Today, 4 April 1915, was Easter Day. Kittie Calderon went to church, but we do not know if George did. At Steep, Hampshire, Edward Thomas wrote his poem ‘In Memoriam’:
The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.
Next entry: Biography and the limits of non-fiction
In 1915, today was Easter Saturday. For reasons I will give this coming Monday, I think George Calderon was at home over Easter on long weekend leave. This means he may have worked on the possibly four literary works that he wanted to leave in a publishable state if he went to the Front and never returned. One of these would have been his one-act curtain-raiser, The Lamp.
In my post of 29 March I summarised its plot. I would now like to tackle its subject-matter, but in two posts because I think there are two different levels of meaning to the play.
The first is expressed quite simply in the action. Having persuaded the ‘ascetic’ Theophanes to sell his own son Yanoula into slavery for money to keep the lamp burning in perpetuity, Kolónimos makes the mistake of leaving the young boy with his parents until the morning. He has not met the boy’s mother, Myrrhina, so he does not know what a strong person she is. She refuses to part with Yanoula for the sake of the lamp:
No, no. The sun of my sky, the moon of my night, for a smoky flame? My child, my life, God’s special voice to me? No. My eyes are opened now. The voice of life speaks in me, drowning the murmurs of your sullen creed.
This world was made for happiness. The sunshine and the trees, the singing birds and water running joyfully, these are the true symbols of God on earth, not lamps that smoke in the dark corners of hermit caves and huts. When I defied my father and left my home, I chose you for your manly courage, not for your gloomy faith; when I left the city and followed you to the forest it was to seek the true and simple happiness of life, and not to say to sorrow: ‘Be my joy.’
I thought you wise, and I made you steersman of my soul, but now I see you are close driving upon the rocks I take the helm. I will not sell my son.
This play was George’s last word on established religion as he had known it in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. He was deeply attracted to Christ’s ethical message (indeed Kittie, a regular churchgoer, called him ‘the best Christian I know’), but an unspecified experience as a boy had turned him against what he called ‘the parsonic mind’ and with it established religion. We do not know what this experience was, but it could even have been some form of abuse, since Kittie says in her memoirs that he had ‘suffered cruelly at its [religion’s] hands’ and his mind had been ‘so wounded at the time it was growing’.
Although set around AD 50, The Lamp debunks false asceticism, inverted pride, religious hypocrisy and totemism in the Church. George’s highly successful one-acter The Little Stone House had attacked the last two already, but there the religious hypocrite and totemist had died as the curtain came down, whilst the son she refused to acknowledge was carted back to Siberia. In The Lamp, the religious fanatic does not die, he is left as morally shattered as his lamp, and the believer in ‘Life’ escapes with her son into the world of humane values. But note that she retains her belief in Christ. She believes that the ‘true and simple happiness of life’ is Godly. In this she may appear to speak with a particular Calderonian conviction.
Next entry: Easter 1915
In my post of 5 January I described what I assume is a bugbear of all biographers: ‘facts’ that you have acquired from somewhere, that stick in your mind like flies in amber, but when you want to use them you can’t find their source for love or money, you end up wondering whether you imagined them, and you can’t use them. I quoted three in my January post and said the theme would be continued.
I now continue and conclude the theme, but with what is not so much a phantom fly in amber as a very large black beetle.
The fact is, when I returned from a year’s research in Russia in the summer of 1973 my great-uncle Tom and great-auntie Lottie came over to visit my grandmother, who was living with us, and they asked me about my experiences in Russia. They listened, and at one point (I can see her now) my aunt simply turned to my uncle and said, ‘Mrs ——–‘s husband went to Russia, didn’t he, Tom?’ To which my uncle, who had a slight stammer, simply replied, ‘Yes…yes he did.’ This seemed to be a private exchange between them, and I didn’t recognise the surname of Mrs ——–, so I didn’t pursue it.
But the thing is, Mrs ——–‘s surname was unusual, not obviously English, and years later, after my aunt and uncle were dead, I could swear that the name was ‘Calderon’, which, of course, meant nothing to me in the year 1973. So the prospect suddenly arose that my own great-aunt and -uncle had met Kittie and even heard her speak about George!
And it’s not impossible. My great-uncle was a long-distance train driver and had lived close to the great Ashford (Kent) railway terminus since about 1925, and in 1934 Kittie Calderon moved from Hampshire to Kennington, only two and a half miles from where my aunt and uncle lived. There is evidence that Kittie was active in Ashford’s social life in the 1930s, as were my aunt and uncle, and that Kittie gave permission for George’s translation of The Cherry Orchard to be used gratis for a production in Ashford during the war, to raise money for the Services Club close to Ashford Station. Perhaps, then, Kittie had also given a ‘talk’ about her husband.
As you can imagine, it is now somewhat mind-boggling to contemplate the possibility that my aunt and uncle ‘knew’ Kittie. Why on earth did I not ask them about ‘Mrs ——–‘?! How much, and what, could they have told me?! Did they even visit her at ‘White Raven’, the house built for her by Violet and Evey Pym’s son Jack and called that because her lifelong friend Nina Corbet (from the Norman knight ‘Corbeau’) was ‘Black Raven’ and Kittie ‘White Raven’ (from the Russian expression for ‘something rare’)? Photographs suggest that Kittie entertained large groups of a women’s organisation at ‘White Raven’ in the garden, so could my aunt have attended?
How-ever… This massive beetle in the amber of memory may be a complete phantom. I may, of course, be imagining I heard the name ‘Calderon’ and, above all, I shall never be able to verify this ‘fact’ in this world. Please be advised, however, that despite today’s date this is not a spoof; I have not made this Cheshire Beetle up.
Next entry: What is ‘The Lamp’ about? (1)
Those who have been on my journey since 30 July 1914/2014 will remember that six weeks into it (12 September) I wrote about the problem I was having of holding in my head the two activities of writing the blog every day and writing the continuous narrative of the biography. I felt I was strangely bifurcating, and before the timeline of the book had overtaken the timeline of the blog it produced a couple of months of writer’s block.
Another way of looking at the trouble was to contrast the day-at-a-time real time of the blog with the extended time past that I was writing as a biographer toiling over chapter 14 (1914-15). I simply found it difficult to keep the two apart in my brain. I suggested my brain was suffering from ‘chronotopia’ — the need to manage two different ‘chronotopes’, i.e. time/space forms, simultaneously. Some people might find this easy, but I don’t.
The problem should have been solved when on 6 February 2015 I finished chapter 14 with the events of 4 June 1915, four months ahead of the ‘real time’ of the blog. Unfortunately, I have now ‘lost’ a month on various activities, including the deep research of Kittie’s life June 1915-July 1921, which means that the gap between the blog and the book is narrowing again. I shall probably be able to start chapter 15, dealing with that terrible period of Kittie’s life, after the Easter holiday, so biography-time will never fall behind blog-time. But because my brain is currently filled with the events of Kittie’s life 1915-21 I am already beginning to experience some chronotopia again; to be blunt, interference or confusion between the two times. Also, it intrigues me whether this confusion is just the natural dementia of a 67-year-old!
Obviously, I am desperately impatient to get on with chapters 15 and 16 and finish the book (see my post of 4 March). I am also disturbed by the strange sense of having lost touch with George since he went over the top at the end of chapter 14. I have now to focus on Kittie, the survivor, but it’s a biography of George and I’m afraid of losing my feel of him for good. I can’t wait, then, not just to to finish the book, but to start revising it, because I will then be back in the swim of his life. But the temptation to hurry, and botch, must be avoided. The last two chapters have to be written with exactly the same care as all the others, even though I have a deadline breathing down my neck (a deadline that I have already missed by six months). As Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote: ‘Patience, hard thing! the hard thing but to pray, / But bid for, Patience is!’
The unexpected bonus of all this is that running the blog means I shall have written one book of 160,000 words over three and a half years covering George and Kittie’s lives 1867-1950, and another of about 125,000 words in one year covering their lives from July 1914 to July 1915… So two entirely different ‘works’ with entirely different ‘chronotopes’. I will leave it to other people to discuss whether you can compare a 400-page book with a 12-month blog and call them both ‘works’, or even, as Stuart Kelly did in his TLS piece ‘Enter John Aubrey’, claim that a day-by-day webpage of someone’s life is a new, digital-age form of biography. My blogmaster repeatedly tells me that when it closes down on 30 July 2015 Calderonia will at least be ‘a document that’s always there’.
Next entry: ‘Phantom flies in amber’ (Concluded)
If, as I have suggested, George used his long weekend leave to put his literary manuscripts in order, then as well as working on a detailed synopsis of Tahiti (see my posts of 14 and 21 March) he must have done something on his one-act play The Lamp, because when Kittie came to prepare all of George’s one-acters for publication in 1921 she found parts of The Lamp existed ‘only in the form of rough draft’. The draft could not have been that rough, however, as the version Kittie published reads seamlessly.
The British theatre today has a highly problematical relationship with one-act plays. In the 1980s, I seem to remember, Harold Pinter wrote to The Times objecting to a short dramatic work being described in its pages as ‘not a play’. For him, it was a ‘play’ whether it lasted twenty minutes or provided ‘two hours traffic of our stage’. But it is extremely difficult to get such plays staged, because even two of them, with interval, last less than an hour, and as numerous playwrights have discovered (including myself) a programme of shorts is considered too disparate for a modern audience to cope with.
Thus there is no ‘market’ for short plays today, except perhaps in the amateur dramatic world and especially drama festivals (see the first-rate book edited by Rex Walford and Colin Dolley, The One-Act Play Companion).
But it was not always so. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras there was a vast market for one-act plays as curtain-raisers. Not all the audience arrived in time to watch the whole of the curtain-raiser, but by the time it was over they were there and ‘settled’ for the main play. Once a curtain-raiser was in repertory, it could be trotted out over the seasons to precede entirely different plays. This meant that if a dramatist wrote a good one-acter, it might be performed all over the country for years and become a nice little earner for him (as was the case for Chekhov with his ‘vaudevilles’). This is exactly what happened to George’s The Little Stone House, which was premiered by the Stage Society in January 1911, toured Britain and to Canada with the Manchester Repertory Company 1911-13, was performed by numerous other companies, and was still being revived and broadcast on radio in the 1920s. It was so successful that George’s friend Rupert Brooke decided he must cash in by writing his own imitation of it, Lithuania.
As I shall probably discuss next weekend, the subject of The Lamp is similar to that of The Little Stone House — reprising a successful formula is always good commercial sense, of course — but the differences are crucial; fundamental. This was the last play George wrote, and his final emphasis is very significant. Doubtless he was hoping to repeat his success with The Little Stone House, which is why he was taking infinite pains in March 1915 to get such a short play (18 printed pages) right…
THE PLOT
The scene is set in Syria around AD 50 and a stage direction requires ‘soft “Arabian Night” evening sky’. Theophanes has been converted by St Paul and is revered as a hermit. But really he is an idolater, a totemist, because he is fixated on a lamp that he has ‘vowed to keep […] always burning to the glory of God’. He is described as an ‘ascetic of about forty-two or -three’, yet he is married to a ‘beautiful woman of about twenty-eight or thirty’ called Myrrhina and they have a son, Yanoula, ‘a fair, handsome boy of nine or ten’.
When the play opens, the ‘holy lamp’ on an altar in their hut is about to go out for lack of money to buy oil. Myrrhina loves her husband for converting her, but her Christian beliefs enable her to see the lamp in perspective:
If it go out, has not its flame lighted a flame in a thousand bosoms that will never die? […] If God needed your vow, he would send you the means to fulfil your vow. No, though your vow fail, yet shall we still continue in the joys of his blessing, we three together, you and I and our son.
At this point, a ‘sleek and prosperous’ merchant, Kolónimos, appears with a bag of gold. He is a slave-trader and ‘the greatest sinner in Antioch’, but he too has made a vow: he will ‘make restitution to God’ by endowing money to buy oil for the lamp in perpetuity, and he throws the money on the altar. At first Theophanes welcomes this as a miracle, but since Kolónimos will not renounce his calling, the hermit rejects the ‘unclean’ money. As obsessional as Theophanes, the merchant says he cannot break his vow either. He tries to make Theophanes accept the money as payment for ‘some charm or philtre to restore the waning lustiness of youth’, but Theophanes objects: ‘I have nothing to sell.’ Then the slave-trader sees Yanoula and twists the story of Abraham and Isaac to persuade Theophanes that it will be ‘the will of God’ to sell his son into (paedophile) slavery. For the sake of the lamp and in the name of sacrificing ‘earthly joy’ — his own son — Theophanes agrees and the deal is struck. But Kolónimos leaves Yanoula with his parents until morning. When Myrrhina returns and hears what her husband has done, she tries to reason with him, but he is blinded by his belief that he must sacrifice others to attain what he sees as his own glory in heaven. She continues to counter his arguments, implores Theophanes to leave the lamp and their unhappy home, but he will not. She takes Yanoula and as they depart she ‘strikes down the dying lamp’.
The play ends with the direction: ‘The man stays with the money about him, and the lamp broken, weeping.’
Next entry: ‘Bifurcation’ and ‘chronotopia’ again
I have received a long and very interesting letter from John Dewey, author of the superb Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Fyodor Tyutchev (2010), commenting on my various posts over the last three months that touch on biographical matters. For information on this biography and John Dewey’s translations of Tyutchev, go to www.tyutchev.org.uk .
There is a resemblance between Dewey’s predicament as a biographer and mine in that ‘nobody knows who Fyodor Tyutchev is’, just as ‘nobody knows who George Calderon is’. There the resemblance ends, however, since Fyodor Tyutchev is actually Russia’s greatest poet after Pushkin! It is only in the West that comparatively few people have heard of him. Amazingly enough, now I think of it, in 1971 I was going to do a Ph.D. comparing Tyutchev with Samuel Coleridge, before Chekhov’s plays grabbed me.
On the question of how long one should take writing a full-length biography, Dewey writes: ‘Like you, when I started on the Tyutchev biography in earnest in 1999 I was aiming to complete in time for a significant anniversary (the 2003 bicentenary of his birth). This proved to be hopelessly optimistic, and in the event the project took the decade which, as you point out, Park Honan customarily found necessary’ (see my post of 21 December 2014). Most interesting! But Mirror of the Soul is magisterial, exhaustive, and looks pretty definitive to me, which I can’t possibly claim for my biography of George. Dewey explains the stretching of his biographer’s clock thus: ‘It was not only because the material seemed to grow and grow, but because there were several frustrating unknowns regarding Tyutchev’s life and certain individual poems which I became obsessively determined to solve if at all possible. And I’m sure you’d agree that detective work of this kind is actually one of the secret pleasures of writing a biography.’
Certainly. However, I simply have to say that my biographer’s clock, or fuse, is shorter. I couldn’t contemplate spending ten years writing a biography, mainly for the reason I gave in my post about Honan: I need my own self back. I have written academic books, which generally took three years from start to publication, but I couldn’t face ten years and that is why George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is not footnoted, and not told as a scholarly linear narrative. I suppose what always made me want to write about George was his extraordinary life and personality, his ‘otherness’, and that’s really what drives me on to tell his and Kittie’s story. In a way, my book is not so much a chronology as a psychology. I will write more about this on another day, in connection with Ruth Scurr’s self-avowed ‘deep fascination with how and why we tell the stories of earlier lives’.
John Dewey also writes: ‘I was particularly struck by your discussion of a biographer’s feelings on reaching the death of his/her subject. Like you I experienced a mixture of relief and sadness at that point, and have often wondered since if this is typical. […] Your identification of the different “times” involved hadn’t occurred to me and is most illuminating’ (see my post of 9 February). If only! I still can’t rationalise this experience, but was extremely interested to read of Dewey’s own. I keep wondering if the most obvious explanation isn’t the most plausible: that we have grown very close to this person we have been writing about, and when he/she dies in the text one part of our brain triggers the ‘grief response’ but another part of the brain knows the person hasn’t ‘really’ died… I shall say more about the problem next week.
Finally, Dewey has just read A.N. Wilson’s ‘magnificent biography of Tolstoy, having thought beforehand that as a novelist he might take a novelistic approach [see my post of 6 March on Ruth Scurr’s essay “Lives, some briefer than others”]. In fact he does not, but rather deals with Tolstoy as one novelist discussing the life and work (incomparably greater, as he would be the first to admit) of another. It’s full of brilliant insights and delightfully ironic comments — highly recommended’. Wilson has to deal with what Stuart Kelly in his TLS piece about Ruth Scurr’s Aubrey ‘biography’ called the ‘Damascus Quandary’, i.e. why a person (in this case Tolstoy) suddenly rejects their past and radically reorients themselves. ‘Wilson gives some very convincing answers’, writes Dewey. ‘I had to confront a similar problem with Tyutchev, who seems eventually to have prized his Panslavist political writings above his lyrical verse, but I can’t say I managed to come up with a coherent explanation.’
There are ‘nervous prostrations’ in George Calderon’s life but not, I think, a single ‘Damascene Moment’, and hence no ‘Quandary’ for me as his biographer. Rather, most people seem to feel that the quandary is: why does Calderon appear to have radically reoriented himself so many times — from barrister to Russianist to short-story writer to novelist to anthropologist to dramatist to political activist to balletomane to soldier to… death? What, to rephrase Virginia Woolf in The Waves, is ‘the thing that lies beneath the difference of the thing’? That is the mystery in George’s case.
I am extremely grateful to John Dewey for such a stimulating letter.
Next entry: Weekend work: ‘The Lamp’
Today, 25 March 1915, Field Marshal Otto Liman von Sanders left Constantinople for Gallipoli to take command of the Turkish forces at the Dardanelles. He was not a brilliant Prussian general, but many consider him first-rate. Upon arriving, he said to one of his colonels: ‘If the English will only leave me alone for eight days…’ In fact the naval attack of 18 March was never repeated and the Allied landings did not happen for another month.
At the end of February 1915 it seems the Turks had only 15,000 troops on the Peninsula. By mid-March there were about 70,000 at the Dardanelles in toto. This was almost equal to the maximum force Kitchener could allow Hamilton for the Gallipoli campaign. More kept arriving and ‘the scheme of defence improved out of all recognition’ (Official History). Liman von Sanders now put his men into intensive training.
Frankly, the Gallipoli campaign was already lost. But the Edwardians were never people to shirk a task, especially a hopeless one.
Next entry: Time and the biographer
Please read Katy George’s and my Comments for the background to this letter, which Katy discovered recently amongst some papers of Mrs Raikes in a charity shop in Deal, Kent. New letters of Kittie Calderon’s are as rare as new ones of George’s! As I shall explain below, this find is invaluable to me as their biographer.
The letter is a very clear example of Kittie’s flying Quangle-Wangle handwriting, so I don’t think it is necessary for me to transcribe it:
Obverse of letter from Katharine Calderon to Gladys Raikes, 31 March 1923
Reverse
In those days, correspondents often just put the day of the week or the day of the month at the top of their letters, so it is brilliant that Kittie’s envelope has also survived, and this is clearly date-stamped 1923. It is addressed to Mrs Raikes at ‘Vinnicks’, Highclere, otherwise known as Downton Abbey, near Newbury… However, this was crossed out and the letter redirected to St Hilda’s Hall, Oxford.
The first matter of great interest is the mention of a ‘talk’ by Rothenstein and the fact that ‘he’ had written to Kittie telling her about it. This is George’s great friend, the painter William Rothenstein, about whom I wrote in my post of 3 January. It so happens that we have an undated letter from Rothenstein to Kittie in which he apologises for having ‘neither talent nor time’ for writing a memoir of George Calderon, but is planning a ‘talk’. Until Katy found this letter to Mrs Raikes, we had no idea that Rothenstein had actually given a ‘talk’. But it seems likely that his undated letter is the very one referred to in Kittie’s letter above, and that he gave the ‘talk’ where Mrs Raikes wrote her own letter from, i.e. at Highclere. Personally, I would have expected Rothenstein to have given the ‘talk’ in Oxford, where he had many literary contacts and where George was still a well-remembered figure who had been an undergraduate at Trinity College and raised a body of student volunteers during the Coal Strike of 1912. Perhaps Mrs Raikes had put her ‘permanent’ address on her own letter to Kittie but actually heard the ‘talk’ in Oxford and was still there, at St Hilda’s, when Kittie replied. No reason springs to my mind, at least, for why Rothenstein would give the talk at Highclere.
The reason Kittie put ‘talk’ in inverted commas, and I have perpetuated this, is that to people of Kittie’s and Rothenstein’s generation and social standing ‘talk’ was a new, rather infra dig word. Edwardians gave ‘lectures’. In his letter which we may now date as 1923, Rothenstein himself apologised to Kittie:
My very dear lady, […] my lectures are nothing more than desultory improvisations. But you will know this talk, however inadequate, will be de coeur. My love for and devotion to George has grown with the years. Just as my friendship was strongest during the last year, it would have remained one of the strong towers in my life. If it is a memory, it is a living and powerful thing. As I grew older, and, I hope, a little wiser and steadier, I learnt to appreciate George’s character more and more. So long as I live you may be sure of my devotion to him and to yourself. There are no two people I love more. So you may imagine it is no common task I am undertaking, but a secret act of homage to two very dear spirits.
This rather suggests ‘Will’ spoke from very few notes and that is why there is no known text/record of his ‘talk’. But at least we now know he gave it.
The inference is that he also referred to Percy’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921). Rothenstein’s own copy is in McGill University Library, Canada, and in 2010 Professor Alan Andrews, an expert on George’s fellow dramatist St John Hankin, emailed me to say that he noticed Rothenstein had written on the front end paper: ‘[Page] 90 account of dear George’s relation with me.’
The other subject of great interest to me in this letter is Kittie’s own feelings about Percy’s Sketch from Memory. She thinks it ‘beautiful’ and actually calls it a ‘Life’. The latter is one in my eye, as I have been saying for years that my book is the ‘first biography’ of George Calderon! On the other hand, Kittie had a great hand in this book, supplying a long memoir of George written specially for Percy, and all the biographical material that she thought fit. As a relative of Percy’s once put it to me, ‘he wrote the book for Kittie’. The latter is graphically borne out by the fact that it has a substantial, very moving section devoted to Kittie’s first husband, George’s friend and Percy’s uncle, Archie Ripley. It was very much George’s ‘authorized’ biography, then.
I will say no more about this subject here, except that (1) I have access to all the biographical material Kittie made available to Percy, but also to far more that she did not, (2) there were large areas of George’s life that Percy was not able to summon up a critical interest in, and (3) Calderon and Lubbock had fundamentally different personalities.
Nevertheless, Kittie was obviously pleased with the result, describing both the Sketch from Memory and Earlham as ‘masterpieces’. Although Percy’s prose is perhaps too Jamesian and orotund for our taste today, I would not disagree with that judgement. Earlham is the better-known book, a post-1918 recherche du temps perdu that has had great influence down the generations and never, it seems, been out of print. But the ‘Life’ is such a personal matter for Kittie that she implies with her three dots that she can’t talk about it… It is extremely interesting to see what she has to say about Earlham, for which she drew the frontispiece in the first edition, as she knew the place well from when she was married to Ripley. ‘Utterly and completely true yet perfect in its art — and of both books that is true’ is a very valuable statement to have from her.
I cannot add much about Mrs Raikes to what I have said in my response to Katy George’s Comment. However, thanks to the indefatigable labours of Mr Johnnie Pym, Evey and Violet Pym’s grandson, I can tell followers that the desire Kittie expresses in the last paragraph of this letter soon came true: Mrs Raikes’s late husband was a friend of Major C.E. Pym (‘Evey’), who invited her and her two sons to stay at Foxwold 1-6 September 1923, when Kittie herself was already there. They also coincided at Foxwold in 1931.
P.S. No mention of the distinguished Raikes family would be complete without a footnote referring to the fact that the dandy Tom Raikes (1777-1848) met Pushkin playing cards in St Petersburg high society in 1829 and is probably the ‘puteshestvennik zaletnyi,/ Perekrakhmalennyi nakhal’ (‘traveller just flown in,/An overstarched lout’) immortalised in Evgenii Onegin, Chapter 8, stanza XXVI, lines 9-14.
Next entry: Gallipoli: the beginning of the end
Today, a Monday, Admiral de Robeck, Commander-in-Chief of the British-French fleet at the Dardanelles, and his second-in-command Admiral Wemyss, arrived at Lemnos on their flagship the Queen Elizabeth for a conference with Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. De Robeck’s Chief of Staff, Roger Keyes, did not attend as he was busy organising a new fleet of minesweepers for a fresh attack on the Narrows — which despite the bad weather was intended to be imminent and decisive. (See my posts of 10 and 18 March.)
Events in the Gallipoli Campaign sometimes seem a perfect illustration of chaos theory. According to Hamilton, the first thing de Robeck did on sitting down at the conference table was to announce that he was now convinced the Fleet could not force the Narrows without the Army. How could de Robeck possibly say this? For the past three days he had been preparing for a fresh naval attack, five more British battleships and one French were on their way, a new squadron of spotter-planes was arriving, and everywhere Keyes had found captains’ and crews’ morale high.
In his memoirs, Hamilton claimed that he had always accepted de Robeck’s view as the ‘man who should know’ about the Navy forcing the Narrows alone, and would never have dreamt of expressing an opinion. But this is disingenuous, as we know that he wired Kitchener on 19 March telling him that in his view the Straits could not be forced by navy action alone; the Army must undertake a ‘deliberate and prepared military operation, carried out at full strength, so as to open a passage for the Navy’. Obviously, Hamilton had no naval expertise… But he knew that his words would carry great weight with his benefactor and chief, the Secretary of State for War.
The result of today’s conference is a chaological mystery. Whoever convinced whom, and whatever the chance factors that influenced de Robeck, everyone, including Wemyss, now agreed that a combined operation was the only way forward! When he heard it, Keyes was incredulous, and never ceased subsequently arguing for a naval attack. But Hamilton announced that he could assemble his invasion force in three weeks, and on 24 March he left Mudros with his Staff for Alexandria to do so.
Next entry: A terrific find
Katy George’s discovery of Kittie’s letter to Gladys Raikes of 31 March 1923 (see Comments and my post this coming Monday), in which Kittie talks about Percy Lubbock’s ‘Life’ of George, has reminded me that Percy also played a vital part in creating Tahiti from the synopsis that we presume George was perfecting now in 1915 whilst home on weekend leave. In her Preface to Tahiti, Kittie directed ‘words of greatest gratitude’ to Percy for his ‘untiring help’ in ‘dealing’ with all the manuscripts from which the book was assembled. This could not have been easy for him, as he was working on George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory and other projects at the same time. Grant Richards had decided to bring out the ‘Life’ on 10 May 1921 in order to prepare the public for the publication of George’s selected works, which began in July with Tahiti.
Both books were very well received. Kittie’s Cutting Agency sent her over thirty national and international reviews in three months. On 12 August 1921 the Evening Standard put Tahiti at the top of the best-seller list for Central London, and by October it was being reprinted.
But perhaps for Kittie the most gratifying reception was from George’s and her friends. Laurence Binyon, for instance, wrote to her on 13 August 1921:
It is a book I shall never forget. It makes so vivid a picture of the Island in one’s mind — and a not less vivid picture of George. I feel as if I had been there with him. I like best the chapters about the charming Amaru and his hospitality. George brings me so much nearer the natives than the other writers who have written about the South Seas. One sees how disinterested was his feeling for them — not the mere getting of an exotic pleasure and experience. But his insight and knowledge make the story a sad one. What a shame it seems on all us Europeans to have ruined these innocent creatures and (George makes one see) their real civilization! […] I am not fearfully interested in folklore myself, so the parts which give solid information on this score — though I expect of great value — do not delight me so much as the parts of purely human interest, as the descriptions, which have scent and atmosphere as well as vivid pictures.
The educationist and reformer Isabel Fry wrote to Kittie:
The book is simply charming — and vivid and brilliant too. And learned and cultured. But what I enjoy most is the direct sense of personality and the revealing of such a perfectly delightful one, delicate and stalwart, sympathetic but no sentimentalist; and such simplicity combined with a real profundity.
One should remember that for the Edwardians ‘charming’ was as powerfully positive as ‘stalwart’. Kittie’s lifelong friend Constance Sutton, who was extremely well read, wrote: ‘With this and Percy Lubbock’s tribute, you can feel that George’s personality and genius are safe to be recognised for all time.’
But the success came precisely when Kittie was overwhelmed by the biggest loss since George’s death in 1915: on 5 August 1921 her other lifelong female friend, Nina Corbet, died suddenly in Lugano at the age of fifty-four. Kittie left London immediately to comfort Nina’s mother in Torquay, and stayed there some time.
Next entry: 22 March 1915
It is not quite clear from the wording of Kittie’s memoirs whether George had been coming home every weekend from Friday to Monday before starting a ‘machine gunnery course on Hayling Island’, or whether he was able to take such long weekends once he started this course. Either way, I believe that by now he would have begun it, because it must have lasted several weeks. On Gallipoli, we see him merely supervising the care of a machine gun, but presumably he would have learnt how to use it efficiently himself, and had plenty of practice firing it on a range, so that he could take over if machine gunners in his platoon or company became casualties.
Understandably, Kittie concentrates on his personal relations at Fort Brockhurst:
Capt. [Arthur] Maxwell Labouchere the adjutant (alas, killed later [1918]) became a real friend and made a great difference — and the Peels (a young brother officer and his wife) were often a refuge; as George expressed it, their ‘little young household was such a rest from barrack life’.
It was a comfort to know that there were such bright spots — and there were many points that helped. He liked the Colonel [Hawkins], and Major Benson D.S.O. was such a splendid soldier to work with. George’s sense of camaraderie, as it was certain to, made him throw himself into the spirit of it all — be the spirit of it all. […] I also heard later how his music had counted.
Kittie’s reference to ‘bright spots’ could imply that George was not over-happy at Brockhurst — possibly even depressed, as at Ypres. Followers may remember from my post of 22 January that we know he wasn’t comfortable with the ‘hard and arid gaiety’ of the officers’ mess sitting-room, and sought refuge from it outside Fort Brockhurst when he could. He was entitled as a married officer to live in digs, and Kittie would have set up a home for him there, but he felt that if they did this he wouldn’t learn ‘one quarter as much of soldiering as by living in Barracks’, and Kittie agreed (see my post of 16 January).
Incidentally, I have made little progress in deciphering the five ‘appled out’ lines in George’s letter of 10 May 1915 that may describe the less positive side of his stay at Brockhurst (see post of 22 January). I have consulted a university library manuscripts section, the forensic department of one university, the criminology department of another, and a retired chief constable, but they have not come up with a solution. Examination both magnified and under ultraviolet light has revealed only six words. The way forward appears to be to make a word-by-word ‘grid’ of these lines, put in what we have, and turn it over to a team of cryptologists.
What we can presume is that George received a lot of letters from a wide range of friends such as William Rothenstein, Henry Newbolt and Manolo Ordoño de Rosales, and we know for a fact that he had with him at Fort Brockhurst a ‘large number’ of books from the ‘London Library’. Both letters and books were lost when the battalion moved out.
Within the battalion, Labouchere wrote later, George took ‘everyone’s heart by storm’. He was particularly valued for what Kittie called ‘his unending invention and energy in getting up sham fights’, i.e. field exercises. Not surprising, perhaps, for a dramatist and expert pantomime-stager, and perhaps that is what he enjoyed as a lieutenant most!
Next entry: Tahiti: The book’s reception (1921)
Just after dawn today, the first ten battleships of de Robeck’s Anglo-French fleet moved off from Tenedos for what it was hoped would be the decisive attack on the Dardanelles, leading to forcing the Narrows on the 19th.
De Robeck had been forbidden by the Admiralty to attempt to ‘rush’ the Narrows (this would have been suicidal). The plan today was simultaneously to silence the shore guns protecting the first, Kephez minefield, and batter the forts at the Narrows from a fairly safe distance, enabling the minesweepers to clear a channel forwards. Next day the forts would be destroyed at close range and the minefield at the Narrows cleared.
At 10.30 this morning, in beautifully clear weather, lines A and B, comprising six British ships followed by four French, entered the straits and came under fire from Turkish mobile guns on either side. They steamed on to about eight miles downstream of the Narrows and at 11.25 the British ships in line A started pounding the fortresses at Chanak and Kilid Bahr on either side. These did not bother to reply, although the ships met a continuous barrage of howitzer and field gun fire from the nearer shores.
At noon, the French squadron B moved forward to close the range, whilst enabling line A to carry on firing astern of it. The forts at the Narrows now started firing at the French, who took some bad hits, but the attack continued and seemed to be succeeding: by 2.00 p.m. the forts had fallen silent. A Turkish General Staff report described the situation at this point as ‘very critical’.
Then things unravelled. As the French squadron began to retire on the Asian side to allow the six British battleships of line C to come forward, the Bouvet hit a mine in the counter-intuitive string laid by Geehl (see my post of 8 March). It sank in two minutes with the loss of 640 men. Line C closed range again, the guns at the Narrows sprang back to life, but by 4.00 p.m. were once more dimmed. The minesweepers were now called in, got to work, but suddenly panicked and withdrew. Then the Inflexible hit another of Geehl’s mines and limped from the field. Within five minutes, the Irresistible hit another, six hundred crew and casualties were taken off, and it drifted towards the Asian shore under heavy fire. Naturally, no-one in the Fleet knew what was ‘attacking’ them. The only possibility seemed to be mines being released into the current, or torpedoes from undetected shore tubes. ‘Deeming it impossible to keep his fleet in the Straits in face of this new and unknown danger,’ de Robeck ‘decided to interrupt the operations’ (Official History).
Just after 5.00 p.m. the Fleet withdrew, leaving Commodore Roger Keyes to attempt to salvage the Irresistible with a squadron of his own. In the course of this, the Ocean hit yet another of Geehl’s mines. All the crew were rescued, but later that evening she sank along with the Irresistible.
Altogether, then, today three battleships were lost and three others put out of action. In effect, it meant that the Fleet’s strength had been reduced by a third. De Robeck, however, was all for resuming the attack after reconsidering his plan, and Keyes thought that neither the forts nor the mobile field guns were now a menace, all that had to be addressed was the mines. The War Council informed de Robeck on 19 March that five more battleships were on their way to replace those lost, and the Admiralty confirmed that he could continue the assault on the Narrows if he saw fit.
Sir Ian Hamilton, however, who had observed the second half of today’s attack from inside the Dardanelles, wired his patron Lord Kitchener that he no longer believed the Straits could be forced by naval action alone.
Next entry: Life with the 9th Ox and Bucks
After the naval bombardment at the Dardanelles was suspended on 8 March, the weather worsened but the highly energetic Commodore Roger Keyes was able to make some progress with the minesweeping by replacing trawlermen with Navy volunteers.
On 11 March Winston Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty) replied to Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden’s wire of 11 March with a carefully crafted one that included the words: ‘We do not wish to hurry you or urge you beyond your judgment, but we recognize clearly that at a certain point in your operations you will have to press hard for a decision, and we desire to know whether you consider that point has now been reached.’
Carden did not reply.
In what was to become a fateful pattern during the Gallipoli campaign, Carden had practically been brought out of retirement to command the East Mediterranean Fleet, and in Alan Moorehead’s words ‘he had already had a long winter at sea off the straits before this action had begun’. He had lost his appetite and was getting very little sleep. He was worried sick about every aspect of the operation.
On 14 March Churchill telegraphed again. It was a long wire containing top secret intelligence about the depletion of the Turks’ ammunition on the Gallipoli Peninsula, but it ended with almost an order: ‘The unavoidable losses must be accepted. The enemy is harassed and anxious now. The time is precious as the interference of submarines is a very serious consideration.’ Carden replied that he would probably attack on 17 March.
Tonight, Monday 15 March 1915, Carden had a nervous breakdown. He had to relinquish his command and sail home immediately.
On 17 March Churchill appointed Carden’s second, Vice-Admiral John de Robeck, to command what Churchill called ‘the Mediterranean Detached Fleet’ (it included a French squadron) and de Robeck promptly told him that, weather permitting, he was going to attack the forts at the Narrows next day.
Next entry: 18 March 1915
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
It must have taken great self-control for George to concentrate on making a full synopsis of his book Tahiti when he was home on weekend leave, rather than simply keep writing it. But it was certainly the most rational approach. It must also have taken him a long time, as it had to be detailed. ‘Some parts of the book were practically finished,’ Kittie wrote in her Preface (1921), ‘others existed in many forms [my italics].’ Then there were diaries and ‘papers’ from which she had to make ‘direct selections’, and ‘very often the same matter was found in different versions’. In the synopsis, he had to make the source of the various elements of the composition that were to be fletched onto the timeline as clear as possible. What Kittie made from his synopsis is a masterpiece.
Although I have a whole chapter in my biography devoted to what he did on Tahiti in 1906, reconstructed from both his own account and information kindly supplied to me by the Tahitian authorities today, I shall not be looking at Tahiti as a work of art until I get to the year 1921 in the chapter I am about to write — about Kittie’s life 1915-22. I will be very short of space, but I have been re-reading and thinking about the book for years, so it will be a huge pleasure to commit my conclusions to paper.
Tahiti has a clear set of strands: the ‘road’, Tahitian people, music, pre-Christian religion and customs, the French administration, ‘getting back to nature’, rampant sectarianism, the baleful touch of ‘Civilisation’… But from the literary point of view, the most interesting question is: how fictive is this ‘travelogue’? When I researched the biographical Tahiti chapter, it soon became clear that George had changed certain names, e.g. of the ship he arrived on and French officials. But his own note, reproduced by Kittie in her Preface, suggests something rather different:
Everything set down in this book is true. I have thought it important, for a right understanding of individual lives, and thereby a conglomeration of detail, to give a picture of the whole, to put down personal details which I have been told or found out about people. The only untruth is that I have sufficiently disguised the personality of those of whom they are told, so that no one should recognise them.
Unless ‘personality’ meant for Edwardians something closer to ‘identity’ (which is not confirmed by dictionaries), George is saying that not only did he change people’s names, he changed their characters. Does this mean that, for instance, the unique, idiosyncratic, charming Tahiri-i-te-rai and Tupuna were not in fact like that? The suspicion reminds me of our discussion a few days ago about when is a biography actually fiction!
Just possibly, one can see this at work in some of the pencil sketches and watercolours that he produced. Perhaps the reason he did not intend the watercolour I showed in my blog of 27 February to be published, and did not put the woman’s name on it, is that it was imaginary — his private idea of what Rarahu, the heroine of Loti’s Le Mariage de Loti, looked like? Compositionally it has several resemblances to Loti’s own drawing. Then I have long been intrigued by the sketch entitled ‘(Manu)’ that Kittie included in Tahiti. This is the sketch I have reproduced above right. In technique, intensity and wistfulness it always struck me as different from the rest. Then about three years ago I suddenly realised it reminded me of the figure in the left of Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ — the figure reproduced on the left above.
We know that George was deeply interested in Gauguin’s art, because he visited the famous First Exhibition of Post-Impressionist Paintings in London in 1910, which included thirty-six of Gauguin’s paintings, and wrote about it in the New Age. ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ was not shown in that exhibition, and I have been unable to track its ownership from, say, 1906 to 1914. But could George have seen a reproduction after he got back from Tahiti and drawn ‘(Manu)’ then, because he was reminded of her by the Gauguin figure? As with the ‘Rarahu’ painting, there are some distinct resemblances. It is also interesting that he has put ‘Manu’ in brackets, as though it was not ‘really’ her, not actually done from life. Not all of the drawings/paintings reproduced in Tahiti have the names of their sitters on, but ‘Manu’ is the only one enclosed in brackets.
The other thing we have to remember is that the writing of Tahiti was an act of creative hysteresis, i.e. the creation came years after the cause. So, as Kittie stresses, it was a work of memory…and memory of course massages fact. Although it contains its barbed wire, syphilis, and brutes, is the Tahiti of George’s book an imagined world, a fictive one, and how close are those qualities to imaginariness and fictitiousness?
I have a predilection for this image of Tahiti myself, because in the winter of 1972/73 in Moscow, surrounded by informers, KGB microphones, queuing, freezing fog, lies and mass psychosis, I came across a Soviet reproduction of ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ in a pack of postcards sold at a tobacco kiosk. Along with other ‘icons’, including sensu stricto Rublev’s ‘Trinity’, I stuck it on the snot-green wallpaper above my work table in the student hostel on Lenin Hills.
People will say that it is quite obvious what the ‘message’ of this painting is from the central position of the blossoms and the breasts, but in my experience your eye very quickly fixes on the girls’ faces, which are so different, yet filled with the same gentleness, nobility, and security. The painting, even in this oddly coloured reproduction, helped me survive a year in the Soviet Union as a postgraduate.
Soviet postcard reproduction, c.1970, of Gauguin’s ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’
Sometime in 1973 I wrote:
Those girls, they stand there simply, offering
perhaps the future, or the murdered past.
Oh love-red blossom, and on golden skin
ash blue and faded mauve and deepest Pasque.She is still giving, strongest trust; yet looks
a little to the side, beyond us here.
The other whispered softly to her, coaxed,
but almost hides her own pale, thornless briar.
(First published in Iota, no. 37, 1997)
Next entry: 15 March 1915: The strain tells
New followers of the blog deserve an explanation, I feel, of why the last four posts have been purely military and what stage ‘Calderonia’ is at.
The main object of the blog is to follow the last year of writer George Calderon’s life in a kind of ‘real time’, i.e. by posting events and documents exactly a hundred years after they happened. We need to contextualise these by keeping track of other, simultaneous developments — military, social, political — that impacted, however obliquely, on Calderon’s life. Concurrently, when there is time I discuss any theme that arises, e.g. Edwardian semantics, George’s Chekhov translations, or the writing of my 160,000-word biography, which is now almost finished. (Another theme is, please consider Leaving a Comment on the blog rather than e-mailing me or writing, so that your views can be shared directly with other followers.)
On 9 January 1915, at the age of forty-six, George was given a commission as lieutenant with the 9th Ox and Bucks. Shortly after he moved with them into Fort Brockhurst at Gosport, the whole battalion went down with flu and tonsilitis, and he was very ill. About the middle of February 1915 he was well enough to come home to Hampstead on sick leave. My guess is that he returned to Fort Brockhurst and his military training in the first week of March 1915 (see post of 3 March 2015).
Unfortunately, we have no personal documents relating to Calderon’s life between the beginning of February and the middle of April 1915. This could be because, as his wife Kittie’s memoirs tell us, he was home Friday-Monday every weekend. However, George was a pretty prolific letter-writer and one of the purposes of his letters home from military service was to provide a record of his experiences for a later book. It seems quite possible, therefore, that he wrote home in this period but that some of his letters were concerned with Kittie’s attempts to persuade him to give up active service and work on the home front. He was unresponsive to her arguments, and those of many of his friends. So she may well have destroyed this part of their correspondence.
Rest assured, from the middle of April we can resume the story of George’s life in much more continuous ‘real time’, with some wonderful personal documents. Meanwhile, my supposition is that on weekend leave, amongst other things, George worked on a synopsis of his travel book Tahiti which would enable Kittie to assemble it if he did not return from the War, and on his last play The Lamp, which she was similarly able to complete for publication. Tomorrow, then, I will look at aspects of Tahiti (see also my blogs of 27 February and 1 March), and subsequently I shall discuss The Lamp.
On the military front, my priority will be to keep in step with developments at the Dardenelles. For a superb recent interview on the subject, go to:
http://www.historyanswers.co.uk/history-of-war/the-blunder-of-gallipoli-a-failed-campaign-dissected/
Next entry: Tahiti: an imagined world?
Biography and the limits of non-fiction
I keep dipping into Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life. It’s very compulsive reading, but I don’t have time at the moment to let it run away with me as I would wish. Nevertheless, I’ve read enough both of the ‘diary’ Scurr has produced and her Introduction to be able to say that they certainly challenge received ideas about biography. I shall try to get to grips with her innovativeness before long, but in the meantime any follower who has read Scurr’s book is very welcome to get the ball rolling by leaving a Comment to this post.
In my post of 6 March I touched on several issues that Ruth Scurr raised in an essay in The Guardian, but underlying them all was my wariness, unease, about bringing biography closer and closer to fiction, in fact novelising it. I fret equally, though, over the opposite question: whether a biography can be one hundred per cent non-fiction — whether it is possible to keep elements of fiction out!
Take my last two posts. They are predicated on the ‘fact’ that George Calderon was home on leave from the 9th Battalion Ox and Bucks at Fort Brockhurst from Good Friday to Easter Monday 1915. My reasons for believing this are:
1. Kittie in her memoirs says he regularly came home ‘for Friday-to-Monday leave’.
2. I would expect him to want to be home with her at Easter.
3. The very last of George and Kittie’s 247 books to be found (2013) is Thomas Sturge Moore’s Hark to These Three Talk about Style (London, Elkin Matthews, 1915), and in the front is the inscription: To Mr & Mrs Calderon a token of a neighbourly Easter from the author. 1915. For the Calderons’ close relations with their neighbours the Sturge Moore family at 40 Well Walk, see my post of 20 November 2014 and others. It seems unlikely that Sturge Moore could have written this inscription if both George and Kittie were not there to give the book to.
Yet it takes, perhaps, a conscious effort to remind oneself that it is still not a FACT that George was at home at Easter. For that one would need a dated letter or document to say so. Thus non-fiction has here effortlessly drifted into fiction…or fiction effortlessly crept into non-fiction. And it is all too easy for the biographer to let this happen.
Sturge Moore’s book, incidentally, is a veritable repository of Edwardian aesthetics. There is no evidence that George read it, but I would dearly have liked to know what he thought of it. There is evidence that he found the whole notion of ‘style’ dubious. He seems to have felt that the man was the style and the man had to have something to say. In January 1899, when Kittie and he were sharing their critical views in correspondence, he wrote:
Next entry: Two separate biographies