9/11/15. It is a huge relief to have ‘finished writing’ the penultimate chapter, ‘Aftermath and Masterpiece’, of my biography. Although it is only 9000 words long, it has taken me ten weeks to research and write (in pencil). It has been by far the most difficult of the fifteen I have written, and it’s not in a good state. It’s a patchwork held together by hiatuses. The reason it is so different is, of course, that George isn’t physically alive in it; it’s about Kittie’s life after George and her posthumous creation of his reputation. Hundreds of changes, some radical, will probably be made when I ‘type it up’, and then each time I read it on the screen. I expect I shall manage to knock it into shape. Meanwhile, on with researching the very last chapter, ‘White Raven’, which follows Kittie’s life to its end and George’s continuing afterlife. It will be short, but quite full of incident. I just hope the research does not take an unconscionable time…again.
* * *
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 WW 1 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, bring 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
Captain of the 11
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George Calderon c.1901
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
George Calderon, 1912
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Watch this Space
9/11/15. It is a huge relief to have ‘finished writing’ the penultimate chapter, ‘Aftermath and Masterpiece’, of my biography. Although it is only 9000 words long, it has taken me ten weeks to research and write (in pencil). It has been by far the most difficult of the fifteen I have written, and it’s not in a good state. It’s a patchwork held together by hiatuses. The reason it is so different is, of course, that George isn’t physically alive in it; it’s about Kittie’s life after George and her posthumous creation of his reputation. Hundreds of changes, some radical, will probably be made when I ‘type it up’, and then each time I read it on the screen. I expect I shall manage to knock it into shape. Meanwhile, on with researching the very last chapter, ‘White Raven’, which follows Kittie’s life to its end and George’s continuing afterlife. It will be short, but quite full of incident. I just hope the research does not take an unconscionable time…again.
* * *
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 WW 1 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, bring 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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