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There’s a touch of Douglas Jardine about that look; the scarf as well. Not so much ‘of’ or even ‘anti’ Establishment as beyond it. He’s always going to be his own man. Maybe that’s what gets the ladies. Congratulations. We look forward to the book adorning our shelves before long.

Congratulations, Sam&Sam. I’m following your progress keenly – as exciting as a murder-mystery novel, but with the bonus of no-one having to die. I see you as Poirot, explaining the denouement to dim readers. When will he deliver his final line? And is the champagne on ice yet?

Interested, with my Polish background, about potential shortenings of Sam & Sam into a single, pluralised word, I suppose meaning “themselves”. In Polish that would be “Sami” if they include at least one man, and “Same” if both women. Sadly, they don’t have the trans-lingual pun of being English names in their own right.

That’s terrific! I love it. But of course it’s not the eyebrows! It’s the eyes. The depth of pain in them; the vulnerability. He is looking past the camera – at what? [Thinks: Who is this man of mystery? I must buy the book and find out!]

And the touch of gold. A subtle echo of Percy Lubbock’s biography of George perchance?

The headmistress in question was perhaps behind her times. “Evasive” they, a helpful way of being gender-neutral, has been around a long time. For instance, there are plenty of examples in Jane Austen’s work. As Emma Woodhouse says:
“It is very unfair to judge of any body’s conduct, without an intimate knowledge of their situation.”
For many more examples see Henry Churchyard’s site: https://www.pemberley.com/janeinfo/austhlis.html

When you introduced the topic of gender equality with the observation that a male and a female publisher could call themselves ‘Sam&Sama’, I paused to wonder whether masculine Russian pronouns are as domineering as their English counterparts. Would ‘Sama&Sam’ sound as odd to a Russian as the phrases ‘hers and his’ and ‘she or he’ do to us?

There seem to be a whole lot of arguments and theories around gender and grammar. (And if any expert Calderonian could provide a simple summary of them, I for one would be very grateful indeed.) They were dead keen on grammar when I was at school. The Headmistress was so distressed by the clashing pronouns of a notice that said, ‘If anyone [singular] finds a tennis racquet in a green case, would they [plural] kindly return it…’, that she was quite unable to read it out in Assembly. Then there were the hours we wasted (as it seemed) trying to remember whether French and Latin words were masculine or feminine (not, I note, feminine or masculine)… Why, oh why, did they have to be either – as it never occurred to me to ask at the time.

What else did I never think to ask about at school and at home? What cultural brainwashing about gender difference did I absorb – and how far does that, rather than physical/biological differences, affect, for instance, my negotiating skills today?

Yes, it’s that old question of nature v. nurture. Surely, though, nurture has to be more capable of rapid change than nature. I use the word ‘rapid’ advisedly. Female contemporaries of George Calderon could look back on Samuel Johnson’s day and reflect that they had far greater educational opportunities than did their 18th-century forebears. Edwardian society was at least discussing Votes for Women. A century on and things are better again. We would not be worrying about the gender pay gap now if there were still jobs and professions – the armed forces, to name but one – that were closed to half of the population. My children have no difficulty in using ‘they’ and ‘theirs’ instead of ‘she’, ‘he’, ‘hers’ and ‘his’, and they don’t hesitate to tick me off if my conversation or attitudes lapse into traditional male/female stereotyping. But the rate of change can still seem painfully and frustratingly slow.

I have mulled over this comment for a couple of days. Not least because I have been trying to bring the epigram ‘Patience is a virtue, possess it if you can…’ into line with our world of diverse and fluid sexuality and gender identity. I give up – or rather, I throw down the challenge!

These links are most interesting. Thank you! So women negotiate for raises as much as men, but ‘are denied them more than men’. Could this be precisely where the ‘supplement’ discrimination creeps in? In fairness to men, perhaps, I have to admit that the gentleman I quote on the subject was a senior figure in an oil company twenty years ago! I don’t have more recent personal experience, but I still think that gender difference clouds men’s judgement on the subject, just as it may still do for some women where competency at childcare is concerned?

I have hesitated to get involved in this debate in wider fora, but will interject here.

I think another factor in the modern professional world is that women may not be such tough salary negotiators. One needs to be able to walk away from a job or an offer if one believes that the salary is insufficient, and check out a range of employers before signing a contract.

I am open to being corrected here.

It was great to hear today that your book is so close to completion. Cheers to you!

Very pleased that you and James (that’s Sam & Sam) could hack it;
But Sam & Sam to me remains Sam Johnson & Sam Beckett.
Two of a name and (oddly) Beckett thought two of a kind,
Sam Johnson from the eighteenth century and Sam Beckett lagging behind.
Beckett was always planning to write a play about the sage,
Which never did unfortunately make it to the stage;
Not Boswell’s Johnson, charged with wit that takes the breath
Away, but Johnson’s: lonely, prayerful, and afraid of death.
Lucky’s tirade in Waiting for Godot, it has been shown,
Contains several references to Sam Johnson ‘for reasons unknown’.
Beckett (Sam) was haunted all his life by Johnson (Sam),
Doubling themself, as if Descartes’ celebrated ‘I am’
Were plural; and when Beckett stopped and looked inside
It was old, carbuncular, stumbling Johnson that he espied;
And in Sam’s tortuous relationship with Mrs Thrale
We can surmise Sam Beckett learnt the rules of how to fail;
‘Fail better’ was the best that Beckett could ever approve
From anyone; ‘Shall we go? Yes, let’s go. They do not move.’
A more optimistic quotation for George Calderon:
Last of The Unnamable — ‘I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’

Congratulations to Sam 1&2 on reaching this important milestone! Your hard work has paid off, and it should be ‘all systems go’ from now on.

A fascinating story – and so sad that the house was demolished.

‘… and I trust that in due course they will seek a famous commercial publisher to bring it to an even larger readership.’

The delicious irony in your last sentence (the best irony is always ‘delicious’, isn’t it?) is surely worthy of Aleksei Mikhailovich himself. Bravo, Patrick. Illegitimi non carborundum!

For many years I have had similar experiences when phoning a company. You get a series of options, none of which quite fits your needs, and then when you choose one, you are faced with another set of questions. This approach to service certainly saves money for the company, but it fails to deliver social utility, in the same manner as many websites.

It is a considerable comfort to me, Ian, that you too think Publisher X’s ‘Castle’ is bonkers. No publisher I know is more approachable and pings back faster than you! Given the number of authors in your stable http://www.unicornpublishing.org/, I don’t know how you do it.

‘If readers have followed me this far, they may be feeling as I did by then…’

This far and no further! The way some ‘publishers’ put up self-important barriers is enough to drive anyone bonkers. Tell whomsoever is being mucked about to contract me at Unicorn and boom boom job done! Marketed properly too.

A depressing tale, Patrick. You’re certainly not alone in morphing into Victor Meldrew. From a rational viewpoint computers should make life simpler, and in many ways they do. The trouble is that companies have got wise to the possibilities offered by computerisation of offloading much of the work involved onto their customers. This is of course a no-brainer for them, but a pain in the neck for the rest of us. Perhaps it’s time we started fighting back. Militant Fogeys unite!

For anyone else out there contemplating self-publishing I’d certainly recommend doing so through Brimstone Press (www.brimstonepress.co.uk; go to their ‘Advice’ page). For a single setup fee of £150 (£100 for any subsequent books published with them) they provide an ISBN number and deal without all the hassle of Nielsen Bookdata registration. This is of course in addition to all the other services provided by Brimstone. Compared with Nielsen’s outrageous charge for a single ISBN no. this is excellent value, which Brimstone is able to achieve by purchasing their ISBN nos. in bulk.

Damian, thank you (once more). But you surely know that, like matter, time is infinitely (?) compressible and expandable? Keep the communications coming!

Patrick: I am open-mouthed with admiration at your energy. (This is quite convenient, as I am also brushing my teeth). I do not wish to waste any more of your precious time…

Patrick: thou art a veritable provoker of parody.

Let me not to the passage of the Word
Admit impediment. Text is not text
Which alters when a tyrant has demurred,
Complying with the censor–fie! What next?
O no, it is as precious as a scroll
That looks on printed books as chickenfeed;
It can shine through nine carbons on a roll,
(Though legibility’s not guaranteed).
Text never is corrupt, though mistypes be
Inevitable as is human error;
This alters not the text’s integrity,
Which stays authentic–saying No to Terror.
If this is not the soul of samizdat,
I’ll sell my typewriter–and eat my hat.

I hope your readers will forgive us both!

What a dramatic story! Having come to George Calderon late, I am looking forward to the book now.

You clearly deserve an award for your publication and promotion of samizdat back then, Patrick. I can see why Sam&Sam is close to your heart, making it an obvious choice for self-publishing the Calderon biography.

I loved your ‘original’ of the ‘Samuel Goathead’ sonnet. Any chance of these being republished or at least made available online? Did they manage to convince the ‘Titian-haired Maia’, or at least persuade her that your friend had gone to extraordinary lengths to win her over? It would be interesting to see one of his Russian ‘translations’, too. All in all a fascinating story!

One of those “ah ‘bobbins’ it turns out the ol’ man certainly got up to some r8 hijinks I didny know ’bout” type o’ posts.

This is a rum kind of conversation though Patrick. Here I am, talking to you; and there you are, privately discussing what I said with – who?

So may I address this comment to the Shy Seventeen emailers and the unnumbered communicators-by-other-means: won’t you consider sharing your views more widely? It is not that I don’t empathise with your reluctance to comment; believe me, I do. I know how daunting it is. The first time I posted something on Calderonia I felt exactly as if I was sticking my head above a parapet. I still regularly feel nervous that I will be shown up as a complete fool. But honestly, it won’t happen – Patrick is terrifically polite and enormously kind, besides which he moderates our comments to stop us posting nasty stuff about each other! Speaking personally, I have also found that writing up a nebulous train of thought for online publication can clarify it in an extremely helpful way.

So go on – please do give it a try. I for one would love to know more about these views that Patrick so tantalisingly alludes to. You, who writes about the War for a parish magazine – have the past four years changed your definition of heroism? You, whom the fields of crosses make furious and ill – have you always felt this way, or has the spotlight of the centenary period – or the ongoing crisis of Brexit – changed something for you? And you, who feel uncomfortable at the scale of the monuments – is it the sheer number of names, or something to do with the relationship between the stones and the landscape?

I share Patrick’s surprise that nobody has come out in defence of the marmoreal giants of the CWGC. Let me do so now. Thiepval is the only large memorial that I have visited, and my first and lasting impression – as I saw it from afar on the bus – was astonishment at how small and insignificant, and dare I say it, temporary, it seemed against such a vast and beautiful landscape. I found the experience of standing in front and within the monument very moving, but in an entirely gentle and peaceful way. I felt glad for the missing of the Somme that they are remembered, and very much hope to visit them, and their monument, again.

And talking of monuments… I spent an hour this afternoon with two students, one of whom who will be travelling to Flanders during the Easter Vacation to visit the graves and memorials of members of Trinity who fell in the three Battles of Ypres. Next term she will be putting on an exhibition of her photographs in the college hall during Arts Week. This is student-led commemoration; the excitement and enthusiasm are palpable and infectious, the ‘vision’ for it is inspiring. I asked them if they had seen Journey’s End, and neither of them had even heard of it.

Why does this make me feel so cheerful? I think because I suddenly realised that it doesn’t matter a hoot if I see it or not. The future of commemoration is – as it should be – in the hands of the young.

Thank you Clare! I will bask in the assumption that ‘high use material’ coincides with high quality material, and stop lamenting my Lawrentian lot…

If you deserve a white feather Patrick – which you most certainly do not! You get a gold star from me at any rate – but if you do, then so do I. For I saw a trailer for Journey’s End a couple of weeks ago and those three minutes were enough; I know I can’t face it either.

And while we’re in confessional mode, let me admit that I have also baulked at your invitation to re-read our past conversation about commemoration. My brief encounter with Journey’s End reminded me somewhat uncomfortably that I was annoyed – offended, truth be told! – by one post in which you opined that you felt sorry for archivists who have to spend so much time ‘doing’ commemoration. You said, I think, that you didn’t know how we can bear it. I’m afraid I found this rather facile at the time. (Anyone who has ever attended a meeting about GDPR, for instance, would know that it is the activities that offer emotional engagement which actually make the job bearable!) But now, alas, your remark has returned to haunt me. Killed in action… Died of wounds… Last seen going forward… Hit by a shell… Shot by a sniper… Presumed gassed… After three and a half years of drawing up monthly lists of the fallen of Trinity College (we display them alongside Laurence Binyon’s famous poem), I just feel sickened at the prospect of an evening spent listening to the sound of shellfire and watching actors made up with fake blood pretending to die in the trenches. It isn’t real, and I don’t have to watch it.

But Journey’s End has had excellent reviews. I hope my son will see it, and all his friends who love to play war games on their computers; they need to know what the First World War was really like. I said as much to him, and he was affronted. He knows a lot more about warfare than I do, he says. Some games are based on the experiences of real soldiers in past conflicts; and they are very ‘realistic’. Why do I think a film is more like the real thing?

That was a challenging question. Indeed, John knows a great deal about weapons; and tactics; and his skills are real enough. He has the confidence of youth, for he is 22, the same age as many of the young men who gave their lives in the First World War. Is his enthusiasm for war any different from his counterparts a century ago when [public] schoolboys and undergraduates played extensive war games in their OTCs, and territorial officers rushed to volunteer for service overseas? Even the middle-aged George Calderon couldn’t wait to gallop off to the Western Front!

Yes, yes, he went for the sake of his ideals, as you have regularly reminded us. And so do they who go today to fight in the Middle East. (Did you watch the Channel 4 drama series The State last year by the way? Superb tv.) What such men all seem/seemed to lack, then and now, is any awareness of what war might actually start to feel like when they can’t turn the screen off or take off their kit and go home for tea. You posted an excellent summary of the emotional impact of war on 31 October 2014 – there’s a link to it via my featured comment in your right hand column. You said:

‘The massed slaughter and mutilation, the material destruction, the relentless stupidity of it all, begin to depress you, then oppress you. Come last weekend, when we were working on the Battle of Gheluvelt, I literally wanted to shout with Siegfried Sassoon, “O Jesus, make it stop!”’

If Journey’s End engenders that feeling in viewers, then the more people who watch it the better! I see on Wikipedia that in 1928 George Bernard Shaw described the original play as a ‘useful [corrective] to the romantic conception of war’. And as a description of the trenches is it any less ‘real’ than, say, the selectivity of soldiers’ letters home, or, worse, the commanding officers’ letters to parents describing the beautiful deaths of their sons? My personal experience of commemorating the War has mostly been about memorialisation of the dead, but this film is commemoration as ‘history’. If it tells the viewer what the trenches were like, then, surely, it is real.

And so now I start to feel guilty as well as cowardly for my reluctance to go and see it…

But it also seems to me that the emotional course of commemorating the centenary of the War has closely followed that of the War itself. The ‘Blood Swept Lands and Sea of Red’ poppy installation in 2014 felt nationally significant, and engendered feelings of pride and admiration at its scale and scope. In Trinity College we installed a memorial to our fallen German and Austro-Hungarian members, and glowed with international peace and harmony. Commemoration was fun! Then came two years of hard slog – Gallipoli, Loos, the Somme, Arras, Passchendaele… – and this was a time of serious books, landmark exhibitions and growing understanding and knowledge; commemoration felt worthwhile, and important. But now it is the fourth year and we are emotionally drained; exhausted. Have we got the stamina to press on to the end? Will we have achieved anything meaningful at all?

The film I saw a fortnight ago was Darkest Hour. Gary Oldman was fantastic! I don’t know if Churchill ever used his famous maxim in World War One, but that, I think, is all you and I can hope to do now. KBO, Patrick! KBO…

Hello Damian, your index does sound wonderful, I must say. And if you want some solid evidence of it being widely consulted, then look no further than the Oxford libraries’ SOLO catalogue. I see that the Bodleian Library has acquired a second copy of the D H Lawrence Handbook in which it reposes, and this is to be found on the open shelves of the Gladstone Link, where it is labelled UBHU. That stands (although I’m not sure quite how) for “high-use material which has been selected on the basis of previous use by readers”. So there!

Thank you Patrick! And do you know, I have since recalled an episode that proves the truth of your last sentence. When James Boulton and his team were working on the General Index to the CUP edition of Lawrence’s letters (which was eventually published, volume VIII, in 2000) he wrote to me suggesting that they might make some use of my Index; taking over some of the thematic heads, etc. I don’t now remember why nothing came of the suggestion; but I suspect it may have been at least partly due to my own negligence and procrastination. And/or the fact that I was already looking over the sea to Lille, at this time: demob happy? Still, it was an opportunity missed.

When I tell you, however, that the Index as it stands runs to 285 pages (40 pages, double column, on DHL himself, all his pomps and all his works) entirely without my help, you may wonder how this might have been inflated with it…

An absolutely wonderful story, Damian, wonderfully raconted… It should, surely, go into an anthology of literary-critical labours? ‘My Index shall grow/Vaster than empires and more slow!’ And there is something Chekhovian about the ‘detail’ that you were paid exactly a pound a page for it. Moreover, do I discern here a work of proto-structuralism? You can bet thousands and thousands of people have used it!

Patrick: Having read your Indexing Post and the several interesting Comments which have followed, I doubt that my own experience as an indexer will add very much. But who knows? My story may well touch your compassion, and that of your readers; so here goes.

My guilty confession is that I once worked on (for ever, it seems in retrospect) and then published ONLY AN INDEX; nothing else besides! And felt at the time that this was a signal contribution to knowledge. The facts are these. As a kind of Lawrentian, I had found it very frustrating that the two Phoenix volumes of his essays were so inadequately indexed (a couple of perfunctory pages). And so as a preparation for my own definitive book on Lawrence, which somehow never got written, I decided to create my own index, which would cast a stroboscopic light on the evolution of Lawrence’s ideas. This was to be no mere name index, of course; but an Index of Themes, which reveal all of Lawrence’s ideas in their interrelation, contradictoriness and complexity; so that in a way no further work of criticism would ever be necessary. To paraphrase Pope, I had the snake of science by the tail! It all depended on the selection of words to be indexed, of course, and I selected twenty or so head-words (such as death, dualism, feeling, life, love, mind, nature, sex, soul ) and a further dozen of important pairings (blood v nerves, creation v corruption, instinct v intuition, personality v impersonality, etc). I then read and re-read the Phoenix volumes until they started to fall apart in my hands, taking notes on reams and reams of paper. (24 sheets seems a joke!). All this was in the 1980s, pre-computer of course; and I then typed out my apocalyptic index – each page reference including a short, identifying quotation – in what turned out to be 123 pages. Done; and Lawrence was there to be open-mined by anybody who cared to consult this new Key to All Mythologies. A it happened, arch-Lawrentian Keith Sagar was a colleague at Manchester, and when I spoke to him about my Index he persuaded me to let him include it in his next Lawrence book – he published about a dozen – called A D H Lawrence Handbook, where it took up a hundred pages. (I remember I was paid £100, which must work out as the lowest rate of remuneration ever devised in the university.)
I never received a single comment on the Index, and now – with my books stranded between Manchester and Lille – I can’t even find my own copy of the Handbook. Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!

Ah, indexes: what happy memories (!). My son offered to produce one for my Tyutchev biography with a computer programme, but I was very doubtful. What about people such as Ivan and Aleksandr Turgenev, often referred to simply by their surname in the text (where it’s clear from the context which one is meant)? Or those mentioned under their first name, or as ‘his brother’, ‘her old friend’, ‘the foreign minister’, etc.? I decided to revert to pre-computer methods, armed myself with 26 sheets of A4 labelled A to Z, and went through the typescript, adding names and page references as they appeared. I suppose a card index would be the more usual procedure, but that seemed somehow even fiddlier. I also decided against a general index, adopting the common continental practice of names only. I’m sure you’re right that these provide a more direct route to information than vague categories such as ‘Censorship’, ‘Paris’ or ‘Train travel’. For the same reason I did without sub-indexes, relenting only in the case of Tyutchev himself, for whom a few of the most important themes of his life are included. I also prepared a separate index of poem titles and first lines, which I thought necessary for the biography of a poet. I have to say it was a few months of some of the most soul-destroying work I’ve ever had to do.

I do think that some sort of index is necessary (and not just because those months at the coal face would otherwise have been spent in vain). Like you, I’d prefer everyone to read my book from cover to cover, but we surely have to accept that for many the product of our labours will be no more than a research tool, to be dipped into for specific information. I’ve certainly lost count of the number of books I’ve used in that way myself.

Incidentally, were you ever as puzzled as I was at the lack of indexes in Soviet (pre-Gorbachev) publications? A Russian once explained this to me as a requirement of the censorship authorities. I found this hard to believe – but then, as we know, in Russia improbability and the truth have always gone hand in hand. One can only assume the censors had a paranoid fear of dissidents beavering away in secret at indexes to collect and collate dossiers of information harmful to the state. Thinking about it, there’s something so deeply satisfying about the idea of indexes being subversive that it makes the whole dreary process of compiling them seem worthwhile!

I’m afraid my thoughts about indexes are not very profound – but may I share a favourite example of how probably best not to do it? Below is an extract from the index to J. Horace Round’s Feudal England (1895). Specifically, the longest single entry, that for Edward Augustus Freeman, Oxford’s Regius Professor of Modern History 1884-92. This plethora of sub-entries – well, they speak for themselves.

Freeman, Professor: unacquainted with the Inq. Com. Cant. 4; ignores the Northamptonshire geld-roll 149; confuses the Inquisitio geldi 148; his contemptuous criticism 150, 337, 385, 434, 454-5; when himself in error 151; his charge against the Conqueror 152, 573; on Hugh d’Envermeu 159; on Hereward 160-4; his “certain” history 323, 433; his “undoubted history” 162, 476; his “facts” 436; on Heming’s cartulary 169; on Mr. Waters 190; on the introduction of feudal tenures 227-31, 260, 267-72, 301, 306; on the knight’s fee 234; on Ranulf Flambard 228; on the evidence of Domesday 229-31; underrates feudal influence 247, 536-8; on scutage 268; overlooks the Worcester relief 308; influenced by words and names 317, 338; on Normans under Edward 318 sqq.; his bias 319, 394-7; on Richard’s castle 320 sqq.; confuses individuals 323-4, 386, 473; his assumptions 323; on the name Alfred 327; on the Sheriff Thorold 328-9 ; on the battle of Hastings 332 sqq,; his pedantry 334-9; his “palisade” 340 sqq., 354, 370, 372, 387, 391, 403; misconstrues his Latin 343, 436; his use of Wace 344-7, 348, 352, 355, 375; on William of Malmesbury 346, 410-14, 440 ; his words suppressed 347, 393; on the Bayeux Tapestry 348-51; imagines facts 352, 370, 387, 432; his supposed accuracy 353, 354, 384, 436-7, 440, 446, 448; right as to the shield-wall 354-8 ; his guesses 359, 362, 366, 375, 378-9, 380, 387, 389, 433-5, 456, 462; his theory of Harold’s defeat 360, 380-1; his confused views 364-5, 403, 439, 446, 448; his dramatic tendency 365-6; evades difficulties 373, 454; his treatment of authorities 376-7, 449-51; on the relief of Arques 384; misunderstands tactics 381-3, 387; on Walter Giffard 385-6; his failure 388; his special weakness 388, 391; his splendid narrative 389, 393; his Homeric power 391; on Harold and his Standard 402-3; on Wace 404-6, 409; on Regenbald 425 ; on Earl Ralf 428 ; on William Malet 430; on the Conqueror’s earldoms 429; his Domesday errors and confusion 151, 425, 428, 436-7, 445-8, 463; on “the Civic League” 433-5; his wild dream 438; his special interest in Exeter 43 1; on legends 441; on Thierry 451, 458; his method 454-5; on Lisois 460 ; on Stigand 461; on Walter Tirel 476-7; on St. Hugh’s action [1197] 528; on the Winchester Assembly 535-8; distorts feudalism 537; on the king’s court 538; on Richard’s change of seal 540; necessity of criticising his work, xi., 353.

[No, of course I didn’t type this up; it’s online.]

Perhaps the indexing issue is best resolved by considering the intended readership – whether the book is mainly going to be enjoyed as a once-off good read, rather than for reference, and whether those who enjoy it will, to any extent, want to go back to the text and find details of dates etc.. Often I’ve found myself with a good biography to hand but have found it easier to check a detail more readily on the web.

Go with illustrations scattered throughout the text. I think that makes a book more interesting than a “gallery” of photos grouped in the center.

It would be great, imho, to have the illustrations “in the right place”. That’s just where I want them as a reader. Include the material where it is most relevant to the story, not send me off to wander round the book looking for it. And footnotes at the foot of the page (not somewhere else). I have “discussions” with publishers whose software puts tables and diagrams at the top or bottom of pages, sometimes in stacks, sometimes even in the wrong subsection. If that sort of material is contributing to the argument, I’d like it to be exactly at the point in the discussion where it is most relevant (and will give most help to the reader). Hmm, you’ve obviously touched a nerve there!

Dear Ian, I am highly flattered that you read my blog, and I am genuinely grateful to you for spending valuable time on commenting! You are, of course, right about the indexing. I have employed professional indexers in my time and have considerable experience myself from a previous life, so all that is being worked on at the moment is assembling the terms from the typescript; the page numbers will be inserted, as you say, at the very last stage. Where the paper is concerned, I have gone for some rather classy stuff and it remains to be seen how well the shots come out on it. (The printers say it will be ‘significantly’ cheaper.) Finally, many is the time, reading the rave reviews Unicorn’s Lord Lansdowne is getting and contemplating how well your marketing will sell it throughout the world, that I have regretted not going with you, but…the money, the ‘editing’, the hassle! Yours ever, Patrick

Dear Patrick, I know it’s none of my business but I can’t help myself! You should really index as the very last stage or you’ll end up doing it twice with shifting page numbers. Indexing is actually a specialist task and if you’d like a good Unicorn indexer let me know. Also there’s no way, if you are using good grade paper stock, that inserting images in the text is cheaper than having plate sections, simply because you can use regular fluffy paper for the text and only have the cost of art paper for the plates — otherwise you’ll have to use art paper throughout or the images will look flat. I’ll keep quiet from now on if you prefer!

I really like how the scan of the visitors’ book looks in this entry.

We considered turning it black & white (which we do with some images on here when we want to emphasise contrast for signatures, etc.) but maintaining the creme look of the pages, the brown wear at the edges, and the orange/black pattern of the book’s cover was definitely the right decision here.

Dear Damian,

Thank you for this magnificent, erudite and beautifully illustrated Comment which, taken with Bryan Missenden’s, just about says it all concerning the ‘classical’ limerick. Perhaps ‘classical’ is the wrong word for it, it should be called the ‘popular’ limerick? Their impromptu nature, ‘Rabelaisian’ tendency, music hall slapstick, and even the fact that they often don’t scan, surely point to these limericks being an ever-fertile ‘unofficial’ genre? (Prétentieux, moi?)

When I labelled Brodsky’s and my limericks ‘Dud’, I was being provocative, but what I mean is that they both ignore the essential nature of the ‘popular’ and the ‘Lear’ limerick and therefore seem to fail… Joseph wrote his down for me in his Leningrad flat on 11 January 1970 during a conversation we were having about the problems besetting poets in Soviet Russia, and I got the clear impression that he had deliberately ‘deformed’ the limerick genre as an experiment in originality (he was very much into ‘making strange’ in his own poems at the time). I think he’d first made the acquaintance of the ‘popular’ limerick from American friends the year before and decided he’d stand the limerick on its head, produce one that wasn’t funny, or was at least wry, and which is actually ‘serious’. It’s very ingenious, it scans of course, and we mustn’t forget that he wrote it in a foreign language! But, since it transgresses so many of the conventions of the ‘popular’ limerick, is it a limerick or is it a dud?

Similarly, yours truly prefers the Lear limerick and when he lived in Soviet Russia produced a number of them that, perhaps, had an absurd element to them, but were basically satirical. I was wrenching the Lear limerick in that direction, but Lear’s heft is never as narrow as satire. (In this particular one I was having a go at the way Russians of the time were always saying ‘objectively’ when they meant ‘as a Communist’.) So these limericks of mine were ‘duds’ as Lear limericks, or at most perhaps parodies of Lear. At the end of the day, I think only one person could ever write successful Lear limericks…

The French limerick is a masterpiece!

All power to your lyre, monsieur, and my renewed gratitude for your Comment gems.

Patrick

Patrick: thank you for your entertaining and informative take on the limerick, via a discussion of Uglow’s book on Lear. I particularly like the idea of Lear’s recurring rhyme forming a kind of trap (or manhole cover?); there is no escape — usually afforded by a witty third rhyme which comically reverses the drift of the foregoing. A favourite in this mode:

There once was a man from Darjeeling
Who boarded a bus bound for Ealing.
It said on the door,
‘Do not spit on the floor,’
So he stood up and spat on the ceiling.

But poor Brodsky! He must have done something bad to you at some time, to be thrown into the blog with his feet stuck in the concrete of that dismal example.

I’m sure your readers have sampled the anarchic delights of the unrhyming limerick: ‘There once was a man from Dunoon / Who always took soup with a fork’ etc, and ‘There once was a man from Dundee / Who was stung on the nose by a wasp’ etc. But I wonder how well known is the rare French example, a limerick most scandalously heretical:

Il y avait un jeune homme de Dijon
Qui n’avait que peu de réligion.
Il dit, ‘Quant à moi,
Je déteste tous les trois:
Le père, et le fils, et le pigeon.’

I couldn’t remember the middle of this, but tracked it down in the lively introduction to Norman Douglas’s anthology ‘Some Limericks…’, published by the Library of Alexandria in 1929.

I won’t try any of my own on you, for fear of ending up like Brodsky at the bottom of a lake…

Not original, but surely . . . The limerick’s an art-form complex, Whose contents run chiefly to sex. It’s famous for virgins and masculine urgin’s and vulgar erotic effects?

Patrick: I have just read your most interesting reflections on the entity of an Introduction, and its unstable relationship to the work that follows. ‘The self can’t do it’, you say, of the degree of reflexivity involved; yes indeed, as one can’t lift the chair one is sitting on. (Just tried.) But I find your argument that the dialogue between author and subject is central to biography totally convincing; we’re back to an inflated DNB without it. (And it’s this perception that enables you to make such a sensitive analysis of Uglow’s method — if it is such — in her recent Mr Lear.)

There is a well-known observation by Henry James in one of his Prefaces (forgive me quoting from memory), where he says: ‘There is one’s story, and then the story of one’s story’, proceeding to confess, with (affected?) embarrassment, that for the author — especially the author of Prefaces, which is what you are talking about — ‘the latter imbroglio might end up being the more interesting of the two’. This most insightful of comments, from a not-uninsightful (I parody the man) novelist, seems to offer a strong defence, justification, of your method and your argument. In a haiku:

George Calderon met
Patrick Miles: a strange meeting
that redefined both of them.

Thank you, Jules, both for your Comment (we don’t often get them from Emeritus Professors of Chekhovian Business Management), and for putting your money where your bemusement is! Would you believe it, I have twelve preorders already. But we shall be printing SIGNIFICANTLY less than 6000..! All best, Patrick

Callooh! Callay! Patrick, belated congratulations on this huge step forward. I am so pleased that my prediction came true. But down to business: how do I pre-order? £30? A mere bagatelle. I shall put aside five of your English pounds each month till June!
Only 5,999 to go!
Jules

These words of Theodor Adorno’s came to mind regarding your point about orthodoxy in publishing: ‘Education is precisely that for which there are no correct uses; it is to be attained only through spontaneous effort and interest, not guaranteed solely by courses, even if these are of the general study type. Yes, in truth it does not even happen through effort, but instead thanks to receptiveness, the faculty of actually allowing something spiritual to come to one and absorbing it productively into one’s own consciousness, instead of (as an unbearable cliché puts it), just learning, just talking.’ (Philosophy and Teacher, 1963)

Congratulations on reaching closure after your many ‘Gogolian’ tussles with the publishing industry, Patrick. Your sense of relief comes across vividly: the phrase ‘With one bound he was free’ springs to mind.

£30 for such a thoroughly researched hardback of quality seems very reasonable to me, particularly as with Clay as printers production standards promise to be high.

As you say, the orthodoxy we are up against is largely cultural rather than political, although the reservations expressed by some which you quote concerning George’s anti-suffragism and strike breaking are perhaps significant. In my biography of Tyutchev I made no attempt to gloss over his extreme PanSlavist views, which, if he were alive today, I’m sure would make him an ardent supporter of Putin, at least in the field of foreign policy. (Quixotically, he combined this with an equally ardent support of freedom of speech and internal reform.) Whether this may have put publishers off I have no way of telling, not that I would have changed a word of the book if it had. That would have been a shameful reversion to the Soviet practice (at least before Gorbachev) of playing down, shrugging off or even ignoring Tyutchev’s political views. Having said that, I have to say the main reason publishers dismissed the book was most likely that they saw it, in the words of sympathetic acquaintance, as ‘the biography of an unknown poet by an unknown writer’, and hence requiring some effort on their part to market.

Your aphorism ‘you can only improve the design of boats by rocking them’ hits the nail on the head – one to remember!

I wish you all the very best for your further steps in the exciting world of self-publishing, and look forward to the book’s long awaited appearance on 4 June.

John

Hi Patrick – a large part of the pleasure of being your friend is that you are not an establishment man! Long may it continue. I feel pretty confident of that prediction.

A Happy Christmas to you too Patrick, and thank you for another year of unfailingly interesting and stimulating posts.

This one surprised me a little – clearly I have not been paying sufficient attention. One day in the summer I happened to find myself walking up Well Walk, Hampstead, and mused that when George Calderon is famous (again), he might have a blue plaque… But he didn’t actually move there until 1912? And Heathland Lodge, his primary home for 11 years then, sounds so much bigger and grander. I had also formed the impression that Kittie and George were pretty comfortably off after inheriting from her mother, but their move to Well Walk looks like a major downsize. One wonders why…

… And looks forward to reading your book to find out!

A dog’s (Christmas) dinner indeed! Is there such a thing, Patrick, as a bidography? Yes there is–Virginia Woolf’s Flush a prime example, if not known under this handle. But I can see ‘Bidography’ having its own shelf space in bookshops at this time of year…

Given the importance of their pets to George and Kittie –something which you faithfully record–I wonder whether it is impertinent to suggest that you might get sponsorship for your book from the RSPCA (‘A’ standing for authors as well as animals: a breed equally at risk of cruel treatment), or even Battersea Dogs’ Home, liberally endowed as it is by people who persist with Edwardian values?

A publisher writes: Hmm, I should perhaps say something in defence of our ignoble profession. From our side of the desk, we are overladen with submissions, most of which are of too poor quality to pursue, but each one still needing a reply. The ones that are worth pursuing often come without any thought to marketing, and we never use the word ‘publishing’ without it being followed by ‘and marketing’. Once in a while we will come across a submission that is worth pursuing on all fronts and then find it is unfundable. And funding these days is the big issue. With the book trade buying at 50% discount on the one hand and using the best colour reproduction possibilities on the other, there are simply losses to be made publishing and marketing illustrated non-fiction. Going down the digital route as Patrick is doing is a valid alternative, but one needs to be awfully careful not to end up with a garage full of unsold and unsellable books. If one plays one’s cards right one can have one’s cake and eat it, if that’s not moxing mitaphors, by ‘self-publishing’ with a proper publisher, if that’s not a contradiction in terms. Good luck to all authors and artists out there; and good luck to all publishers and marketers too!

This all sounds depressingly familiar, Patrick, not that I have such a wide and long experience of the commercial publishing racket as yourself. My encounter with it came as a shock after years of working for a small friendly firm which published translations from Russian largely as a labour of love. Apart from downright crooks (and there are some of those), for a large number of those involved the power they wield seems to have gone to their head. Best to think of such self-proclaimed ‘gatekeepers’ perhaps as jobsworths in peaked caps who get a kick from turning people away. There are exceptions of course, and I hope you do succeed in finding the odd jewel or two among the dross. Re ‘marketing storm’ (should you go for self-publishing), a fruitful approach I found was emails targeted at university and other specialist libraries, as well as selected university staff in relevant fields (in your case, Russian depts., Theatre Studies, WW1 studies, etc.) identified from their online academic profiles. All time-consuming, but at least that way one can guarantee sales to libraries. The American academic market is particularly vast, of course. Anyway, the best of luck whichever route you take.