ways. To read it from the beginning, go to the top of the column on the right and click the appropriate link. You can then read forward in time by clicking the link at the end of each post. If you wish to start at a particular month, scroll down the column on the right to Archive at the bottom. Posts can also be selected through Search Calderonia and the Tags on the right. An update on the complete biography of George Calderon always follows this introduction.
25/1/16. As many have said before me, the agony of ‘writing’ is the fight to the death between what you think you want to say and…the writing. It is draining, torturingly slow, and I’ve had weeks of it with ‘White Raven’, the sixteenth and last chapter of my biography of George Calderon. Now it’s over. Today I ‘finished’ the book. All that I have to do is revise it (164,000 words), add about 800 words, write the Introduction and Afterword, Acknowledgements and Bibliography, etc., which will probably take two months! Despite the nervous exhaustion, I cannot help but feel light-headed.
A blog-visitor asks me whether ‘completion’ will leave me feeling ‘as if you are missing something close to you’. I have thought about this and I believe the answer is no. I have been writing the biography sensu stricto for four and a half years, but one way and another I’ve been in a dialogue with George and Kittie for over thirty. They are locked in my heart and mind; the key is lost; they will be there for ever.
But I cannot pretend that I have said goodbye (in writing, at least) to Kittie today without a deep sadness — a malaise quite different from the terrible, senseless wrench of George’s death at Gallipoli two chapters before. Thanks to her three diaries and the far more extensive documentary material than in George’s case, I had been living and dreaming her life at White Raven — a house I know well — almost day by day between 1934 and 1944. It is sad that she gave herself so completely to other people in this period, some of whom appallingly exploited her, that she kept the ailing Elizabeth Ellis on as her housekeeper through thick and thin, took Elizabeth to Hove with her, even, where they died eighteen months apart in the same nursing home, that hardly anyone was present at Kittie’s funeral, and that we don’t even know where her ashes were scattered. Yet this is how she planned it. There can be no doubt that her last years were a determined kenosis.
During the war, when she could not sleep at night because of the air raids, she sat in an armchair by her bed ‘very tightly wrapped up in a travelling rug’ (Edward Hamilton), going through all her and George’s boxes of papers, dividing them into those to be burned and those to be saved for posterity. She captioned most of her 525 photographs and wrote explanations or comments on many of the 884 letters. These explanations are clearly addressed to someone unnamed who will be listening — someone in the future. Against all the odds (for by 1950 George was publicly almost forgotten) she believed someone would hear her. I feel endlessly honoured to be the first such person.
About fifteen times whilst writing this last chapter I considered heading it with a quotation from a letter of Percy Lubbock’s written in 1944. Percy had been exiled from Italy with his wife Sybil since 1940, Sybil died in Montreux at the end of 1943, and Percy was left alone there for the rest of the war. Kittie had sustained him with her regular letters evoking Lubbock family news and life at Foxwold more vividly, visually, he told her, than anyone else. He and she had a pact that if he could not cope as Sybil’s tropical disease worsened, Kittie would fly to Switzerland immediately; but in the event, this was militarily impossible. On 26 April 1944 he wrote to her: ‘I clearly see you from afar, but you are a long way off.’ This exactly expresses my own feeling as I was writing the end of the book. But epigraphs like this can be toxic. I decided against it.
After a break, I shall start ‘re-writing’ the book I have just ‘finished’, and I will be posting weekly on a wide range of topics.
This is the most recent ‘Watch this Space’ post. For the archive of ‘Watch this Space’, please click here.
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