Source?

Can anyone identify the text below? If so, please leave the answer in a Comment, explaining how you arrived at it! A free copy of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius or Anton Chekhov: A Short Life will be yours if you are right and would like one.

Click the image to enlarge.

In the past year, from a previous state of immunity, I have been acting as literary executor to three separate people. Amongst the meticulously prepared teaching materials of my old Russian supervisor, the late Dr Peter Squire, I came across twenty photocopies of this text, which was evidently intended for translation by students into Russian. Unusually, Peter had not supplied the name of the author at the end. But it’s such an amusing and interesting piece, I think, that I would like to know who wrote it — and read the rest. My first guess was that it was by George Orwell, but I can’t find it in his essays.

It’s interesting for a number of reasons. First, is what the author says about the ‘peculiar quality of English patience’ true? (It does correspond to my own experience of sixty years ago in a small rather self-contained south coast town, but aren’t we all far more ‘swift to wrath’ these days?) Second, is the ‘peculiar quality of English patience’ really ‘rooted in self-confidence’? Surely it is more likely to be rooted in procrastination and a lack of confidence about how to handle the situation? Isn’t the act of ‘dropping someone like a stone’ after putting up with them for years cruel and vindictive, as you’ve never given them the least inkling you’re like that, i.e. not actually a saint? Isn’t it an admission of defeat? Isn’t it a symptom of one’s own emotional inadequacy, as one’s not developed the ‘interpersonal skills’ to avoid such drastic and final action? And so on…

I think we should be told.

A special case is when men simply walk out of a house and marriage. There have been half a dozen instances of this in my acquaintance, but I don’t know of a woman who has done it.  The marriages or relationships were between three and thirty years long and in one case even the police could not trace the exiter. One wonders, of course, whether the couples had been discussing their differences, or rowing, for years and the man felt he had reached a last straw moment, but that’s not the impression I received. It looked more like the bloke having decided that it was useless discussing their differences and his only course was to walk. Indeed, one woman stopped me in the street to tell me her partner had walked out but she had had no warning and did not have a clue why he had done it. (To me it seemed clear that they were incompatible, but that begs the question.) Whichever way you look at it, it’s cruel to do it, but I fear it’s just ‘the peculiar quality of English patience’ in action. Confronting the problem is judged too complex, time-consuming or doomed to failure. Another explanation is that both the ‘patience’ (‘putting up with it for years’) and the sudden ‘dropping’ convince the dropper that he’s both virtuous and in control.

About twenty-five years ago I was at an academic garden party and slagged off the university department I had been teaching in to the two people I was talking to. I then distinctly heard a husband and wife fifteen feet away agree that they were dropping me from their dinner party and Christmas card list! For me too it was a great relief.

ADVERTISEMENT

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.