On 30 August 1920, Kittie received through the post the first draft of Laurence Binyon’s ode to George’s memory, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57345 . She was at Constance Sutton’s Tudor home in Herefordshire, Brinsop Court, and wrote to Binyon next day that she had read his poem ‘in the beautiful courtyard of this wonderful house […] a lovely spot to read it for the first time’.
As he explained in his covering letter, Binyon had just returned from a holiday in Brittany and had written ‘the verses’ there. The fair copy he was enclosing had been transcribed by his wife Cicely. He had many doubts about the poem, which he set out to Kittie at length, and he asked her to be ‘exact in your turn — and exacting’. ‘There may be false notes perhaps. There are certainly things that could be better.’
Given Kittie’s definitely ‘exacting’ critical standards, it is amazing that she took exception to only one word. The poem swept her off her feet. ‘I just can’t find the words, I think it is so beautiful and so him’, she told Binyon. She loved all of it, but particularly the last stanza, where she felt George was ‘there […] standing before one’.
The word she had difficulty with was ‘Temperance’ in Binyon’s original second line:
Wisdom and Valour, Faith,
Justice and Temperance, — names
Of virtue’s quest and prize, —
What is each but a cold wraith
Until it lives in a man
And looks thro’ a man’s eyes?
‘Was George “temperate”?’ Kittie asked Binyon. She found it ‘very difficult’ to say why she did not think ‘Temperance’ was appropriate, and I am sorry that for copyright reasons I cannot quote the hundred and fifty or so halting, dash-marked, underlined and disjointed words in which she struggles to define her meaning, because they convey a vivid image of her thinking onto the paper. She tussled with it, because she felt it was a very important question that she had to resolve. George was not, she stresses, ‘intemperate’, ‘but but [sic] there was a swift white heat about him that with all his gentleness and tenderness burnt things up without hesitation’. It did not ‘always’ burn things up, Kittie continues; sometimes it was a positive ‘driving force’; but whatever George did he did ‘with a sort of passion’. This ‘never blinded his justice or integrity’, yet ‘it did burn up’.
What Kittie is describing is precisely what I feel to be George’s and other Edwardians’ uncontrollable urge to go at things like a bull at a gate. Thinking twice, risk assessment, analysing where beginnings might plausibly lead before acting, was boring to them. They had instantly to ‘get up and go’. They saw this as ‘adventure’, as their ‘propensity to act’, their ‘enterprise’, without realising that often they just wanted the fix. (This explains George’s unfinished or barely started projects.) Further, they saw this rush at things, this ‘burning up’ as Kittie calls it, as heroic. Thomas Carlyle’s writings about the ‘hero’ and the ‘great man’ still affected them (we know from George’s library that he was a fan). Personally, I feel that this is the most likely explanation for Newbolt’s and George’s intensity in the ‘icons’ of them that I discussed in my last post. In a letter to Grant Richards, George describes Chekhov as ‘a great man’. Maybe; but it is impossible to imagine Chekhov, or even Tolstoi, posing as great men in their photographs…
With Binyon’s agreement, the words ‘and Temperance’ were removed from the second line of the ode and the metre filled out with an adjective: ‘the lofty names’. Binyon also made a dozen changes of his own before the poem was published.
In the First World War the Edwardians paid a terrible price on the battlefield for their unpondered, essentially self-gratificatory conception of heroism. George, though, was already critical of heroism before 1914, as his and Hankin’s hilarious send-up in their 1913 play Thompson amply demonstrates. And as Susan Chitty writes:
By the end of 1915 Newbolt was struggling to keep up his spirits. The ill-fated invasion of the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli had failed. Calderon had died there. The next patriotic book to encourage boys to the front was due but, not surprisingly, Newbolt’s attitude to war was changing. ‘I write about heroic deeds and hairsbreadth escapes as if they were children’s games, with no real pain or danger in them,’ he admitted to Alice [Hylton].
(Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt (London, Quartet Books, 1997), pp. 227-28.)
Related
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Captain of the 11
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George Calderon c.1901
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
George Calderon, 1912
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Intemperance and ‘Heroism’
On 30 August 1920, Kittie received through the post the first draft of Laurence Binyon’s ode to George’s memory, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57345 . She was at Constance Sutton’s Tudor home in Herefordshire, Brinsop Court, and wrote to Binyon next day that she had read his poem ‘in the beautiful courtyard of this wonderful house […] a lovely spot to read it for the first time’.
As he explained in his covering letter, Binyon had just returned from a holiday in Brittany and had written ‘the verses’ there. The fair copy he was enclosing had been transcribed by his wife Cicely. He had many doubts about the poem, which he set out to Kittie at length, and he asked her to be ‘exact in your turn — and exacting’. ‘There may be false notes perhaps. There are certainly things that could be better.’
Given Kittie’s definitely ‘exacting’ critical standards, it is amazing that she took exception to only one word. The poem swept her off her feet. ‘I just can’t find the words, I think it is so beautiful and so him’, she told Binyon. She loved all of it, but particularly the last stanza, where she felt George was ‘there […] standing before one’.
The word she had difficulty with was ‘Temperance’ in Binyon’s original second line:
Wisdom and Valour, Faith,
Justice and Temperance, — names
Of virtue’s quest and prize, —
What is each but a cold wraith
Until it lives in a man
And looks thro’ a man’s eyes?
‘Was George “temperate”?’ Kittie asked Binyon. She found it ‘very difficult’ to say why she did not think ‘Temperance’ was appropriate, and I am sorry that for copyright reasons I cannot quote the hundred and fifty or so halting, dash-marked, underlined and disjointed words in which she struggles to define her meaning, because they convey a vivid image of her thinking onto the paper. She tussled with it, because she felt it was a very important question that she had to resolve. George was not, she stresses, ‘intemperate’, ‘but but [sic] there was a swift white heat about him that with all his gentleness and tenderness burnt things up without hesitation’. It did not ‘always’ burn things up, Kittie continues; sometimes it was a positive ‘driving force’; but whatever George did he did ‘with a sort of passion’. This ‘never blinded his justice or integrity’, yet ‘it did burn up’.
What Kittie is describing is precisely what I feel to be George’s and other Edwardians’ uncontrollable urge to go at things like a bull at a gate. Thinking twice, risk assessment, analysing where beginnings might plausibly lead before acting, was boring to them. They had instantly to ‘get up and go’. They saw this as ‘adventure’, as their ‘propensity to act’, their ‘enterprise’, without realising that often they just wanted the fix. (This explains George’s unfinished or barely started projects.) Further, they saw this rush at things, this ‘burning up’ as Kittie calls it, as heroic. Thomas Carlyle’s writings about the ‘hero’ and the ‘great man’ still affected them (we know from George’s library that he was a fan). Personally, I feel that this is the most likely explanation for Newbolt’s and George’s intensity in the ‘icons’ of them that I discussed in my last post. In a letter to Grant Richards, George describes Chekhov as ‘a great man’. Maybe; but it is impossible to imagine Chekhov, or even Tolstoi, posing as great men in their photographs…
With Binyon’s agreement, the words ‘and Temperance’ were removed from the second line of the ode and the metre filled out with an adjective: ‘the lofty names’. Binyon also made a dozen changes of his own before the poem was published.
In the First World War the Edwardians paid a terrible price on the battlefield for their unpondered, essentially self-gratificatory conception of heroism. George, though, was already critical of heroism before 1914, as his and Hankin’s hilarious send-up in their 1913 play Thompson amply demonstrates. And as Susan Chitty writes:
(Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt (London, Quartet Books, 1997), pp. 227-28.)
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