12/10/15. There were dozens of books published by English and American visitors to Tahiti between about 1890 and 1930, and Rupert Brooke’s poems about the island became extremely well known. I have to admit that this literature is so large that I have scarcely dipped into it. Understandably (I hope) I have concentrated on reading, re-reading, and penetrating George Calderon’s posthumous Tahiti, which I regard as his masterpiece. However, without reading the other books it is difficult to know what the standard is. I was delighted, therefore, to be given recently a copy of Robert Keable’s Tahiti: Island of Dreams (1925), because it compares books on the island from Loti to George: compares them with each other, and with the author’s own experience of the island.
Keable devotes seven pages to Tahiti. He writes: ‘It is the best book on the island that has been written, and for that very reason, perhaps, is not popularly known. It is a sad hook, and in it George Calderon depicts, with simple truth, at once the beauty and the sorrows of the Isle of Dreams.’ That is gratifying, at least. But when Keable visited the island, he could find only one Tahitian still alive of those whose portraits George had drawn in his book. Similarly, Frederick O’Brien, author of Mystic Isles of the South Seas (1921), wrote to Kittie on 30 October 1921: ‘Many of the people in your husband’s book I knew in 1913, but most of them are dead. I was again in Tahiti a few months ago. The influenza and the prevalent tuberculosis had taken more than half of those who lived there in 1913.’
From this you may conclude that I have reached 1921 and have only about 2000 words to write in my first draft of Chapter 15, ‘Aftermath and Masterpiece’. More on the difficulties next week…
I always have four or five approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, 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Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Captain of the 11
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George Calderon c.1901
George Calderon, 1912
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Watch this Space
12/10/15. There were dozens of books published by English and American visitors to Tahiti between about 1890 and 1930, and Rupert Brooke’s poems about the island became extremely well known. I have to admit that this literature is so large that I have scarcely dipped into it. Understandably (I hope) I have concentrated on reading, re-reading, and penetrating George Calderon’s posthumous Tahiti, which I regard as his masterpiece. However, without reading the other books it is difficult to know what the standard is. I was delighted, therefore, to be given recently a copy of Robert Keable’s Tahiti: Island of Dreams (1925), because it compares books on the island from Loti to George: compares them with each other, and with the author’s own experience of the island.
Keable devotes seven pages to Tahiti. He writes: ‘It is the best book on the island that has been written, and for that very reason, perhaps, is not popularly known. It is a sad hook, and in it George Calderon depicts, with simple truth, at once the beauty and the sorrows of the Isle of Dreams.’ That is gratifying, at least. But when Keable visited the island, he could find only one Tahitian still alive of those whose portraits George had drawn in his book. Similarly, Frederick O’Brien, author of Mystic Isles of the South Seas (1921), wrote to Kittie on 30 October 1921: ‘Many of the people in your husband’s book I knew in 1913, but most of them are dead. I was again in Tahiti a few months ago. The influenza and the prevalent tuberculosis had taken more than half of those who lived there in 1913.’
From this you may conclude that I have reached 1921 and have only about 2000 words to write in my first draft of Chapter 15, ‘Aftermath and Masterpiece’. More on the difficulties next week…
I always have four or five approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!
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