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Seeking Permission

In Peter Cameron’s novel The City of Your Final Destination, Omar Razaghi, a naive doctoral student from the University of Kansas, arrives unannounced at a neglected estate in deepest Uruguay with the intention of gaining permission to write the biography of a half-forgotten literary lion. On the estate live the surviving, discontented members of the dead writer’s extended family – and they can’t, it seems, make up their minds on what to do about Omar’s request. Will the biography boost sales of the dead man’s books? Will uncomfortable truths be revealed? Beneath the surface of his light, engaging comic novel, Cameron has something serious to say about the perils of biography-writing and the burden literary reputations place on the shoulders of the next generation. Poor Omar, however, is just a kid trying to get his feet on the lower rungs of the academic ladder. Seeking permission from the executors – leaving aside all those other permissions he’ll need – is uncharted territory for him.

Omar doesn’t realise what he’s got himself into – the widow, the brother, the mistress! – all in limbo, each with his or her own undefined agenda. But having come so far, this personable young man is invited by the family to stay at the estate: yet as time passes no one, it seems, will give him a definite answer. Omar settles in. He comes to find the whole set up quite agreeable. He is unbuffeted by experience! And he’s in a time-warp where nobody’s capable of making a real decision. Perhaps, it is suggested, if he were to engage in a little jewel smuggling escapade he might gain his ‘permission’. Then while rigging up some netting, Omar is stung by a bee, falls out of a tree, breaks a bone and goes into an anaphylactic coma. His capable girlfriend is summoned from Kansas to deal with the situation. By which time, though, Omar has fallen half in love with the young mistress of the deceased literary lion – and she with him. Well, matters are finally sorted out, thanks to the intervention of the brother’s partner – a Japanese man with a refreshing sense of practicality – and Omar gets his permission. But back home in the Midwest, and faced with the drudgery of the academic life, the scales finally fall from the young man’s eyes. He’s not cut out to be a biographer – and he hasn’t even read the Calderonian guide to the potholes of copyright law – so he wisely decides to throw in the whole project, return to Uruguay and act on his feelings for the last love of his one-time subject.

I haven’t read any of Jane Howard’s novels (yet), but I think it’s very unusual for someone whose fictional writing is so closely based on their own psychodrama to go on to write a full-length autobiography as well. I speculate that in both she was desperately trying to create order from the chaos of her life. Perhaps she spent all her life grappling with that in her writing; and from what Martin Amis has said, she succeeded in making sense of her life in her writing (‘penetrating sanity on the page’). There is something heroic about that. It’s not surprising people loved her.

I’m glad you had such a great holiday in Madeira, Patrick. This comparison of your visit with George’s is fascinating. And what a poignant contrast you make between two ‘sadly tinged’ women of his acquaintance. On the one hand, we have the solitary traveller Pippa Strachey being teased and patronised by a chauvinistic George on board ship; and on the other, Kittie Calderon, left ‘all alone in [a] big rambling house’ and forced to justify her husband’s regular absences with the distinctly dubious line that ‘a man can’t have completeness of adventure if he has got a woman with him’. (I can’t help observing that a package tour to the Canary Islands doesn’t sound quite such as an adventure as, say, Pippa Strachey’s independent journey to India in 1900-1…but let us not digress.)

These two women would seem to have had quite a lot in common. Did they know each other socially, despite their political differences? They were born five years apart into upper middle class families, and they both received a typically genteel education. Kittie specialised in painting; Pippa played the violin. Both were very involved with the lives of their friends and relations, and both assumed the role of carer for their elderly parent(s). It was in their aspirations that their lives diverged. Pippa chose a life campaigning for women’s rights and, whether by choice or not, she never married. Kittie chose a domestic role, and married twice.

I am sure you are right when you say that ‘Lesbia was the daughter Kittie Calderon wanted and never had’. George must have been aware of his wife’s yearning for motherhood, and it occurs to me (belatedly, perhaps) that he may sometimes have found living with Kittie ‘pretty demanding’ too. I wonder if the palpably sad atmosphere which Lesbia detected was due not so much to him being away, as to Kittie’s awareness that her relationship with Lesbia was the nearest she would ever get to having a child of her own?

Both women ended their days in nursing homes. The cheerful Pippa presumably reflected with some satisfaction that she had voted in more than a dozen General Elections. And Kittie?

This question is probably best answered by Schulz himself:

“I don’t like the name of my strip at all. I wanted to call it Good Old Charlie Brown, but the person at the syndicate who selected Peanuts just picked it at random from a list of possible titles he jotted down. He hadn’t even looked at the strip when he named it. The syndicate compromised on Sunday, though. Once I rebelled and sent it in without any title. We finally agreed to put Peanuts at the top and include Charlie Brown and His Gang in the sub-title on Sunday.”

But why would the word be on ‘a list of possible titles’ in the first place? Apparently it was a term (of endearment?) for children, popularised by a 1947 TV programme The Howdy Doody Show, which had an audience section for children called ‘The Peanut Gallery’. That’s according to The Schulz Museum, here.

While I’m talking about names, I’ll clarify that ‘Sparky’ is used throughout the biography (as in the pictured excerpt) to refer to Charles M. Schulz and was a family nickname after the horse Spark Plug from the Barney Google comic strip. I thought it was cool that the nickname came from a comic strip, and I think Michaelis probably did too, as he uses it broadly throughout the book.

‘Peanuts’ is an intriguing title. I’ve never thought about it before. Can you enlighten us, James? After all, in Anglo-English it means ‘something piffling’, yet Schulz is one of the greatest philosophers of the age!

Patrick: Barthes may be out of fashion, or vieux jeu, but there is nothing truer than his proposition that the meaning of a work lies with the reader rather than the author: for the simple reason that the reader is (temporarily) alive to call the tune, while the writer has decently departed the scene–or, left his text to fend for itself. It should not surprise us therefore that George Calderon’s play The Fountain was put on at the Strand Theatre in 1925 by members of the I.L.P. Arts Guild. If the Guild found something provocative in the play, so much the better for the play (and for them).

Remember Orwell’s Animal Farm, which has been turned inside out and back again by people in search of its ‘real’ political meaning; and even his currently chart-topping Nineteen Eighty-Four has been (and is being) dragged through a hedge backwards, to emerge ideologically bedraggled. Orwell may well have protested, in an essay, that everything he had ever written was ‘against totalitarianism, and in defence of democratic socialism’, but once he has floated off his raft of fiction, there is no way to predict what contradictory currents will take it where, and who may climb aboard to hoist the Jolly Roger.

If literal, monologic Lenin could venerate Chernyshevsky, and abominate Dostoevsky, what does this tell us about the relation between politics and literature? Political discourse ends with a vote (or a revolution), whereas, as Keats persuasively put it, poetry ‘ends in speculation’; speculation which Lenin and his like had no time for. One is reassured that the I.L.P. (one recalls, the only party of which Orwell was ever–briefly!–a member) did.

Jenny’s comment and this article from Das Magazin are equally compelling. Could it be that we are also ‘suffering from’ history repeating itself? I found myself reminded of How Domesday Book Got Its Name – from the widespread and unsettling feeling that “they” know everything about “us”. Some – I hope many! – Calderonians may live long enough to commemorate the millennium of the Norman Conquest. It is sobering to reflect that nearly a thousand years have passed and once again the population of this little island is preoccupied with the thought of invaders from across the English Channel.

We are offered endless speculation about the post-Brexit future of Europe. Have we come full circle from World War One? I suspect the truth is, only time will tell.

I’m afraid, Patrick, that your friend was backing a winner when he said, ‘‘It rather looks as though the Brexit vote split along lines of education.’ Published just yesterday (6th Feb) is the BBC’s more detailed breakdown of Brexit voting per ward – don’t bother to read all this, but take a look at the very highly-clustered graph entitled: “Wards with more graduates had lower Leave vote”.

Of course, what this convincing graphic tells us is only that people with degrees tended to vote Remain. It certainly does not tell us what Patrick’s friend (and/or others from the cosy elite classes) may have been thinking, in Patrick’s words, that ‘those who voted Leave weren’t educated enough to know what they were doing’. Far from it, it could even give us a pro-Brexit message that those without degrees are having a rough time in our globalised society and were smart enough to see they could do better if Britain left the EU.

Phew, I’ve managed to sound politically neutral on Brexit (despite being an unashamed Europhile and an ‘if-only’ Remainer). But moving on swiftly….

I read Patrick’s post last week, the same day that I happened to read an article published on Motherboard website (a spin-off from Canadian news/culture magazine, Vice). The article, by Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, and originally published in German in Das Magazin, is here:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win

Both Patrick’s and Das Magazin’s articles expose the power of number crunching in understanding social trends. And both of them major on the role of ‘education’ – or shall we say “information” – on democracy.

The Das Magazin article suggests that Trump’s team successfully used ‘big data’ (aka number crunching) to help Trump win the presidential election, probably using the services of a UK firm called Cambridge Analytica. Would Trump say that this article contained ‘fake news’, in his words? Maybe, and I did feel there was a lack of hard fact in Das Magazin’s article, perhaps too much quotation from the Cambridge Analytica’s CEO (bearing in mind that this firm might have something to gain from a story on its vote-manipulation prowess).

But the main arguments of the article are demonstrably true. Big PR firms use Facebook and other social platforms to deliver advertising messages via enjoyable or shocking ‘virals’, which rack up millions of views. Many of these have a definite anti-establishment feel to them (to make them fun to share) and it is really easy to include a message to target groups of recipients, who will spread the message and/or be influenced by it. The example given is the inclusion of ‘videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators’ – easy to see how this would erode Clinton’s vote.

Over to the ‘Guardian readers’ (I use this term lightly and in jest) to bemoan the use of Facebook as a news source. Probably the Edwardians felt the same about the information sources that the then non-franchised classes could access.

Just back on Brexit to finish off (sorry). Das Magazin made passing mention of Brexit, but didn’t seem to have any real story here. With the British political parties claiming, variously, and unbelievably in both senses of that word, that Brexit would mean the NHS would have more money, that Brexit would cause financial ruin, and (via the infamous poster) that refugee migrants equate with EU nationals free to work in Britain, there was a vacuum of hard fact and no need for any sinister manipulation of opinion. I’m with Patrick in linking ‘contemporary political instability and rudderlessness’ with ‘the products of politicians’ incompetence’, albeit in a different century. And in 100% supporting democracy over ‘Philosopher Kings’!

For information: the latest view among historians is that celebrity dates from the 18th century and that Rousseau was its first ‘casualty’: an ordinary man thrust into the limelight: see the recent book by Antoine Lilti. My own view is that the first celebs in this country were Emma Hamilton and Queen Caroline: Caroline could cope, Emma couldn’t.

On education and democracy, it is worth remembering how small a percentage of the Edwardian middle-class actually attended a public school and Oxbridge. As a result the extent to which even the prosperous in Britain before the First World War had profoundly imbibed the notion of public service and imperial sacrifice can be exaggerated. Most members of the middle-class (or middle classes, if you prefer) had local, family and civic identities and were not particularly philanthropic. Their focus was local rather than national politics, despite the railways.

Patrick: in your Post today, you scrupulously use home-grown Brexit as an example (or an example offered to you) of a democratic decision split on educational lines. But surely, as we reel from Trump’s scything of the American political scene, we observe once again the implicit antagonism of differently educated sections of the community? So many American writers and politicians have admitted, since 8 November last year, that they simply didn’t know what was going on in the country. There’s a curious contradiction between horizontal connectivity (the linking of like-minded people and groups) and the mutual sealing off on the vertical scale. A net–‘reticulated at its intersections’, as Dr Johnson famously defined it–may be more one-dimensional than we think. And at this moment of social media, this certainly does not help democracy to deliver.

I greatly enjoyed this post – yet another book added to my must-read list. But it does raise the GC question. Was George Calderon a nature lover? I know he once lived on a farm, and was proud of his horsemanship, but he still gives the impression of an essentially urban type. All those cafes and theatres! Your description of him encouraging his men to pick and chew ‘the leaves of a certain shrub’ as they went into battle is extremely powerful (Calderonia 4 June 2015); but I can’t help thinking this relates more to psychology than to botany.

Then there’s the other GC… John Lewis-Stempel’s strikingly beautiful cover implies that his study is confined to the Western Front. So what about the Gallipoli Campaign? Did British countrymen find any comfort or inspiration in those arid Turkish dunes? Or were the landscape and wildlife just too different from home?

As it happens I have recently been reading the letters of another Trinity College graduate who fell at Gallipoli – the brilliant young physicist Henry Moseley, who was born in the year that George Calderon came up to Oxford. (See J.L. Heilbron’s excellent biography, H.G.J. Moseley: The Life and Letters of an English Physicist 1887-1915 (University of California Press, 1974).). Harry, as his family called him, was very keen on the natural world, and gives a flavour of the plants, birds, and animals that George might have encountered. He arrived on the Gallipoli peninsula in early July, 1915, and in his first letter home noted that the ‘centipedes 8 inches long and very fat look terrifying’. Stationed on the coast, he admired ‘a gorgeous blue and red heron’, but informed his mother there were ‘no flowers left here except a few purple cistus and various heath like shrubs’. Moving inland, there were ‘large land tortoises… The birds are very interesting, lots of them, nearly all strange except nightjar and plentiful turtle dove.’ His attempt to introduce a pet to the mess was a failure – ‘the local tortoise is a very brisk walker.’ The men soon started collecting specimens for their lieutenant’s inspection – ‘a land crab…insisted on departing before my arrival… So did a large hedgehog brought in by one of my linemen. Then there are frogs that sing all night, mantises that v. seldom pray and grasshoppers innumerable. If I was not rather busy I could spend all my time examining the local fauna… The sage and thyme and many other herbs smell delicious.’ Henry Moseley’s last surviving letter was dated 4 August, and the only wildlife mentioned is flies. He was killed by a sniper at Chanuk Bair on 10 August 1915.

May I urge every reader of Calderonia to follow the link in John Dewey’s comment to his blog post on the Brimstone Press webpage? It is a great polemic that had me cheering by the end!

John, I hope you will be cheered to know that I just looked on the online SOLO catalogue, and found that there are no less than four copies of your biography of the Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev reposing on the shelves of various libraries within Oxford University. Including one in the hallowed and eternal stack of the mighty Bodleian itself. That’s a lot more than can be said for the ‘mass of trashy pulp’ on sale in Waterstone’s and Smith’s….

Good luck with finding a publisher (and I think that unfortunately luck does play a large part). As you say, trying to interest a commercial publisher has to be the first path to go down, however fraught with obstacles it may be. My own dispiriting experiences in this field are outlined in a blog which I wrote some time ago for Brimstone Press, the self-publishing outlet which I was eventually fortunate enough to come across: https://brimstoneauthors.com/john-dewey/
Don’t be discouraged by my experience, though: I’m sure your biography stands a very good chance of being published commercially.

He damns one who writes in the cold? (4,3)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all!

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s “Shed Man”!

I wonder what his superpower is. The ability to teleport instantly to a shed anywhere in the world, perhaps?

I like this picture!

I was very interested to read Clare’s post having worked on the metalpoint drawing as a conservator working for the Oxford Conservation Consortium (of which Trinity College, Oxford is a member). Metal points generally produce a very delicate impression as the marks are made when a metal stylus is dragged over a “rough” (prepared) surface to leave traces of the metal behind. Unlike drawing in graphite, chalk or charcoal, the tone is very even and pale. It is not possible to make a darker line by applying more pressure – that can only be achieved by using a different metal (e.g. lead) and depth of tone is built up using repeated strokes placed close together. Many old masters such as Leonardo and Michelangelo used the metalpoint medium but it became less common as graphite became more readily available.

The Pienne drawing was interesting as it was clearly executed on a commercially available “prepared” sheet of paper – indicated not least by the perforations along its left edge where the sheet had been removed from a pad of paper. I was not in a position to identify the exact metal used – it is likely to have been silver but without analysis, I cannot say for sure. I am also uninformed about the use of metal point specifically for commemorative portraits.

In general metalpoint drawings are collected and sometimes shown in Museums (both The British Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington had big exhibitions of metalpoint drawings in 2015) but you are right that their visual impact requires close examination and can be somewhat lost in the larger context of some museum galleries.

For further information see :-
Joseph Meder, The Mastery of Drawing; James Watrous, The Craft of Old-Master Drawings; and Thea Burns, The Luminous Trace: Drawing and Writing in Metalpoint.
‘Drawings under Scrutiny: The Materials and Techniques of Metalpoint’ in Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns – Washington 2015, p.21, note 1.

On Clare’s post, I was thinking as I read it how much a trail of details gives us some kind of view of a person in the manner of pixels painting a grainy picture.

On the further discussion, I agree with Patrick that Pienne’s silverpoint appears to be have been deliberately made ‘softer and warmer’. I sought out the image of the original photo once more and feel that there are three significant differences, none of them accidental: the head has lost the belligerent angle; the mouth is less pursed; the eyes show more iris and lose the slightly menacing narrowed look.

“A wraith”, says Patrick. Now that life’s fight is over, the sternness is no longer needed: instead, wisdom and calm.

I wondered if silverpoint was chosen as a medium because of the commemorative nature of the picture copying. I had never heard of silverpoint, and looked it up in Chambers, to learn nothing more than it being “the process or product of drawing with a silver-tipped pencil”. Perhaps silverpoints are not shown much in galleries because they do blend in so dreamily with their surroundings, or perhaps they are not often produced. I further wondered if the silvery compound used presented any kind of challenge to the archivist or conservator.

In any case, there is real beauty in the thoughtful pale picture hanging quietly in the background of the vibrant progressive current-day college.

Many thanks Patrick for your comment – though it seems very odd for me to be saying that on your blog!

I am delighted to know that Kittie Calderon really did like Pienne’s portrait of George. That thought will give me pleasure whenever I walk past it on the stairs. And as my eye falls on the silverpoint I will also feel pleased that you are writing George’s biography. He thoroughly deserves to emerge from those shadows and be better known in the college today.

You mention Kittie’s failure to contribute to the War Memorial Library. I was so astonished by this that I went back to check the printed list of subscribers several times – and again, just now, to make sure. There is no way she didn’t know about it. President Blakiston ran a massive fund-raising campaign, during which he wrote 1,200 personal letters to alumni and families of the fallen. Donations were made by relatives of 74 of the 155 men named on the memorial board. There was an impressive response from graduates: 17, for example, from George’s year, and 22 from the year below. It is surely not a coincidence that his friends were among the most generous: Frederic Lowndes pledged £30; Horace Dowdall, £20; Arthur Lowry, £15… But by far the biggest donor was Herbert Blakiston himself. The President gave £1,200 (equivalent, approximately, to £120,000 today). Every loss had felt to him like a bereavement.

With our rosy commemorative spectacles on it is easy to feel sentimental about all of this. But I will follow you in sticking my neck out and say that I think Blakiston would have been moved by the final sentence of Kittie’s letter, when she said, somewhat awkwardly, ‘you must have felt [an] extraordinary sense of something splendidly accomplished after all your hard work when the War Memorial became an actual living fact.’ The point about an Oxbridge College is that it is not just a pile of ancient buildings; it is a perpetual – living – community. Blakiston was fully aware of this when in October 1914 he described the War as ‘the greatest crisis in [Trinity’s] history since the siege of Oxford’. (For several months in 1646 the college administration had entirely broken down; it had been, in effect, ‘every man for himself’.) It is perhaps the sense of a multi-generational pseudo-family that is so distinctive about an Oxbridge college. This is just as true today as it was a century ago – although I am very glad to say the community is no longer restricted to white men from English public schools. Blakiston would doubtless be horrified at the international mix of today’s Governing Body, and the way that modern colleges seek out able applicants from all schools and ethnicities… Next year Trinity College will even welcome its first female President! But if ‘Blinks’ could see his Library now – greatly expanded with a basement and gallery, bristling with tech, open 24/7, and packed with hard-working students – I think he would be very proud indeed.

Dear Clare,

I think it is wonderful that you have managed to reconstruct for us the story of Trinity’s portrait of George, and contextualise it within the College’s gallery, as it were. Also, your description of Pienne’s silverpoint work at the end of your guest post is most moving and appropriate.

I’m sure you are right that even Kittie wasn’t confident about tackling Blakiston. She was out of her comfort zone. Moreover, it was a very busy summer for her, dashing hither and thither from Petersfield, so perhaps she had to interrupt the writing of her letter. But what I can’t help feeling is that she was now rather embarrassed at not having contributed any money to his War Memorial Library project. She could be ‘contrarian’ — or, well, she was certainly her own woman — and liked to give to charities of her own choosing, so perhaps that’s why she opted not to give money but to pay for a young artist to make this portrait that would go to the College. It can’t have been cheap, and she commissioned another portrait from him that summer, of Evey Pym’s future daughter-in-law, Diana Gough. Kittie believed in encouraging up and coming artists: other examples would be Percy Lubbock and the young architect Jack Pym.

I really think she did like it. She had a facsimile made of it for herself, which she kept with her at ‘White Raven’ to the end, whereas the 1910 drawing by the great portraitist William Rothenstein, which she owned, went missing for a hundred years and there is no mention of it in her Will (which there is of the Pienne facsimile). I am sticking my neck out and saying that I think she instructed Pienne to make it softer and warmer. Hollyer’s original photograph is an Edwardian ‘icon’, a bit of theatre PR. Pienne’s version is perhaps a portrait for the post-war age; a portrait into which the personal, vulnerable, sad element could be allowed to intrude; certainly a wraith, but a wraith she could still love and did. I totally agree with you that it is beautiful.

Yours ever,

Patrick

Patrick:

I thank you (on this 4th of November) for your post on Owen yesterday, and for your sensitive and perceptive reading of the last line of “Greater Love”: ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.’ You are dead right to castigate the dubious interpretation offered by Santanu Das, which lifts the line from its moorings on the swell of his own hard-ridden thesis, and leaves it twisted and discoloured like a piece of driftwood. The shift of subject through the four stanzas–from lips, to attitude, to voice, to heart–progressively detaches the poem from any such sexualized reading; I agree with you that (especially by the end), the poem has ‘no specific gender orientation at all.’ I read the poem as hingeing on the contrast between love as ‘kindness’ (‘Kindness of wooed and wooer’)–the famous ‘milk of humankind-ness’ as repunctuated from Macbeth–and the greater love, the ‘fierce love’, of sacrifice: written in blood, not milk.

(Or, thinking of your ongoing Binyon discussion, should I repunctuate for clarity ‘not-milk’?)

Jon Stallworthy once told me of a conversation he had with Tom Boase, the art historian and head of Magdalen while he was researching his book on Owen. Boase was a notoriously prickly individual and seen by undergraduates and fellows as something of a cold fish. Quite out of the blue, according to Stallworthy, he began to talk about life in the trenches (Boase won the MC). Boase told him that in the course of the war, he had developed a close relationship with his batman, a butcher’s boy from Abingdon. One day as they were talking with one another the trench took a direct hit and the butcher’s boy was blown to smithereens. Since then, Boase confided, he had never been able to relate to another human being.

Perhaps there is another reading of the Binyon, where “not old, as we that are left grow old: age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn” is parenthetical, as though there was a silent “but” between “grow” and “not”? The bacchiac phrase “They shall grow” is then alluding to their growth in our memories in “we will remember them”, and their progression towards immortality in the final stanza?

Patrick: it’s difficult to keep up with the churn of your ideas on biography (particularly as one travels around, this week, getting on the wrong train at Euston and aiming for Glasgow rather than Manchester!). I’m amazed by how much of the stuff you have read. In Waterstone’s yesterday I fingered a number of recent ones, but remembering I had to lug these back to Lille I desisted–except for Dominic Hibberd’s Owen, which I conspicuously lacked.

Two points occur to me. You lament the need to respect ‘the facts’, and the way coping with these can flatten out the biographer’s style; turn biography into chronicle. But doesn’t Virginia Woolf make exactly the same complaint in the context of fiction? From memory: ‘The intolerable narrative business of the novelist, getting from breakfast to lunch, and from lunch to dinner.’ Whatever genuine distinctions there are (and you have reviewed them), this is one thing they share; fiction and biography both serve Chronos, though their rites may and must vary.

Then: you conceive in your last post of a collective, comprehensive biography (or compendium of biographies) on the net, which would render written biography superfluous. But then such a concept has been tried out (though just in print) before–and I don’t recall your having considered this example. I’m thinking of Edward Nehls’s Composite Biography of D H Lawrence (date somewhere 60s/70s?), in which he deliberately eschews the form and style imposed by one biographer in favour of assembling different, overlapping but also contradictory points of view. Before you retreat into hibernation, nestling in your typescript, I’d be glad to have your views on such a venture.

You have set me thinking about the biographer as ‘friend’… I don’t know Ruth Scurr’s Robespierre, but I have read her Aubrey, and this quality struck me very forcibly. At times I even wondered if on some subconscious level she was in love with him!

Experiment surely has to be a Good Thing and I am sorry if this will sound unduly critical. One man’s meat and all that. Aubrey was very impressive in many respects, but, as with you and Robespierre, I sensed a vacuum at the heart of it. For me, the missing ‘meat’ was any evidence of archival research (as opposed to reading books). There were some important areas where Aubrey’s own words and Scurr’s cleverly woven tapestry just did not provide enough information – his broken engagement for example, or the complicated process by which he lost his estate and his fortune – and I felt a bit of work with some court records would have added a lot. It also gave me a headache to be constantly wondering where Aubrey’s ‘own’ words stopped and Scurr’s began: personally I would have felt happier to see a clear separation by the use of two different fonts. But of course I realise that to have introduced these elements would have seriously undermined the whole point of the experiment.

Is there a difference between a biography of a real friend, as opposed to an imagined or assumed one? It’s a long time since I read Elizabeth Gaskell’s life of Charlotte Brontë, but I recall thinking that she’d done a great job. Percy Lubbock on the other hand! You once said on Calderonia that you didn’t think his life of George was a biography, but I sense you have done something of a U-turn there. When I first encountered Percy, many years ago, I found his sheer Lack of Facts simply maddening. It seemed both lazy and shoddy and I mentally categorised his life of George as Bad Biography. I am however looking forward to being persuaded otherwise by your promised post on the subject….

Patrick,

Till now I have resisted the temptation to write a response to your accusation of ‘nastiness’ among Edwardian men.

Those of us who went to UK private (‘public’) schools in the 1960s/early 1970s may have experienced the end of an era when toughness, duty and stoicism were considered to be the most important values. My grandfather’s generation went to the same school in the Edwardian era and all volunteered to join up in WW1. One even fought in WWII as well, in Italy.

The key was this: yes a man could be tough on others within the context of the task in hand, but he should be even tougher on himself. ‘Never complain, never explain’. And, look after your men first, before you look after yourself.

Going back to the Edwardian era: how could men like Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton have endured what they did, and in the way they did, if it was not for this ‘Edwardian’ outlook? Of course, a gentleman should also display charm and courtesy as well as toughness, duty and stoicism. But what an impossible mix to achieve for most.

Philip

Many thanks Alison for sharing your personal experiences of Patrick’s George Calderon project. You are in the unique position of having lived in close contact with the raw materials of this biography for three decades, and I found your insights very thought-provoking. I don’t think it is the least bit odd to feel you have ‘met’ people from the past through their letters and papers; rather, it is strong indicator that there is enough substance there for them to be brought to life – surely the goal of any biographer – in a ‘mere’ book (as Patrick once described his blog).

It is interesting that you have found Kittie so much easier to engage with than George. Yes, he was a maverick (a synonym, I presume, for ‘genius’); yes, the pattern of her life is ‘familiar territory’; and yes, you have got to know the descendants of people who knew her well. But I think you put your finger on the crucial reason when you say, ‘the archive of letters and papers is her collection.’ Although this is often overlooked, there is indeed something very powerful and significant in what someone selects for preservation, and in how they choose to arrange it.

We all have our prejudices. I have to admit that I am always predisposed to like a biography if I know the author has made the effort to walk in the footsteps of the subject, and visit the places connected with his or her life. So it was particularly nice to read of you and Patrick tramping the by-ways of Middlesex, exploring remote Shropshire churchyards, and analysing the view of Cap Gris Nez as you sat down to dinner there one evening. George’s habit of travelling the world makes his a difficult trail to follow of course. But seriously, is it not your duty to finish the job and take a trip to Tahiti? I see that one can fly there via LA, and look – http://www.tahiti-tourisme.co.uk – you don’t even need a visa!

Very moving piece Patrick – I did enjoy reading it.

This is a further comment on the subject of nastiness – but also on your post today, ‘Edwardian Bastards – a personal note’.

Oh dear, this is all getting a bit distressing. I have grown very fond of George, and went to bed yesterday feeling guilty, even embarrassed, that I had made you call him a cad; and yet I also feel upset when I think of Blakiston squirming as he heard (or imagined) people sniggering at the depiction of him in Downy. You feel defensive, I detect, in your justification of George’s behaviour – it was ‘jealousy’ of a more successful individual, not (though I fear it was) the more contemptible bullying of a weaker man. You still vividly recall how perplexed and frightened you were by some of the First World War veterans whom you met as a child. Clearly, it is not lightly that you call the Edwardians bastards…

All these strong emotions flying around! I am reminded of the discussion of the Goldilocks Principle that we had some time ago on Calderonia. Commemoration of the fallen of 1914–18 is neither too distant to empathise with, nor too recent to be painful. It is ‘just right’ to engender in most people a gratifying tingle of poignant regret. It seems to me that the same principle is at work again here, empowering us to form and hold such strong opinions about an earlier generation. We could criticise our medieval forebears for the way that the aristocracy and the Church repressed the peasants; but we don’t. The feudal system was too different from our world and too long ago. It would be odd and crude to call crusading and castle-building knights and lords bastards. We regularly censure British society of 20 or 30 years ago for its institutional discrimination of all kinds. But it’s a complicated business and we may feel uncomfortable when we consider our own past complacency, even complicity. I am astonished for example when I reflect that in the 1980s I greatly enjoyed Carla Lane’s appallingly sexist TV comedies! It would seem ill-judged, bad-mannered, simplistic, unhelpful, to refer to recently retired or deceased police officers, politicians, or writers as bastards. The Edwardians however – enough years have passed for us to see and analyse their flaws clearly. But they were our grand- and great-grandparents, and we know their names, own their knick-knacks, and live in a world that is in many ways still quite similar to theirs. The Edwardians are all dead, and yet we still ‘know’ them well. The historical distance then is just right to be judgemental, emotional, and personal. What a load of bastards they were!

Am I the only follower of Calderonia who lies awake pondering these things? Come on, the other 57 of you – what do you think?

I do not feel qualified to comment on whether Edwardian men were bastards or not, but I do wonder if you are reading too much nastiness into their portrait photographs. Yes, the ‘laughing and smoking’ picture of George in your banner seems so much more likeable than his disdainful and theatrical studio portrait. But perhaps we feel attracted to it on an emotional level not because George looks ‘nice’ (as in, the opposite of ‘nasty’), but simply because he looks ‘modern’. The relaxed informality of his tipsy grin and ruffled hair seem extraordinarily atypical of the Edwardian period. Do you know when and where it was taken?

If the photo on the right of your banner is epitomizing Edwardianism, the George at the far left is sporting a typically vacant Victorian expression. There are various theories as to why the Victorians never smiled in photographs – the difficulty of not moving during a long exposure for example, or a wish to conceal their rotten teeth, or the risk of looking unsuitably silly in what might be their only ever picture. Victorian sitters also had a marked tendency, for whatever reason, not to look directly at the camera. We do not as a result of this describe them as looking shifty or shy or unfocused, for these are not attributes that we associate with the period. Edwardians on the other hand liked to be photographed staring straight into the camera lens. Again I have no idea why; perhaps it simply became possible to print a large, close-up of a face as photographic techniques and equipment improved. But the resultant bold expression chimes exactly with what we know about the Edwardian mindset, and so we are tempted to read into their photographs such qualities as confidence, arrogance, menace – and nastiness. Poor Newbolt was born with those narrow lips, and he could not help having a slight frown on his middle-aged brow! I rather suspect this was just his ‘normal’ face, and, hopefully, his wife was fond of it.

George’s treatment of Herbert Blakiston though; that seems a remarkably long way from normal behaviour, then, or at any time. To me, his depiction of Trinity’s senior tutor and future President in Downy V. Green goes beyond ‘nasty, even vicious’. The thing about Blakiston is that he had every reason to believe that George was his friend. When George entered Trinity as an undergraduate exhibitioner, Blakiston was a newly elected don. Both men were members of the College’s Gryphon Club, a small and essentially light-hearted paper-reading society which met weekly and dined termly. They may not have been soulmates, but within the College this was a close association that carried an expectation of mutual and lasting respect. For George to deride and ridicule Blakiston as he did in Downy was therefore not just cruel; it was a betrayal. It was dishonourable, and it was ungentlemanly. I am not sure what the opposite of gentleman would be in this context. A bastard?

I love the concept of EPMOS. I can now see it’s what I narrowly escaped succumbing to myself a few years ago!

Thank you. F.E. Jamieson was the co-worker of Arnoud (always spelt in French !) Pienne, 1885-1952, who was really a commercial artist. His son Aronold Pienne 1909-1987, was my father in law. He was very young when he knew these great people, having left school in order to study art at 14, he met many old people when he was very young – a wonderful recipe for an interesting life. I have a photograph of the silverpoints drawing in Trinity. I asked them for it in about 1987/8 and they had not already photographed it. They should now have a negative (or whatever the new negatives are called) Please let me know if I can help at all. Alan Robinson

I have done some checking with my wife. F.E. Jamieson did some work occasionally with Arnold Pienne’s father, who did “chocolate box style” commercial art in London. They collaborated from time to time but were two separate people. Arnold Pienne, the son, was the one who did the Calderon picture.

Thanks for this fulsome reply ! I hope that I can help. Arnold Pienne was his real name and he knew the old aesthetes,like Ricketts,Shannon, the Binyons, Sturge Moore etc. I am pretty sure – but might be mistaken that the portrait is in Christchurch,Oxford; I am sorry not be better informed. i didn’t think it was Trinity. I have a receipt for an enlargement of the small photograph, done for 10/6d in 1926. and this was made by Fred.Hollyer, Pembroke Sq.,Kensington. I also have – to be sold – a presentation copy, sent to him by Mrs Calderon, of George Calderon: a sketch from memory by Percy Lubbock. Let me know if I can help in any way, but it’s a world away fro my own.

Very many thanks John for sharing such a charming story from your family history. At the risk of sounding like a sentimental Victorian, I was very touched by the way that Horace Pym’s literary friends put themselves out to include his disabled son in this wonderful ‘bit of fun.’

The crippled child is a great trope of Victorian and Edwardian children’s literature. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s Colin in The Secret Garden (1910) comes instantly to mind, and so does Johanna Spyri’s Clara in Heidi (1881). Representing innocence and suffering, the young invalid is generally a passive figure, only occasionally the hero or heroine of his or her own adventures when there is a moral lesson to be taught – Susan Coolidge’s bed-ridden Katy (1872) for example. It is surely the authors’ genius as writers that has made these particular novels such enduring classics, despite the sometimes uncomfortable social attitudes that they reveal. I can’t deny that Heidi in particular was a great favourite of my own childhood, and, googling, I see that it was in 2005 that I enjoyed the Paul Marcus film version with my daughter.

But the reality for most physically disabled children of a century and more ago must have been pretty grim. They had very restricted educational opportunities and extremely limited prospects of future employment, while the mentally impaired were highly likely to live out invisible lives in institutions. Hooray for the Pym family then, that Julian was encouraged to become a ‘keen naturalist’ in the course of his short life. I see that he died at the age of about 21 – was this as a direct result of his spinal injury or from some other cause?

Patrick has often reminded us that the First World War did away with, or was the beginning of the end of, numerous Bad Things of the Edwardian era. I wonder if the huge wave of servicemen returning home from the War with life-changing physical and mental injuries was what kick-started the 20th Century’s steady (although not always smooth and by no means complete) transition from a society in which the disabled are treated as objects of pity, charity and distaste, to one where every person participates equally.

Dear Sir, You seem to have missed a rather lovely silverpoints drawing of Calderon by my late father in law Arnold Pienne, it is in Christchurch,Oxford and,although, I have a prejudice, it is quite beautiful.

I am very pleased to see this reconsideration on your part, Patrick. I nearly wrote in reply to an earlier blog of yours which rather took the line that the generals were stupid and uncaring of their soldiers’ lives. The best analysis I have come across of that first day’s disaster is in Martin Middlebrook’s “The First Day on the Somme”. He too focuses on the extra time that it took soldiers to walk rather than run across no-man’s land, and points out that where that instruction was ignored and saps were dug forward from which soldiers rushed across to the German lines, then initial success was achieved. He too points out that Rawlinson was the only infantryman – and a good one with a fine reputation from the Boer War – among the senior generals and that the cavalryman Haig was unwilling to over-rule him. Rawlinson assessed that his infantry would not be able use fire and movement (see below) and that they would only be able to walk forward. And that’s where it all started to go wrong. So, would the armchair critics please put themselves into Rawlinson’s position and, having determined that you had to send your attacking infantry forward at a walking pace carrying all their impedimenta over the ravaged ground of no-man’s land towards a determined and resolute enemy, please decide what story you are going to tell them to induce them to climb cheerfully out of their trenches at the appointed hour and begin that fateful advance. You too might very well come up with something confident about the devastation that will have been wreaked by the greatest artillery bombardment in the history of the British army to date.

Fire and movement is the essence of all modern military tactics. One group shoots to keep the enemy’s heads down while the other advances some distance; then they change roles. It can be done at various levels of command. When it is done by small groups of infantry it is called “pepper-potting” and it is very effective, particularly when advancing in contact across open country. But it is difficult to do well, even by experienced and well trained infantry, and Rawlinson knew that those in his Fourth Army, only formed in January 2016, were neither. At the micro level it needs flexibility in timings and boundaries, and it gets more difficult without reliable battlefield communications – the curse of all World War I operations – and the consequent need to tie the infantry to a rigid, pre-arranged artillery fire plan. And it gets even more difficult when you start to take casualties among your junior leaders, as you undoubtedly will, and the momentum wavers when those who have gone to ground become increasingly reluctant to get up and advance again. Maybe in 1916 Rawlinson had a point. Certainly when the Germans decided after much debate that this was the way forward for their great attack of March 1918, the Kaiserschlacht, they created an elite force of carefully selected and trained stormtroopers to lead the advance; the rest plodded along behind just like the infantry of 1916, ready to consolidate the gains.

Rawlinson was not a fool. He was not relieved of his command, and in 1918 he planned and commanded the Fourth Army in one of the greatest feats of arms in the history of the British army, the rolling attack from August through to November which broke out of the trenches, mastered the very different art of open warfare and finally broke the German army and its morale.

Let us all take a deep breath – er – before we waft away entirely on a fluffy cloud of sentiment. I feel I would be failing in my professional duty as an archivist if I didn’t make one or two hard-nosed points here. My sincere apologies in advance if I come across as a bit sniffy…

Patrick, you are spot on in your desire to keep the Calderon archive exactly as Kittie arranged it. As soon as a person’s papers are reorganized or added to, they cease to be an archive at all, but that much more sterile entity, a ‘collection’. Kittie however did not purchase rusty paperclips especially for the purpose of leaving damaging marks on Archie and George’s precious letters! You therefore should set about procuring some brass replacements forthwith. (Readers at home, this goes for you too. And if any of you are using rubber bands to hold your treasured bundles together…. Please don’t; in 50 years they will be like fossilized worms glued fast to the paper. What you need is cotton tape.)

Clearly the conditions in that Scottish attic were rather on the damp side. And I’m guessing also rather dusty. Your description of inhaling the aroma of George Calderon’s cigarettes (or pipe) is wonderfully, beautifully, evocative – Archie’s death bed too. But no matter how one’s brain interprets it, the mustiness that pervades archival documents is usually just good old-fashioned dirt, and the top notes are soot, and mould.

I like the sound of those archive boxes and folders. These really are the ideal way to store and transport archives; they come in all sorts of shapes and sizes and can be made-to-measure to house individual items, books, and albums. Archive boxes offer valuable protection against sudden changes in air temperature and humidity, and are an additional line of defence against smoke and water if disaster strikes. Unlike those highly-acidic brown manila envelopes that were so favoured by the Victorians and Edwardians, modern archival packaging is pH neutral. (Readers again: if your old letters are turning brown even though you keep them in the dark, then your conditions are too acidic. Rectify this before the paper becomes brittle and friable.) It shouldn’t really be harming the Calderon letters to get them out and look at them from time to time – a change of air is as beneficial for documents as it is for us humans, and you can check that none of those mould spores has sprung to life.

Oh dear. While I am on my archivist’s soap box, I must just mention photographs too. They are the most fragile and vulnerable documents of all. Quite likely Kittie stuffed hers into brown envelopes – it’s what most people did in 1940. If those within the Calderon archive are not already in individual polyester sleeves, may I recommend these too? The inert plastic allows each photograph to be examined without being touched; it stops previously bent corners from snapping off; and it prevents any risk of abrasion to the surface of the image. (Readers: Not in possession of any Edwardian photographs? Then think back to the 1970s, 80s, 90s… Do you have early colour prints, stuck so lovingly into those albums with the sticky plastic pages? Nasty. You will never retrieve the original colours, but if you have the negative strips in the back of a cupboard get them out and have them digitized. This service is offered at all the High Street photography shops. And then – whether you print them again, create a photo-book, or send them to the cloud – MAKE A RECORD OF WHO THE PEOPLE ARE! Your descendants, or your future biographer, or the poor neighbourhood archivist who gets to write the catalogue, will be very, very grateful indeed.)

Thank you all who read this comment to the end. I got my husband to check it for me. He said, ‘No wonder you’re such a wow at parties!’

Another excellent post, vividly capturing an evocative moment that links us to long forgotten times.

Smell … so evocative, calling on our distant memories. I remember sniffing pomegranate bubble bath and suddenly transporting back 45 years in time to see pomegranates at my great aunt’s flat. But smell links us physically to the past as well, as active and vital molecules float upwards from their past embodiments and into our noses. Sadness sometimes, as the molecules flee and the smell fades with all else … leaving words and their semantics to last the longest. Thanks once more, Patrick, for writing your blog for all of us.

Smells of the archive
are his petite madeleine,
bringing back lost lives.

Patrick: considerably less a war historian than your modest self, I nevertheless hazard a ‘literary’ comment on the alleged instruction, once over the top, to ‘walk’ towards the enemy. My hazy impression is that I have never seen such a practice described, in prose or poetry. What one remembers, from writers who have tried to convey the immediacy of actual conflict, is the two-time effect of either rapidity or paralysis; never, that I can think of, the deliberation of walking. I cite just one example, from Owen’s ‘Spring Offensive:’

So, soon they topped the hill, and raced together
Over an open stretch of herb and heather
Exposed…

Isn’t this the image we always have? And Owen would surely have known; he’d been there and done it. Of course, this is only an impression; and ‘only’ from literary sources. It would indeed be interesting to have some counter-evidence; and as you say, only the military historian would have the authoritative references.

Your description of the ‘dog days’ sounds depressingly familiar. The final stages of my Tyutchev biography were a soul-destroying slog that seemed to go on for ever. Repeated proofreading still failed to prevent several typos and errors getting through under the radar, and in the event I had to paste in an ‘Errata’ slip listing the worst of them. Are you compiling your own index, or farming that task out? I did my own, and can only say that wasn’t much fun either, especially as I’d decided to give dates and very brief biographical data for all the individuals listed in it. After the elation of (apparently) completing the book comes the suddenly realisation that there’s still all this boring nitty-gritty stuff to be done!
Your experience with the Calderon quote re Chekhov’s plays must be a fairly common phenomenon. It probably explains why so many famous quotes become known to the wider world in an incorrect (yet sometimes arguably improved) version.I had a similar experience myself recently, when I emailed my MP about the referendum result, only to realise after sending it that I’d reversed ‘remain’ and ‘leave’ in the final sentence, thus making nonsense of the whole argument! The possibility that it was a Freudian slip is somewhat disturbing. Anyway, all I could do was send a second email pointing out the error.
I hope it may be of some comfort to know that your current travails are not unusual. All I can say is, keep at it: it will be worth it in the long run!

A very powerful and moving account, Patrick

Oh Patrick! However much one thinks one knows about World War One, there really is no end to the horror of it all…

I am glad that Ben Hattersley had kind people looking after him in the last years of his life. This anecdote has reminded me of your post about visiting the Sandham Memorial Chapel (26 October 2015); specifically, your reaction to Stanley Spencer’s ‘The Resurrection of the Soldiers’. [One can see this immense painting online – search on artuk.org – although only through a glass darkly, as it were.] Spencer spent much of the War as a hospital orderly. You can just tell from the faces in his paintings that he treated the maimed and injured servicemen in his care with great tenderness – and surely he listened to them too. How many, like Ben Hattersley, were haunted by the Apocalyptic screaming of the horses?

Spencer’s white crosses and granite blocks are disturbingly reminiscent of the memorial cross and grave markers that extend beneath the Thiepval memorial to the missing of the Somme. You remarked that ‘in the centre [of ‘The Resurrection of the Soldiers’] are two mules waking from death and craning their necks round to look at the almost unnoticeable white figure of Christ.’ But Spencer’s two horses are also white, and for every man rising up from the ground, a fallen horse is stirring too. You quoted from the National Trust brochure, that Spencer’s frescoes ‘celebrate the human companionship of war.’ But the message of this painting has to be more than that – Spencer is representing the equality of men and horses in their soldiering, in their suffering, in their sacrifice – and in the immortality of their souls. No wonder the Bishop suspected Spencer of heresy!

Did Kittie Calderon ever visit the Sandham Memorial Chapel? I guess she knew instinctively what humans who talk about ‘dumb animals’ have forgotten. Her dog Bunty may have been unpleasant and smelly, but I bet nobody understood or comforted Kittie quite so well as she did!

Patrick: Thank you once again for your vivid recollection from your time working in the mental hospital, and Ben Hattersley’s memory of the screaming of the horses. Frustratingly (but not untypically), I can’t lay my hands on my copy right now, to confirm and give the reference, but I’m pretty sure there’s a chapter in Barbusse’s Le Feu, pub 1916 (trans as Under Fire 1917) which focusses likewise on the screams of suffering horses; and also the logistical difficulty of dealing with the mountain of horse corpses on the roads. (I’d be glad if someone could confirm this!). Of course, Morpurgo’s War Horse (and the blockbuster film) made much of the horse, in a more sentimentalized way.

Back to the mental hospital: one is relieved to hear that you had a better time there than did Samuel Beckett in his, where his experience led him to identify with the patients (who had, it seemed to him, ‘escaped from a colossal fiasco’) rather than the doctors who were trying to keep the fiasco on the road.

You are no doubt familiar with Edward Elgar’s comment re. the war horses, written to a friend within days of the start of the First World War:

“Concerning the war I say nothing-the only thing that wrings my heart & soul is the thought of the horses-oh! my beloved animals-the men-and women can go to hell-but my horses;-I walk round&round this room cursing God for allowing dumb brutes to be tortured-let Him kill his human beings but-how CAN HE? Oh, my horses.”

“There” [says biographer Northrop Moore] “spoke the man….with an overpowering sense that his world was being destroyed. Few indeed saw so far so quickly”

The Bishop of London in his address in Westminster Abbey pointed out something I had not realised. After going over the top the normal (and obvious) thing to do was to run a few yards, throw yourself onto the ground, then go on like that until you got close to the enemy lines. At The Somme the troops had been ordered to WALK across No Man’s Land, on the assumption they would not meet any opposition. To make matters even easier for the German machine-gunners, everyone blew their whistle at 7.30 to let them know we were coming. Madness!

What a fascinating phenomenon this chronotopia is! It must be unusual (perhaps unique?) for a biographer to run a day-to-day blog on their subject at the same time as writing the biography, so perhaps you’re the first to have encountered it. The article you quote (rather impenetrable to me, I must admit) suggests further research by neurologists could yield exciting results for understanding exactly how time works in biographical and other narratives

Patrick, you should take consolation in your affliction by apophenia and pareidolia — or perhaps, as you seem to fear, by a toxic mixture of the two so far unidentified by science. Mark Antony provides all the evidence of being a fellow-sufferer, as he laments the forfeiture of his ‘visible shape’ towards the end of the play:

Sometime we see a cloud that’s dragonish,
A vapour sometime like a bear or lion,
A towered citadel, a pendent rock,
A forked tower, or blue promontory
With trees upon’t that nod unto the world
And mock our eyes with air…
That which is now a horse even with a thought
The rack disdains, and makes it indistinct
As water is in water.

And Antony’s author was evidently a man who invested heavily in this condition; a man whose mind was a kaleidoscope of superimposed images, a privileged panopticon from whose vantage point all things in heaven and on earth were simultaneously visible and interchangeable, understood only and always in terms of each other. The condition is most memorably summarized by his man Theseus in The Dream, with his description of the ‘seething brains’ of the lunatic, the lover, and the poet; the poet whose privilege it is to give ‘to airy nothing/A local habitation and a name.’

So do keep that brain of yours seething, making those connections for us which we expect a poet/biographer to provide. And don’t be afraid (as I’m sure you aren’t, really) by those long words wheeled in by Holofernes the schoolmaster. He and his like ‘have been at a great feast of languages, and stolen the scraps’!

Damian Grant

That Tom Murphy quote is great, yet so familiar.

“Tell me what it’s about, because I don’t know any longer”.

I thought I had read similar in a Terry Gilliam interview after shooting Brazil. Or maybe an Aaron Sorkin character says it somewhere…

However, google came up empty-handed. A Tom Murphy original! (?)