16/11/15. I have been reading the copy of The Sayings of Lao Tsŭ (John Murray, 1905) that George Calderon gave his wife Kittie on her birthday, 5 March 1905. I had always known that George was interested in Taoism, but the signs had steadily been mounting that it was more than that. Since I knew nothing previously about Taoism, I thought I had better start by reading this short book translated by the famous Sinologist Lionel Giles, then branch out. There are no books about Taoism in the remains of George’s own library.
The documentary evidence of George’s reading and knowledge of Taoist texts falls in the years 1905-12. He thanks William Rothenstein in a letter provisionally dated 1905 for helping him find some of these texts. On Tahiti in 1906 he quotes Lao Tsu in a discussion about beauty. In a 1910 review of Chesterton’s What’s Wrong With the World? he accuses Chesterton of ‘not perceiving the virtues, the “identity”, or “tao” of the thing that he attacks’. George’s contention in his Preface to The Fountain (1911) that ‘all the Evil that matters is produced, not by evil intention, as is generally supposed, but by good intention working through the complicated channels of our social system’ could be interpreted as a plea to practise Taoist wu wei (active non-action). A 1912 note in his own shorthand also sounds distinctly in the spirit of the Sage: ‘Play. To show that pleasure is to be had only by
refraining from it. It is a thing of the imagination. It is too confused in reality. The mirage goes.’ Even George’s belief that there is a ‘profound philosophy’ behind Chekhov’s endeavour ‘to establish the true relation of Man to the surrounding universe’, and that ‘ever since we began to think in Europe, we have been wrong about Man’ because we have sought to ‘sever the individual, to abstract him in thought’ from his widest environment, could be taken to hint at the Tao.
The more one thinks about it, the more resemblances one sees between some of the precepts of Taoism and George’s personality in the last ten years of his life. Given that Taoism is not theistic (by the 1890s George was an agnostic/ atheist), and given some of the intriguing overlaps between Taoism and the kind of Christianity George did believe in, it is tempting to conclude he was a private Taoist. But this is an all too familiar trap for the
biographer. Nothing but empirical evidence will do. In the absence of it, one could construct a species of conspiracy theory that explained ‘everything’ about George Calderon — and was literally undisprovable.
I content myself at the moment by deeply internalising the Sage’s saying: ‘If people took as much care at the end as at the beginning, they would not fail in their enterprises.’
* * *
If you haven’t read it already, please read Clare Hopkins’s latest Comment now. It is definitive, in my view, but still there is plenty that some might find contentious. If you do have a reaction, PLEASE comment in your turn! I have received some short emails about Clare’s Comment, but we would all much rather follow a debate on the website. Some issues might be:
— Recently, there have been cases reported in the press of people who were counselled towards ‘closure’ after bereavement, went with it, but were ‘hurried’ and in fact just repressed their mourning; and they feel this did them psychological damage. It has led them to question the whole concept of closure.
— An issue is, then, can we actually direct (‘manage’) bereavement and commemoration? Are Clare’s ‘stages’ prescriptive, or ex post facto, i.e. retrospective?
— I see that Cambridge history professor David Reynolds, who has written about the factual side of WW1 memorials and the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, is giving a public lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace With the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. In an interview, he says that WW1 is now ‘turning into a historical issue rather than one with a personal focus’, which reminds me of Clare’s ‘stage four’, when in her words ‘commemoration distils into History’. However, do we want our live emotions to be ‘historicised’? A recent German president said that for the German nation there can be ‘no moral closure’ on two World wars, so why should we expect our own empathic, existential closure on WW1? Even Reynolds admits ‘it will be hard to ever truly move on from the trauma of the conflict’.
— Will WW1 ever come to ‘exemplify important qualities in the English (or British) character’ the way Agincourt, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, or the Battle of Britain have? Was our part in WW1 tragic rather than heroic?
* * *
Benedict Cumberbatch’s nightly outbursts about the Government’s policy towards Syrian refugees, delivered from the stage after the cast curtain-call for Hamlet, call to mind George Calderon’s after-performance oratory at the New Theatre, Oxford, in March 1912.
Liverpool Repertory Company, under Basil Dean, were touring their production of George’s The Fountain. As was the custom, the author was called onto the stage by the audience after the first night in Oxford, 4 March 1912. But the first national Coal Strike was in progress, slowly throttling the country. Instead of just taking his bow, George burst into a rousing appeal to the undergraduates present to form a body to go and work in the mines. ‘I was simply cold with terror’, wrote Kittie afterwards: ‘I had no notion this had been in his head.’ George invited volunteers to meet him outside Trinity College next morning, in the evening he led a mass debate in the college hall about what action to take, and by the end of the day an Oxford University Strike Emergency Committee with 300 members had been formed under George’s chairmanship. On 6 March he and Kittie left for London to coordinate with activists there…
One of the questions in my mind about Cumberbatch’s action is, what did the other actors think about being detained by it every evening and what was the management’s attitude? As it happens, subsequent events in George’s case may give us an intimation. On 7 March 1912 George travelled on his own to Cambridge for the first night there of The Fountain. The audience was small and the actors ‘livened things up’ with some anachronistic adlibbing about the Coal Strike, presumably partly aimed at George. When there were calls for the author afterwards, George was ‘prepared to take a call’, the Cambridge Daily News reported, but was prevented ‘possibly because Mr Basil Dean thought the time and the place were hardly suitable for propaganda’.
George was unable, then, to repeat his political theatre in Cambridge. But this did not prevent him from addressing a meeting of over two thousand students that had already been organised for the day after in Cambridge’s new Examination Hall.
* * *
I have several approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!
Related
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George Calderon, 1912
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Captain of the 11
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
George Calderon c.1901
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Watch this Space
16/11/15. I have been reading the copy of The Sayings of Lao Tsŭ (John Murray, 1905) that George Calderon gave his wife Kittie on her birthday, 5 March 1905. I had always known that George was interested in Taoism, but the signs had steadily been mounting that it was more than that. Since I knew nothing previously about Taoism, I thought I had better start by reading this short book translated by the famous Sinologist Lionel Giles, then branch out. There are no books about Taoism in the remains of George’s own library.
The documentary evidence of George’s reading and knowledge of Taoist texts falls in the years 1905-12. He thanks William Rothenstein in a letter provisionally dated 1905 for helping him find some of these texts. On Tahiti in 1906 he quotes Lao Tsu in a discussion about beauty. In a 1910 review of Chesterton’s What’s Wrong With the World? he accuses Chesterton of ‘not perceiving the virtues, the “identity”, or “tao” of the thing that he attacks’. George’s contention in his Preface to The Fountain (1911) that ‘all the Evil that matters is produced, not by evil intention, as is generally supposed, but by good intention working through the complicated channels of our social system’ could be interpreted as a plea to practise Taoist wu wei (active non-action). A 1912 note in his own shorthand also sounds distinctly in the spirit of the Sage: ‘Play. To show that pleasure is to be had only by
refraining from it. It is a thing of the imagination. It is too confused in reality. The mirage goes.’ Even George’s belief that there is a ‘profound philosophy’ behind Chekhov’s endeavour ‘to establish the true relation of Man to the surrounding universe’, and that ‘ever since we began to think in Europe, we have been wrong about Man’ because we have sought to ‘sever the individual, to abstract him in thought’ from his widest environment, could be taken to hint at the Tao.
The more one thinks about it, the more resemblances one sees between some of the precepts of Taoism and George’s personality in the last ten years of his life. Given that Taoism is not theistic (by the 1890s George was an agnostic/ atheist), and given some of the intriguing overlaps between Taoism and the kind of Christianity George did believe in, it is tempting to conclude he was a private Taoist. But this is an all too familiar trap for the
biographer. Nothing but empirical evidence will do. In the absence of it, one could construct a species of conspiracy theory that explained ‘everything’ about George Calderon — and was literally undisprovable.
I content myself at the moment by deeply internalising the Sage’s saying: ‘If people took as much care at the end as at the beginning, they would not fail in their enterprises.’
* * *
If you haven’t read it already, please read Clare Hopkins’s latest Comment now. It is definitive, in my view, but still there is plenty that some might find contentious. If you do have a reaction, PLEASE comment in your turn! I have received some short emails about Clare’s Comment, but we would all much rather follow a debate on the website. Some issues might be:
— Recently, there have been cases reported in the press of people who were counselled towards ‘closure’ after bereavement, went with it, but were ‘hurried’ and in fact just repressed their mourning; and they feel this did them psychological damage. It has led them to question the whole concept of closure.
— An issue is, then, can we actually direct (‘manage’) bereavement and commemoration? Are Clare’s ‘stages’ prescriptive, or ex post facto, i.e. retrospective?
— I see that Cambridge history professor David Reynolds, who has written about the factual side of WW1 memorials and the work of the Imperial War Graves Commission, is giving a public lecture at the Perse School on 2 December entitled ‘Making Peace With the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. In an interview, he says that WW1 is now ‘turning into a historical issue rather than one with a personal focus’, which reminds me of Clare’s ‘stage four’, when in her words ‘commemoration distils into History’. However, do we want our live emotions to be ‘historicised’? A recent German president said that for the German nation there can be ‘no moral closure’ on two World wars, so why should we expect our own empathic, existential closure on WW1? Even Reynolds admits ‘it will be hard to ever truly move on from the trauma of the conflict’.
— Will WW1 ever come to ‘exemplify important qualities in the English (or British) character’ the way Agincourt, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, or the Battle of Britain have? Was our part in WW1 tragic rather than heroic?
* * *
Benedict Cumberbatch’s nightly outbursts about the Government’s policy towards Syrian refugees, delivered from the stage after the cast curtain-call for Hamlet, call to mind George Calderon’s after-performance oratory at the New Theatre, Oxford, in March 1912.
Liverpool Repertory Company, under Basil Dean, were touring their production of George’s The Fountain. As was the custom, the author was called onto the stage by the audience after the first night in Oxford, 4 March 1912. But the first national Coal Strike was in progress, slowly throttling the country. Instead of just taking his bow, George burst into a rousing appeal to the undergraduates present to form a body to go and work in the mines. ‘I was simply cold with terror’, wrote Kittie afterwards: ‘I had no notion this had been in his head.’ George invited volunteers to meet him outside Trinity College next morning, in the evening he led a mass debate in the college hall about what action to take, and by the end of the day an Oxford University Strike Emergency Committee with 300 members had been formed under George’s chairmanship. On 6 March he and Kittie left for London to coordinate with activists there…
One of the questions in my mind about Cumberbatch’s action is, what did the other actors think about being detained by it every evening and what was the management’s attitude? As it happens, subsequent events in George’s case may give us an intimation. On 7 March 1912 George travelled on his own to Cambridge for the first night there of The Fountain. The audience was small and the actors ‘livened things up’ with some anachronistic adlibbing about the Coal Strike, presumably partly aimed at George. When there were calls for the author afterwards, George was ‘prepared to take a call’, the Cambridge Daily News reported, but was prevented ‘possibly because Mr Basil Dean thought the time and the place were hardly suitable for propaganda’.
George was unable, then, to repeat his political theatre in Cambridge. But this did not prevent him from addressing a meeting of over two thousand students that had already been organised for the day after in Cambridge’s new Examination Hall.
* * *
I have several approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!
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