Even at this late stage, ‘things keep coming up’. It took me, as predicted, two pretty full days to input to the text of my biography (167,000 words) the 1000+ corrections and revisions that emerged from my two complete readings of the printout, and I am now going into the process of assembling and writing my Afterword. But a fortnight ago, just before I went on holiday, my eye happened to light on the last page of George’s Introduction to his translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard in the last volume of his selected works posthumously edited by Kittie. In my chapter on George and Chekhov I always quote from the first edition of his translations (1912), or if I am referring to his revisions, then the second edition (1913), but on this occasion I happened to be consulting this volume of the selected works (1924) about something else.
I think the concluding paragraph of George’s Introduction (dated 1911) was extremely important to him, because he had not expressed any personal ‘wider’ views about Chekhov’s beliefs anywhere else. In this last section of the Introduction, entitled ‘Symbolism’, he mocked contemporary Russian critics who were ‘sure that there is a message of substantial hope in Tchekhof’s plays’ and that Chekhov believed ‘we may confidently look for the Millenium’ (this became the politically approved view of Chekhov in the USSR). George ends:
Surely it is another piece of Symbolism. Each generation believes that it stands on the boundary line between an old bad epoch and a good new one. And still the world grows no better; rather worse; hungrier, less various, less beautiful. That is true; but there is consolation in the assurance that whatever becomes of this husk of a planet, the inner meaning of it, hope itself, God, man’s ideal, continually progresses and develops. If that is not what Tchekhof meant, it seems at any rate the best interpretation of what he wrote.
Suddenly I noticed that instead of ‘the inner meaning of it’, the 1924 edition has ‘the meaning we put into it’. The vocabulary and cadences of this concluding paragraph are very carefully weighed, in my opinion, and if George himself changed ‘the inner meaning of it’ to ‘the meaning we put into it’, it would be revealing. It would suggest that instead of we humans having to attune ourselves to the tao of the ‘given’ world, instead of our having to discover the meaning hidden in the natura naturata, we project our meaning upon it, which we might take from anywhere, including theistic systems, scriptures and revelations. In other words, this change of words could imply that in the two years since George wrote the first version of his Introduction he had retreated from his Taoism to a more human-centred belief — I don’t say Humanism or Christianity, but at least to a more person-based, individual, existential form of faith. And this would tally with the impression I have that at Gallipoli he drew comfort from the established religion practised around him for all the troops by army padres.
But I said ‘if George himself’ made this change. When its implications hit me, my first reaction was to suspect that Kittie had made it when editing the 1924 volume in which I spotted it — and I will give my reasons for thinking that in my next post.
Ruminating further, though, I realised that if George himself had made this change, it would be in the second and last edition published in his lifetime, the one of ‘1913’. Here there was a slight problem. I don’t actually have that edition and had always taken my 1927 Jonathan Cape edition to be a reprint of it, since a footnote in it implies it was printed from the second edition; but equally, the 1927 edition could have been reprinted from Kittie’s 1924 edition… To ascertain, then, whether it was Kittie who made this significant change in George’s final, declarative word on Chekhov, there was no alternative but to obtain the second edition. I knew there was only one copy advertised in Britain, so I hit the phone and bought it. It was not cheap and should arrive within a week. Also, although advertised as ‘second edition, 1913’, a conversation with the bookseller established that the words on the verso of the title-page are ‘second edition, October 1912’! (The first edition was published on Chekhov’s birthday, 29 January 1912.)
I had long ago compared the texts of the translations in the first edition and the ‘second’ edition (i.e. my 1927 copy). The differences are very interesting. A footnote in the ‘second’ edition says that ‘Prince Kropotkin’ pointed out some errors in the first edition (he was a close friend of Lydia Yavorskaya, who played Nina in the 1912 London production) and that George had corrected them ‘since the first edition’. Some errors, however, had still got through, and it never occurred to me that George might have changed his Introduction as well. Now the possibility arises that Kittie made changes that were perpetuated in the 1927 edition and editions ever since, without George’s approval. It seems unlikely, but the only way to find out is to compare the first and second editions (now both dated as 1912), and then the real second edition with hers of 1924.
This raises a general point, I think. Nearly a hundred years have passed since Percy Lubbock’s ‘life’ (as Kittie described it) of George. I really do hope that my own biography of George leads to others tackling theirs before another hundred years go by. Even at this late stage, I simply had to follow up this question of the variants in the last paragraph of George’s Introduction, because the latter is so important to George’s achievement, but there are other late-arising issues that I have decided not to pursue. I think these might be useful avenues for future biographers to investigate, so I will mention some of them.
Although I searched twenty-three literary journals by hand for the period 1895-1915, and discovered stories and articles by George that were not already known, future biographers should surely be able to search more widely in online versions. Then, I would go down to the British Library (avoiding the brickstacks in the courtyard), locate the voluminous manuscript of George’s and William Caine’s pantomime The Brave Little Tailor, which by then will surely have been catalogued, and compare it scrupulously with Caine’s published narrative version of 1923. I would spend weeks in France trying to find George’s lost letter to Professor Paul Boyer in which he, George, explains to Boyer how Edwardian Englishmen and Englishwomen commonly have a ‘T’other’ in their private/sexual lives, and that this is accepted. And I would go to the department of the British Library in which Laurence Binyon worked, and I would turn over everything of the period 1920-23 looking for the originals of George’s sketches and paintings made on Tahiti and trying to discover what happened to the manuscript of Tahiti. And…and…and…
Someone will ask: ‘Why aren’t you doing those things, if you’re writing the definitive biography of George Calderon?’ To which I can only reply: ‘Give me a break!’ There can never be a ‘definitive biography of George Calderon’. I will have spent about eight years on mine by the time it appears, and I am firmly opposed to EPMOS, i.e. ‘Ever-expanding Post-retirement Magnum Opus Syndrome’. No-one will believe this, but: there are other things I want to write too.
If I have shown future writers about George some inviting avenues for their research, which lead to new material that even refutes some of my own interpretations, I shall be posthumously more than happy. I was very pleased to have done this with my publications about Chekhov on the British Stage. Dozens of younger researchers out there now know far more about this subject than I do. I have left the subject behind, and they have moved it on. That is how it must be.
I love the concept of EPMOS. I can now see it’s what I narrowly escaped succumbing to myself a few years ago!
I’m glad you feel the concept is applicable, John, but you are clearly an example of how to avoid it! In their retirement, several professors have tried to involve me in their magnum opuses, but it eventually dawned on me that they didn’t intend to finish them, as that would be ‘the end’… Now that they have undergone their final graduations, NO-ONE seems able to complete these exemplars of EPMOS. The situation was rather similar with George Calderon’s enormous work on folk religions, which he began in 1895, worked on right up to 1914, but did not finish. Kittie took on at least two top international scholars to complete it, but they found it impossible and it has disappeared without trace.