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Excellent entry, Dad. I like the escape room picture, of course, but the story about the Russian and the hole-in-the-wall is exceptional!

Delicious! “Are you being Served?” meets “Keeping up Appearances” via Calderotica. But Patrick, you cannot leave us dangling like that just before Christmas!

One thing – could you perhaps post part II after the watershed? Reading this whilst preparing breakfast, I nearly spilt milk on my corduroys!

Patrick: I read your story ‘Black Tie’ on Monday, and knew immediately that it didn’t work for me. There was something forced, factitious; something that didn’t let the elements click together. But I also knew I would have to come back to it in order to understand why.

I have read it again today and think I can explain. It seems to me that the story doesn’t know from the outset where it’s going; it is flawed, hobbled, by a betraying uncertainty of tone. Is it another campus comedy, in the Sharpe/Bradbury/Lodge tradition, or does it unexpectedly fall down a shaft into something deeper? It starts out, with Jonathan Palmer, as broad comedy; the narrowed down Dante PhD, the 6 medics in the house, the (improbable, but this doesn’t matter) sexual episode in the bath. The surreal detail of the table on the roof is excellent! But then death intervenes. Hang on…is this just going to be an excuse for more jokes? Six Medics at a Funeral? At this point, we’re not sure. Then the parents of the dead boy are introduced, very respectfully (I like the rounding detail of the father ‘always on the verge of saying something’, without actually doing so. This could go either way). They stay over in college rooms: improbable again, I find, but this time it does matter, because we are into a different register. Your central character JP decides to go to the funeral: quite in order.

But from here on, I think, the story loses control. Not only is the act of borrowing the black tie very awkwardly expressed (his request of the college servant is ‘met with gravity’; doesn’t the phrase itself wince?) but the narrative then goes haywire. The funeral service is conventional enough, but then the actual burial takes Jonathan into deeper waters than he or we expected. With the phrase ‘This is when it hit him’; this where it changes gear. The sudden sense of alienation, the revulsion (mud as excrement), the loathing of the other people present. It is as if we have stumbled on Paddy Dignam’s funeral from Ulysses, by mistake. And what does poor Bakhtin have to do with all this? One might almost expect a triplet from The Inferno! It’s just as well, I think, that JP decides not to go to the wake, where he would no doubt have made an embarrassing exhibition of himself, and brought the college into disrepute.

Patrick: I apologize for the fact that none of this is very helpful. (Unless there are two stories here that need to be teased apart.) But the last point made here, about the college, prompts another general reflection about your Cambridge stories — some of which, as you know, I really like. But is it possible that the very social structure of the university and its colleges, the fish-tank artificiality of its strongly-marked hierarchy (senior academics, tutors, students, servants, and bedders), the exaggerated age and gender differences, the temporariness within fixity, is itself too laminated a basis for fiction? Too unyielding? Except perhaps to comedy, or (like your Beckettian Tower story) fiction of the unashamedly philosophical kind?

Morris Zapp knew his place, but I don’t think Jonathan Palmer knows his.

My dear contrite Patrick: you make me almost ashamed of what you kindly call my ‘archery’, so ready are you to own up to some youthful infelicities (or in-FionaFlytes?). Perhaps I should try throwing some boomerangs instead, to expose some of my own?

I thought of Pope’s account of his own reaction to criticism: ‘Did some more sober critic come abroad? / If wrong, I smil’d; if right, I kiss’d the rod.’ (Although Pope himself never did, of course.)

I sympathise and agree with your conclusion, looking back (and over), that there is not much that can be done to ‘correct’ one’s earlier work. The repair always shows; and doesn’t even have the merits of a good, self-declared piece of darning. And there’s something almost dishonest about it too; one thinks of the notorious case of Auden’s systematic rewriting (and occlusion) of his earlier work. Whatever one thinks of ‘cancel culture’, it is worse, I think, to replace a statue, or a story, with something that pretends always to have stood on the same plinth. The best thing, no doubt, is to accept that flies in amber are really flies, not butterflies; and to set out again, reheartened, with a new net. And it is good to know that this is precisely what you intend to do.

Thank you Patrick for your Monday morning entertainment — we certainly need some these days, other than the daily diet of human hideousness which actually taps on the window, and creeps over the sill.

But my dear Sir, prepare to find yourself as stuck full of arrows as Saint Sebastian. I have to say, with respect and with regret, that this (very early) story has many things wrong with it; some of which are attributable no doubt to the small and shuttered world of Cambridge studenthood. How ridiculous it (now) seems that examinations loomed like cliffs around us, blocking the view. And those intolerable sherry parties! Even rigid old Coriolanus learnt, ‘There is a world elsewhere.’ And should that world not be more present, at least by implication, even in a student story? As later revised?

But to begin at the beginning. I know the works of Chaucer have now been digitalized in the British Library, but this does not provide and excuse –even then– for starting your story with a medieval personalization of Morning at the window, disturbing your lovers. Or is this Phoebus, opening one of Spenser’s cantos in The Faerie Queene? Or Donne’s ‘busie unruly Sunne’? The strategy smells of the lamp, and this first sentence (with the symmetrical, bracketing last), surely has to go.

A further source of confusion: I first thought that Morning was going to be the name of the character; a doubt not entirely removed when his actual name turns out to be May!

Then it’s part of the ‘small world’ sense that the story itself brings to mind that of small animals in a cage, or young fish in an aquarium (both Stephen and the unnamed young lady later are described as babies). This is confirmed by the horror — yes, it is almost like Kurtz’s horror–of adult sexuality, which is fended off by the grotesque headlines that freeze poor Stephen, and never entered upon, even by implication, by the young lovers themselves. As we shall see, the story has another, comic denouement reserved for them; this being the moment that rescues the story, right at the end.

A couple of details. What is supposed to have happened to spotty Philip Potter? We are never told; though his fate is used as an ice-breaker between the young couple. And why does Fiona Flyte (the name is from the comedy drawer) have to marry an accountant? Accountants, and lawyers, turn up regularly as the off-stage villains in your stories!

More significantly, why are we never told the name of the girl in the wardrobe (where she is no doubt more comfortable than she was in bed)? This cannot have been an oversight…

But there are perhaps a few oversights in the writing itself, very unusual with you, which I will have the temerity to point out. In the paragraph with the horrible headlines, Stephen confesses to ‘going to one of them’ (where he is literally sick). One of what? I can detect no antecedent here. Then later, in the paragraph ‘Yes, there she was…,’ the word ‘suddenly’ is used, without chaperone, to be followed by ‘all of a sudden’ in the next paragraph; whereas a little later, the use of the word in modern stories is self-consciously castigated. What of the two earlier instances?

But I descend to small details here, and poor Saint Sebastian must be suffering unduly. So let me end by saying that the conclusion of the story is wonderfully comic, and I hope can be rescued in any redrafting you may be driven to. The theme of the strategies used by surprised lovers is a venerable one, with examples in Chaucer no less; though one thinks of countless examples in 18c novels and 19c farces (you will be able to call more to mind than I can). I recall Poe’s chilling version, in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’; but normally the scene is used for comic effect. There must be at least one in Chekhov (an inverse of the one about the bed that collapses under the unfortunate, legimate couple on honeymoon); and in Maupassant; and in any short-story writer worth their salt.

Any knocking on the door tonight will be kids for Hallowe’en…

Patrick: this latest story (from 1978!) has a lot in common with the one posted a few months ago, featuring crowds on a tower…and an extreme, Beckettian vulnerability on the part of the narrator, who cannot bear to be looked at, to be seen. Esse est percipi. Here, we have the other side of the coin – or another facet of the dice, to multiply the narratological possibilities? The character is again motivated, alarmed, by the ‘double string’ (old optics) of the eyes. But this time, his vulnerability is deflected by being projected outwards onto clothes; his own and others’. He suspects that it is his clothes that attract other people’s attention; but they are actually looking ‘at him‘.

By contrast, all the other extravagant apparitions seem to be completely at ease with themselves – whatever they look like to others. They are able to be ‘simply the thing I am’, not conditional on the percipi. Or so it seems to him, stripped down as he himself is to ‘the bare, forked animal’, feeling that ontological draught under his tweed. To survive in this world, he has to do what he does in the last paragraph: construct a tailored carapace of his own, within which he can feel comfortable – and change his name; to Morton, to Raffles.

I don’t know how you could write this story today, when everyone wears jeans, and there is not a monocle to be seen. Tattoos? Body piercings?

‘Did they not know, or were they in denial?’ – the inescapable question at the heart of the matter to which, I regret to say, I have no clear answer. It’s worth considering, however, why Yvonne Kapp, then in her sixties and having led a full life, contributing to many causes both political and non-political, chose to devote more than a decade of full-time, painstaking, health-damaging and virtually unpaid effort to recording in minute tapestry detail the life of Eleanor Marx. ‘Tussy’ was a hardworking, multifaceted, idealistic woman – one not wholly unlike Yvonne herself, but one who was a participant in the full tumult of the Victorian Age. She lived, it might be said, ‘Before the Fall’, in some sense in an Age of Innocence – and she died well before the decisive revolutionary moment of October 1917 and all that was to flow from it. Eleanor Marx was, in retrospect, cocooned from the future – a briar-patch future in which her biographer found herself so deeply embroiled and one in which Yvonne, I would guess, was sometimes required to close her eyes.

For me at least, the delicious thing about John Pym’s post is the fact that Yvonne and Margaret were elegant, highly intelligent, rather posh people, with civilised manners that extended to the tea ceremony, yet the constant unspoken truth is that their political beliefs were, in John Pym’s words, ‘an unarguable given’ — they believed, like Brecht and Hobsbawm, in a political system that was already responsible for the deaths of millions. (Did they not know, or were they in denial?) It is even hilarious when their beliefs knock against reality, as when Yvonne finds East Germany not exactly her Utopia. John Pym has written the perfect portrait of a certain type of British communist; and of a whole age.

A fascinating post, both the historical background and your own contact with your ‘first communist’. Thank you.

Patrick: I implore your indulgence (once again) for this crenellated crinoline comment.

In Günther Grass’s novel The Tin Drum
there is at least a point in crinolines;
Anna hides Joseph under hers, and he
takes full advantage and a child is born
who will be Oskar’s mother (now read on).
But what was Mrs Shapter doing
with such ridiculous encumbrances?
Hiding a Russian spy? A Romanov?
Icons or artefacts long undeclared
to Customs? No; it simply was the mode,
the custom, to dress women up like this,
a cultural repressiveness that made
a mockery of that most feminine,
Blake’s ‘human form divine.’ Luckily, George
was not required to jump through hoops like these
to get his Russian up to scratch…

Fabulous! How exciting not only to be able to fully identify a mysterious name but to have such detail to give flesh to the skeleton of history we’re often left with. Blessings to those who made drawings and annotations for those of us desperate for information in the future.

Dear Harvey, thank you for this powerful, beautifully compact post. Several people have told me how moving they find it, and Rabeneck’s account. I appreciate that the post sums up so much both for you personally and for Anglo-Russian relations.

That 2004 occasion does seem like a high point in genuine cultural exchange with Russia. In 1987, on behalf of the British Council, Alison and I organised the UK-USSR Colloquium in Cambridge entitled ‘Chekhov on the British Stage’, which had the personal endorsement of Gorbachev, and genuine cultural exchange in Chekhov studies flowered through the next decade. But by 2007 the eminent Chekhov scholars Mikhail Gromov, Lidiia Opul’skaia, Aleksandr Chudakov, Emma Polotskaia, and others, who had worked on the Academy edition of Chekhov and all passionately believed in Anglo-Russian contacts, were dead. In the next decade, Chekhov’s house in Yalta even became caught in the crossfire between Ukrainian nationalists and the Putin dictatorship.

I think Russians are ‘more finely tuned to other people’s emotions than we are’. They have had to be in order to survive in such a repressive and murderous society. With certain Russians — in the Soviet period, at least — I often felt that as I was speaking, they were reading my body language so skilfully and fast that they were four or five jumps ahead of me in the discourse. Also, I think Russians became so adept at reading emotions because they could not place any trust in the actual words their compatriots were uttering, as everyone in Soviet life indulged in coded speech or brazen vran’e (compulsive lying).

Can Russia pull itself out of the obsessive victimhood, paranoia, and nationalist-fascist coal sack it has thrust itself into? If not, I don’t see the good times in Anglo-Russian relations and cultural interchange returning in my lifetime, either.

Thank you Patrick for revisiting the ‘existential situation’ out of which your story (sort of) arose. I’ve not read as much Dostoevsky as you would think I shouldn’t have done, but I do remember the story — ‘The Double?’ — about the character haunted by his Doppelgänger. This must surely have been festering somewhere inside you also, at the time. (This story was once rather convincingly adapted for TV: early on, back in the 70s?.)

It’s fascinating to me, given the strong, almost magnetic parallels, that you did not know Beckett’s Film at the time. It’s as if ideas are around in the air like spores at a given time, and may be picked up by different writers and developed in different ways. And the more I reflect, the more I have to admire the way you can seize on a subject as it were out of the corner of your eye: certainly not the common stock that lies (often done to death!) in the middle of the road.

I’m intrigued, Patrick, by your (very) short story posted today. And not just by the description ‘brown-man,’ — Cambridge shorthand? — which puzzles me. No; it is the intensity of the emotion which is stimulated by the fact of being seen. More than simply paranoid, there is the hint of something existential.

And then something clicked, and I remembered Samuel Beckett’s bizarre text Film (published in 1967: included in Faber’s Complete Dramatic Works, pages 321-34). Beckett prefaces this text with the Berkeleyan axiom: Esse est percipi. And the drama is played out, visually, between percipi and percipere; seeing and being seen, being and being known or felt to be. Beckett’s own summary: ‘Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception.’ (As another dramatist once put it: ‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.’) Beckett’s character suffers ‘an agony of perceivedness’, very like the alarm/trauma of your ‘brown-man.’ He is disturbed by being observed by his dog, his cat, his parrot, and even a fish. More pointedly, by a print on the wall ‘of the face of God the Father, the eyes staring at him severely’. He then looks at a series of photographs of himself at different ages, in each of which he is being attentively observed; and all of which he tears up. Only at the end does Film make it clear that this is a parable of agonized self-consciousness.

Now, Patrick: is it not possible that you as a switched-on drama man might have known this text — or seen the film, which was made in 1965? And half-remembered it as you wrote your story. It’s uncanny that as he shrinks from being pointed at, your character also ends up with the photograph (of his shrunken self?) on the mantelpiece. Your story, one notes, is captioned by a Kafka drawing. Perhaps you were superintending a Cambridge confluence, here, of two masters of self-interrogation? Congratulations, anyway, to your younger and your older self!

The very perspective, rarely undisturbed by “redevelopments”,
the little brown man can still tight rope across from Caius to Great St Mary’s.

And Winifred’s 1939 diary entry for 11th July states that Kitty Calderon and Marchesa de Rosalis arrived at the Shelbourne. They lunched with the Verschoyles and then the Verschoyles brought them for a drive (a favourite pastime) to Lucan and the Phoenix Park. Then they dined.

Thanks very much Patrick. I wouldn’t recognise the Ospringe photos but Winifred’s greatniece ( grand-daughter of Dorothea Letts and her husband Arthur Williams, who lived in Ospringe) might. But that is for another day. The relationship may not be just literary – as Kitty was the daughter of John Hamilton (1800-1884) of Brown Hall and St Ernan’s Donegal, she was related to Winifred’s husband, William H.F. Verschoyle .
The relationship is difficult to work out but I think it is thus (using Burke’s Peerage and Virginia Mason’s book on the Verschoyle families):
Reverend William Henry Foster b. 1796, d. 1861
married in 1821
Catherine Hamilton b. 1803, d. 1873, the (half?)sister of John Hamilton above.

Rev William Henry Foster and Catherine Hamilton had 3 children including Catherine Helen Foster (married name Verschoyle) d.1901, who was the mother of Winifred Letts’s husband, WHF Verschoyle.

So Kittie was a first cousin of Catherine, mother of Winifred Letts’s husband … I think.

Looking at Letts’s 1927 diary, it appears that she visited the Hamilton home at Brown Hall and St Ernan’s for the first time in that year of 1927, a year after her marriage to the widower WHF Verschoyle.

Fascinating connections!
Thanks again

I am currently working on compiling information about the life and works of the writer and warpoet, Winifred M Letts (1882-1972), who married WHF Verschoyle in 1926 in Dublin. Letts’s 1937 diary (unpublished) tells of her journey from Dublin to stay with her sisters in Ospringe in midJuly 1937 and states that Kitty Calderon came to tea with Marchesa Louise de Ordono de Rosalis (July 17th 1937) and that, the following day, they ‘all went over to see Kitty at White Raven’, where Letts’ nephew took a lot of photographs. I wondered if there is any reference in Kitty’s 1937 diary to the same occasion or if there are any photos from the visit by any chance?

Two years and one day before the death of Chekhov, the Campanile, the famous old watchtower of Venice, collapsed into Saint Mark’s Square, miraculously avoiding damage to the Basilica and the Ducal Palace. The enormous pile of rubble became a magnet for scavengers – and soon fanciful photographs, postcards and engravings began to appear purporting to illustrate the magnitude of the catastrophe. A few days ago Sarah Quill, the eminent photographer who’s been recording the buildings of Venice since 1971, gave an illuminating lecture on the Fall and Rise of the Campanile to our local Fine Arts society illustrated with several of these ‘fakes’. One genuine photograph was embellished in the engraving made from it by the presence of several colourful long-skirted lady souvenir-hunters. By 1912 the Campanile, thanks to a huge national effort aided by outside benefactors, was triumphantly reopened – largely rebuilt from its own wreckage.

Nice to read this – if it’s the same Damian Grant, I remember some very enjoyable tutorials from my time as an undergraduate at Manchester University in the late 1980s.

Greatly taken by John Pym’s subtle post, I asked him if he could lend me back (as it were) the copy of Terminations illustrated — which I had never read — and this Mr Pym did. Needless to say, it’s a queer, light headed feeling, reading a copy inscribed by George, given by him to Kittie, and then cut by her as she read it; even though she does not appear to have left any annotations.

I found myself wondering why there seem to be no mentions of Henry James in the whole George Calderon corpus, yet Kittie owned about a dozen of his books. Similarly (perhaps a nod to Damian Grant here), I can remember no general or specific reference to contemporary politics in these four stories by James, whereas any full-length fictional work of George’s is full of both.

What particularly struck me is that every story is concerned with a form of ‘celebrity obsession psychosis’ (they are not all literary celebrities — one is a ‘thinker’, another seems to be a powerful public figure, but as offstage characters they are less concrete than Mrs Mainwaring). Some of the victims of this mania ruin themselves in the service of their hero, others actually destroy him.

One can hardly deny that this is a very modern, relevant subject. James does stir the psychological depths of it. At about the same time, Chekhov was addressing the phenomenon in stories such as ‘A Passenger in First Class’ and ‘My Name and I’ (better known as ‘A Tedious Tale’), and above all in The Seagull.

I must confess I don’t know the stories by Henry James that John Pym comments on here, but they are clearly cut from the same block as ‘The Aspern Papers’ and other attempts by James to fictionalize his own creative process — and the problems it encounters, both technical and circumstantial. (One remembers that passage in one of his Prefaces, where he admits that the handling of this technical process is in the end more interesting to him than sorting out the merely human convolutions of the plot.)

It is clever — and entertaining — of Pym to update the satirical edge of these stories to the present time; the revelation about disguised gender here is really something (though we should remember that 19c women authors knew a lot about this stratagem, from force of circumstance). It occurs to me to remark, however, that worse than the fate of a country house party that pillories an author is the fate of an author and editor, today, arrested at St Pancras station by the British police on a tip-off from French police, because he had dared to share the displeasure of the French public with the president’s most unpopular policy on retirement. (I refer to the case of Ernest Moret, 28-year-old editor at Editions de la Fabrique, who was arrested and questioned for twelve hours last week.) Losing your liberty is more perilous than losing your manuscript; and it is to be hoped that protests made in connection with this case in both France and the UK will throw light on such scandalous police proceeding.

AN INTERLUDE
by
Katharine Calderon

BRIGHTON PIER, 1912. A blustery morning. TWO GENTLEMEN are deep in conversation about a forthcoming London theatrical production. One wears a dark suit and an Oxford college scarf wrapped several times round his neck. He carries a Gladstone bag. The other sports a neat goatee and a straw boater with a gaily coloured band. From time to time he gesticulates for emphasis with a pince-nez.

The wind shivers the leaves of the birch trees along the front. In the distance a lone sheep bleats forlornly on the South Downs.

CALDERON (a translator and theatre director): My dear Anton, I cannot for the life of me think who we could engage for the rôle of Madame Arcadina. Or indeed that of Nina, daughter of a rich landowner.

TCHEKHOF (a playwright): May I venture to suggest, George, Miss Gertrude Kingston and Mme Lydia Yavorska? Just a thought, dear chap – your decision is final of course!

CALDERON: Capital, dearest Anton, capital! You are a genius! And I believe they share the same agent…

CALDERON reaches into his Gladstone bag and retrieves a mobile phone. As he begins to scroll through the list of contacts, a HERRING GULL swoops and seizes its breakfast! A few moments later, the bird alights on the iron railing at the head of the pier and drops the device with disdain into the waves.

Blackout. Curtain.

Thank you Jim for your post yesterday, which turned on the French series Dix Pour Cent; or, Englished, Call my Agent! Living as we do in France (Lille), my wife Madeleine and I were enthusiastic watchers of the series in the original. And so although we can’t comment on the subtitles I thought it might be worth saying a word, in response, to one thing which this series underlines: the prestige of the cinema in French culture.

It strikes me repeatedly that news of and from the film industry regularly makes the main news in France, particularly on an ‘elite’ channel like French/German bilingual Arte; and indeed news items which have nothing to do with the cinema are often explored via film treatments of the subject. It is very common on the programme 28 Minutes, for example, for a director (if possible young, female, and black) to be invited to join a discussion of issues treated in their film. Equally, established actors and directors are asked for their opinions (after generous reviews of their careers), in an almost reverential manner.

No doubt it is true everywhere that the media lionize media personalities; but I do believe that this is more markedly the case in France. Dix Pour Cent is happily complicit in the very processes it (gently) satirizes. (The only bad guys are the double-dealing managers.) Stars replace the Royal family — and of course, Netflix’s The Crown scored a double six in this respect.

East of the Rhine, (so far)
Brilliant piece to ponder and find shafts of personal reflections.

Thank you Patrick for this. (Incidentally, Radio Scotland was actually referred to by Pedroc Trelawney on Radio 3 this morning: giving the results of a singing competition.) I think that Babel is a good image for so many of these new contraptions, each one sleeker, faster, more expensive, and more unintelligible than the last. Are they not, in fact, presages of entropy, the return to elementary disorder? I am made to think of the last lines of The Dunciad:

Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries all.

(Zuckerberg and Musk are surely better candidates than Colley Cibber for the Anarch.)

Thank you for this glorious post, Damian! One appreciates — ‘experiences’, so to speak — the full gamut of your emotions from intense irritation with Siri to sheepish contrition and a resurgent, Sisyphean hope…that is dashed. But don’t you, as a Blakean, find it somehow encouraging that even such fantastically clever Satanic technology can unaccountably go barmy? I am reminded of a sentence in Chekhov’s story ‘In the Hollow’: ‘They put a telephone into the Council offices, but it soon stopped working as bed bugs and German cockroaches bred in it.’ A neighbour, by the way, was given the British version of your HomePod by her husband for her birthday (but it is green and squat, like an unfinished Tower of Babel) and complains that it won’t give her the one thing she wants — Radio 4!

I don’t often comment — at least not under my real name — but I think your letter home proves without doubt that you have been hiding the fact that you are actually a descendant of GC:EG. The secret is now out!

But on to the important matter of sprouts. I am ridiculed by my family for taking the purchase of said cruciferous vegetable so seriously from the moment the first frost arrives and also for my refusal to serve them with bacon at Christmas dinner (a stand also taken by none other than Delia Smith). I was surprised to learn that the practice goes back as far as 1969. At least you make no mention of Yorkshire puddings.

I shall stop writing lest these musings lead to accusations of ‘Bah, humbug!’, but not before wishing you and the supporting cast of Calderonia a very happy Christmas and, as has now become traditional, a better new year.

Yours, Theobrassica

Wow, what a metaphor for life. How life’s experiences leave their mark, and how damage can sometimes be built upon, creating change that is not imperceptible. Conversely … “what we’ve been through together” is a reason to have a deeper relationship with the patched up items in your life.

What terrific Comments! They will give great enjoyment to readers! Thank you very much. Old Lion (Lev) would be tearful to read about the performance of his parable (Calderon, by the way, considered Tolstoy’s short folktales the perfection of his writing). And I had never thought about it before, but I think John Pym is right: not only his grandfather and George were waste-not-want-not-ers, it was an Edwardian Thing.

Those slivers of soap in the Blue Horse… I imagine George in the Edwardian spirit of waste-not-want-not might perhaps have soaked those fragments saved by Kittie, incised them and pressed them down in his shaving bowl – as we all, who brush our faces each morning, should do today, in solidarity with Ukraine.

A heart-warming Ukrainian story. Last night the Christmas lights on the tree which stands at the crossroads in our village – Wootton, nr Abingdon – were turned on. This is an annual ritual on Advent Sunday and is followed by mulled wine and mince pies in the Community Centre. This year, as part of the festivities, the village drama society put on a short Christmas play – an adaptation of Tolstoy’s version of the Russian folktale, Papa Panov. Unbeknown to the cast, there were several Ukrainian refugees in the audience, who were being introduced to the English obsession with amateur theatricals. It is good to report that their views on Russians did not extend to Tolstoy and that one of the Ukrainian children won the Papa Panov quiz we held afterwards. She was the only one who could both pronounce and spell Tolstoy in English (the name of the author had been announced at the beginning).

Patrick: I cannot match your sepia memories, nor the fineness of distinction you make between different times, ages, or epochs (depending on how important one thinks them to be). But as one who still occasionally skates around on these terms I do remember an amusing exchange between Frank Kermode and Malcolm Bradbury where, talking of literary movements (which shadow the larger cultural movements you are exploring), they wondered about the utility of such phrases — then bandied around — as ‘pre-postmodern’ and ‘protofeminist’ in discussion; not to mention monsters like ‘the long 18c.’, with interchangeable heads and tails. (Unless I misread, you yourself allude to the possibility of interchanging the head of Victoria with George V. But can you see her ancient majesty stammering?)

We end up in a Hall of Mirrors in some Intellectual Fun Fair, to which entry is obtained by knowing the password of the month. Even innocent terms like early, middle, and late (late James?) can be refined out of useful existence. I guess that behind all this lies too simple a reliance on that illusory discipline, the History of Ideas. We are encouraged to believe that this idea followed that, like geological strata; we just have to clamber up the cliffs of Lyme Regis with a magnifying glass and all will become clear. But ideas surely don’t behave like that, and never have. One of Blake’s marvellous perceptions: ‘What is now proved was once imagined.’ It is much more likely, and better respects the capacities of the human mind, that most of the ideas we bounce around have been bouncing around, in different places, for a few thousand years. More like magma than stratified minerals. So that volcanology might provide a better image that geology for what we are up to. But it’s hot in there!

Patrick: you talk of being entangled in rhetorical nets! But in this latest comment you have buried me in compost, offloaded a whole Kew Gardens-worth of chrysanthemum lore and logic (not to mention music) which leaves me leafless, stripped bare of argument.

But grasping at straws, I can at least agree with you about the falsity, the artificiality of the word ‘odour’ in the title of the story. Yes; this is perhaps Lawrence going for an ‘upgrade’, getting a bit above himself — which he would normally scorn to do. The word ‘odour’ is as you say from a different register; we would rather expect to (and do) find it in Eliot’s The Waste Land, recycling Enobarbus’s very upmarket Cleopatra: on whose barge ‘strange synthetic perfumes…drowned the sense in odours’ (lines 87-9). It is significant, I think, that in the famous passage in Sons and Lovers where Mrs Morel is startled by the lilies ‘reeling in the moonlight’, Lawrence does not use the word ‘odour’; ‘scent’ and ‘perfume’ are enough for him.

And for her. But how much of Mrs Morel’s interior life — like that of Mrs Bates — is hers, and how much the intrusive author’s, is surely one of those will-o’-the wisp questions which might enable us to do critical somersaults to exercise ourselves but which must remain unresolvable — like the mathematicians’ pi. As Gustave Flaubert said: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ Was this a boast, or an inculpation?

Birkin’s and Ursula’s coming together was ‘wordless, and utterly previous to words’… No Jamesian loquaciousness-ness there, then! And yet are the last two pages of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ overwritten? Is all the ‘free indirect speech’ a bit wobbly and unbelievable? Does Lawrence ‘know’ too much here and ‘tell’ too much himself? (‘The children had come, for some mysterious reason’…) I cannot help feeling the story isn’t totally successful despite his rewrites?

I am most grateful to our stalwart follower John Pym for this partial defence of Henry James, delivered, if I may say so, with Jamesian elegance.

One can certainly be pulled up after a wall of words in a James novel by ‘some stiletto observation or line of dialogue’. But might this not be the exception that proves the rule? For me, at least, these pithy observations are as little articulated with the rest of the text as James’s walls of words are with his pages of unrelieved dialogue. I submit that he has a fundamental problem with cohesion and over-writing. However, as I said in my post, the short stories excel.

I gather that James was concerned about the size of his readership, but what a roll-call of eminent contemporaries signed the 1913 letter of congratulations that John Pym quotes! They are all Edwardians to the core.

‘No series of posts about the “Edwardian Era” would be complete without a reference to Henry James, often regarded as its greatest novelist.’ Patrick Miles goes on to identify several Jamesian attributes that he regards, in a sense, as particularly Edwardian. Of these, I would take issue with only one: the terrifying nature of James’s loquacity.

The serpentine sentences require patience, to be sure, but after a while, like the clues to a cryptic crossword puzzle, they open to reveal their meaning — and become (for some of us at least) utterly addictive. The Golden Bowl (1905), for instance, described by Ismail Merchant, the producer of its twenty-first century movie adaptation, as ‘a sort of whodunit’, undoubtedly contains page after page each of which could be characterised as a ‘solid wall of words’, but from time to time, it should be noted, the author deftly inserts some stiletto observation or line of dialogue (a chink in that wall letting in a shaft of light) which turns the plot or a character’s perception in a new direction. To experience such moments, as a reader, is to experience, one might say, the shock of the new.

One significant aspect of Henry James’s greatness is, however, his frequent lack of loquacity — in his many short stories and in such brief compact novels as The Europeans (1878) or The Aspern Papers (1888). New readers could do no better than to start with these two books. Not least, perhaps, because the latter contains one of the purest examples of James’s prose, a description of the equestrian statue in Venice of the fifteenth-century strong-man Colleoni and its complex effect on the story’s nameless somewhat ineffective narrator. Once read, never forgotten.

‘Often regarded as its greatest novelist.’ That phrase pulled me up. How precisely did the Edwardians — the writers of that period, the men and women of the arts — themselves regard Henry James? And if one can suggest an answer, what does that tell us about the Edwardians and their sensibilities?

In April 1913, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, two hundred and seventy ‘Friends’ from both sides of the Atlantic wrote to Henry James offering him their greeting, and the gift of a Golden Bowl. They hoped, too, that he would agree to sit for a portrait by one of their number. James chose John Singer Sargent as the portrait painter but stipulated that his Friends ‘remain the guardians of the result of his labour’.

‘Dear Henry James,’ the letter begins, ‘We unite to send you our greeting, because we wish to-day to give a single expression to a single feeling. You will see when you read our names, that we represent many different degrees of association with you. We are old friends and new; we are friends attached to you by long-standing intimacy and affection; we are friends whose regard for you, not less real, is a later and younger tie. We share with you old memories, of which our names will speak to you, as yours to us; we are newer alliances, slighter relations, names which belong to the further edge of your circle. But we all, at whatever distance from you, however close to you, have this in common, that we love and honour you, and we welcome the opportunity of telling you so with one voice. This is our real birthday present to you, and we believe it is one you will care to possess.’

To read these words today, nearly a hundred and ten years on, is to re-experience their almost palpable intensity, the depth of that collective feeling. And this intensity of feeling, addressed to the master of the unsaid, of suppressed feeling, could not perhaps be decently spoken out loud. It had to be expressed in writing. The love and honour these distinguished upper- and middle-class literary and artistic Edwardians and late Victorians felt for James was one they believe he will care to possess. They can read his mind as surely as he can read theirs. They accepted him whole. The literary carping at his work and reputation would come later. The scraping of the mice at the cathedral door.

I will not quote James’s reply, beginning ‘Dear Friends All’, dated six days after he had received the letter of greeting and the gift of his ‘inestimable’ bowl — it can be found on p. 322 in Volume II of the first collection of The Letters of Henry James (Macmillan, 1920) and it overflows with ‘an emotion too deep for stammering words’. It is composed in one long, considered, carefully crafted wall-of-words paragraph that … takes your breath away.

‘You are the writer,’ his Friends had written, ‘the master of rare and beautiful art, in whose work creation and criticism meet as they have never before met in our language. Our sense of the genius by which a power so original is brought under the ancient discipline of art, is expressed in the proffered symbol of the GOLDEN BOWL, and it is as a symbol that we ask you to receive it.’

Too OTT…? — as we might Tweet today. Well, yes, just possibly. But the united tone of the two-hundred-and-seventy rings true and clear. And as James knew, the world turns and fashions change.

Henry James ends his letter of thanks to his Friends with his signature — and then adds a seven-word postscript, a deceptive, characteristic throwaway: ‘And let me say over your names.’ (A lesser writer today, or a too-hasty sub-editor, might have struck out the word ‘over’.) Among the names — I pick at random — J.M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm, Rupert Brooke, Erskine Childers, Gerald Du Maurier, John Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, Anstey Guthrie, Rudyard Kipling, Desmond MacCarthy, Edward Marsh, Alice Meynell, Henry Newbolt, Arthur Pinero, John S. Sargent, Logan Pearsall Smith, Ellen Terry, Henry Tonks, G.M. Trevelyan, Hugh Walpole, H.G. Wells and Virginia Woolf.

In this list, which the Master said over, on a spring day in London at No. 12 Carlyle Mansions, in Cheyne Walk, S.W., the Edwardian era — and on its heels our modern world — rises up to greet us.

It is very gratifyingly ‘rooting’ to have one’s preconceptions about the Edwardians (e.g. their love of sport and travel, their hedonism and interest in birth control) tested on the touchstone of demographic data. This is another post by Professor Brockliss that I am sure will be visited again and again, including (judging by past experience) from abroad.

I think his emphasis that ‘what has been defined as distinctive and thus historically noteworthy may be true only of one particular social class or specific group within an occupation’ is very important. For instance, it may have seemed to me typical of George Calderon’s ‘class’ that he committed serious amounts of his time to various social and political causes, but in the light of Professor Brockliss’s post I must recognise that in this he was more typical of a ‘specific group’ of educated activists than a class, since Edwardians were ‘five times less likely than their grandfathers to hold any sort of civic office during their lives’.

I note with interest that the author suggests the death of Charles Darwin in 1882 was a marker of the end of the Victorian Age in that he was ‘the last great amateur scientist’. Would it be possible to say whether Darwin was a typical Victorian in other ways?

One of the purposes of guest posts on Calderonia is to enable experts to stick their necks out, even say something ‘outrageous’, and Professor Brockliss has certainly woken us all up by suggesting that the Edwardian Age should be defined as starting around 1880 and ending in the early 1930s! I see the economic wisdom behind this, but can it be claimed intellectually, psychologically, in terms of mentalité? As soon as I met George Calderon and Archie Ripley through their papers, I knew that by 1895 they were Edwardians, and I still feel (with D.H. Lawrence, it turns out to my surprise) that the Somme and Gallipoli were the death knell for Edwardianism. Yet Brockliss’s evidence for the Great War having ‘in important respects […] consolidated rather than undermined the hallmarks of the Edwardia era’ seems irrefutable.

I am immensely grateful to him, as I judge from their emails numerous followers are too, for such a refreshing and impeccably documented look at the Edwardians. We must all read his forthcoming book on the Victorian and Edwardian professions!

James Whishaw was my great-grandfather. His youngest daughter, Audrey, was my grandmother. She was [born] on the 9th of September, 1901, in Saint Petersburg. I think James left his family in England after the 1905 revolution while he went back to Russia. He like many others in the English community lost everything when the Bolsheviks took over. In the family we have a story that he was about to be arrested by the Red Guards. He managed to escape. He did return to Russia in Archangel in 1918, helping to give financial support to the White Armies. He wrote a book about the Whishaw family, a copy of which is in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University along with other archives from the English community in Czarist Saint Petersburg.

What a wonderful post. Thank you very much for so many reminders of the games I and my sisters played particularly when we visited Granny Thomas (probably my ‘more’ Edwardian grandmother). Her almost identical croquet set was donated to the National Trust’s Nuffield Place only 10 years ago when the family home with a croquet lawn integral to the garden design was sold.

I cannot speak with any authority to Patrick’s query about how, precisely, the use of the ‘MacGuffin’ (or, as one might say, the rarefied red herring) differs from the application of ‘The Rule of Chekhov’s Gun’ in the movies. But I would say that when guns themselves are introduced in almost any film you care to mention, they usually go off – at some point. In two classic 1952 Westerns, however, George Stevens’ Shane and Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, the plots of which are both predicated on the evil consequences of gunplay, the key element in each film is the hero’s pathological reluctance to discharge his weapon.

For the older film buff, the MacGuffin is most closely associated with several movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock. For Hitch, the great trickster, a magician always on the lookout for the diversionary hand movement, the meaningless red herring became something his latter-day devotees cherished – along with his own cameo walk-on appearances. But these MacGuffins were, in my opinion, essentially a publicity stunt. What spectators eagerly talked about, or puzzled over, in the foyer at the end of the show.

As a footnote, I might add, that the Chekhov work with the highest number of firearms over the fewest number of pages must surely be the short story ‘The Avenger’, about a cuckolded husband determined to purchase a weapon with which to shoot his wife and her lover – and for good measure, perhaps, himself too.

As a schoolboy, and aspiring comic actor, I performed in a stage version of the story (there have been at least two in English) taking the role of the prissy gunsmith. This called for a pedantic enumeration of all the weapons on offer in the gunsmith’s shop, together with an emphasis on their correct usage. But everything, including a blunderbuss, seemed too expensive for the indecisive and increasingly frustrated husband… And, by the time the curtain fell, no gun had actually been fired.

Oh Patrick! It took me a while to realise what reading these instalments of your writer-publisher’s Ukrainian Diary was reminding me of – but it is of following your blog in its early days when you posted almost daily updates on George Calderon’s life from the declaration of World War One in August 1914 until his death at Gallipoli in June 2015. The unfolding details of that narrative quickly became gripping, and your expert musings on Calderon’s motivation and physical and mental health issues, plus your research-based insights on the wider progress of the conflict, were unfailingly interesting and useful in informing my own thoughts about the commemoration of the War.

Similarly, I have found myself increasingly eager to read your latest commentary on the war in Ukraine when the link appears in my email inbox; and I am concomitantly saddened to read (16 May) that you do not see yourself continuing it. Personally, I don’t think the delay between something happening and you sharing your diary entry about it matters at all. Why should it when your entries are dated? Nor does it bother me that you feel the need to express your ‘anger and disgust’ at the War so vehemently. I would not expect you to be impartial! Rather, your lifetime of study of all things Russian surely gives me confidence in your opinions. If the Daily Mail runs a story saying that Vladimir Putin has cancer, it seems like wishful thinking or propaganda; if you believe he is being cossetted as a frail invalid, I can dare to believe it.

But publishing your diary may be putting your friends in Russia at risk? Then – of course – you must stop.

Until the War is over?

Fabulous – I hope it turns out to be entirely accurate.

I hear you Patrick and you are right about the absence of NATO strategy. However, quite apart from the impracticality of deploying a substantial number of Western regular, volunteer troops in the Baltic states in midwinter when there was no appreciably increased threat to that area, your proposed action would have had no impact on Putin, since he knew with absolute certainty that the said troops were not going to invade Russia whatever he did elsewhere.

Really interesting post, Patrick. I’ve just been to the Surrealism exhibition at Tate Modern and my main takeaway was a comment about one artist and his expression of ‘a belief in a subjective world beyond reason, or a dissatisfaction with reality’. Even if it only gives temporary respite, there is such joy in creating some really true nonsense – time to get on with some of my own, and I look forward to seeing yours.

Oh dear Patrick! Your 11th April blog shows quite clearly that you really don’t understand the function and limitations of NATO. It is not a world police force with a mind of its own. It is a grouping of sovereign nations who have come together for their own protection against a formidable and untrustworthy potential enemy. With much labour they have agreed the circumstances in which they will take military action against an aggressor and they have all signed up to go to war if any one of the signatory members is attacked. They have not signed up to go to war in defence of an unlucky third party and it would take a difficult and lengthy debate to bring all of those sovereign nations to agree on military action in support of Ukraine, not least because of the probable terrible consequences for all of Europe should they do so. That may seem pathetic, and it is possible that opposing Russia now might in the long term result in less damage than having to do so later, but that is the reality of NATO’s position.

Fascinating Patrick! That explains all sort of things which have been puzzling me about how the Russian people can go along with this brutal tyrant. The answer seems to be that this is what they yearn for; and that implies that when/if they learn that they have been fed a diet of lies, they will simply bury their heads in the sand and deny it. Horrible!

Brilliant analysis and, sadly, all too true. Could this be the beginning of the end of darkness?

Patrick: I too am moved by that photograph you have posted, with the almost anonymous hooded figure mourning the dead mother in Kiev; and by your commentary, which well describes the complex and profound emotions registered on the face. You refer to Bruegel; for me, the helpless open mouth brings to mind the silent wail of Munch.

But somehow, your consolatory ‘Love always wins’ is snatched too rudely from the fire. (I think of the child in Chaucer’s ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, singing ‘Amor vincit omnia’ in ironic counterpoint to the narrative.) How does one set this consolation — which I want to share — with this kind of thing, a response from Ukrainian writer Olena Stiazhinkina which appears (translated) in the London Review of Books for 24 March: ‘These Russians are not people […] This morning, in Berdiansk, one of these monsters from Moscow shot an old man for refusing to hand over his mobile phone […] I promise: my great-grandchildren will hate theirs and teach their children the same.’ Such hatred is surely understandable, and may also (as she says) be handed down. And what does love have to say to this? ‘Love, and be silent’ is a hard injunction to follow. Is the best we can hope for that love may somehow overlay hatred, not extirpating it but insisting, patiently, on a desperate balance between the two? The greatest poets provide an insight into the question: ‘How with this rage shall beauty find a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?’

Dear Andrew,

I found the clarity, impartiality, and profound wisdom of your insights extremely helpful as I try to understand the situation in Ukraine.

You ask, ‘What are you going to do today to make your bit of difference?’

When I consider the existential threat that is climate change, I can choose not to fly, and I can shun single-use plastics and beef. When I watch ‘Life and death in the Warehouse,’ I can make the effort to walk to Wilko’s for a light bulb, rather than order one on Amazon prime. But night after night I see the obliteration of Mariupol on TV – and I cannot answer your question. I wish, how I wish, that I could.