I said in my post of 6 October (nearly two months ago!) that I was ‘fired up to put the last tittle on my biography by the end of November’, which meant in the first instance writing the Afterword (‘Who George Calderon Was’) and finalising the notorious Introduction…
Have no fear, my post today is not an O fallacem hominum spem! [see 27 July 2016]; I am going to finish the text of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius by this Thursday, which means putting the last tittle on the Introduction and Afterword, and not the least reason for meeting that deadline is that I told followers I would!
I have never suffered from writer’s block, I think. When something has to be written, I clear the decks, powder the wig, and sit down to write it at a rate of 500-1500 words a day. Nevertheless, it never ceases to amaze me how unpredictable and labyrinthine are the routes by which one actually reaches that point. Each of these mazes or algorithms is totally different, a fresh and bracing journey of discovery…
On 6 October, I wrote that I was ‘on course to start writing the Afterword next week’. I thought I was, as all the research had been done and was laid out in order. But within a couple of days, I wobbled: I felt I hadn’t got my head round it all sufficiently, I hadn’t had long enough to digest everything, think about it, let it ‘rest’ like a joint of beef. I immediately set out to read the whole typescript again. With more checking added, that took a week. I re-read all 150 reviews of George’s life and works that came out between 1921 and 1925, which was complex because they are spread over his archive, my file on Kittie 1915-22, my file on his afterlife, my file for the Afterword… I had to keep re-digesting the file for the Afterword, my notes for it, getting a grip on all of that… That took about another fortnight. A lot of connecting up, tweaking, attempting to think outside the box went on. Then I started to write the Afterword.
But I hadn’t got further than a page, before it set me thinking about the Introduction. I started tinkering with the Introduction whilst writing the Afterword. Weird if not fatal, you might think, but there was sense in this, even if I had never had any previous intention of doing it. After two thousand words of the Afterword, I stopped writing it and worked full time on the Introduction, ‘finishing’ it a week ago. It is version 7 and has gone to my critical readers who tore to pieces versions 3-6 (1 and 2 I ditched myself). It might not be final, then, but I really think it must be penultimate.
Now I am on the finale of the Afterword… Naturally, after five years writing you approach a summing up with fear and trembling; magnified in this case by the task of summing up a man and the whole Edwardian ethos. The sheer data-crunching has been demanding. The writing of both the Introduction and the Afterword has been torture, as story-telling (i.e. biography) comes naturally to me, but generalising (synchrony) doesn’t. So to cap it all, my old friend Chronotopia has put her spanner in, i.e. the problem of one’s brain having to switch from one ‘chronotope’, ‘temporality’, or way of thinking of time, to another, or (in the case of the Afterword) having to hold both in one’s mind at once.
Altogether, in this game getting to the point where one is ready to sit down and write is an act of hokey cokey with Chronotopia that even Len Goodman might baulk at.
Simultaneously, I have been working a day a week on a shortish book of dialogue with John Polkinghorne about ‘eschatology’ (i.e. life and death!), akin to the dialogue that appeared in the Church Times on 9 October last year based on our previous conversations that may be found at polkinghorneat85.org.
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Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
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.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Captain of the 11
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon, 1912
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon c.1901
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
One does the hokey cokey
I said in my post of 6 October (nearly two months ago!) that I was ‘fired up to put the last tittle on my biography by the end of November’, which meant in the first instance writing the Afterword (‘Who George Calderon Was’) and finalising the notorious Introduction…
Have no fear, my post today is not an O fallacem hominum spem! [see 27 July 2016]; I am going to finish the text of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius by this Thursday, which means putting the last tittle on the Introduction and Afterword, and not the least reason for meeting that deadline is that I told followers I would!
I have never suffered from writer’s block, I think. When something has to be written, I clear the decks, powder the wig, and sit down to write it at a rate of 500-1500 words a day. Nevertheless, it never ceases to amaze me how unpredictable and labyrinthine are the routes by which one actually reaches that point. Each of these mazes or algorithms is totally different, a fresh and bracing journey of discovery…
On 6 October, I wrote that I was ‘on course to start writing the Afterword next week’. I thought I was, as all the research had been done and was laid out in order. But within a couple of days, I wobbled: I felt I hadn’t got my head round it all sufficiently, I hadn’t had long enough to digest everything, think about it, let it ‘rest’ like a joint of beef. I immediately set out to read the whole typescript again. With more checking added, that took a week. I re-read all 150 reviews of George’s life and works that came out between 1921 and 1925, which was complex because they are spread over his archive, my file on Kittie 1915-22, my file on his afterlife, my file for the Afterword… I had to keep re-digesting the file for the Afterword, my notes for it, getting a grip on all of that… That took about another fortnight. A lot of connecting up, tweaking, attempting to think outside the box went on. Then I started to write the Afterword.
But I hadn’t got further than a page, before it set me thinking about the Introduction. I started tinkering with the Introduction whilst writing the Afterword. Weird if not fatal, you might think, but there was sense in this, even if I had never had any previous intention of doing it. After two thousand words of the Afterword, I stopped writing it and worked full time on the Introduction, ‘finishing’ it a week ago. It is version 7 and has gone to my critical readers who tore to pieces versions 3-6 (1 and 2 I ditched myself). It might not be final, then, but I really think it must be penultimate.
Now I am on the finale of the Afterword… Naturally, after five years writing you approach a summing up with fear and trembling; magnified in this case by the task of summing up a man and the whole Edwardian ethos. The sheer data-crunching has been demanding. The writing of both the Introduction and the Afterword has been torture, as story-telling (i.e. biography) comes naturally to me, but generalising (synchrony) doesn’t. So to cap it all, my old friend Chronotopia has put her spanner in, i.e. the problem of one’s brain having to switch from one ‘chronotope’, ‘temporality’, or way of thinking of time, to another, or (in the case of the Afterword) having to hold both in one’s mind at once.
Altogether, in this game getting to the point where one is ready to sit down and write is an act of hokey cokey with Chronotopia that even Len Goodman might baulk at.
Simultaneously, I have been working a day a week on a shortish book of dialogue with John Polkinghorne about ‘eschatology’ (i.e. life and death!), akin to the dialogue that appeared in the Church Times on 9 October last year based on our previous conversations that may be found at polkinghorneat85.org.
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