Calderonia

Cambridge Tales 7: ‘The Folding Party’

Posted on July 31, 2023 by Patrick Miles

For Laurence Brockliss

Chris Hardie and Julian Slawianski took over the editorship of the poetry magazine Helios at the end of their second year, when its founders graduated and left Cambridge. Unfortunately, they could not find anyone to do the same for them, so the mag would not be coming out again.

No-one particularly minded about this. They had had a good stable of contributors, many of whom would be staying on in Cambridge, but four years was more than respectable for a student poetry mag. In fact it was long enough for a magazine to become ‘fixed’ and slightly passé. Poets were more attracted to the fold-outs and slim card-covered booklets of the next wave of mags, with titles like Reanimator, Tilde, and Curiously Strong.

Hardie was a major student poet. He had a range of registers that evoked admiration and envy. His ‘Blue Pagoda’, for instance, was beguilingly romantic:

The turquoise breeze lingers in the porch
and trails of dust snake brownly
through the distant groves of jade
tinkle tinkle the leaves sing
the dry waves
pound in silence on the pirates’ shore

and another opened magically ‘I trust I shall tryst with you in Tintagel’. Yet he could also be abrasively New York:

Oh the blues was in my cornflakes,
Yeah, and sadness in my bread.
I am pinned on the Christmas tree of life
its Hegel tapping on Marx’s cracking window

Slawianski, who had short brushed-back hair and usually wore a jacket, clean shirt and tie, was the production manager of the magazine, but also a poet. His ‘Bedroom’ had created a sensation:

i traced that grey shadow on the wall
to its beginning
but fail with
that rainbow refraction
on the white door

However, ‘i am a dead leaf’, which continued ‘shake me off your branch/die and let die/even the cacti you gave me are dying’, was felt to be so explicit that he might be writing himself out.

The exams were over, the summer was halcyon, parties were raging everywhere, so they sent a note round to all their contributors: ‘Helios is folding. Come to say goodbye at Chris’s room, F4 Cowley Court, this Friday after Hall. Some wine and food provided, PBAB.’

Hardie had half packed. (‘But I haven’t done the infantry on your room!’ his bedder protested.) Several trunks and a mattress lay in the bay window, he had cleared his shelves, and there were cardboard boxes and piles of paper beside the sofa. But his large work table was spread with cheeses, grapes, crackers and pâté from the International, he had opened several bottles of College claret and Piesporter, and he had three more boxes under the table. He and Slawianski put on a Simon & Garfunkel album, poured themselves glasses, and waited.

First to arrive were Nick Button and Ginny Dolun, the most prominent pairing on the Cambridge poetry scene. He was tall, thin, bearded, and slightly hunched at the top. His eyes were always far away. Dolun was short, thin, hard-bodied. In her frilled polyester dress she could have been taken for a twelve-year-old, except that her steel-wool hair was greying and she appeared to have walnuts under her bodice.

‘Hi! Great to see you! Thanks for coming!’ the hosts greeted them. Slawianski poured them glasses and they started to fill their plates.

‘I saw they reprinted two of yours in Carcanet,’ Hardie said. ‘Congratulations!’

‘Um…’ Button began very softly.

‘Yes. We made sure they acknowledged first publication in Helios,’ the girl stated definitely.

‘That was good of them,’ remarked Slawianski, lighting a Gitanes. ‘What are you doing in the Vac.?’

‘Er…’ Button started.

‘We’re staying in a cottage in Devon,’ Dolun told them.

‘And then we’re hitch hiking in the South of France,’ breathed Button with a slight jerk of the head.

A.J. Beaton strode in. He startlingly resembled John Cleese in stature and flatness of head. He always wore a black jacket and orange tie.

‘This is a sorry occasion. But I must say, you’ve had a fair run. Thanks for inviting me…it’s good of you. And thanks very much for publishing me.’ He tucked in. Slawianski filled the glasses.

‘Almroth…’ Hardie began. ‘I know this is a bloody awful subject, but…do you know more about Garth Nightingale? He was a first year at your college, wasn’t he?’

‘Mm. Yes, he was. I met him once or twice. A nice chap, very fresh face…angelic even. He was translating Hölderlin. Apparently his bedder found him – fully clothed – flat out on his sofa with his arm dangling. Overdose. He’d definitely been trying LSD. I’m told he didn’t do any work for his Part I Modern Languages, though he’d come up as a Scholar…which made it worse, I suppose. A friend of mine who lives on the next staircase heard his bedder and another one talking in the court, and apparently Nightingale’s bedder said: “He’s back in bed already. He said he looked at the question on the exam paper and wrote: ‘Yes’. That’s all he wrote: ‘Yes’, and walked out.” Dear me…’

‘God…’ snorted Hardie.

‘Wha-what are you doing next year?’ Button asked Beaton.

‘Well there’s the rub. I want to do a Ph.D. on F.T. Tryng and Ned Haworth, but since they are still alive I don’t expect the Faculty – ’

‘Tryng?!’ roared a voice. ‘Hello you Bazzas…and Sheila!’

Dolun looked at the wall. It was the Antipodean poet Les Gough, a postgraduate who had taken Cambridge by storm and was published everywhere.

‘You can’t read Tryng, it’s like watching television!’

Everyone looked down.

‘Sorry! Sorry! There’s nothing wrong with television: I’m starting a job with TW3 in September myself!’

Dolun grabbed Button’s arm.

‘Come on, Nick, there’s a mattress over there.’

Chris Hardie absented himself to put on a Pink Floyd record.

‘What about Nightingale, eh?’ asked Les Gough through a kind of half-grin set on his face. ‘I suppose the writing was on the wall with those gnomic quatrains of his in Journeyman. “Suicide/Is making the world/Realize/That you’re dead.” Shouldn’t it have been “letting the world know you existed”? And he really ought to have changed his name, for poetical use at least!’

‘Come over here, Les…’ Beaton beckoned to two armchairs. Gough grabbed a bottle and followed him.

More poets were arriving, and attacking the food and drink: Jeremy Trift (disciple of Ferlinghetti), Carol Brookes (translator of Tsvetaeva), Kevin Morse, E.B. Knox, the haiku-writer Martin Helm, Sue Glenn…

Button lay on the mattress with his back to the bay window and was slowly rolling a joint. Ginny Dolun was kneeling beside him, talking at him fast and gesticulating. He ignored her.

Slawianski went over to Naomi Lewis, who was standing in the centre of the room with no-one to talk to. She had shiny black hair, large dark eyes, and wore a flax-blue jumper with a bright gold Star of David on a chain. They had printed two of her poems in the last issue, one of which, Slawianski recalled, ended: ‘I remember/The gift of your living,/The gift of my loving.’

‘What are you doing after Cambridge?’ he asked.

‘I’m hoping to go into publishing. But first I’ve got a part-time job at the New Statesman.’

‘Fantastic!’

‘And what are you going to do? You’re an engineer, aren’t you?’

‘Ah… I’m going into the family business.’

‘Really? What is it?’

‘Cars!’

He asked her if she would like some free copies of Helios, and took her over to a neat pile of them on a half-moon table.

Suddenly, there were raised voices from the mattress. Ginny Dolun had stood up.

‘Right, that’s it, you bum! I’m leaving you!’ she shouted with clenched fists and flashing eyes.

Button exhaled a cornet of smoke and said audibly:

‘Hurt is both a transitive and intransitive verb…’

She stormed out. No-one took any notice, as their relationship was well documented in Button’s poems. Button got slowly to his feet and followed, waving vaguely at everyone.

The party was going well. Les was on his second bottle and chain smoking. He cracked one brilliant linguistic or surreal joke after another at A.H. Beaton, who never entirely reacted. Kevin Morse, however, the author of some modern nonsense poetry, was squatting on the carpet before them, paralytic with laughter. Sue Glenn listened, glass and fag in hand, from a safe distance.

A veil of smoke floated, ash was getting well trodden into the carpet, a long Leonard Cohen tape was playing, and the conversation flowed.

‘…but then came Roger Woof’s article about Tryng in the latest issue of Frank Voices…’ E.B. (Edgar Barry) Knox informed Carol Brookes. He too wore a black jacket and orange tie.

‘…Steiner was arguing that it’s got Feminist posture at base…’ said Chris Hardie in all seriousness to Naomi Lewis.

‘…so then I wanged my donger…’ Les told his audience.

At 11.15 people started to leave. Kevin Morse announced that he had become a bird, and then a dolphin, but he remained manageable. There was an amiable upwelling of thanks and good wishes for the future.

‘What are you doing, Chris?’ asked Jeremy Trift.

‘Don’t laugh, I’m going to be a civil servant! You?’

‘I start at ICI next month!’

Not many home addresses were exchanged, as everyone knew that if they wanted to they could stay in touch through their old colleges. Hardie and Slawianski saw them out onto the landing, then went back in, gathered up bottles and food, stacked the plates, emptied ashtrays, and lightly hoovered.

‘Let’s have a drink, Jules,’ sighed Chris, grabbing the remains of a bottle of Médoc and sinking into an armchair.

‘Bloody good idea…’ Slawianski lit a Gitanes.

‘The million dollar question is, what are we going to do with the…literary remains? The Poetry Bookshop have got plenty of copies, our contributors have got plenty, we’ve left some in JCRs, but there’s four unopened boxes of fifty there from the printers, and that bale of editorial papers, rejected poems, other mags.’

‘The mill pool?’ suggested Slawianski.

‘Brilliant! You see that old blue trunk over there, with the broken handle…’

The following day, Slawianski came to lunch, they packed and locked the trunk, and deposited it outside in a corner of the college bike shed. At dead of night, they met and carried it to Silver Street bridge. They swiftly manhandled it onto the balustrade with fifty feet of rope through the good handle, and let it down slowly. When it was half submerged, Chris released his end and the trunk disappeared with barely a swirl. Julian coiled up the rope, which was from the boot of his car.

‘So cartons of sensibility fell through a hole in the river…’ improvised Hardie.

‘Yes. Tomorrow to fresh fields and pastures new!’

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Bedroom, Blue Pagoda, Cambridge, Cambridge Tales, Carcanet, Chris Hardie, Friedrich Hölderlin, G.W.F. Hegel, Gitanes, haiku, Helios, John Milton, Julian Slawianski, Karl Marx, Leonard Cohen, parties, Pink Floyd, poetry, poetry magazines, River Cam, students, suicide, Tintagel, undergraduates | Leave a comment

Guest post by Harvey Pitcher: Melikhovo 2004

Posted on July 15, 2023 by Patrick Miles

The house at Melikhovo (winter 1973)

This recollection goes back almost twenty years, but it does not seem that long ago. As I grow older, time does not slow down, as one might expect, but races away at an alarming rate. Chekhov had died in 1904 and in the summer of 2004 a Conference was being held at Melikhovo, his onetime home, to mark the centenary. I was due to read in Russian the eye-witness account of his death given by a young Russian student, Leo Rabeneck, in an article entitled ‘Chekhov’s Last Minutes’. To almost all the delegates, and certainly all the Russian ones, who had grown up in Soviet times, this graphic account was completely unknown, as it had been published in Paris in 1954, the fiftieth anniversary of Chekhov’s death, by which time the young Russian student had become a prominent member of the Russian émigré community.

The reading was introduced as the concluding item in the Conference, although, as the organiser, Vladimir Kataev, pointed out, it might also have made a fitting opening. Living through those last moments for themselves, the audience was unusually quiet and attentive: ‘you could have heard a pin drop’ was no exaggeration. I’d added some details of my own about the Rabeneck family and knew the text well, as my translation had appeared in the TLS under the title ‘Chekhov’s Last Moments’, so I was not worried that I might stumble over any of the Russian words, but there was one point at which I feared I might not be able to control my voice. This was when the German doctor, who’d been looking after Chekhov in Badenweiler, asked Leo Rabeneck, who was only twenty-one and had never seen a death before, to break the news to an unsuspecting Olga Knipper that Chekhov was not resting comfortably on his pillows but had died. I was relieved when I managed to keep calm and negotiate the danger area. Afterwards one of the Russian delegates came up to thank me and said he’d found the account very moving, ‘especially the moment when your voice broke’. How had he heard that? I thought it hadn’t happened. Are Russians more finely tuned to other people’s emotions than we are?

I haven’t been back to Russia since 2004, and in retrospect that moment at Melikhovo seems like the high point in my involvement with that maddening country: a moment of genuine cultural exchange. Chekhov had provided me with an absorbing interest throughout my adult life, and in return I was giving something back in their own language to those Russian scholars who’d been quietly keeping his spirit alive during the previous century and preserving a part of Russian culture for future generations. The good times in Anglo-Russian relations that we enjoyed around the turn of the century now seem a distant memory, and those of us who lived through them can congratulate ourselves on our good fortune. Will the good times come again? Maybe they will, since Anglo-Russian relations have always been cyclic, but not, I fear, in my time.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Anglo-Russian cultural relations, Anton Chekhov, Badenweiler, centenaries, death, Dr Schwörer, Leo Rabeneck, Melikhovo, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, Russia, Soviet Union, The Times Literary Supplement, TLS, Vladimir Kataev | 1 Comment

Cambridge Tales 6: ‘The Tower’

Posted on July 3, 2023 by Patrick Miles

A drawing by Franz Kafka

A small brown-man had a narrow bedroom, a spacious living-room, and a gyp-room (more like a galley) at the top of a Gothic quadrangle. The living-room contained a fluted white mantelpiece with a gas-fire, a moth-eaten charcoal grey sofa against the internal wall, and a coffee table next to it. The brown-man read very comfortably lying on the sofa, and sitting on it he could eat meals from the coffee table. But when he needed to write he went over to a desk that just fitted into a dormer with lattice windows on three sides.

At first he simply took his books and pad of paper over to the desk, sat down, and wrote without ever looking up. As his essays got harder, however, he would occasionally look out of the leaded window before him. He noted with interest that the roofs on the other side of the quadrangle were a bluish foam-flecked green, like seawater. He took to having a mug of coffee next to him as he wrote – increasingly slowly and effortfully – and when he paused he would contemplate the tower of the city’s main church beyond the far side of the quad. Only sky and clouds were visible around the tall tower, but sometimes black shapes appeared between the battlements, or heads and shoulders moved mechanically, it seemed, along them.

Could he be seen? He constructed the beam between his eyes and theirs. Surely they could see him and watch him as he sat there writing. He kept his head down, but would occasionally look up ‘nonchalantly’ to verify whether people were there. If beams of light could pass between him and them, so could bullets, either way, and he imagined this. He was particularly alert to anything being raised above head-level on the battlements. On days when watchers were on the tower, writing became a torment. He took to dropping onto his hands and knees and crawling across the carpet to the left-hand corner of the casement to check first, with his right eye, whether they were there. If they were, he kept his ‘third eye’ on them all the time as he tried to write. He found it impossible to write at night, as he could not see the tower.

Outside, he paid no attention to the tower whatsoever, even though he passed it on the other side of the street. But one day, as he was returning to his room, he saw a crowd of tourists, including a woman in a bright red sou’wester, queuing by the big church doors that opened onto the pavement opposite, and a notice that read: ‘View city best from Tower £1.’ He had never wondered before how they got up there; clearly this was the latest arrangement. When he reached his room, he made himself a mug of coffee, took it casually to the desk, sat casually down, and casually looked up. There they all were, including the red sou’wester, draped over the battlements and staring into his dormer, staring straight at him, even pointing! With a zoom, he instantly shrank into a little man with a bowler hat on the mantelpiece.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged bowler hats, brown-man, Cambridge colleges, Cambridge Tales, Franz Kafka, paranoia, persecution mania, towers, writer's block, writers | 5 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 23

Posted on June 19, 2023 by Patrick Miles

16 May 2023
The suspense about the Ukrainian ‘counter-offensive’ is terrible. I hope it will last. It winds the Russians up and keeps them guessing. Moreover, except at Bakhmut, Russian forces have been in deep defensive positions for months now, enabling the Ukrainians slowly but inexorably to build up their military punch, and the longer that goes on the better. Of course if a peace could be signed that withdrew all Russian forces from the East and submitted the Crimean question to international law it would be better. Meanwhile, the Ukrainian battle plan has to be as clever and unexpected as possible, and their attack devastating enough to be decisive. Many people think that Putin is finished if he fails in Ukraine, and especially if Kyiv retakes Crimea, but perhaps the days of palace revolution are over in Russia: the new bosses will attempt to keep him as some ailing figurehead to whom they give a state funeral, so as not to rock the boat too much. However, I have always believed that the Russian military hate Putin for dropping them unprepared in this mess and destroying their unity of command, so if they are defeated in Ukraine they will make him the scapegoat. There will be a disabling move against him by top army and security figures, but they will be too wary of his remaining popularity to do a Beria on him.

24 May
We have been in the Lake District, amongst other things looking for the rare butterfly the Duke of Burgundy Fritillary (Hamearis lucina, Linnaeus 1758). It’s not a true Fritillary butterfly at all, but the only European member of the large family Riodinidae (‘Metalmarks’, referring to the white spots underneath which superficially resemble the silver spangles on the underside of true Fritillaries). And I’m glad to say we found it:

Photograph by Will Miles, May 2023

It’s an exquisite little butterfly, which is recovering its numbers at certain U.K. sites. The males are intensely aggressive: whilst they wait for a female to come along, they position themselves on a perch known as a lek from which they will aerially attack other males, as well as insects much bigger than themselves. It’s often said that no-one knows why the butterfly was given its English name (in French it is known simply as la Lucine), but it could have been by analogy with aristocratic butterflies like the Queen of Spain Fritillary — and no-one really knows how that got its name, either.

8 June
It is now almost impossible to buy a foreign newspaper in Cambridge. W.H. Smith, who only a year ago sold French, German, Spanish, Russian and Polish ‘papers, might have a copy of Le Monde Diplomatique if you are lucky. Sainsbury’s have stopped selling European newspapers, the shop opposite King’s College that used to sell a good range no longer sells newspapers at all, and a general store run by some young Arab men which sold newspapers in European languages, Arabic and Russian, did not survive the pandemic.

Is it something to do with Brexit and an assumption by newsagents that it’s not ‘necessary’ now for anyone to read foreign newspapers? Is it the result of a national attack of insularity? Or is it that everyone is supposed to read newspapers online? (Mind and sight destroying for me, at least.) Hypotheses are invited in the Comments column.

13 June
I have received three new creations by my old friend and collaborator, mature writer Harvey Pitcher: two short pieces of non-fiction with a Chekhovian connection, and a four-act play with, I think, undertones of The Cherry Orchard. Harvey is seeking what one might call a professional amateur production of the play, but meanwhile he has kindly allowed me to feature one of his prose pieces, entitled ‘Melikhovo 2004’, as a guest post on 15 July, which will be the 119th anniversary of Chekhov’s death at Badenweiler.

Melikhovo was the estate south of Moscow where Chekhov lived from 1892 to 1899; today it is a museum. A big conference was held there on the centenary of Chekhov’s death, at which Harvey acquainted Russians with the circumstantial memoir of an émigré Russian, Leo Rabeneck, who as a young man was present when Chekhov died. In his guest post Harvey speculates on an aspect of his experience at the conference and shares with us his thoughts about those ‘good times in Anglo-Russian relations that we enjoyed around the turn of the century’ and whether they will ever return.

Sam2 and I are hoping to be able to put into Harvey’s post a link to the full PDF text of his published translation of Rabeneck’s memoir. I felt it would look morbid if I added to the post itself an image of the very photograph of the dead man that Leo and his brother took the following day after the corpse had been washed and dressed, so I decided to embed it in the PDF. I know the photograph well (as Rabeneck says, it was published throughout the Russian press). However, when I went onto the Web to find it, I discovered that the second image offered was the following one, which I first saw in The Times of 5 January 2018 illustrating — presumably in good faith — an article about tests recently carried out on a blood spot on the shirt Chekhov was wearing at the moment of death:

‘Chekhov on the death bed in Badenweiler 1904’

I believe this image is what in common English parlance is called a fake. My reasons:

— It purports to be before the corpse was washed and dressed, yet Chekhov’s face is not skewed to one side, as it was in death and remained, noticeably, even after Dr Schwörer and Leo Rabeneck had turned the body onto its back next morning. In Rabeneck’s photo (taken after the body was washed and dressed) you can still see the tilt of Chekhov’s head resulting from him having died on his side and rigor mortis having set in.

— Chekhov’s face is too pale. He was suntanned at the time of his death, as Rabeneck remarks and his own photograph shows, and his face was not as long as above.

— I know of no mention in the literature of a photo being taken between Chekhov’s death at 3 a.m. on 15 July and Rabeneck’s return to the hotel room with Olga Leonardovna at about 5 p.m. that day, by which time the undertakers had done their work; although the latter could, of course, have taken their own photo after Chekhov was turned on his back but before they washed and dressed him. It seems that Rabeneck was partly in attendance whilst the undertakers were there, so his and his brother’s photograph could have been taken either before or after Leo returned with Olga Leonardovna to view the body, ‘surrounded by flowers’; most likely, surely, after.

The quasi-byline on the Pinterest version of the above image reads in Russian: ‘Poets, Rare photographs, Conceptual photograph’ (sic). ‘Conceptual photography’, I discover from the Web, ‘uses images to transmit abstract ideas […] bringing a new meaning to photography that transcends its use for portraiture, landscapes and snapshots.’ Is the image a ‘conceptual photograph’, then? I think we should be told, before too many people follow The Times and believe it is an historical document.

Incidentally, the tall object on the bedside table in this image might be thought to be the bottle of champagne from which Chekhov drank his final glass, and which was indeed placed on the bedside table; but closer inspection shows it is a candlestick with something square, looking perhaps like a label, at its base.

17 June
The advance at Zaporizhzhia is bitter and bloody… I cannot help feeling the Ukrainians have massive blows in reserve, but their commanders’ biggest asset is flexibility, their ability to adapt tactics, think outside the box, and surprise. The Russian army, created by stultifying autocracy, can never compete with that.

In 1992 the then liberal newspaper Moskovskii komsomolets published a Russian poem written by me in Moscow in 1970 and called me ‘a great friend of Russia’. So I am: of all that is good in the life and culture of the Russian people. Laughably, Putin and his accomplices accuse the West of ‘wanting to destroy Russia as a country’. No, it is they who are destroying the Russia I am talking about and believe in.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, Badenweiler, Bakhmut, Brexit, butterflies, conceptual photography, conservation, counter offensive, Crimea, Dr Schwörer, Duke of Burgundy Fritillary, fakes, Kyiv, Lavrentii Beria, Le Monde Diplomatique, Leo Rabeneck, military defeat, Moskovskii Komsomolets, newspapers, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, photographs, Pinterest, Queen of Spain Fritillary, Riodinidae, Russian Army, The Lake District, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, W.H. Smith, Zaporizhzhia | 1 Comment

Short story (concluded): ‘My First Communist’

Posted on June 12, 2023 by Patrick Miles

In the Easter holidays Peter went on a skiing trip to Switzerland organised by the headmaster. I could have gone myself, but my parents didn’t have the money. Privately, I was intrigued that the Freres could afford it either, but what bemused my friends was that ‘Frere’ was going at all, as he was notoriously unathletic, ungainly and accident-prone.

Sure enough, he was skiing down a slope on the second day, went over ‘a bump’, as someone put it, and broke both of his shins. It was the high point of the school trip. He got emergency care in Switzerland, then flew home on a stretcher with the rest of the group, the centre of attention. I was soon told by my mother that Peter was in bed at home recovering, and that I ought to go and see him.

Joy Frere opened the front door. I was bearing a bag of grapes and a bottle of Lucozade. I noticed immediately that the door to the front room was closed.

‘Go up,’ she said, ‘Peter will be pleased to see you. Helen is there.’ Helen? Helen? Who is Helen? I asked myself. ‘By the way, the tortoises are out now, if you would like to see them when you leave.’

I went up onto the dark landing and could see that the door to Peter’s bedroom was ajar. He was lying in bed with his head on the pillow, looking exhausted but smiling beatifically (there is no other word for it). With his right hand he was lightly caressing the hair and face of someone presumably bent towards him, and he was talking. I flattened myself against the wall and listened.

‘…a time completely different from now, Helen. The police, the army and the bureaucracy will have been abolished, probably there will be no money, just movements of numbers, not through banks, but electrically… Everyone will be made to have free education provided by the state, and there will be no marriage and family as we know them today. There will be free development of each for the development of all! And this council estate will give way to beautiful communal homes, high and perhaps made of glass, with fountains playing…’

I decided I’d heard enough, and didn’t want to be caught eavesdropping by Peter’s mother, so I went up to the door, knocked, waited for the patient to say ‘Yes?’, and entered.

The B.O. was powerful and I was flabbergasted by what I saw. It was Helen Minter, the most attractive girl on the estate, and probably a year older than Peter, sitting on the stool by the window, but right up against Peter’s bed. She had evidently straightened up as soon as I knocked, and was not in the least embarrassed.

‘Ah, Martin,’ said Peter without moving a muscle, as though on his death bed. ‘Do you know Helen?’

Well, of course I knew who she was, but I had never dared speak to her. She had a rather long, sculpted face, pale skin, shoulder-length fair hair and smoky-blue eyes, and if you passed her in the street she would always beam a smile at you that made you go weak in the bladder. She performed this now, said ‘Hello…’ to me softly, and vacated the stool.

‘I must go, Peter,’ she announced.

‘I suppose you must, Helen…’ Peter drawled very quietly, smiling wanly and yearningly from his pillow. She emerged from the side of the bed and I took her place. She kept her eyes on Peter as she moved round the room, then lingered by the door, nodded, and left.

After presenting my wares and discussing Peter’s medical condition, I blurted out: ‘That was Helen Minter. Helen Minter! What on earth was she doing here?’

‘She’s a dear girl… You know, don’t you, that they live four doors away? They are terribly Christian. She heard that I was laid up, and decided she must visit the sick – that’s what she told my mother.’

I suddenly noticed that the Russian alphabet had been replaced by a colour portrait of Lenin with a spotted tie. The spots were strangely intimidating.

‘Does she come to see you very often?’

‘About every two days, and always on a Sunday afternoon.’

‘Does she stay long?’

‘Just over an hour. We talk about this and that, and she holds my hand. I must say, it’s rather nice when she lies next to me on the eiderdown and stares into my face… We have never kissed, you understand.’

He paused, pulled a smile at me, and froze it.

Almost in a state of shock, I cut my visit to a minimum. For politeness’ sake, I found Mrs Frere in the kitchen and cast my eyes over the tortoises. Despite the April sun, they weren’t exactly active. The biggest one was standing high on his front legs with his neck stretched out so far it looked as though he was hoping to fly forth from his shell. There was lettuce scattered about, but none of them was eating it.

When I was clear of the Freres’ house, I just stood on the pavement, did a rictal double take, and guffawed three times hollowly.

Helen Minter lay next to Peter Frere on his bed holding his hand and gazing into his face? How? Why? What could she see in him, the biggest gink in the school?! Greying hair, eyes and lashes like a woman’s, gawky limbs, a chisel chin… I was madly jealous. Was it remotely possible that she was doing this out of Christian charity? Doubtless that was the official reason, just as my own mother had told me I ‘ought’ to visit Peter that day. But there had to be more to it, if she was not resisting him stroking her face… How long would it last, I asked myself? Would she become his ‘girl friend’ when he recovered? Should I take to my bed myself?

I was adamant, of course, that I could not visit Peter again all the time Helen was calling. But I did not have to: within a fortnight, he was hobbling round the estate on crutches with Helen assisting him. From my bedroom window I saw them progressing slowly from ‘the top’ in full sight of all the houses in the avenue. She was wearing a blue shirt and some kind of apron dress over the top of it. I honestly thought for a moment that she had dressed up to be nurse to Peter’s wounded war hero and they expected a round of applause. Ten days later, I was walking ‘up the top’ myself, to see my grandmother, when they suddenly appeared round the corner coming towards me on the other side of the road. Peter had thrown away one of his crutches, Helen was dressed normally, tastefully, as befitted a girl attending an exclusive school, and she was clinging to his free arm. I swear Peter slowed down and walked more ‘painfully’ when he saw me. As they drew level, they both smiled sweetly but said nothing. I nodded and half waved, as though in a hurry…

How it all turned out, I never discovered. I never visited the Freres’ house again, I was aware that Peter would be concentrating on his ‘O’ Levels that summer, or should be, and I finally lost touch. I can’t continue the chronology, so to speak. It’s almost sixty years ago now and I only remember isolated events and gossip.

Peter got five ‘O’ Levels, but they were good enough for him to go into the Science Lower Sixth. In the autumn term I saw him once or twice at school looking really quite normal (his height blended better with his being a sixth-former), and even wearing a boater. Then the hilarious, but essentially rather serious news went round the school that he had been arrested for obstruction whilst distributing leaflets at a demonstration by miners from the local collieries. I think what struck us, in the Fifth Form, was that at seventeen Peter Frere was behaving as though he was an adult. This left one with a rather uncomfortable feeling, akin to the apprehension that Helen Minter had lain on his bed in that foetid bedroom.

The last time I ever saw him must have been the following summer. I bumped into him on the street wearing normal clothes and looking nearly thirty. We stopped and stood quite apart. He did not cock his head on one side as he talked to me, and seemed even more self-contained than usual.

‘How are you doing at that school?’ he asked.

‘Oh, you know… Grinding for ‘O’ Levels. How’s yourself?’

I suddenly realised he must have left and I had not noticed.

‘I suppose you heard, I had to leave. I’ve got a job at a small engineering firm, Walter Hendersons, between here and Blurbury. It’s very good. I go every day by bus.’

In retrospect, it looks as though things went rapidly downhill from then on. Peter’s father died later that year. My parents took the local paper, but I never read it. However, a photo of Mr ‘Reg’ Frere in his black jacket, waistcoat and tie caught my attention in the paper on the back of an armchair. I read that he had joined the Communist Party in 1920, was a high-up in the Amalgamated Engineering Union, and had worked closely with the NUM in the coalfield. One day I was passing the Freres’ house on the corner and noticed it was empty. Mrs Frere, my mother told me, had moved to Blurbury to live with Peter, who was engaged to someone he had met at work. Then Mrs Frere died. Apparently she had always had blood pressure problems, which did not surprise me as she often presented ‘apple cheeks’. Peter did not present them, but I remember wondering whether at this rate he might be next, given his general sicklinesss and physique similar to his mother’s. But I later heard that he was married and living in London. At nineteen, so I was told, Helen Minter married an estate agent ‘with a sports car’ and moved to Brighton.

I survived the Lower and Upper Sixth and went on to University to read Zoology. This, of course, was common knowledge to all my parents’ friends. One of them, a woman who did am-dram with my mother, opened an artist’s and stationery shop in the old part of the town and I went to it one summer when I was home, to buy some tubes of water colour. It was a long, wood-lined, rather dark room, but the far end was all glass facing a radiant garden. The proprietress, Eileen, was very affable, and after I had paid she said to me, ‘Would you like to see our tortoises?’ Obviously, I was mildly surprised – and assented.

The light glowed more and more golden in the garden as we approached the glass door into it. I saw at once that it was a sun trap. It was completely enclosed and mature trees bowed inwards from its feather-edge fence, with a rich border of flowers in front of them, a rockery to one side, even a small fountain playing at the back. And there, on a not over-mown lawn, were the tortoises…the Freres’ tortoises! I observed and counted them, and there could be no doubt about it. The big two looked as old as ever, the yellow one as small. None of them had changed, and yet they were noticeably more active than they had been at Peter’s. The biggest was striding around the garden occasionally stopping and looking up at the sun. The second biggest was tearing a beef tomato apart with its front claws. The medium-sized three were circulating from one form of food to another – lettuce, strawberries, even a small heap of pink rose petals was provided. In a recess between two large lavender bushes in the border there was a wooden house for them all. We had entered leaving the glass door open, but none of them made any attempt to escape. As I watched, the yellow tortoise set off for the fountain, climbed into the shallow dish beneath it, and sat there drinking and sunbathing. It was Utopia.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary, Uncategorized | Tagged A.E.U., Body Odour, Brighton, Christianity, Communism, demonstrations, G.C.E., Helen Minter, N.U.M., Russian language, skiing, Switzerland, tortoises, Utopia, Utopianism, zoology | Leave a comment

Short story: ‘My First Communist’

Posted on June 5, 2023 by Patrick Miles

For John Pym

The stars! How clear the night sky was then, when we moved into the still unfinished council estate, how deeply dark, and how bright the stars! On a cold winter’s night, you almost gasped when you saw Orion hanging there, magnificent, or, rather, striding across the universe, so in your face; whilst Rigel and Betelgeuse, or nearby Aldebaran, or Capella and Procyon, threw such long, steely shafts of light that they actually seemed close, seemed to be watching, or even watching over, or even communicating with the boy observer! I soon transferred the star-charts on the end-papers of The Golden Book of Astronomy to the heavens overhead. And then I got a two-and-a-half-inch refractor telescope. Poking it through a tall rose trellis between our house and the next, I followed after sunset the mysterious phases of brilliant Venus. I could discern the rings of Saturn, and discovered tiny glinting moons next to Jupiter. I peered into the Pleiades and tried to count how many ‘sisters’ it really had. Gradually I found nebulae and the great cartwheel galaxy of Andromeda – so clearly a galaxy, so clearly remote beyond imagining…and I stared at it through my telescope for minutes at a time, in awe that it was just like our own Milky Way yet only one of numberless galaxies… Although it was risky, I also tied layers of red cellophane over the eyepiece and squinted at the Sun. I could clearly see the burns on its face and great flaring prominences like hair, that dwarfed the Earth. I longed for a comet. Yet nothing, actually, could have compared with that simple experience, night after night, of the whole universe lying out there before me, of looking millions and billions of miles into its depths, and into time, yet knowing there was no end to it (and the idea of that endless void was depressing). The stars…the stars…the panoply of ‘our’ stars… Truly, they were the Firmament of Wonder to me.

In those days, hardly any astronomy was taught in schools. A girl at primary school who was keen on astronomy, and had been to the Planetarium in London, was obliged to show a teacher one of her books before he would believe that the Sun is only a ‘small’ star. At secondary school, I was the only person I knew whose hobby was astronomy, and I kept the fact to myself.

I was astonished, then, to see in the creative section of the school magazine a long piece entitled ‘Our Solar System’. In construction it was rather basic, even simple-minded. It began with a general descriptive paragraph, then went through the planets one by one, starting with Mercury and devoting three or four lines to each. These invariably began ‘X is the Nth planet and Y million miles from the Sun’. It looked boring on the page, but the string of figures given for each planet – diameter, density, rotation, length of year etc – was impressive.

It was written by someone in the class above me called Peter Frere. I had never spoken to him, but knew who he was because ‘Frere’ was the tallest boy in his form, if not the school. He was thin and subliminally gawky. His legs were incredibly long, his stomach rather hollow, his chest broad and quite deep, his neck thin, and his face cavernous. There was no mistaking that his rather coarse hair was greying. The eye sockets beneath it were enormous, but his eyes were so large and blue, with long lashes, that they seemed like a woman’s. His face was always pale. It tapered to a small, hard chin.

I gathered that Peter Frere lived on a corner in the oldest part of the council estate, so I waited outside the school one day for him to appear on his way home and casually joined him. No introduction seemed needed; I plunged straight in and congratulated him on his article.

‘Hm…’ he said, cocking his head at me slightly quizzically, flickering his eyelashes in a disarming smile, and holding a finger and thumb in the air. ‘It’s important for people to have the data. Did you know that Jupiter is big enough to contain over 1300 globes the size of Earth?’

‘No, I didn’t!’ I exclaimed in amazement at Frere’s knowledge.

As we walked along, he entertained me, between pauses, with a series of facts – usually statistics – which he introduced with the same words, ‘Did you know?’. I remember, for instance, hearing from him for the first time that an American rocket had recently passed close to Venus and reported that the planet’s rotation was ten times slower than previously thought and ‘retrograde’, i.e. ‘the wrong way’. Peter was sceptical, however, about the Americans’ data.

‘The Russians are much more likely to be accurate. Did you know that they estimate the number of asteroids at 200,000, whereas everyone else thinks it’s about 40,000?’

Again, this was completely news to me. I suddenly realised as Frere was talking, that he had already started shaving – and the light stubble on his cheeks was silver. Although only fifteen, he seemed older. Everything about him, including his woman’s eyes, seemed much older.

We carried on walking to his house and talk turned to the Moon.

‘Did you know that in 1958 a Russian astronomer at the Crimean Astrophysical Observatory witnessed a volcanic disturbance inside a crater on the Moon?’

‘That’s incredible! No, I didn’t…’

‘Not to mention, of course, that in 1959 the Russians photographed the other side of the Moon for the first time, from Lunik Three.’

‘Yes. It was a strange photo, wasn’t it? You know, you just saw these big holes in it, like cheese.’

‘Ye-s – yes!’ said Peter, smiling broadly again and raising his finger and thumb. ‘But before long the Russians will be landing on the Moon. That is Khrushchev’s plan. Sorry, Khrushchov’s… N.S. Khrushchov. Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchov…’

I was impressed by this precise enunciation of the Russian leader’s full name, but bemused. Peter bestowed on me a stream of figures about the heights of mountains and dimensions of craters, then commented casually:

‘The best time to look at the Moon, of course, is at the Quarters.’

We had reached his house.

‘Do you have a telescope?’ I asked him.

‘Yes, my father bought me one. You must come and see it…’ He looked down on me from his height, cocking his head to one side and addressing me as his junior. ‘I can’t invite you in now, as I’ve got to do my homework.’

It was a day in mid-January when I ‘went round’ to the Freres’ house for the first time. I knocked on the front door, was admitted by Peter, and directed by his outstretched arm straight into the front room to meet his father.

I was a bit taken aback at first that Mr Frere was so old (he was probably in his late sixties). As we entered, he put down his newspaper, which I could not help noticing was the Daily Worker. He was sitting in an armchair in the corner of the room next to the window. The most arresting thing in his vicinity was a brightly lit aquarium with tropical fish sailing about in it. On the other side of the room a coal fire was burning and there was a television. He was wearing thick-framed glasses, a black jacket, flannel trousers, waistcoat, white shirt and tartan tie. There was a stick on each arm of his chair, and a mug of tea on a table beside him. He was evidently quite a short man, jovial, with more than a passing resemblance to Arthur Askey.

Peter announced me with a histrionic gesture.

‘Dad – Martin Barlow.’

‘So you’ve come to see Peter’s astronomical telescope. Are you interested in astronomy?’

‘Yes, sir, I am.’

‘No no no – we’ll have no “sirs” here, my boy! Do you know who Gagarin is?’

‘Of course!’ I laughed.

‘Isn’t he an amazing man?’

I agreed with Peter’s father, although I hadn’t really given Gagarin’s personal qualities much thought. With that, the interview was over.

‘Well, I am glad to meet you, Martin. Off you go, then, and Joy will give you something to eat.’

Mrs Frere was already standing in the hall. She was unmistakably Peter’s mother: her head was roughly triangular, her eyes large, and she had thick, greyish eyebrows. But she wore bright lipstick and looked no more than fifty. You could imagine there might well be something joyful about her, but at the moment she was anxious. She clasped her hands together and almost wrung them.

‘So you are Peter’s friend Martin… Hello, I’m Joy. Would you like me to bring your tea up to you, boys, or would you prefer to have it in the kitchen afterwards?’

‘Oh, we’ll have it later, Mom, thank you,’ said Peter with a flourish of his hand, and set off upstairs.

Peter’s bedroom was intriguing. It smelt less than fresh, and seemed almost that of an adult. For one thing, the bed was a double one, taking up much of the room. On the wall above it was a large poster of Valentina Tereshkova. The right hand wall bore a diagram of the zodiacal constellations with fanciful outlines, and next to it the Periodic Table. Beneath them, on a small trunk, lay a neat pile of the Daily Worker. The darkest corner contained what was evidently Peter’s desk, with a little shelf above it holding a multi-volume encyclopaedia. By the window was the telescope, with a map of the Moon sellotaped to the wall next to it. I was rather disappointed. The refractor was on an altazimuth mounting and proper tripod, but it looked only two inches across and was in black and white plastic. Peter explained that the big window slid back and he did all his observations from here, where he could always follow the Moon. Rightly or wrongly, I assumed this meant he never actually went outside to view the night sky, as I had to.

‘I’m studying the moon in detail,’ Peter told me, ‘because I think someone will make a soft landing on it soon, and I wonder where’s best. My own guess is between the Oceanus Procellarum and Copernicus…’

He showed me a small white cardboard box that he was setting up to measure the brightness of the night sky and individual stars. It featured a variable slit and thin vertical copper wire.

‘The…mm…mathematics of it are rather difficult,’ he said, pointing to an adjacent tome with a battered dust jacket, entitled Astronomer’s Handbook. ‘That belonged to my father.’

After this, we went downstairs, passed the open door to the front room, where Mr Frere was deep in his newspaper, and Peter opened the door into the kitchen.

It was almost stifling, but extremely light as there were windows all round overlooking the garden, which was small and wedge-shaped. Mrs Frere immediately fussed over making our tea. The source of the heat was prominent: a coal-fired range across one wall, complete with scuttle, tongs and fender. But the most unexpected thing was the sight of three medium-sized tortoises propped against the inside of the fender, soaking up the glare of the grate. Two more tortoises, large and very scrawny in the neck, were plodding awkwardly across the kitchen floor, whilst a small yellow one lay beside an open cardboard box snapping at some lettuce. Mrs Frere realised that I was surprised, so promptly explained, as she toasted our teacakes, that they had had the tortoises ‘for a very long time’ and hadn’t ‘the heart’ to put them in the garden shed every winter to hibernate. It was a good tea and I left by the side door, as I always did in future.

It was clear to me that Mrs Frere was concerned about Peter’s friends and that he probably had few. This was dramatically borne out a couple of months later, when I was going home at the end of the morning and passed the large windows of an isolated form-room near the school library. I could clearly see Peter lurching about the room between desks, pursued by three of the worst bullies in the school – ‘Crudmore’ (I don’t remember his real name), Wilkins and Webb, who were shorter and stockier than him. Peter was trying to treat it as a game, emitting mock cries, dodging and even leaping in the air. But one of the bullies was standing by the closed door and hit him in the back whenever he passed, whilst the others punched him as hard as they could whenever they got close enough. When this happened, he uttered real screams. They grabbed his satchel and threw his lunch on the floor. Peter did not see me. Then I caught sight of the faces of other members of his form watching in horror through the pane in the door, and continued on my way fast.

I was shocked, of course. Why had they picked on Peter? Why didn’t he defend himself, seeing as he was so much bigger than them? I realised that he probably annoyed them as a ‘freak’. He was ‘too tall’ for his age, his head was a funny shape, his eyes were not ‘masculine’, yet he could already grow a beard; and he was too clever. Yes, he was eccentric, ‘weird’…

The next day, in the morning break, I went to see a young teacher who had a daughter of my own age and seemed to me protective and likely to do something about the bullying. He was well known to be left-wing and was said to have stood up to the acting headmaster even physically after the latter beat a boy in front of the school. He listened attentively, but said nothing. I couldn’t work out whether he was going to take the case up; also whether his silence betokened that he thought I was just ‘telling on’ the perpetrators. The boys in Peter’s form who had witnessed his torment through the glass told a friend of mine that they had reported it, but it had been going on for weeks in that classroom after the last morning lesson. I also heard on the parental grapevine that Joy Frere was in tears about it and had gone with her invalid husband to complain to the new Head. The ‘Crudmore’-Wilkins-Webb ritual certainly stopped, but I sensed that a different form of bullying took its place: ostracisation because Peter hadn’t ‘stood up for himself’ and everyone knew that his mother, for goodness’ sake, had had to do that for him.

Since he was in the year above me, I had no contact with Peter at school, and never mentioned the bullying to him. There also seemed no call for me to go and look through his telescope, or for him to come and look through mine. I was much more interested in persuading Charlotte Greene, the daughter of the local chemist, that she ought to come and view the moons of Jupiter through my telescope. It was set up on a tripod now in our back garden, and round the eyepiece I thought I might be able to get close enough to her face to kiss it.

It was a bright Saturday in early April when I next visited the Freres. I bumped into Peter as I was coming home from town and he invited me to carry on walking with him and drop in.

We entered by the front door again, and as we passed the front room I could see Mr Frere in his armchair smoking and watching the television.

‘Hello there, my boy!’ he waved at me, and we went straight through to the kitchen. It was full of sunlight and they had the back door open, through which the tortoises were laboriously stumbling in and out.

‘We are letting them into the garden now,’ Peter’s mother explained, ‘but we bring them in again at night in case there is a frost.’

She rapidly provided Peter and me with drinks and biscuits, which we took up to his room.

Because of the size of the bed, and the fact that the trunk with the newspapers practically blocked one side of it and the telescope the other, I hadn’t actually been able to sit down on my first visit. But the telescope on its tripod had now been propped in a corner, and there was a small stool under the window. Sitting down on it, beside the bed, I immediately noticed that the zodiacal figures on the wall opposite had been replaced by a poster of a heavily bearded gentleman with an eyeglass on a cord, and the Periodic Table by a chart of the Russian alphabet.

‘Are you learning Russian?’ I asked.

‘Yes, I’m teaching myself.’ Then he added lightly: ‘I think it’s quite important… I think given the superiority of Soviet science, Russian is likely to become the new lingua franca. But in any case it’s the language of the future.’

I didn’t question this, but made a few jokey remarks about the new headmaster and the quirks of some of our teachers.

‘But what do you expect, Martin? The school is just part of the establishment…the bourgeois establishment. I’m completely alienated from it, but I’ve got to get my O Levels. “The social life from which the worker is shut out is life itself, human activity, human enjoyment, real human existence”.’

I looked at him.

‘Marx,’ he informed me, pointing at the bearded gent. ‘Forwards, 1844.’

‘Ah.’

‘As Marx and Engels say in the Manifesto, “the proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority”…’

I was very impressed, but reacted to the quotes as if they were simply facts Peter was spouting like the astronomical ones earlier. Yet he delivered them differently, somehow. He looked at me from the semi-darkness of his chair, flickered his eyelashes, spoke, then gazed beyond me out through the window.

‘The triumph of socialism and then communism is historically inevitable.’

I stared at him.

‘Marx has proved that scientifically.’

After failing to seduce Charlotte Greene to the science of astronomy – and having exhausted almost all I could do with my telescope – I had become more interested in natural history. So I asked Peter a few questions about the family’s tortoises. They were indeed of different species, he said. Mr Frere had first become interested in the creatures when he fought at Gallipoli (‘like Clement Attlee’). He had watched heavy armoured vehicles lumber over them in the sand, only for the tortoises to get up again and walk away. When I left, Joy Frere was carrying the tortoises, who helplessly worked their legs in the air, from the garden into the kitchen.

It was interesting to talk to Peter every so often, there was no doubt about that, as he was so different from everyone else I knew; in a word, he was unconventional. But I could not work out what it was he ‘knew’ that gave him such an essential apartness, a condescending yet dreamy remoteness that he had not possessed during his astronomical phase, but which made me convinced we weren’t really on the same wavelength. There was an elephant in the room, I sensed, but I couldn’t see it.

At school, the interdict on bullying him stood, I think, but whenever I heard his name mentioned it was with amusement, as if he were a ‘crank’, or lived with his elderly parents in a world that no-one recognised or understood. Some boarders from my form had been over to the next town one Saturday afternoon, wearing uniform of course, and seen Peter in jeans, denim jacket and a red shirt selling the Daily Worker on the street, which they found hilarious. I was going to Germany that summer as part of the school exchange, but Peter wasn’t, as he didn’t ‘do’ German in the Lower Fourth. Nevertheless, I heard the German master telling a colleague in the corridor that he gathered ‘Frere’ was going to East Germany for the equivalent period, which the German master found ‘most peculiar’. My mother mentioned to me later that all the Freres had gone and Mrs Frere had had ‘a wonderful time’.

Altogether, there was no reason for me to visit Peter any more, but I still bumped into him out of school, particularly on Saturdays. One such Saturday in November, by which time I was in the Fourth Form and Peter in the Fifth, I was coming home from the centre of town when I saw him ahead of me in a gabardine mac. I could hardly walk past him, so I drew level.

‘Oh, hello,’ he smiled faintly, and cocked his head at me graciously. ‘I haven’t seen you for ages. Do you want to call round for tea tomorrow? I can’t invite you this afternoon, I’m afraid, we’ve got a meeting.’

I said that I could not make the next day, as it was Remembrance Sunday. I offered no further explanation, because I reasoned that if he knew I was taking part in church services for Remembrance, he might sound off about religion being ‘the opium of the people’ (the only quote from Marx that I knew).

‘Mmm…’ he said. ‘Commemoration of the victims of imperialism!’

‘What?’

‘The so-called “fallen” and “Glorious Dead” in both world wars were the victims of imperialism – which is just the highest stage of capitalism, can’t you see that, Martin?’

‘Well…I can see they were the victims of German and Nazi imperialism, I suppose.’

‘No. They were also the victims of British imperialism. French imperialism. American imperialism. Both wars were wars between capitalist imperialists for the control of economic resources. The proletariat was so weak then that it was manipulated by British, German etcetera bourgeois capitalists into going to war.’

‘You mean the soldiers didn’t know who they were fighting for?’

‘Precisely, my dear Martin: they were fighting on both sides for their masters, the monopolist capitalists…’

‘Hang on, I don’t think you can be right there, Peter, because I know my grandfather joined up to defend his country – to stop it being taken over by the Germans…and my father hates Hitler and the Nazis even now.’

‘No no,’ Peter laughed, ‘they may have thought that’s what they were fighting for, but only the capitalists profited from it. I’m a pacifist. As Marx and Engels said, “the working men have no country” – patriotism is bourgeois indoctrination. When the new proletarian era comes, there will be no more wars. How could there be, after socialist revolutions in every country?’

‘So in Britain, for instance, the people who were killed in two world wars won’t be part of the nation any more, so to speak…they’ll just be victims of the past, kind of lost..? After the revolution, we won’t feel anything for them any more, no pity, no gratitude, no sort of…connection? We won’t remember them?’

‘Pity we shall feel, my father always say that. But pity for them as working men who were duped – who didn’t really know what they were fighting for.’

‘You mean they were duped because they were only “working men”? That’s a bit snooty, isn’t it?’

‘Not at all, Martin. That’s just how it was. There is going to be a proletarian revolution – it’s historically inevitable – but they didn’t know that. “We’ll make Winston Churchill smoke a Woodbine every day, when the Red Revolution comes!”.’

I found Peter’s certainty about these matters unsettling, indeed slightly frightening. After all, could he be right? But it was obviously impossible to argue with him, because his belief in this stuff was now so complete; almost as though it were a religion, I reflected ruefully. I decided not to make any effort to talk to him again. Circumstances, however, soon changed that.

(To be concluded 12 June)

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Artur Askey, astronomy, bullying, Communism, Friedrich Engels, Gallipoli, Iurii Gagarin, John Pym, Karl Marx, Lunik Three, Nikita Khrushchev, Peter Frere, Remembrance Sunday, school days, Sputnik, The Communist Manifesto, The Daily Worker, The Moon, tortoises, USSR, Valentina Tereshkova, Vladimir Lenin, Winston Churchill | Leave a comment

Writing’s weird workings…

Posted on May 29, 2023 by Patrick Miles

My fortuitous review of Keith Dewhurst’s excellent novellas, combined with John Pym’s spontaneous submission of his post about Henry James’s story ‘The Death of the Lion’, has suddenly concentrated my mind on my current project and alerted me to things of which I had scarcely been aware. ‘Weirdnesses’, in fact.

Consider: the sheet below, which as usual you can click on to enlarge, dates from 1978 (that’s beyond any doubt). Staggering though I find this now, it appears to be a list of thirty short stories I might write. By that I don’t mean a list of ‘ideas’ for short stories, or even ‘titles’ of short stories, although the latter is certainly what they appear to be. These are reminders to me of the images — settings, events, people, experiences — lodged in my mind and notebooks that I thought might lead to a short story in each case.

But what to make of it now? I’m astonished to see that they were already in two categories: ‘C.T.’ on the left, standing I think for ‘Cambridge Tales’, a title I would never consider using for a collection, and seven headed ‘Other’ on the right. What do the various markings mean? Two of the dark ticks seem to refer to stories that were already published by 1978, the other four ticks to stories that were written by about 1982. But one story on the right, ‘Armageddon’, was incorporated in the ticked ‘White Bow’, and hence crossed out in the list, and another, ‘The Communion’, was also crossed out and never went anywhere, along with eight others — I can’t even remember what they were about. Then what do the red marks mean, or the circles round two stories? To cap it all, given its subject and the different handwriting the last ‘title’ on the left must have been added after 1987, although I don’t make a habit of ‘updating’ past notebooks and I don’t remember adding it.

It’s a time-muddle (chronotopia?) that I have no intention of trying to disentangle. Yet some things emerge from it that intrigue me — even fill me with a kind of wonder. For instance, 18 of these stories have now been written, but mostly with entirely different titles and the 12 that I have written in the past two years seem to have grown well away from their original conceptions. But, frankly, I can hardly believe that I have written those 12 at all, 44 years after the above list was jotted down, and that I’ve written them in ‘only’ two years… Moreover, in the image below you can see from the change in handwriting, spacing, and writing tools (from ink to pencil), that in 2021 I was able to pick up the page and a half of the story ‘Crox’ that I had written in about 1979 (why couldn’t I go any further then?), and carry on where I left off for another three pages to the end.

What has happened between 1978 and the 2020s to make this all possible? Well, as they say, it doesn’t bear thinking about… Perhaps even the contrasting slants of the above lines tell some story lost in my own life’s time. Now I just have to get on with the job of writing the remaining stories. But there is something mysterious, humbling, even miraculous about it all. I would never say with William Blake ‘tho I call them mine, I know that they are not mine’, but at least I know what he meant.

I am now going into writing the last two stories for the collection of 20, which will be called simply Ghoune/White Bow. These two stories will total about 15,000 words (unless things ‘mysteriously’ change), amounting to a quarter of the book, which should be about 120 pages long, and the aim is for Sam&Sam to publish it either just before Christmas or in the New Year. Keith Dewhurst and John Pym have focussed my mind no end (merci!) and I’ve decided to give Calderonia followers a preview of six more stories between now and Christmas, which means that you will have read 13 stories on the blog, but only a third of the book. The first story, to be in two parts and start on 5 June, will be the most recently written and I dedicate it to Mr Pym. It is not a ‘Cambridge Tale’, but an ‘Other’.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 'My First Communist', Autumnia: Three Novellas, Cambridge Tales, chronotopia, Ghoune/White Bow, Henry James, John Pym, Keith Dewhurst, manuscripts, notebooks, Sam&Sam, short stories, William Blake | Leave a comment

Guest post by John Pym: Henry James’s ‘The Death of the Lion’

Posted on May 1, 2023 by Patrick Miles

The title page of Terminations with a portrait of Henry James (1906) by the photographer Alvin Langdon Coburn. Photograph of James courtesy of the Literary Canon (S 2464).

An unnamed young Englishman, a lowly journalist with literary ambition, begins to tell a story (cast in the form of ‘meagre’ private notes): the author Neil Paraday is recuperating at home in the country from a grave illness; he’s published four books and his latest work, in two volumes, is about to appear. Signs suggest it will finally make his name. But will he live long enough, the reader wonders, to enjoy his good fortune? So begins Henry James’s tale ‘The Death of the Lion’, divided into ten fast-paced chapters, which appeared in April 1894 in Volume I of The Yellow Book, the Bodley Head’s strikingly illustrated new periodical.

A year later, James gathered together three of his published tales (including ‘The Death of the Lion’), two from The Yellow Book and one from Scribner’s Magazine, each touching on the intermingled themes of the business of literature and the price of reputation. These were to form the basis of a new collection which would conclude with a brand new work, a mystical, slightly suffocating story titled ‘The Altar of the Dead’, a two-hander, one of whose characters is a woman who earns her living by writing for magazines – though magazines, one infers, less generous or cutting-edge than The Yellow Book.

The four tales appeared between hard covers under the title Terminations. Opposite the title page of the English edition the London publisher William Heinemann drew attention to five other six-shilling ‘short stories in one volume’, including Frank Harris’s Elder Conklin and I. Zangwill’s The King of Schnorrers (‘With over Ninety Illustrations by Phil May and Others’, Heinemann added in a second notice at the back of the book).

In 1895 short stories sold well. They were admired and enjoyed, and could, as Terminations demonstrates, be attractively recycled. One reason James favoured The Yellow Book, his biographer Leon Edel notes, was that its publisher offered the inducement of no limit on an author’s word count. ‘The Death of the Lion’ runs to nearly fifteen thousand words, a figure that few if any commissioning editors of print journals would countenance today.

On reading Terminations a few months ago, I was struck first, however, not by the modern anomaly of three short stories reprinted between handsome blue boards, the page signatures of which had to be cut with a paperknife by the book’s first eager reader, but by how little the literary world sardonically (yet often merrily) satirised by Henry James in the closing years of the reign of Queen Victoria, had changed nearly a hundred and thirty years later at the start of the reign of King Charles III.

There were, perhaps, no Hay-on-Wye literary festivals or heaving Frankfurt book fairs in the mid-1890s, or indeed wearisome month-long author tours, but as James’s narrator recounts, looking at the scene from the outside, many of the modern absurdities of the Literary Life – in London, Venice or New York – were then abundantly present and oppressively to the fore.

The story opens, for instance, with a markedly unvarnished scene between our narrator and his ‘chief’, Mr Pinhorn, the sharp new editor of a weekly magazine recently saved from extinction by a fire-sale buy-up. The former pitches the idea of an interview with Mr Paraday: a man who hasn’t as yet, in that cold phrase, ‘been touched’ by anyone else. ‘When I had reminded him [Mr Pinhorn] that the great principle on which we were supposed to work was just to create the demand we required, he considered a moment and then rejoined: “I see; you want to write him up”’ (my italics).

Neil Paraday – his creator’s alter ego? well, maybe – was a timid, somewhat anti-social man anxious mainly to be left in peace to complete his work. He had a rented base in Sloane Street, Chelsea, and a wife from whom he was separated but whose upkeep he paid. He was, at this point, it seems, simply getting by. But fame was about to crash on him like a wave, and the narrator perceives, in a characteristic burst of Jamesian empathy, his author’s acute vulnerability, and without ado (or even permission) appoints himself to the role of amanuensis and gatekeeper.

Enter the vainglorious Mr Morrow, with his walking stick and ‘violently new gloves’, a celebrity gossip columnist, who appears at Paraday’s country retreat, looking for a scoop and boasting of his syndicated effusions in thirty-seven influential journals – including The Tatler’s ‘Smatter and Chatter’ column. He’s a hack crashingly determined to create the required demand. Mr Morrow, the coming man, would not, one feels, have hesitated a second to burglarise a film star’s phone – had there been film stars or mobile phones in 1894.

James warms to his task as the tale unfolds. Next up is the salon hostess Mrs Weeks Wimbush, chatelaine of a grand mansion called Prestidge (pay close attention to these names), to which she invites her grand friends, Lady Augusta Minch and Lord Dorimont, plus a bulky, privileged and perfectly delineated European Princess, to be entertained by her latest literary lion, who, this July, is the luckless and not-at-all-well Neil Paraday.

James has his narrator elegantly embroider the tapestry of his ‘meagre notes’ by beginning to relate the climactic events of this catastrophic house party by means of a letter, a love letter of sorts, to the American heroine of the tale, Miss Fanny Hurter, a would-be autograph hunter first introduced bearing a huge volume containing signatures of the great and the good, living and dead.

I will not spoil the wrap-up – ‘The Death of the Lion’ is available at no cost to read online – except to say that Miss Hurter does not disappoint and that Henry James proves himself a quite exceptional farceur as Mrs Wimbush’s guests first casually disrespect the two volumes of Paraday’s new book, which have been reverentially displayed for them to leaf through and appreciate, and then succeed in losing the manuscript ‘scheme’ of the author’s next and very possibly greatest work.

It should be noted, however, that the tale’s final episode features two other authors wholly unlike Neil Paraday. They’re literary shooting stars possessed of a miraculous insight into ‘the larger latitude’ (whatever that may be) who play key roles in the denouement: Guy Walsingham author of Obsessions, and Dora Forbes author of The Other Way Round. But, heaven’s above! ‘Guy’ is really Miss Collop, ‘a pretty little girl who wore her hair in what used to be called a crop’, while ‘Dora’ is ‘florid and bald; [his face adorned with] a big red moustache’.

‘You bewilder me a little,’ the narrator says to Lady Augusta, chief culprit in the loss of Paraday’s priceless manuscript, when all this is being explained to him, ‘in the age we live in one gets lost among the genders and pronouns.’ Henry James – dated and unreadable..?

* * *

Kittie’s copy of Terminations and George’s inscription.

I’m grateful to Patrick Miles – whose Diary post of 6 February 2023, on the subject of short stories, prompted me to write the above – for the kind gift of a copy of the second edition of Terminations. The book came from the Library of George and Kittie Calderon and proved surplus to requirement when the collection was archived. The inscription on the flyleaf reveals that it was a Christmas present to Kittie from George (‘Peety’) in 1905.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Terminations', 'The Altar of the Dead', 'The Death of the Lion', comments, commissioning editors, Frank Harris, gender, George Calderon, gossip columnists, Henry James, I. Zangwill, John Pym, journalism, Kittie Calderon, Leon Edel, literary hostesses, literary life, literary salons, literature, magazines, manuscripts, Neil Paraday, Peety, Phil May, pseudonyms, Scribner's Magazine, short stories, The Tatler, The Yellow Book, William Heinemann | 2 Comments

Keith Dewhurst: a new Spring of writing

Posted on April 10, 2023 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Keith Dewhurst (whose Wikipedia entry does not log half his achievements) was born in 1931. I would say he is the greatest survivor of the British post-war theatrical renaissance that is often compared to the Elizabethan-Jacobean phenomenon. As well as being one of the original Z-Cars writing team and author of over twenty TV plays, he has created many plays for the Royal Court, the National Theatre and elsewhere, including Lark Rise and Black Snow, and written the screenplay The Land Girls, the novel Captain of the Sands, and a fantastic book about Manchester United entitled When You Put on a Red Shirt.

So Keith Dewhurst is ninety-one… You might expect something diminuendo, then, even autumnal, from his latest book (see above), published in March. Far from it! This and the other two works of fiction he finished in lockdown are as vibrant, original, mind-bending, comedic and unputdownable as anything out there by a young writer.

The actual key to the title of his latest book can be found in the eponymous first novella, but to say more would be a spoiler. Take it from me, the ‘faery kingdom’ of Autumnia is an exceedingly ingenious element in the plot, which concerns the absolute self-belief of an upper class matriarch, Mercy Runacre, married to Hector, an MP in Attlee’s government, and the return of their eldest son who disappeared on a bombing mission over Germany in 1943. As a boy in the 1950s I knew families like this and Dewhurst’s evocation of post-war Britain is uncanny. There is a lot of class, bounders and cheerless sex, but bags of humour too. One of my favourite moments is when, having lost the 1951 election, Attlee summons Hector to offer him a Barony. ‘How are you?’ Hector asks. ‘The dry little man scraped at his pipe with a match-stick. “Slugs all over the garden,” he said, “but I suppose we mustn’t complain.” He tapped down fresh tobacco and tried to light a match.’

The second novella, ‘Art Movers’, will really keep you on your toes. In all of the novellas Dewhurst tells his story through short scenes that knit beautifully together, but in ‘Art Movers’ the scenes are shorter than ever and not titled as chapters, because the essence of Charlie March’s job is flitting from one place to another with his van and managing a cast of about thirty characters and bit parts (his part-time employees). March is an ex-soldier who fought in Iraq and suffers from bad PTSD, but has discovered his métier as an efficient, no-questions-asked transporter of valuable art works, mainly in London. You have to work out, then, what exactly is going on in his daily life, and with whom, which is demanding. But as I have implied, Dewhurst’s vast theatrical experience shines through his prose here: each scene moves at a terrific pace on the page (there is not a redundant word), so the effect for the reader is really like watching live theatre. Arcing the whole narrative is the question of whether Charlie will accept Beth’s demand that they live together. It is not resolved until the last two pages — and very movingly.

The novella that you might assume is ‘autumnal’, even autobiographical, is ‘After’, whose hero is an elderly widowed dramatist, Wilf, who has serious heart problems, a carer aptly named April, and an undying drive to write. Like Keith Dewhurst, Wilf lives on the Isle of Wight, but that’s as far as the resemblance goes. Wilf’s situation (‘Old Man Desperation’, the title of chapter 2) enables him to deliver himself of choice comments about life in Britain today, of which this is a representative sample:

‘Look at them. Bloody newsreaders. All they do is read autocues but they think they are philosopher kings.’

Wilf asked [the Help Line] if any of the self-righteous wanking do-gooders running British television had any artistic rigour at all, and was cut off.

‘If only transgenders play transgenders I suppose only serial killers will play serial killers?’ Wilf mocked.

But such Meldrewism is incidental. There are two plotlines, both superbly handled. A young relation named Cookie turns up, who is curious to know Wilf as she believes he is her grandfather. She also resembles him as a loner and black sheep. Covid and lockdown strike. ‘Self-isolation, Wilf had observed, was what writers sought above all, but for the most part the world denied them.’ Cookie stays for the duration and again Dewhurst achieves a brilliant twist of a resolved ending…which again I must not spoil.

The other plotline, however, is not resolved. When Wilf tried to write, ‘there was the ache behind his forehead again, and a blank when he sought a situation that would be the metaphor for what he wanted to show’. But that situation is found in the death of theatre in the English Civil War. An actor who was there tells the story of the demise of the King’s Men (‘Shakespeare’s company’) in chapters parallel to the main plot, evoking the life of these actors as marvellously as Dewhurst did with Victorian actors in The History of Polly Bowler. The great theatrical renaissance of the first Elizabethan age is killed by the zealotry of Puritans and Cromwell’s soldiers…a metaphor for the death, as Wilf sees it, of the theatrical renaissance of the second Elizabethan age at the hands of militant wokery.

Keith Dewhurst, the Isle of Wight Literary Festival programme, 2022. (Copyright Andy Butler)

It is very rare for me to re-read a new work of fiction immediately, but I have done just that with Autumnia and enjoyed it even more the second time. It seems to me these three novellas would be perfect for a reading group, as each is so different and bound to stoke interpretation, discussion and even argument. They are all utterly up to date. Dewhurst’s knowledge of life in Britain today puts my own to shame. ‘Art Movers’ and ‘After’ are particularly topical. And he always writes fast, vividly and punchily. Autumnia is so fresh and alive that it leaves you feeling Keith Dewhurst has not entered ‘Autumn’ as a writer, but a new Spring. The book is pure Primavera!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged art dealing, Autumnia: Three Novellas, Clement Attlee, COVID-19, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth II, English Civil War, Iraq, Isle of Wight, James I, Keith Dewhurst, King's Men, Lark Rise, lockdowns, London, Manchester United, National Theatre, novella, plotlines, Primavera, PTSD, Puritans, Royal Court, The History of Polly Bowler, theatrical renaissance, Venice Three, wokery, World War 2, Z-Cars, zealotry | Leave a comment

Guest post by Jim Miles: Call My Agent!

Posted on March 27, 2023 by Patrick Miles

One of my jobs is teaching English at a language school in Cambridge. I have students varying in age from teenagers right up to retired adults, and from countries all over the world. This makes the work very interesting but naturally it can be quite tiring, especially when there is a rapid turnover of students requiring very different needs and lesson content/styles.

At the start of the year I had a French student whom I taught mostly 1-to-1 for 90 minutes per day, working on general fluency and training her for potentially taking the IELTS exam so that she can study at a UK university. Often 1-to-1 classes with the same student every day for weeks can become quite grindy and even exhausting, but with this student we had five weeks of such classes without it ever feeling like the format was wearing thin. I think one reason for this is that we had bonded over our mutual interest in Netflix shows and she recommended a few to me that I had even begun watching and discussing with her. The one that hooked me the most was Dix pour cent (literally, Ten Per Cent, titled Call My Agent! in English).

Dix pour cent is a French Netflix show, set at a fictional Paris-based acting agency, with a core cast (pictured above) playing the agents at the firm and a ‘real-life’ actor every episode playing a ‘version’ of themselves. For example, over the 4 seasons of the programme (24 episodes in total) we see Juliette Binoche, Jean Reno, Sigourney Weaver, Isabelle Huppert, and so on, each playing themselves in their own episode where the plot of that particular instalment essentially revolves around them and their interactions with the agency. It’s a great concept which gives the real-life actor a chance to parody and mock themselves in hilarious ways, but which also has many story arcs about the agency itself, and the personal lives of the agents (who, unlike the guest actor, feature in every episode).

I’ve seen all four series now, and in fact have started again from the beginning, watching with my parents. We are two episodes in and they seem to be really enjoying it. The student who recommended the show to me said that she is in a cycle herself of watching and rewatching it all on a loop: she will miss the characters so begin from the start, get through all the episodes and then, a few months later, do the same again!

Watching the programme helped my classes with my student because each day when we began I would explain which episode I had seen the previous day and we would start by discussing that as a warm up. Often I would ask about particular aspects of French language or culture that had come up, and I think this was a very good way to encourage her to be articulate and dynamic in her use of English, as she was actually talking about something she knew very well and was interested in, rather than the often rather dry prompts from the stock exam materials.

One particular bit of language which appeared in the show and which I discussed with my student is the French term bobo. Actually my student had already told me this word when it came up in an alternative context to do with particular areas of Paris and the type of people you find there. However, it then featured in an episode of Dix pour cent that I watched, so I had the meaning reinforced.

In this scene, shown above, two of the agents are trying to film in a public place for rather complicated and convoluted reasons relating to a contract that they have broken. As you can see, there is a guy in the background on an electronic scooter ruining the shot!

He is described by the agent Andréa as a bobo, which is a portmanteau of ‘bourgeois-bohemian’. What makes this interesting to me is that in the English subtitles the term is translated as ‘hipster’, however after discussing this with many of my French students it seems they disagree with that translation and the term is more nuanced — something more like ‘champagne socialist’ in English, rather than merely a ‘hipster’ (which many of them said they use in French). I think the translation to ‘hipster’ works fine in the context of the scene, but it was interesting to learn from my students that there was some additional subtlety to this term bobo and that they use ‘hipster’ themselves in their native language, with perhaps a very slightly different meaning from in English.

I spoke to a French former colleague about the show, and she described Andréa (seen with the cigarette above) as the main character and it being ‘based on a true story’. From this I extrapolated that the writer of the ‘true story’ had been the Andréa character and that the events in the show were adapted from her own life, but the sources I found online suggest that actually Dix pour cent is based on the memoirs of Dominique Besnehard, a French actor and talent manager. Either way, I think I agree with my friend that Andréa is the main character in the show, as several of the later story arcs revolve around her personal life and even from the early episodes she is one of the most watchable and formidable presences at the agency. Indeed, watching now for my second time and my parents’ first time, they comment constantly about her behaviour, usually paired with something about what an impressively-sized nose the actress who plays her (Camille Cottin) has.

Dix pour cent is a show that is compelling and funny even if you do not really have an interest in the French language — certainly it is easy to follow with the English subtitles, which are very high-quality. However, for people who do have an interest in the French language it has an additional layer of enjoyment for these bobo-like terms that pop up. I am looking forward to continuing it with the folks!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged acting agencies, bobo, Call My Agent, Camille Cottin, comments, Dix pour cent, Dominique Besnehard, France, guest posts, hipster, IELTS, James Miles, Juliette Binoche, language teaching, Netflix, Paris, scooters, Sigourney Weaver, subtitles, translation | 4 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 22

Posted on March 20, 2023 by Patrick Miles

‘Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, left, holds the flag of a military unit as an officer kisses it, during commemorative event on the occasion of the Russia-Ukraine war one year anniversary in Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, Feb. 24, 2023. (Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP)’

24 February 2023
A recent study made by a reliable Moscow source indicates that 22% of the Russians polled were fervently in favour of the war on Ukraine, 20% were deeply opposed to it, and the rest (58%) ‘had no feelings either way’. I sighed when I read this, because it is exactly what I would have expected. The bugbear of Russian politics has always been the profound indifference of most Russians to what their government is doing. ‘There is the government, Patrick, and there is us, you see. The two are quite separate. We don’t want anything to do with the government’, was the sort of thing people said to me when I was in Russia (admittedly, under communism, but they no longer said this out of sheer terror). Or as Nadezhda Mandel’shtam put it: ‘In Russia everything always happens at the top. The common people say nothing’ (narod bezmolvstvuet — the last stage direction of Pushkin’s play Boris Godunov, interpolated by a censor, probably the tsar). The narod may well have a pungent, intelligent and meditated opinion about Russian politics and politicians (this was confirmed to me by what I heard when I travelled incognito third class across the steppe from Taganrog towards Donetsk in 1970), but they have absolutely no desire to represent it. Yes, it really does mean that about 60% of the Russian people aren’t interested in democracy. So they do not have it, and have no experience of a true, functioning democracy. Freedom and effective democracy demand responsibility rather than the pursuit of self-gratification, and the former is far too much effort for most Russians. It’s a horrible saying, but true: people get the government they deserve, in the sense of what they have either passively permitted or actively fought for.

4 March
I have just come across the Greek quotation mega biblion, mega kakon (the poet Callimachus, apparently, third century BC). It means ‘A big book is a big mistake’. I love the sound of the Greek word for ‘mistake’, which could be loosely (‘loosely’!) translated as ‘cack-on’. My biography of George Calderon (534 pages) is the finest-looking book I will ever produce, but I shall never again publish one so thick. We simply had to charge £30 for it. Of course, I think it is worth every penny, but despite all the good reviews and laborious marketing we only recently broke even and still have 27% of our stock left to sell. There is no doubt in my mind that £30 is too much for most people to pay for a biography, especially when its subject is not already well known. A thick book is an expensive book. Callimachus was right: ‘a mega-book is a mega-cack-on’…

11 March
Talk of the Devil and… Two days after writing the preceding, I decided I must read Jennifer Homans’ November 2022 biography of the Georgian-Russian ballet master George Balanchine (1904-83), who together with Lincoln Kirstein (‘the money’) founded New York City Ballet and is recognised as the Father of American ballet generally. It is a magnificent Granta hardback, 772 pages long, weighs in at 2.5 lbs, and costs…well, that’s the interesting thing: £36.50 at W.H. Smith first time round, now the RRP is £35, you can get it on Amazon for £27.69, the paperback for £22.50, and Kindle for £15.19. So the hardback started at over £30, but it looks as though someone realised £36.50 was not only a very odd price (perhaps a conversion from U.S. dollars), but a publishing cack-on.

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

It took me five days to read the book, and personally I think it could benefit by being 150 pages shorter (but who am I to talk?). Jennifer Homans is undoubtedly a very brilliant person. In her late teens she trained at Balanchine’s School of American Ballet, observed him in the last years of his life, danced in many of his ballets, then at twenty-six embarked on an academic career that has culminated in her being Scholar in Residence at New York University and the New Yorker’s dance critic. It is not clear how long she researched this blockbuster, but it was ‘over a decade’ (p. 608) and took her to archives all over the world. I think she spent too long informing herself about early influences on Balanchine’s mind (Russian Nietzscheism, Vladimir Soloviev, theosophy etc); the resulting part is too long, superficial and unconvincing. As someone who has been on the inside of American ballet, she is also apt to cover pages and pages with names and ballet politics. But the book is still 75% absorbing, and make no mistake: balletomanes the world over are going to have to own a copy. (I decided I must read it because of the cross-over between Ballets Russes, Michel Fokine and George.) A mega-book, then, but not a mega-publishing-cack-on.

18 March
One of the expressions of George Calderon’s that I am rather fond of (and there are many), occurs in his letter to William Rothenstein of 1 January 1915: ‘I have fallen into a routine of slight occupations’.

The ‘slight occupation’ in my case is to have become practically the literary agent for two poets and two prose translators. Needless to say, I am not a professional literary agent, despite one of the poets having just written to me: ‘let us know how much and we will pay whatever you suggest’! (Definitely not; it would be the thin end of a not-slight occupation wedge.) I just think they are all first-rate and one should assist good art if possible.

What happens is that I suggest who they should submit their work to, or I myself write to the poetry editor/publisher a straight recommendation with corroboration, and the only reason a surprising number of these recommendations have been taken up is that I manifestly have no ‘axe to grind’. A lot of my poems have been published, and I have absolutely no translation ambitions left. Or, as I have put it to one of the translators, ‘I am retired, which is as much as to say dead, and therefore Olympian, or at least not vexatious’.

Frankly, no professional literary agent has ever done anything for me. My theatre agent since 1988, Alexandra Cann, has been wonderful — finding me translation work in theatre and radio, as well as introducing me to eminent theatre people. But, of course, I am not an actor. To discover the excitement and psychodrama (some might say farce) of ‘representation’ for actors, you could not do better than watch the Netflix show Dix pour cent (Call My Agent!, with subtitles). It has ineffable French flavours, but as far as I can see the agency it portrays is the same in its essentials as big acting agencies this side of the Channel. Sam2 (aka James Miles) introduced me to it a few weeks ago, and I just had to invite him to do a guest post about it — which follows in a week’s time.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Personal commentary | Tagged acting agencies, Alexander Pushkin, Alexandra Cann, autocracy, ballet, Ballets Russes, biographies, books, Boris Godunov, Call My Agent, Callimachus, comments, democracy, Dix pour cent, France, freedom, Friedrich Nietzsche, George Balanchine, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Granta Publishing, independent publishing, James Miles, Jennifer Homans, Lincoln Kirstein, literary agents, Michel Fokine, Moscow, Nadezhda Mandel'shtam, New York City Ballet, opinion polls, responsibility, Russia, Sam&Sam, School of American Ballet, theatre agents, theosophy, Ukraine, Vladimir Soloviev, Volodymyr Zelensky, William Rothenstein | Leave a comment

Cambridge Tales 5: ‘East of the Rhine’ (Concluded)

Posted on March 13, 2023 by Patrick Miles

One afternoon in the last week of November, there was a soft knock on the door of my room. Before me stood an elegantly thin woman in her late twenties, wearing an extremely expensive-looking bleu nuit cashmere coat with a silk scarf and holding a flat, shiny black handbag. Her eyes had a sparkle, but her black hair and brows, and the pallor of her face, gave her an unmistakably serious, even strained expression.

‘Gerald? I am Azita…a friend of Eric Smith.’

I ushered her silently in, but she said she had only a few minutes. Without taking her coat off, she sat down.

‘Eric thought highly of you – he told me about the conversations you had. So I am sure he would want you to know what has happened to him.’

‘Ye-s… Where is he?’

‘As I think you know, he went with the British contingent to Bosnia. He got on extremely well with the Serbian commanders and soldiers, and even learned a lot of Serbian – he was very quick at languages. So he was drawn into a bit of intelligence work…reconnaissance and so forth.’

She fiddled with her fingers on her lap.

‘Then the Serbs took over Srebrenica. Eric heard rumours of what happened there, but he did not believe them… He was stationed far away from it, you see, but he had met officers who he knew were in that area, so after the NATO bombing he managed to visit villages around Srebrenica… He found people were digging up mass graves – from executions – and concealing the bodies elsewhere. He saw things – corpses blindfolded and with their hands tied, soaked in blood, mutilated and dismembered, sometimes with their throats cut, even young boys murdered – things that no-one should ever have to see, and when the local people discovered he was British, they told him horrific stories… It was not just war atrocities, he said, but genocide… I don’t know. He couldn’t stand it, and went back to Vitez…where he had a nervous breakdown.’

‘I see…’

‘Eric’s parents contacted me when he was sent home, and I managed to visit him. He was, how do you say, catatonic, weeping all the time, and drinking a lot, of course.’

‘But why on earth did he go back to Bosnia?’

She looked down for a second, tensed her lips, and when she looked up I saw her bright eyes glint. She sat upright and drew in her stomach.

‘It was shame, Gerald. He told me that he felt such personal shame. He had thought the world of those soldiers, he admired them so much…and he simply could not understand how the same men could do such terrible things. “They are not soldiers…they are not soldiers”, he kept repeating. And he felt so ashamed of having admired and trusted them – and even other soldiers, in the past – that he said he had to “expiate” it before the Bosniaks, Srebrenica’s Muslims who had been murdered. I…I am a Muslim myself. In September he drew out a lot of his savings, he managed to bluff and bribe his way – you can imagine – to a village just north of Srebrenica, and he worked there with a lot of investigators exhuming the victims and giving them proper burials.’

I was speechless and felt sick. Azita sat and stared at me.

‘Wha- Where is he now?’

‘They have a lot of alcohol there, and I believe he sank lower and lower. He basically became a gravedigger. Then at the end of October, in an evening’s drinking, he was killed with a spade by someone who said he had insulted Serbia’s honour.’

She looked at her watch.

‘I must go, I’m afraid. Look, this is where he is buried.’

She took out a wallet from inside her coat and showed me a coloured photograph. In the foreground, blurred, were a number of white stelae, evidently gravestones in a formal cemetery. But set back from them against a fence and overhung by a small tree in what looked like an orchard, was a slightly narrow English-style tombstone, brought into focus. It bore Eric’s name, his dates, and a strange epitaph in capitals: DEFEANCE.

‘It was put up by the Bosniaks,’ the beautiful woman said. ‘The British Army informed Eric’s parents.’

‘But what does this word mean?’

‘I don’t know. The locals buried him and I think they must have got confused. “Defence”? “Defiance”? It seems to be both. Presumably they heard Eric say it – repeat it.’

‘Oh, in Eric’s case I’m sure it was “Defiance”… As in Henry the Fifth: “Scorn and Defiance!” He was a great admirer of Churchill and he himself defied all conventional thinking, of course.’

‘Yes… I must go. I will try to write to you. I still have this.’

She opened her handbag, to my astonishment took out Eric’s folded claret tie, then carefully put it back.

I accompanied her to the front door. She turned, smiled cursorily but sincerely, and almost ran up the drive. I could see what looked like a black limousine waiting for her.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged alcoholism, atrocities, Azita, Bosnia, Cambridge Tales, cemeteries, defiance, Eric Smith, genocide, Iran, massacres, militarism, NATO, Nazis, Persia, Rhine, Serbia, Srebrenica, Territorial Army, The British Army, ties, Vitez, war crimes, war graves, Winston Churchill, World War 2, Yugoslavia | Leave a comment

Cambridge Tales 5: ‘East of the Rhine’

Posted on March 6, 2023 by Patrick Miles

For Andrew Tatham

I can’t unerringly recall how the ‘East of the Rhine Drinking Society’ started – and it only met three or four times – but it has left a long vapour trail across my mind.

At first, you didn’t notice Eric Smith at postgraduate gatherings, as he was slight and about five foot six. But when your eyes did light on him, he instantly stood out from the other historians: he was dapper and, well, really very handsome. He had strong black hair and close-shaven stubble visible from a distance on a slightly gaunt face, twinkling blue eyes, rather beautiful lips that curled when he spoke, as though about to stammer, and was impeccably dressed in jacket, waistcoat and dark red tie. He always seemed to be conversing with a restrained but intense humour. Nevertheless, I did not make his acquaintance at these gatherings. He stood ramrod straight and his nickname, I heard, was ‘The General’.

What I think happened is that we once found ourselves walking up the same road to our respective accommodation, he stopped until I caught up with him, and he initiated a humorous conversation. I noticed that if he found something deeply funny, his eyes would twinkle more than ever and seem to withdraw into his head. When we reached the college house I lived in, I must have invited him in to finish a bottle of vodka I had left from a party, together with the remains of some gherkins and rollmops.

I remember that he was delighted by the innovation of knocking back small glasses of chilled vodka and following them with a tiny snack. He was animated, but sat stiffly in his armchair, and I soon realised that his lower jaw was somewhat set, too. It flashed on me that, although only about twenty-five, he had some incipient neurological complaint, especially as his hand occasionally quivered.

Apart from immediate tacit agreement about the Soviet Union, the only thing I recall from this session was that Eric took a childlike pleasure in double- and triple-barrelled names. It emerged when he happened to mention his supervisor, Hugh Quabberton-Minns. He dissolved in laughter.

‘Quabberton-Minns! Qua-bber-ton Minns!’ He spoke slowly, deliberately, and his whole face beamed. ‘It’s amazing, isn’t it…how they all seem to have these mouthfuls of names… It somehow immediately gives them more “bottom”!’

He took a slow, particular drag on his long cigarette, then held it close to his face, the smoke braiding upwards.

‘When we were in Africa, my father knew Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa…’ He looked up and enunciated the name rotundly. ‘Wonderful, isn’t it?’ He rolled it off his tongue with twinkling eyes and a series of short laughs from his throat. ‘Or: Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam! See-woo-sagur Ram-goolam! Mind you, that’s not double barrelled. Do they have them in Russian?’

I am afraid I could think of only one. But in next to no time Eric was able to reproduce it.

‘Afan-arsy Ars-aynevich Kutoo-zov Golen-ee-shchev… Fan-tastic!’ He repeated it several times, then: ‘Did you know that Ranulph Fiennes is really Sir Ranulph Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes?’

I did not, so I practised saying it. I must admit, the fruity aristocratism of such names had always amused me, and we finished the bottle of vodka spluttering and collapsing in laughter over the increasingly concatenated and preposterous varieties Eric produced from his store.

A week or two later, I suppose, Eric buttonholed me after Hall and asked me if I would like to come to him ‘for a return match’ on a day that he named. It was possible for me to accept.

He lived in the smallest flat of his postgraduate hostel, up six flights of stairs. I entered straight into the tiny living room, which was set out: two chairs, a coffee table between them with a bowl of peanuts, two small tumblers, and in the middle a tall, unopened bottle of schnapps.

Eric was in an infectiously merry mood. He was standing fairly rigidly to welcome me, in waistcoat and red tie, but grinning all over his face and even lightly rubbing his hands. He dug his jaw forwards as he laughed his deep-throated laugh.

‘Huh-huh-huh! I thought this evening we would drink from another culture – as it were!’

We sat down immediately and he broke the seal on the bottle.

‘Let’s drink first to our finishing our theses! Prosit!’

‘Do we have to click our heels?’ I said, and raised my glass.

My main experience of spirits hitherto had been of vodka; so I may have downed too much of the glass first go. Neat schnapps was certainly a more substantial drink…

‘I saw you chatting to Maurice Dawson at Hall.’

‘Yes, he’s offering to let me read his thesis.’

‘Huh-huh-huh! It’s on Thomas Tabberer, isn’t it? Some very minor Tudor chancellor…’

‘Yurss… He’s not only finished it, it’s bound and submitted. Apparently it’s quite slim and I could read it in an evening.’

‘Huh-huh-huh, I bet you could – if you wanted to! He’s finished it two terms early and will probably go off to teach at Marlborough or somewhere. He’s a schoolmaster! Thos Cromwell is the only interesting Tudor chancellor…’

Eric poured us another glass of schnapps and expanded on Sir Thomas More, whom he considered ‘a fraud’. More was ‘a reactionary’… I expatiated on Konstantin Pobedonostsev, certainly a reactionary religious statesman under Alexander III…

Suddenly, the front door opened and a slim girl of about seventeen darted in. She had lightish hair and wore a grey dress with, however, a turquoise shirt over the top. She moved deftly round us, with her eyes downcast, but I could just see a demure smile on her mouth. She was carrying a small pile of ironed clothes. She flitted into the gyp room and quietly closed the sliding door behind her.

I looked at Eric. He twinkled his eyes and grinned at me.

‘That’s Mila.’

‘She’s, er…’

‘Yes! Her older sister is even prettier. Actually, the older sister is stunning…but already betrothed. They are twigs on the Persian royal tree, you know.’

I asked no questions. I had the impression from a few clinks that Mila was washing up.

‘Let’s have another. Good, isn’t it? Echt deutsch!’

The conversation turned to my experiences in Russia, which, unlike most people, Eric was genuinely interested in. Suddenly the gyp room door opened. Mila nipped past us into what I assumed was Eric’s bedroom, emerged with a carrier bag, and was making for the front door.

‘Thank you, Mila.’

The girl stopped, half turned to Eric, smiled, and was gone.

‘Actually, I am very interested in Prussia. I’ve been there a few times…former Prussia, you understand, as both the Americans and Adenauer wanted to abolish it. Prussia played a massive part in German history… You and I, one could say, are both East of the Rhine blokes!’

He poured us another glass of schnapps and I scooped up some peanuts.

I had known that Eric’s field was military history; now, as we slugged our way through the bottle, more emerged. He had first become interested in the German army when he did World War 1 at school. Schlieffen, the Moltkes, Falkenhayn, they were all Prussians of course…and they all failed… His focus now was World War 2 and the ‘Battle of Egypt’.

‘Churchill invented that name for it. “Not the end, nor even the beginning of the end”,’ he chuckled imitatively, ‘“but perhaps the end of the beginning”…’

The conversation got slower and slower. To an observer, the pauses would have far outweighed the words. In fact, recalling it now it seems ‘timeless’; as though Eric’s one-liners were suspended in Time.

‘He desperately needed a victory, you see… Alamein was it… The “turning point” of the War… I’m taking an ex-tremely close look at El Alamein… Day by day… And “Monty”…’

After the schnapps, I am pretty sure Eric produced a bottle of white wine, which we also drained. Between glasses and weighty utterances, we dozed where we sat, then somehow or other I negotiated all the stairs and got home around three.

About a fortnight later I was sitting deep in one of the distressed leather armchairs of the Middle Combination Room reading the paper, when Eric looked round the door, greeted, sat down next to me, and picked up the Spectator.

‘Isn’t it about time we had another meeting of the East of the Rhine Drinking Society?’ he grinned.

I knew what this meant, of course, so I prepared with lemon zest a bottle of green label Moskovskaya and put it in the freezer for a week later.

He was on sparkling form, assisted by the plates of zakuski I had laid on.

‘Since our last meeting, I’ve become a revisionist! You see, I just don’t believe the Battle of El Alamein was the turning point of World War 2 that it’s cracked up to be. Churchill ordered all the bells to be rung after it, of course, because in 1942 he desperately needed a victory. The Conservative Party were beginning to doubt his leadership! When you come down to it, Stalin was right to tell Churchill that he was scared of fighting the Germans – by attacking across the Channel.’

‘Ah, well, you can’t expect me to agree with Stalin!’

‘Certainly, certainly, but it was the battles of Stalingrad and Kursk that really turned the tide against Hitler. Look: the death toll at Alamein was infinitesimal, compared with the half a million men the Germans and Russians each lost during the Stalingrad campaign!’

‘But Montgomery defeated Rommel, didn’t he?’

‘Yes. Yes, he did. In the summer of 1942 Churchill shouted at his War Cabinet: “Rommel, Rommel, Rommel, Rommel! What matters but defeating him?” The Eighth Army pushed the Panzer Army Africa back to Tunis, it surrendered, but Rommel – the “Desert Fox”! – escaped. He is by far the most interesting, original and innovative general. Montgomery was a set-battle man. You can’t imagine him downing a schnapps or smoking! He was a dry old stick…there’s something cold and peculiar about Monty. He was ascetic, you know, almost Edwardian.’

Eric continued to expound his ‘revisionist’ view of the Battle of El Alamein through three or four more vodkas, then turned to asking me about Russian women. But I also discovered something startling about him. He revealed that a year earlier he had joined the Territorial Army, having held some superior rank in the Combined Cadet Force at school. I could imagine his TA uniform hanging in his wardrobe, as immaculate as his usual state of dress, but wondered how his hand tremor might affect his markmanship.

The third meeting of the East of the Rhine Drinking Society was a significant deterioration. Entering Eric’s room, I saw a short, goblet-like glass set out on either side of the table, with a bottle of beer and a tall glass beside each. This combination, Eric explained, was a Herrengedeck (drinker’s set). Into the small glass he poured a clear liquid called Korn. You could down this in one like vodka, but it was probably best not to, huh-huh-huh; the real point of the Herrengedeck was to ‘chase’ it down with the beer (which was also German). I am glad he warned me about the Korn, because it was absolutely disgusting. It somehow tasted as though it was raw rye grain, it immediately hollowed out my mouth, and when it hit my stomach I wanted to vomit. The beer on top was certainly a relief.

After relating with many a witty dig and radiant smile that he was feeling more and more ‘alienated’ from the other college historians, Eric took up again the character of Bernard Montgomery.

‘He was boring! You only have to look at him… Always wearing sack and that ridiculous black beret! Then look at Rommel – ’ He went to his desk and showed me a framed photo. ‘The full suavity of a German field marshal, with his embossed shoulder boards, stars, the eagle on his breast pocket, and the Knight’s Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves and Swords at his throat…’

‘Quite the Kurt Steiner from The Eagle Has Landed.’

‘Well, Caine certainly knew how to wear that uniform…’

‘But someone in Russia once told me that when Monty appeared at a reception in the Kremlin, everyone was amazed that he was wearing only one medal – perhaps the Order of Merit or something. Zhukov’s chest, for instance, looked like an iconostasis. At first everyone found it ridiculous that Monty was wearing only one medal, but then, apparently, they respected him for it. It was the sort of thing only Stalin could have done.’

‘Hm – huh, huh, huh – Mongomery saw himself as a “Christian soldier”. He had no charisma!’

Eric poured us each another Korn and opened two more bottles of beer. He loosened his tie, undid his shirt collar, and lit a long cigarette. I continued my line:

‘But I thought Monty’s troops adored him, didn’t they? And that was a big part of his success…’

‘Just imitating Rommel! Not only his own troops adored Rommel, the Italians did, and even the Arabs and colonial troops. He always led from the front, you see, he would get stuck in with his men hauling vehicles out of rivers, he – ’

Mila appeared, with a pile of ironed clothes, and darted into the gyp room.

Eric was off. He explained, to my scepticism, that Rommel believed in Krieg ohne Haß (war without hatred). Rommel had refused to hand over Jews in North Africa for the Final Solution. Rommel would not poison wells when he retreated from territory he had won. Rommel loathed the Gestapo. Rommel was a ‘chivalrous’ and completely professional soldier…

Eric poured us more Korn and beer (there was absolutely nothing to eat with it) and got going on how Israeli commanders like Moshe Dayan regarded Rommel as superior to Montgomery and even a ‘model’ for themselves.

Mila finished her washing up and retrieved another plastic carrier bag from Eric’s bedroom.

‘Here, Mila – meet Gerald!’

The girl gave me a nod, then tightened her little mouth, glared briefly at Eric, and was gone.

‘Rommel wasn’t Prussian, was he?’

‘No. And that’s the whole point. He was able to view that whole military tradition and its failures from outside, and innovate. That, of course, is what interests me. Even in World War 1 as a lieutenant he would attack from unexpected directions – even behind enemy lines – and always take the initiative to mount an assault. These tactics were behind his bestseller Infantry Attack, which Hitler read. But I’m particularly interested in his last, unfinished book Tank Attack. Where is the manuscript of that? I’ve decided now to make Rommel the subject of my thesis.’

I was delighted that in the second year of his Ph.D. Eric had finally decided on its theme. ‘Rommel’ seemed rather a large subject to me, but I assumed he would be concentrating on the military theory side.

We finished the Korn and all the beer, then Eric fetched some cans of lager from his fridge. I fell asleep.

This must have been in the winter of 1995. I definitely met Eric at least once more before I left for Moscow in late March, but I am sure that it wasn’t at a session of the East of the Rhine Drinking Society. I fancy I’d decided to avoid any more of those, but it was my turn and I think I deflected him into a Berni Inn, where we could not share any bottles of spirits. I clearly remember him being elated, and wearing a brand new jacket.

‘I am going to Germany!’ he announced. ‘Just after you leave for Russia. I’m going for six weeks, to work in the Rommel archive, and a professor in Stuttgart – who rejoices in the name Heinrich von und zu Stebbling-Zechstein – is going to introduce me to the Rommel family.’ Eric beamed with retracted eyes and rubbed his hands.

‘Excellent. Well here’s to it!’ I said, raising a schooner of sherry. ‘What exactly will you be working on?’

‘The bits and pieces of Tank Attack, but also Erwin’s relationship with Hitler.’

‘Rommel was politically naive, wasn’t he?’

‘Goodness no. By 1944 he had his own plan for ending the war.’

‘How far did it get?’

‘Well, of course, he joined the 20 July plot and it cost him his life.’

‘But he can’t have understood much about totalitarianism, if he actually attended meetings of conspirators. Lots of Russian generals hated Stalin’s guts, but they would never have proceeded so openly; they knew they would practically have to communicate by telepathy, or act as a lone assassin.’

‘Ha! Maybe that’s why there was no attempted coup in Russia, but there was in Germany! I can see that you don’t like Rommel, Gerald. I’ve come to the conclusion he is the exemplar of a military leader.’

Eric paused. The humour slid from his face, he looked down at the tablecloth, then spoke emphatically.

‘A great commander of men…brilliant tactician…an uncanny feel for the battlefield…apolitical, and a victim of Nazism.’

This was the last time I saw Eric. I had been in Moscow four months when I received an airmail envelope through the Embassy post which contained a photograph of him in uniform sitting at a makeshift table in a wood, with some British officers and soldiers whose uniform I didn’t recognise. They were all holding aloft small glasses and there were several bottles on the table. Eric was grinning broadly and had written on the back:

Vitez, 25 June. The East of the Rhine D.S. lives! This is the real thing. Slivovitz all round! These Serbs are fine fighting men. Back in October. Keep drinking. Eric

I concluded that somehow Eric was in Yugoslavia with the Territorial Army and would be back in Cambridge for the start of the Michaelmas Term. I myself returned in August. Over lunch, one of the historians told me that Eric had volunteered in June to go to Bosnia with the Territorials as part of the logistics staff of the British presence there, and ‘because of his, you know, bonhomie and ability to get on with foreigners, he’s even acquired some role in Army Intelligence’. The same chap told me in September that Eric had come back to Britain for a week at the beginning of the month, then ‘cleared off back to Yugoslavia in civvies, apparently’. This person was himself just off to the Bibliothèque Nationale for three months, so my information dried up. Eric didn’t appear for the start of the Michaelmas Term, but I thought nothing of it. I admit that at some level I was relieved. But he had not turned up by the middle of November, either.

(To be concluded next week)

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Adolf Hitler, alcohol, Battle of El Alamein, Battle of Kursk, Battle of Stalingrad, Bernard Montgomery, Cambridge Tales, double-barrelled names, Eric Smith, Erwin Rommel, Germany, historians, history, Joseph Stalin, Korn, Nazi Germany, Prussia, Rhine, schnapps, Thomas Cromwell, Thomas More, vodka, war, Winston Churchill, World War 2, World War I | 1 Comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 21

Posted on February 6, 2023 by Patrick Miles

Katherine Mansfield

7 January
Almost themed, one could say, in Calderonia, Cambridge academic Ruth Scurr has written a meaty review in today’s Spectator of Claire Harman’s experiment in biography All Sorts of Lives: Katherine Mansfield and the Art of Risking Everything. Anyone who writes short stories should know Mansfield’s work intimately. But I am not sure that I agree with this Scurr/Harman statement: ‘In our age of pandemics, loneliness and an overwhelming number of texts online, Harman suggests, appreciation of short stories — which ask “the biggest questions in the smallest spaces” — is burgeoning.’ I can’t say I have noticed such a burgeoning. The problem, surely, is that word ‘overwhelming’. I have posted a few of my old ‘piffle’ stories on Calderonia, and admit it’s a terribly convenient way of putting short stories ‘out there’. But given the ‘overwhelming’ nature of the Web, can many, if any, short stories get noticed? Are that many writers bothering, then? The days when many more writers than Chekhov could publish a story a week in a newspaper, or Mansfield regularly publish in literary magazines, and get paid a living wage for it, are gone forever.

My publishing project this year is a book of twenty of my short stories, old and new, 60% of which are written. Maybe Harman’s words have encouraged me to preview some new ones online fresh from the oven… It needs thinking about.

14 January
Paranoia apart, it’s my considered view that Calderonia was shut down yesterday by a Russian hacker. The Russian end of Sam&Sam had committed himself to a much longer and franker thread than usual — which I diminuendoed back to silence as fast as I could. Shortly afterwards, a view from Russia popped up on ‘Statistics’, despite the fact that the people I know in Russia can’t access Calderonia. By the evening, Calderonia was ‘unavailable’ worldwide, although of course I did not notice this immediately. My guess is that someone in Russia was researching (not for the first time?) who I am, and discovered my take on Ukraine. Ostensibly, the problem was that the server security certificates of some strands of patrickmileswriter.co.uk had expired. We have never had this problem in nine years, however. Why it should have happened now and triggered unavailability was not really clear. My own theory is that disabling or ‘enforcing’ some of these security certificates was the only way a hacker could shoot us down, given that WordPress’s cyber defences seem state of the art. Fortunately, Calderonia’s own IT expert (aka Jim Miles) was able to restore us to the Web within half an hour of my emailing him.

26 January
A very generous and discriminating friend gave me for Christmas Ronald Blythe’s 2022 book, Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside. It was a pleasant shock to discover that Blythe was still alive, as the only other book of his I knew, Akenfield, was published in 1969. Then came the news that he died, aged 100, at his beloved Bottengoms Farm in Suffolk, on 14th of this month.

I started reading the book on Boxing Day and for peculiar reasons that I will attempt to analyse later, I finished it only yesterday, despite the fact that I had been reading it every day. As I immediately let my friend know, the book is a fantastic delight. It is an extremely skilful 456-page compilation, arranged by month but each month divided into subjects (‘Snowfall’…‘How to Paint Towers’…‘The Reverend Francis Kilvert’…‘On the Way to School’…‘Dwindling Landworkers’…‘To Console’…), from the weekly column ‘Word from Wormingford’ that Blythe wrote for the Church Times between 1993 and 2017.

Its style is all, and doubtless the man. The best description of it that I have seen is ‘a philosophical prose style as light as air’. A newspaper has described Blythe as ‘England’s greatest living country writer’ and the blurb calls him ‘one of the UK’s greatest living writers’ full stop. I could agree with both of those statements. Each section within a month is a fresh surprise, although there is a core of common themes — the church’s year (Blythe was a Reader at three country churches), his cats, the wildlife where he lives, village life and death, the farming year and ghostly past, John Constable, certain English poets and prose writers, hornets, and others. Here is a fairly typical short extract from page 128:

‘It was not always like this,’ I admonish the white cat: ‘tinned breakfast regularly at six, gorgeous radiators, blackbirds through the window, devoted old chap.’ Sometimes I hear them, the skinny labourers clumping down from the bothy to feed the stock, the girls singing in the dairy, the barefoot children falling over the dogs, the mother shouting, the pot bubbling. All gone into the dark, says the poet [T.S. Eliot]. Or into the light, says somebody else [Henry Vaughan].

It is all so fresh and unstrained, so effortless-looking, but actually the very pitch of linguistic skill and literary art. Nor, surely, can there be a more authentic portrait of country life in the very recent past, and presumably somewhere even now. I doubt whether Blythe chose or approved of the book’s title, which is rather obviously cashing in on the post-pandemic vogue for ‘Nature’ as mental therapy, but the book does produce a very strong feeling of an unstressed life ‘in harmony’ with something (perhaps ‘God’, rather than ‘Nature’), and Blythe isn’t ill in it once. I believe everyone should read the book and will enjoy it. It is beautifully produced, by the way, by Calderonia’s own Clays of Bungay, and Blythe’s is the first hardback of theirs with both bookmark and bellyband that I have seen since George Calderon: Edwardian Genius!

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

The Times, in a leader on 17 January sub-titled ‘Ronald Blythe’s bucolic writing appealed to a certain idea of England’, wrote that ‘For many, the real England is a Norman churchyard, a half-timbered pub and the tinkling of the doorbell in the village shop’. Blythe, the leader-writer claimed, ‘did more than most to promote this Elysian ideal of the countryside’, referring to his ‘ intimate study of village life from the 1880s to the 1960s’, Akenfield. This criticism is quite wrong, in my opinion. It was shot down next day by a reader who wrote that ‘In fact much of Blythe’s writing about provincial English life was thoroughly unsentimental and was marked by an acceptance of the need for change’ (evidence supplied). Blythe himself addresses the question in a section of this book entitled ‘Brutal Realities’ (p. 141): ‘The great quandary of those who write about the countryside, or who paint it, is how to keep the euphoric vision, if not out of the general picture entirely, in its proper place.’ In any case, the image that remains with one from Akenfield, I would have said, is of how unremittingly hard and un-euphoric life in the country was — hence Private Eye’s merciless parodying of the book as Akenballs.

The problem for me with Next to Nature: A Lifetime in the English Countryside is rather different. I enjoyed the book so much when I started that I could hardly put it down. Around page 200, however, I began to feel funny, but couldn’t rationalise it. I decided to read at the rate of three or four sections at a time. That didn’t diminish my enjoyment; after all, it is written in entirely separate sections of a page or two, so it lends itself to a segmented reading. But gradually I came to think that the reason I was reading it slowly was that it was subtly but inexorably depressing me. If you look more closely, at least 65% of it is about the past. Events of long ago are constantly being re-evoked, Blythe sees ‘ghosts’ of the past in his mind’s eye, most of the writers he lovingly revisits are long dead, he officiates at many funerals, death and dead friends often feature. Moreover, time in the book is cyclical: the cycle of the seasons, of the Church of England’s services and saints, of an individual’s own life. The cumulative effect, for me at least, was a feeling of entrapment, of rising claustrophobia. In a strange way, then — strange because the writing is so good — I was relieved to finish the book and escape back into the fresh air of the present.

28 January
The death has been announced of the actor Sylvia Syms, at the age of 89. I am moved by what I read about her, because I previously did not know much about her film career (starting with Ice Cold in Alex, 1958, when she was twenty-four), everyone speaks so tenderly of her, and I can see that she was indeed beautiful as a young woman. I only knew her during the rehearsals and tour of Cambridge Theatre Company’s 1987 production of Last Summer in Chulimsk by Alexander Vampilov, for which I was the translator and Russian consultant. She would come and talk to me, but was so modest I never realised what a great star she had already been.

But I certainly realised that she was an exponent of real acting, with both enormous talent and sharp empathetic intelligence; which is why I prefer to use the generic word ‘actor’ of her. Her range was far greater than that of some of the grandes dames of our theatre today. In Chulimsk she played Anna Khoroshikh, the long-suffering manageress of a Soviet cafeteria in the depths of the Siberian taiga. Although literally never centre or front of stage, because the bar and kitchen were always upstage, the part of Anna has more truly tragic depth than any other, and Syms conveyed it with supreme restraint and power. She was completely ‘inside the head’ of this middle-aged woman who has an illegitimate son from being raped during the War and is still in love with her drunkard husband Dergachev, who was wounded, captured, sent to Siberia on his return, yet eventually married her. Without exaggeration, her acting of the part was so natural that she simply was this Russian woman. In this short scene she was unforgettable:

KHOROSHIKH (Sardonically): If you catch any sables, you will save one for me, won’t you? (Seriously) You will, won’t you?.. You used to give me things.

DERGACHEV: Used to, but those days are over. (Goes into back of cafeteria)

Khoroshikh wipes her eyes with her shawl.

Front left: Roy Marsden as Shamanov, centre: Sylvia Syms as Khoroshikh, back: Aidan Gillett as Pashka

Sylvia Syms as Khoroshikh at her ‘bar’ in Last Summer in Chulimsk, 1987

When the production came to Cambridge for a week, Sylvia very skilfully conveyed to me that she would like me to invite her into my college as a guest at high table. This was impossible, as I was not a Fellow of the college, only its Russian Lector. I always regret it, because she would have had the Fellows who remembered her in Ice Cold in Alex and Victim at her feet, and would undoubtedly have said something forthright to them (she was well to the Left) that would have been recounted over the port for years to come.

1 February
The words ‘Spring offensive’ are apt to strike fear. In March 1918 Ludendorff had stealthily brought up 750,000 new troops and three quarters of his entire artillery to concentrate on what he judged to be the weakest point of the British line; the Germans broke through, and within a week had advanced forty miles on a fifty mile front. Putin plans to draft 300,000 new conscripts into occupied Ukraine by the end of February and mount a similar attempt, some say at a weak point like Bakhmut, others say he has instructed his generals to throw this numerically superior force all along the eastern front and make a general advance.

I recently met a British career diplomat who specialises in War. He told me that at the moment, the ‘war of attrition’ on the Ukrainian eastern front is ‘just like the First World War, the only new element is the attacking drones’. I said I thought we had to be ready for the Russians to make considerable advances during their spring offensive, as we had not given the Ukrainians state-of-the-art tanks and other systems soon enough. Therefore, I added, it will all come down to the Ukrainian counter-offensive: would the West make sure the Ukrainians had the weapons to win that, and go on to drive the Russians out completely? As diplomats are skilled in doing, he simply did not react to that.

Are we, in fact, giving the Ukrainians just enough to prevent them from being defeated this year, but not enough to enable them to win? If we gave them all the materiel they need NOW, we would save thousands and thousands of Ukrainian — and Russian — lives, because the war would be shortened. On the other hand, after the Germans broke through in March 1918, the allies, especially Foch and Haig, learnt fast from their mistakes, evolved a different strategy, counter attacked, broke through the Siegfried Line, and by November had won. The Ukrainians, with their superior morale and creative imagination, are quite capable of doing the same even if the Russians break through in places.

3 February

From left to right: the Speckled Wood, Ringlet and Marbled White, of the Family Satyridae. The first two have colonised Cambridge gardens since 2000, the Marbled White was sighted in one last year.

I have received communications from Cambridge City Council officers that they have commissioned wildlife ‘surveys’ this year of the 0.4 hectare Tree Belt that the Council owns behind our houses. The history is that for thirty years this wildlife haven and corridor was kept closed to the public, the Council treated it as ‘a kind of nature reserve’ (their words), but they recently transferred it with no public consultation from Property Services to Open Spaces, thereby surreptitiously changing its use. Since then, it has been invaded by ‘educational’ groups who took in dogs, lit fires, trampled on undergrowth, picked wild flowers, screamed and rang bells. A majority (63%) of local residents adjoining the Tree Belt are against the change of use and have been fighting it tooth and nail for the past year.

To give you an idea of the Council’s competence, it had promised residents a Management Plan before any group was allowed in, but forgot about it (and facts such as fires being banned on Council property). The Council ought also to have commissioned a ‘baseline study’ of the haven’s wildlife before permitting public use, but they did not. A councillor assured me that access would be restricted during the birds’ nesting season (February-June/August), but it has not been. Since the Tree Belt has been unmolested for thirty years, a surprising range of birds has been observed (from gardens) to nest in there, from Tawny Owls and Spotted Flycatchers to Blackcaps and Sparrowhawks. Armed with the opinions of the RSPB and British Trust for Ornithology, I sought to persuade Council officers that the only ‘baseline study’ of nesting that would be fit for purpose would be one of the status quo ante, i.e. of the TB closed to public access for the duration of the study. Alas, no, they have dropped the idea of a ‘baseline study’ and gone for ‘surveys’ carried out this year whilst up to 80 people a week are traipsing in and out. An ornithologist friend who was once Head of Science at English Nature, describes this as ‘ridiculous’.

The particular reason I’ve got involved is that, although I have entered the Tree Belt only twice in thirty years (1991 with the Council’s Conservation Officer and 2022 with the Biodiversity Officer), my family seem to have been the only locals who have kept lists of wildlife observed in their gardens abutting the Tree Belt, and these records are now useful. They suggest a decline in biodiversity of 20-25% since 1991. The reasons could include a big increase in human activity; noise pollution and traffic (the only Tawny Owls I have actually seen in the neighbourhood recently were squashed flat on roads); species epidemics; global warming. The weird thing is, though, that some species are more common than ever (e.g. Goldfinches) and some entirely new species have appeared, for instance the Speckled Wood butterfly, Ringlet, and (last year) the Marbled White. Of course, I greatly regret the loss of Greenfinches and Small Tortoiseshell butterflies due to epidemics, or the disappearance from our garden (despite wilding) of the Wall butterfly, Large Skipper and Essex Skipper. The vitality of the new Satyridae species, however, is astounding. Evidently there are ‘winners and losers’… But the cause is fundamentally the same: human impact on ecosystems, whether global or a mere 0.4 hectares.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Vampilov, Anton Chekhov, armaments, baseline studies, biodiversity, biographies, biography, birds, Bottengoms Fram, butterflies, Calderonia, Cambridge, Cambridge City Council, Cambridge Theatre Company, Church of England, Church Times, Claire Harman, claustrophobia, Clays of Bungay, comments, conservation, cyber warfare, death, ecosystems, entrapment, Erich Ludendorff, Francis Kilvert, funerals, General Douglas Haig, General Foch, ghosts, hackers, Henry Vaughan, Ice Cold in Alex, James Miles, John Constable, Katherine Mansfield, last, Last Summer in Chulimsk, Next to Nature, paranoia, Peter Hall, Ronald Blythe, Russia, Ruth Scurr, Sam&Sam, security certificates, servers, short stories, Siberia, Spring Offensive 1918, Suffolk, Sylvia Syms, T.S. Eliot, The Great War, The Spectator, The Times, The Web, Tree Belt, Ukraine, Victim, wildlife, wildlife corridors, wildlife havens, World War I | Leave a comment

Guest post by Damian Grant: ‘Radio Scotland’

Posted on January 23, 2023 by Patrick Miles

We live in France. In Lille, where the language is French. About a year ago — not knowing anything about the animal — I bought a HomePod online. I had thought it was just a superior (and very stylish) kind of loudspeaker, which I could plug into my i-phone and get it to do my mainly musical bidding. How surprised was I, and how unsurprised my wife Madeleine, to find that this was a much more sophisticated device than either of us could handle, which was not to be tamely plugged in like a dog on a lead (except to the power supply) but required talking to, and being treated with respect if not deference, whereupon it might perform one of the functions it was being asked to do. Like switch on the radio; preferably, BBC Radio 3, the beating heart of classical music.

I betray myself immediately by saying ‘it’. Because the moving spirit of the HomePod is not an ‘it’, but a she; and she is Siri. Nothing gets done unless Siri is asked politely; and unless the formula Dis, Siri is used, she won’t even listen. Dis, Siri, mets BBC Radio 3. But Siri for all her multiconnectedness cannot find the station in my library, in i-tunes, or anywhere else. She has many suggestions for other kinds of music I might like to listen to; or services to which I might like to subscribe. But one does not subscribe to BBC Radio 3, one simply switches it on. This is beyond Siri’s capacity.

Eventually, by means which I neither did nor do understand, Madeleine found a way of getting under Siri’s guard, and forcing her to acknowledge that there was indeed such a radio station, and that its offering might legitimately be accessed by the device over which she presided. Which I was then grateful to do; the fact being that you only had to tap Siri on the shoulder in the morning for her to put you in touch with Petroc Trelawney and his team. Sitting at breakfast, you could even ask Siri to increase the volume, or turn it down, depending on one’s interest in the piece then being broadcast. Turn it up always for the news. (Not that this is always a wise decision.)

One problem that we soon became aware of was that Siri seemed to have a mind or a will of her own. Sometimes she refused point-blank to connect with Radio 3, and regaled us instead with some charming nursery rhymes and songs for children which Madeleine had stored on one of her other devices. (How Siri found these I can’t imagine.) On one surreal occasion, she even interrupted our dinner with the spontaneous question: did we intend to buy a new car? Sometimes she resorted to her old trick of saying that Radio 3 didn’t exist, and that we should be listening to something else. And quite recently she has stumbled on another subterfuge: when asked, strictly according to the formula, for Radio 3, she connects us instead to BBC Radio Scotland. Now I have nothing against the Scots; I even support their desire to be independent of Brexit-touting Westminster. And it’s true that Mendelssohn wrote some fine music up there, around Fingal’s Cave. But this is not the point.

Another hazard of the system is that our grandchildren, two adventurous boys, soon learned the abracadabra that would open Siri’s cave, and developed a relationship with her that involved exchanging jokes, demanding translations into remote languages, and setting her conundrums to which she was forced to confess she did not know the answer. There were also less polite interpellations to which she disdained any response. It was during one of these sessions, recently, that I (returning home with some complicated bad news) became extremely irritated, and seized the HomePod off the shelf, disconnected Siri from her electric soul, and — not knowing where to put this package for the moment –dropped it into the waste paper basket by my desk. It could be put back, and she disciplined, later. Which of course it wasn’t.

This happened on a Wednesday. Thursday is the day our long-time cleaning lady comes for the morning, to do various jobs such as washing the tiled floor, emptying the grate, ironing, etcetera. Normally we would be around, to oversee what was going on and to answer any questions she might have. But this morning Madeleine and I were attending the funeral of a friend, and so Sylviane was left to her own devices. (Devices!) The rest of the day being busy (we went to the theatre that night, to see what turned out to be a long and not very good play), it was not until I lay awake early next morning — I often enjoy a few moments’ quiet reflection, before the alarm rings around seven — that I realized I had never removed the irritating HomePod from the waste paper basket; and that unimaginable things might have happened to it at Sylviane’s most innocent hands.

Go downstairs in my dressing gown. Unlock the front door, out into the cold December morning. Look into the paper bin; nothing to be seen. Look into the general waste bin: two neatly tied bags of household rubbish. Resolve to research into this more fully after breakfast, with Madeleine. (Whose slumber I had punctured with this absurdity.) After breakfast, alerted by a tell-tale yellow cable just visible, we open one of the bags, and indeed find the disgraced HomePod, its stylish orange mesh covered in ash from the fire-grate. Madeleine interrupted my expostulations, and we took the thing inside. With a mixture of brushing and hoovering, it looked again a bit like the device I had once most inadvisedly purchased. But did it still work? Would Siri speak to us again, after this humiliation? We plugged it in, there was a glow from the disc on top, and Madeleine asked, tentatively, for BBC Radio 3. To which Siri, in her usual cheerful tones: Voici BBC Radio Scotland.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged BBC Radio 3, BBC Radio Scotland, Brexit, chaos theory, classical music, cleaning ladies, comments, Damian Grant, Felix Mendelssohn, Fingal's Cave, France, grandchildren, HomePod, IT, Lille, Madeleine Grant, nursery rhymes, Petroc Trelawney, Scottish Independence, Siri, technology, waste paper baskets | 2 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 20

Posted on January 9, 2023 by Patrick Miles

16 December 2022
The Times has a long piece today entitled ‘Putin’s absence fuels rumours of Noah’s Ark plot’. It reports Putin cancelling his annual ice hockey match on Red Square, his annual press conference, and his annual ‘conversation with the people’ (the latter two are broadcast live by state television). This has led to speculation that he is not going to give his ‘state of the nation’ address to the lower and upper houses either, even though he is obliged to by his own constitution. He is said to have had a fall, to be suffering from thyroid cancer, and to have been tipsy and rambling when filmed on a recent visit to Kyrgyzstan (I saw this video on Twitter and reckoned it a fake). Is there any credibility, then, to the rumour that his cronies have set up a plan, codenamed ‘Noah’s Ark’, for him to escape to Argentina or Venezuela if he loses his war with Ukraine and is toppled?

I doubt it; he’s more the Hitler type. On the other hand, I have felt from the very beginning that the Russian military’s heart is not in this war, partly because Putin never gave them enough advance notice to prepare professionally for it. He has made them look fools. Now he is trying to shift the blame for its failure to them, staging events with generals both on their own and with him ‘listening’ to their reports/advice. If the Russian military continue to fail, and conclude that Putin is not going to go quietly, things could change. Rommel joined the plot to kill Hitler after it was obvious that they had lost the war but Hitler said the German people could ‘rot’ — i.e. that he did not care a damn about the German people — rather than him stop the war. My personal view is that if Putin died in office before this war was over, as Nicholas I did during the Crimean War that he brought on himself, it would lead in the short or medium term to a complete upheaval in Russian society comparable to that produced by Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War.

27 December
By chance, but most serendipitously, Jim Miles (Sam2) and I (Sam1) have given each other Christmas presents that commemorate our work with the late John Polkinghorne: I gave Jim a framed print of Opus 9 by Naum Gabo which we used for the cover of What Can We Hope For?, and Jim gave me this book:

No, I cannot read Japanese! But I guessed pretty quickly what it is the Japanese version of — John Polkinghorne’s book The Quantum World (1985) — because John had talked about it with some amusement. He could not read it either, but he was struck by the portraits in it of famous quantum physicists, for example this one of Paul Dirac, who taught him:

What amused him was the rays that seem to be emanating from the great physicists’ heads: were they a form of halo? He seriously wondered what they were intended to convey. Was it a Japanese convention? Are they a feature of the Japanese iconographic tradition and would be instantly understandable to the Japanese reader?

Sam2 was quick to explain: ‘I think in the first place that the portraits are there to bring the physicists to life for the reader — to put faces to names, especially for Japanese readers who could be intensely curious what these people looked like — and then the shapes, or ‘rays’, coming out of them are a bit mysterious, but I think they could represent light, as some of the portraits appear to ‘bend’ the rays. The subtle perspective changes applied to the portraits (and the rays) could be a very clever physics reference that is going over our heads (or certainly mine)…’

3 January 2023
Every year at this time I read in Russian some of Joseph Brodsky’s Christmas (or ‘Nativity’) poems. Whenever possible, he wrote a poem at Christmas, believing that, as he said in an interview, ‘Christmas is the birthday of the God-Man, and it’s as natural for people to celebrate that as their own birthday’.

Nevertheless, there was little specifically religious about his early, longer Christmas poems (1962-71), which I read at the time in blurry carbon samizdat. Gradually he focussed on ‘the cave’, as he called it, with Mary, Joseph and the Child, the star and the magi. To those who knew him in the 1970s and 80s, it comes as a shock to see him referred to now as a Christian poet. In retrospect, though, perhaps it should have been obvious. When I spent part of an evening with Brodsky in Leningrad on 11 January 1970 and asked him why he was so attracted to John Donne, he said it was because Donne ‘represents a vital period in the development of Western Christianity since the Greeks’; I was amazed he didn’t refer to Donne’s poetics. He admired and recommended Kierkegaard’s Either/Or.

Joseph Brodsky, c. 1969. Photographer unknown, Patrick Miles archive

Brodsky’s untitled 1989 Christmas poem begins ‘Imagine, by striking a match, that night in the cave’. Every year I start translating it in my head, but I can’t replicate his tone (expressed in rhymed couplets of amphibrach tetrameter), or the compression that the highly inflected Russian language allows him, so shake my head over its impossibility. Seamus Heaney, using presumably a literal translation by his Russianist son, makes a very good English poem out of it. Heaney’s ear is faultless, so he certainly catches the amphibrach tone, but it entails more English words and a much longer line. Also, he rhymes only once and that rhyme is badly strained. Not having the Russian ringing in his head, Heaney can paraphrase in English as he sees fit (or perhaps in the direction of what he assumes Brodsky meant). To know the source language intimately may not be an advantage for the translator of poetry…au contraire!

7 January
I’m relieved to receive a Christmas card from a couple who support Putin’s war on Ukraine. She is Russian, he English. On their card last Christmas they told me that I shouldn’t believe everything I read in the British press about Russia and Ukraine, so I thought that this year, knowing my stance on the issue, they would cast me off altogether. She believes Ukraine has no legitimacy, she ignores the facts of its history since 1945, she protests that Crimea, Odessa, Luhansk and Donetsk ‘are Russian’, and is exasperated by Ukraine’s criminal corruption after 1991, as though Putin were shining white. She believes Russia is doing the right thing, because she ‘loves’ Russia. I was once at a gathering where the Russian wife of eminent British Slavist X, referring to X’s dislike of Putin, also exclaimed: ‘The trouble is, X doesn’t l-o-o-o-ve Russia!’ (and there was a suggestion that if he loved her, he should love her country). It is difficult to know what to say when political discourse is at such an irrational level. Essentially, these women are possessed by the ‘my country right or wrong’ attitude, which can never be ethical. I am relieved, though, that the card-senders have not terminated a forty-year friendship that saw better times.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.