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Thank you so much for this wonderful recollection of Mr Prynne. In case of interest, my own, which concerns Prynne in the 1990s, is here: https://catherinebrown.org/mr-prynne-at-caius-college-cambridge/

I am still waiting for news of a memorial service.

In the meantime it is possible for anyone to contribute to a book of condolence held in Caius chapel, or to send memories for possible inclusion in a future book; see:
https://www.cai.cam.ac.uk/news/jeremy-prynne-1936-2026

Rereading my own piece, it strikes me that Mr Prynne’s teaching was the very pinnacle of what Oxbridge – or any university – teaching has been or could ever be.

well, i had a shock when you said you’d acquired a dog but then i saw it wasn’t. i have nothing against dogs though i prefer cats but fiona is very opposed to dogs or rather their owners, its a problem here in posh holt where owners assume everyone is going to love their dogs as much as they do and march down the pavement with one or two on leads she’s not going to stand aside any more but is going to walk straight towards them and if dogs are let loose on heathland they ruin the bird life and so on…

What a pitch perfect short story: crisp, graphic, nostalgic, evocative and mischievous.
The injustice of schoolboy punishments comes in many forms, is never forgotten and is definitely character forming. A long time ago, shortly before the playground incident referred to in Melmoth’s story, two boys in their last year at a state primary school in South-East London were busily occupied in removing coat pegs from the school cloakroom – for no obvious reason. Their endeavours were interrupted by their class teacher (no forms in state primaries) whose understanding of justice was even more flawed than the biology teacher’s. One of the boys had an angelic face and golden curls and was told to go back to the classroom and do some work. The other, scruffy and with a slight overbite, was told to report to the headmaster immediately and explain himself. The second boy mounted the stairs to the headmaster’s study fearing the worst. The man was a tartar. Only a few weeks before, he had caned the younger brother of a girl in the boy’s class, then summoned the girl and torn her off a strip for having such an errant sibling! It was six of the best at the very least. Much to the boy’s amazement, he returned to his classroom without a bruise on him. Having duly reported to the headmaster his egregious sin, the head had let him off with a reprimand. ‘You deserve to be caned, young man, but you are too clever and caning will do you no good.’ Needless to say, the lucky escape did not cure the second boy of defacing public property, though he eventually grew out of it. It did, though, teach him, much more than later reading Aristotle ever did, that justice is seldom evenly dispensed, and that, given his brains, if he only smartened up and got his teeth fixed, he could get away with murder.

A brilliantly evocative and thought-provoking medley of observations that would not be out of place in ‘The collected life of a flat-cap penguin’ (your words, only slightly re-arranged). Please don’t protest that you are too old – I’ve just had an email from the son of one of my Group Photograph chaps – he’s just started to put together a book about his father, and he’s 97! More power to you from a fellow bibliomaniac.

Horace Hare’s acid and immensely readable Oxford Confessions deserve to sell even more pleasingly than Yale classicist Erich Segal’s Harvard/Radcliffe smash-hit weepie, Love Story. Paramount Pictures made a fortune in the early 1970s from the film adaptation of Segal’s story, starring Ryan O’Neal and Ali MacGraw (‘Love means never having to say you’re sorry’). Wake up Netflix! Who better than Ralph Fiennes for the role of the machinating Professor Hare? And Jessie Buckley would of course be a shoo-in for the spellbinding Irish phantom who has him in thrall…

If I may be so bold I’ll throw into the Oxford quad Javier Marias’s novel, All Souls. Here’s a taste, courtesy of Penguin and Amazon: “At High Table in an Oxford College, the pretty, young tutor Clare Bayes attracted all eyes, not least to her fetching decolletage. No one’s eyes were sharper, however, than those of the visiting Spanish lecturer, invited as a guest on this occasion. In due course, the two young people were lovers, unbeknown to Clare’s husband. And if the Spaniard was at pains to cover their tracks, his beloved left evidence of adultery with gay abandon — and all this in a university that was a forcing house of gossip and intrigue, a place where ‘at every word a reputation dies’. This affair between the canny Latin and the flightly Englishwoman forms the central thread in a brilliantly-wrought tapestry of Oxford life, at once affectionate in its insight and hilarious in its ironic portrayals of Senior Common Room worthies.”

Dear Patrick, I wish you and Jim well in this new venture!
Theo

A beautiful and highly evocative translation … and very Brodsky in mood and voice.

Patrick Miles recommends three stories from the recent Penguin Archive reprint of a short-story collection titled The New Dress by Virginia Woolf. Let me suggest a fourth, ‘Solid Objects’ (written in 1918 and first published in The Athenaeum in 1920), which may be of particular interest to Calderonians for its opening thumbnail sketch of two argumentative Edwardian gentlemen taking a morning stroll along the shoreline of a sandy beach of a wide semicircular English bay.

We first glimpse the young men as an isolated black dot – an amoeba, one might say – that, as it approaches, grows larger and then sprouts four legs before dividing in two: ‘there was an unmistakable vitality in them; an indescribable vigour in the approach and withdrawal of their bodies’. One of the men, Charles, appears to be asserting his case chiefly with his walking-stick by cutting ‘long straight stripes in the sand’. (No Edwardian country gentleman was wholly complete without his unadorned ash walking-stick, useful for slashing at bracken and brambles – and soon, in 1914, one may surmise, to be replaced by an equally theatrical swagger stick.)

‘Politics be dammed!’ declares John, the other man. And, ‘as these words were uttered, the mouths, noses, chins, little moustaches, tweed caps, rough boots, shooting coats, and check stockings of the two speakers became clearer and clearer; the smoke from their pipes went up into the air; nothing was so solid, so hard, red, hirsute and virile as those two bodies for miles and miles of sea and sandhill’.

But that assurance, that hard red hirsute virility is an illusion as the author reminds us when the men fling themselves down by the six ribs and black spine of a stranded pilchard boat to eat their sandwiches. The two parts of that black speck are about to separate irrevocably. John burrows his fingers in the sand and comes up with an opaque smoothed piece of green sea glass. At which point the author floods the story with her imaginative speculation on the history of the glass. ‘Perhaps after all it was really a gem; something worn by a dark Princess trailing her finger in the water as she sat in the stern of the boat and listened to the slaves singing as they rowed her across the Bay.’

Politics be damned, indeed! The dark Princess’s barge, unlike her gem, will last no longer than the stranded pilchard boat. (The latter a plausible omen of the coming War.) All of which sparks something in John, the hard virile pipe-smoking Edwardian, and sets him on a tormented lifelong quest, abandoning the law and the glories of the House of Commons, for, it might be said, a more honest life (that Bloomsbury ambition) and for things more permanent – unique ‘solid objects’ – which will cause him to speculate about the nature of being – and above all perhaps to exercise his imagination: undertaking a voyage into the nature of real being rather than, like his friend Charles, resigning himself to becoming dead-calmed in the issues and ideas of the moment.

Thank you for leaving this wonderful comment. I am so moved: you have brought the very spot almost unbearably close on this the 110th anniversary. Like George Calderon, your great-uncle was a man of true bravery doing the best for his country and its values.

Thank you so much for putting this online. My great-uncle, Private William Pitt, served with the 4th Btn. Worcestershire Regiment. He was posthumously mentioned in despatches for his actions during both the Second and Third Battles of Krithia. Using the detailed information above, my brother and I were able to visit the very field where he must have been killed, just west of the Twelve Tree Copse cemetery. William has no known grave and is commemorated on the Helles Monument, near where he landed, instead. The hallowed ground is now cropped, leaving no sign of the trenches, so we carefully skirted around the edge of some scrubby oak woodland until we reached the top of the Gully slope on the left flank. We were confident that the Worcesters fought to the right and front of where we stood. Eye witness accounts say they reached their objectives, taking many prisoners in each trench they crossed, but had to retreat when Ottoman reinforcements arrived. We had lunch in a small cafe in Krithia (now Alcitepe) and visited a rudimentary museum displaying the debris collected by local farmers. Throughout our stay, in 2022, the Turkish people were fantastically friendly and welcoming. Huge investment is going into battlefield tourism, making the whole of Gallipoli easier than ever to explore. We paid our respects at the huge Turkish Monument on the peninsula, knowing that, sadly, similar fighting was taking place in Ukraine, at that very moment, not very far to the north of us.

A wonderful post. John, I’ve always adored your writings about Merchant Ivory and would love to chat more about them someday. I teach cinema at the University of Oregon, where James Ivory graduated and there is a substantial archive devoted to the papers of James Ivory and Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. Your knack for appreciating the value of little details like a game of bumble puppy in enhancing the settings of their films is second to none.

Dear Katy, it’s lovely to hear from you again! I hope you are well down there in Kent. Would you believe it, I too typed in that first line, as I thought it was perhaps the most identifiable string of words, but nothing came up. Thank you! All best wishes, Patrick

Pipped to the post! I typed in the first line line of the 2nd paragraph and it came up straight away to the source on Faded Page.

Unpopular Opinions by Dorothy L Sayers, that’s the source of the quote.

Many, many thanks for reprising, Johnnie, for I know how busy you are.

How serendipitous that you had just seen a ‘live’ performance of Murnau’s b&w Sunrise! I gather from Wikipedia that it is considered one of the greatest films ever made and ‘many have called it the greatest film of the silent era’.

Obviously, the programme writer’s statement that the audience in Kent would not have wanted Sunrise made in colour because they felt it was ‘so entirely of itself and of its time’ appears to beg the question! But I do, I think, understand what is meant. Although ‘of its time’, the audience were not watching it for historical reasons — in a past time, as it were, for its window on the past — but entirely for its present human truth, its existential power now (‘entirely of itself’?) — yet the b&w gives the experience that extra perspective of time that convinces us that we are tied to those humans depicted. I feel that the depth of ‘time’ that b&w gives can enhance the ‘universal’ power of the film experience, in The Lady with the Little Dog too. It’s why I feel that modern costume in a Greek tragedy, say, or Shakespeare or Chekhov, can be impoverishing, not enriching. People are more than capable, surely, of handling the distance in time that b&w or historical costume conveys and it deepens their experience?

Just three of the things I noticed in watching Heifitz’s film again after fifty years. First, I was astonished to see that my old friend Georgii Abramovich Bialyi was the first consultant to it. Bialyi was an Academician and the greatest Soviet authority on Chekhov’s early (1880-88) short stories. It was quite possibly he, therefore, who suggested interpolating in the film the scene in a ghastly restaurant where Gurov’s colleague gets drunker and drunker, confesses that he hates his wife because she only married him for his money, and pays a waiter to grunt like a pig. This is a dramatisation of Chekhov’s 1887 story ‘The Drunks’, using some of Chekhov’s own words and a reference to another early short story by him. Second, considering that Stalin had deported the Crimean Tatars only 16 years before, it is amazing that Heifitz should dare to depict them living quite naturally and as Moslems at Yalta in his film — even introducing a beautiful scene of the Tatar coachman praying at dawn on the skyline at Oreanda. (Khrushchev had, however, denounced Stalin’s ethnic deportations in his ‘secret speech’ the year before the film.) Finally, Heifitz’s use of the burning and dripping candle as a symbol of Gurov’s and Anna Sergeevna’s passionate love would inevitably remind Russian viewers of Pasternak’s poem ‘A blizzard swept over all the land…’ with its refrain Svecha gorela na stole (‘The candle burned on the table’); this poem had been printed and made its mark by 1960, but few would know that it was actually ‘written by Doctor Zhivago’ and featured in the last chapter of the novel.

March 8, 2025: Last evening, I watched a digital transfer of a black-and-white movie, made by an expatriate German in California nearly a hundred years ago, in a packed town hall in West Kent. Accompanying this famous film, F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, were two renowned musicians, a harpist, Elizabeth-Jane Baldry, and a multi-instrumentalist, Stephen Horne, who had played, live, at other ‘authentic’ screenings of this movie – but never, before yesterday, together.

Sunrise is on many levels an unquestionably great and enduring film, that is to say it’s actually survived in viewing copies (as well as in a digital transfer) not just in archive preservation prints, but it’s also a deeply sentimental one with the unabashed treacly sentimentality of times past – an unnamed farmer (George O’Brien) is bewitched by a city vamp and induced by her to undertake the heartless drowning of his petite, wide-eyed wife (Janet Gaynor)… It’s a love story, told in the starkest of terms, and touched by humour, breathtaking production design and astonishing visual effects, in a very different Hollywood register from Lenfilm’s The Lady with the Little Dog: one might call it unsophisticated, certainly not by any measure ‘Chekhovian’, appealing to the heart rather than the head. But to watch it now, as I did under optimal conditions in a packed auditorium with two musicians utterly invested in the task of bringing an old silent b&w film back to life and relevance, was to have experienced something rare and unforgettable.

‘The Fleapit Cinema Club’, run entirely by volunteers, which put on the screening, concluded its programme notes on Sunrise with the following paragraph: ‘The film is precious, not least because it belongs to a lost time – it’s one of the silent era’s last hurrahs. At its close you will have forgotten – unless you have a heart of stone – the flashy allure of Woman from the City and fallen for Man, Wife and their rustic charm. Likewise, you couldn’t watch this film and wish it were made in colour. It’s perfect as it is, a monochrome fairytale.’

Indeed, but – Why did we wish it was not made in colour..? Because, perhaps, it was so entirely of itself and of its time. This b&w world was one that audiences knew and instinctively understood (in 1927; at Cannes in 1960; and even today – when we queue to buy tickets to a movie such as the Oscar-winning Roma. One does not require or expect ‘colour’ in a Dürer woodcut or when we watch Chaplin’s Tramp bowing, nervously smiling and politely lifting his black bowler hat.

Your response here is (obviously) deeply informed… Thank you very much indeed. In comparing the coach ride to Simferopol in Heifitz’s film with the chariot race in Ben-Hur you have, I think, chosen the perfect epitome of the differing impacts of b&w and Technicolor; their different aesthetic and intentional possibilities!

I continue to wonder what it is about b&w that seems inherently more ‘serious’. Most bibles are black, we are all brought up on black print on a white page, of course, and I knew a professional photographer who would only produce portraits of politicians in black and white (the difference between a b&w portrait of Harold Wilson and a colour one is really bewildering). Perhaps we are affected by a sense that b&w is ‘the Word’. Historical photographs tend to be sepia or black and white, of course, too. Although I entirely agree that by 1960 b&w camerawork must have been as natural to Heifitz as breathing, I cannot help feeling that the b&w of The Lady with the Little Dog also implies seriousness and historicity, and that he was well aware of that. I think it is also possible that the Soviet censors wanted to make sure the picture of prerevolutionary life (evoked with amazing natural authenticity by Heifitz and his actors) was not too glamorous, so they ordered him to use monochrome. (One must remember that it was a ‘command economy’; perhaps the slight sense of over-length and over-slowness in the film is the result of Heifitz having been allotted celluloid for a film of 90 minutes, so he simply had to use it all up — ‘fulfil the norm’.) The obligatory ‘satire’ of prerevolutionary life is in the gallery of posh, bloated and grotesque characters, very reminiscent of the Kukryniksy political cartoonists’ work, so the film does have a thick stratum of the historical criticism that was de rigueur at the time and this must have amply satisfied the censors; fortunately, these caricatures are played by brilliant old Stanislavskian actors and the core story is unaffected by them.

Incidentally, the footage of the coach hurtling round the bend, piled high with luggage and Ralph the dog, made me roar with laughter, as it looks like a cowboy film! Rather than a Wells Fargo stagecoach, I had always imagined the ‘fly’ that Anna Sergeyevna ‘hires’ as an open carriage (hence Harvey’s choice of the latter word) for just the two of them, but I must be wrong.

I would naturally welcome any more observations from you about details of the film, if you have time and inclination.

Black-and-white camerawork was, I suspect, as natural to the director of The Lady with the Little Dog as breathing in and out or eating his breakfast. I doubt that he was compelled to use b&w stock. It was – this element of his art, one among many – quite simply both appropriate and aesthetically satisfying. Imagine for a moment that the famous chariot race in Ben-Hur had been filmed in monochrome not Technicolor; or that the memorable, punctuating landscape shot in Heifitz’s film of a carriage slowly crossing a hillside had been captured in slightly-off greens and browns rather than in subtle tones of shaded black – neither would have been judged fit for purpose. The contrast in Ben-Hur between the teams of grey and black horses, the red and gold of the opposing chariots would have been lost. Colour accented the speed of the race, the flying sand, the spinning wheels. In The Lady with the Little Dog, in that landscape shot, all attention must be focused on the carriage, which like the lovers themselves appeared to be going precisely nowhere – and the hillside had to be a neutral, one might almost say, a disinterested backdrop. Had Heiftz shot his film in colour (expensive colour) it might have prefigured that colourised still of Iya Savvina – which is after all simply a deeply inauthentic computer-generated image.

We are deeply favoured and honoured to publish on Calderonia the eminent film critic John Pym’s magnificent tribute to Heifitz’s film The Lady with the Little Dog, perfectly complementing Harvey Pitcher’s new translation of Chekhov’s story featured in December and January posts. Pym has entirely resuscitated my interest in the film, which I first saw in about 1968. I have just watched it twice at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_8MwK0EvJ5A and am, I admit, overwhelmed. Naturally, I have understood and enjoyed far, far more in the film than nearly sixty years ago. Without exaggeration, I now find it infinitely subtle; quite possibly, even, great art. There are many new aspects that I would like to place on record in Comments, but I will confine myself in this one to asking our guest writer what, for him, is the essential difference in our reception of a black and white film from a colour one? How do the impacts differ? Is this absolutely recognised in the film world, even today? In 1960 Heifitz could have produced a colour film, like the gorgeous Soviet Anna Karenina of a few years later, but he decided not to, or his censors insisted on black and white (quite possible). Why did he choose b&w, if he did, and why might they have insisted on b&w if they did?

Michael Pursglove was my Russian language and literature tutor also in University of Ulster from 1971 -1975.I did not pursue a career in it which I often regret. However thanks in a large part to Mike”s influence I have maintained a love of Russian language ,literature and customs. I have taken some of my children to visit Moscow and St Petersburg.Recently I had a 50 year celebration party with some of my fellow students from English Universities who were in Belarus for 3 months in 1974.My then roommate actually remembered that I was writing a dissertation on Shamil supervised by Mike!
He was an excellent lecturer- straightforward and fair and a really nice human being.

Hoping he and his family are well.

We are all, followers and occasional contributors, beholden to you, Patrick, for reminding us for ten years that the past is worth remembering and for keeping alive the memory of George and Kittie. You have blown the dust off the Edwardian Age. Thank you many times over. JNP

Male Professionals in Nineteenth Century Britain was a new departure for me. For most of my adult life I have worked on seventeenth and eighteenth century France. It is also principally a work of socio-economic history and I would see myself as a socio-cultural historian. In one important respect, however, it has allowed me to pursue a question which directly relates to my previous interests: when did the Republic of Letters end? I have written extensively about the Republic of Letters in the past. What was its size? From what sections of European society did it draw its members? How did this virtual Republic hold together? But hitherto I had not said anything of substance about its demise.

The general assumption, which seems fair, is that the Republic was doomed from the end of the eighteenth century once knowledge became specialised and research in the arts and sciences was institutionalised in universities and academies. Thereafter, the amateur polymath, often only pursuing his intellectual interests in his leisure hours and principally reliant on his own library, laboratory and botanical garden, could not compete with salaried professionals.

Dating precisely the demise of the Republic, on the other hand, is difficult. This is especially the case in Britain where gentleman amateurs continued to make a splash throughout the nineteenth century – think of Darwin – and where few university post-holders showed any inclination to do serious research before the end of the First World War. My current book, I feel, has helped to pinpoint the moment the Republic died in this country with some accuracy. The mainstay of the Republic had always been members of the three traditional professions, if only because they had had the training in Latin which remained Europe’s learned lingua franca until 1800. It was interesting to discover therefore that among the 750+ professionals that form the core of my study, there were always two or three, even in small provincial towns, who were active as antiquarians, natural historians, astronomers and so on. Most, like the solicitor William Dickson of Alnwick, had a local reputation: they belonged to local learned societies and published on local history and the local flora and fauna. But a few had a national and international renown, notably the Leeds doctor Charles Chadwick who was responsible for the British Association for the Advancement of Science holding its annual conference in the town in 1858.

These republicans of letters belonged to a generation of professionals who were in their prime in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Among the sons and grandsons of the 750, the only individuals who made any contribution to the advancement of learning were the few who held university positions. My cohort of 750 were part of Darwin’s generation. Darwin could exist and flourish because the British Republic of Letters was still alive when he too was in his prime. When he died in 1882 that Republic was all but dead as well.

My book suggests in addition that what killed it off was not just scientific specialism and professionalisation but the rise of the modern family with its emphasis on mutual affection and domestic responsibilities. Besides his intellectual interests, Dickson was a JP, chair of the local health board, and a poor-law guardian. Mrs Dickson and the children could never have seen him. His sons followed him into the law; but neither showed any enthusiasm for his leisure activities. Arguably, Dickens and his fellow Victorian novelists, who had promoted the virtues of a companionate marriage more than anyone, had had a limited effect on the behaviour of the males of their own generation but had worked their magic on the next.

Excellent entry, Dad. I like the escape room picture, of course, but the story about the Russian and the hole-in-the-wall is exceptional!

Delicious! “Are you being Served?” meets “Keeping up Appearances” via Calderotica. But Patrick, you cannot leave us dangling like that just before Christmas!

One thing – could you perhaps post part II after the watershed? Reading this whilst preparing breakfast, I nearly spilt milk on my corduroys!

Patrick: I read your story ‘Black Tie’ on Monday, and knew immediately that it didn’t work for me. There was something forced, factitious; something that didn’t let the elements click together. But I also knew I would have to come back to it in order to understand why.

I have read it again today and think I can explain. It seems to me that the story doesn’t know from the outset where it’s going; it is flawed, hobbled, by a betraying uncertainty of tone. Is it another campus comedy, in the Sharpe/Bradbury/Lodge tradition, or does it unexpectedly fall down a shaft into something deeper? It starts out, with Jonathan Palmer, as broad comedy; the narrowed down Dante PhD, the 6 medics in the house, the (improbable, but this doesn’t matter) sexual episode in the bath. The surreal detail of the table on the roof is excellent! But then death intervenes. Hang on…is this just going to be an excuse for more jokes? Six Medics at a Funeral? At this point, we’re not sure. Then the parents of the dead boy are introduced, very respectfully (I like the rounding detail of the father ‘always on the verge of saying something’, without actually doing so. This could go either way). They stay over in college rooms: improbable again, I find, but this time it does matter, because we are into a different register. Your central character JP decides to go to the funeral: quite in order.

But from here on, I think, the story loses control. Not only is the act of borrowing the black tie very awkwardly expressed (his request of the college servant is ‘met with gravity’; doesn’t the phrase itself wince?) but the narrative then goes haywire. The funeral service is conventional enough, but then the actual burial takes Jonathan into deeper waters than he or we expected. With the phrase ‘This is when it hit him’; this where it changes gear. The sudden sense of alienation, the revulsion (mud as excrement), the loathing of the other people present. It is as if we have stumbled on Paddy Dignam’s funeral from Ulysses, by mistake. And what does poor Bakhtin have to do with all this? One might almost expect a triplet from The Inferno! It’s just as well, I think, that JP decides not to go to the wake, where he would no doubt have made an embarrassing exhibition of himself, and brought the college into disrepute.

Patrick: I apologize for the fact that none of this is very helpful. (Unless there are two stories here that need to be teased apart.) But the last point made here, about the college, prompts another general reflection about your Cambridge stories — some of which, as you know, I really like. But is it possible that the very social structure of the university and its colleges, the fish-tank artificiality of its strongly-marked hierarchy (senior academics, tutors, students, servants, and bedders), the exaggerated age and gender differences, the temporariness within fixity, is itself too laminated a basis for fiction? Too unyielding? Except perhaps to comedy, or (like your Beckettian Tower story) fiction of the unashamedly philosophical kind?

Morris Zapp knew his place, but I don’t think Jonathan Palmer knows his.

My dear contrite Patrick: you make me almost ashamed of what you kindly call my ‘archery’, so ready are you to own up to some youthful infelicities (or in-FionaFlytes?). Perhaps I should try throwing some boomerangs instead, to expose some of my own?

I thought of Pope’s account of his own reaction to criticism: ‘Did some more sober critic come abroad? / If wrong, I smil’d; if right, I kiss’d the rod.’ (Although Pope himself never did, of course.)

I sympathise and agree with your conclusion, looking back (and over), that there is not much that can be done to ‘correct’ one’s earlier work. The repair always shows; and doesn’t even have the merits of a good, self-declared piece of darning. And there’s something almost dishonest about it too; one thinks of the notorious case of Auden’s systematic rewriting (and occlusion) of his earlier work. Whatever one thinks of ‘cancel culture’, it is worse, I think, to replace a statue, or a story, with something that pretends always to have stood on the same plinth. The best thing, no doubt, is to accept that flies in amber are really flies, not butterflies; and to set out again, reheartened, with a new net. And it is good to know that this is precisely what you intend to do.

Thank you Patrick for your Monday morning entertainment — we certainly need some these days, other than the daily diet of human hideousness which actually taps on the window, and creeps over the sill.

But my dear Sir, prepare to find yourself as stuck full of arrows as Saint Sebastian. I have to say, with respect and with regret, that this (very early) story has many things wrong with it; some of which are attributable no doubt to the small and shuttered world of Cambridge studenthood. How ridiculous it (now) seems that examinations loomed like cliffs around us, blocking the view. And those intolerable sherry parties! Even rigid old Coriolanus learnt, ‘There is a world elsewhere.’ And should that world not be more present, at least by implication, even in a student story? As later revised?

But to begin at the beginning. I know the works of Chaucer have now been digitalized in the British Library, but this does not provide and excuse –even then– for starting your story with a medieval personalization of Morning at the window, disturbing your lovers. Or is this Phoebus, opening one of Spenser’s cantos in The Faerie Queene? Or Donne’s ‘busie unruly Sunne’? The strategy smells of the lamp, and this first sentence (with the symmetrical, bracketing last), surely has to go.

A further source of confusion: I first thought that Morning was going to be the name of the character; a doubt not entirely removed when his actual name turns out to be May!

Then it’s part of the ‘small world’ sense that the story itself brings to mind that of small animals in a cage, or young fish in an aquarium (both Stephen and the unnamed young lady later are described as babies). This is confirmed by the horror — yes, it is almost like Kurtz’s horror–of adult sexuality, which is fended off by the grotesque headlines that freeze poor Stephen, and never entered upon, even by implication, by the young lovers themselves. As we shall see, the story has another, comic denouement reserved for them; this being the moment that rescues the story, right at the end.

A couple of details. What is supposed to have happened to spotty Philip Potter? We are never told; though his fate is used as an ice-breaker between the young couple. And why does Fiona Flyte (the name is from the comedy drawer) have to marry an accountant? Accountants, and lawyers, turn up regularly as the off-stage villains in your stories!

More significantly, why are we never told the name of the girl in the wardrobe (where she is no doubt more comfortable than she was in bed)? This cannot have been an oversight…

But there are perhaps a few oversights in the writing itself, very unusual with you, which I will have the temerity to point out. In the paragraph with the horrible headlines, Stephen confesses to ‘going to one of them’ (where he is literally sick). One of what? I can detect no antecedent here. Then later, in the paragraph ‘Yes, there she was…,’ the word ‘suddenly’ is used, without chaperone, to be followed by ‘all of a sudden’ in the next paragraph; whereas a little later, the use of the word in modern stories is self-consciously castigated. What of the two earlier instances?

But I descend to small details here, and poor Saint Sebastian must be suffering unduly. So let me end by saying that the conclusion of the story is wonderfully comic, and I hope can be rescued in any redrafting you may be driven to. The theme of the strategies used by surprised lovers is a venerable one, with examples in Chaucer no less; though one thinks of countless examples in 18c novels and 19c farces (you will be able to call more to mind than I can). I recall Poe’s chilling version, in ‘The Cask of Amontillado’; but normally the scene is used for comic effect. There must be at least one in Chekhov (an inverse of the one about the bed that collapses under the unfortunate, legimate couple on honeymoon); and in Maupassant; and in any short-story writer worth their salt.

Any knocking on the door tonight will be kids for Hallowe’en…

Patrick: this latest story (from 1978!) has a lot in common with the one posted a few months ago, featuring crowds on a tower…and an extreme, Beckettian vulnerability on the part of the narrator, who cannot bear to be looked at, to be seen. Esse est percipi. Here, we have the other side of the coin – or another facet of the dice, to multiply the narratological possibilities? The character is again motivated, alarmed, by the ‘double string’ (old optics) of the eyes. But this time, his vulnerability is deflected by being projected outwards onto clothes; his own and others’. He suspects that it is his clothes that attract other people’s attention; but they are actually looking ‘at him‘.

By contrast, all the other extravagant apparitions seem to be completely at ease with themselves – whatever they look like to others. They are able to be ‘simply the thing I am’, not conditional on the percipi. Or so it seems to him, stripped down as he himself is to ‘the bare, forked animal’, feeling that ontological draught under his tweed. To survive in this world, he has to do what he does in the last paragraph: construct a tailored carapace of his own, within which he can feel comfortable – and change his name; to Morton, to Raffles.

I don’t know how you could write this story today, when everyone wears jeans, and there is not a monocle to be seen. Tattoos? Body piercings?

‘Did they not know, or were they in denial?’ – the inescapable question at the heart of the matter to which, I regret to say, I have no clear answer. It’s worth considering, however, why Yvonne Kapp, then in her sixties and having led a full life, contributing to many causes both political and non-political, chose to devote more than a decade of full-time, painstaking, health-damaging and virtually unpaid effort to recording in minute tapestry detail the life of Eleanor Marx. ‘Tussy’ was a hardworking, multifaceted, idealistic woman – one not wholly unlike Yvonne herself, but one who was a participant in the full tumult of the Victorian Age. She lived, it might be said, ‘Before the Fall’, in some sense in an Age of Innocence – and she died well before the decisive revolutionary moment of October 1917 and all that was to flow from it. Eleanor Marx was, in retrospect, cocooned from the future – a briar-patch future in which her biographer found herself so deeply embroiled and one in which Yvonne, I would guess, was sometimes required to close her eyes.

For me at least, the delicious thing about John Pym’s post is the fact that Yvonne and Margaret were elegant, highly intelligent, rather posh people, with civilised manners that extended to the tea ceremony, yet the constant unspoken truth is that their political beliefs were, in John Pym’s words, ‘an unarguable given’ — they believed, like Brecht and Hobsbawm, in a political system that was already responsible for the deaths of millions. (Did they not know, or were they in denial?) It is even hilarious when their beliefs knock against reality, as when Yvonne finds East Germany not exactly her Utopia. John Pym has written the perfect portrait of a certain type of British communist; and of a whole age.

A fascinating post, both the historical background and your own contact with your ‘first communist’. Thank you.

Patrick: I implore your indulgence (once again) for this crenellated crinoline comment.

In Günther Grass’s novel The Tin Drum
there is at least a point in crinolines;
Anna hides Joseph under hers, and he
takes full advantage and a child is born
who will be Oskar’s mother (now read on).
But what was Mrs Shapter doing
with such ridiculous encumbrances?
Hiding a Russian spy? A Romanov?
Icons or artefacts long undeclared
to Customs? No; it simply was the mode,
the custom, to dress women up like this,
a cultural repressiveness that made
a mockery of that most feminine,
Blake’s ‘human form divine.’ Luckily, George
was not required to jump through hoops like these
to get his Russian up to scratch…

Fabulous! How exciting not only to be able to fully identify a mysterious name but to have such detail to give flesh to the skeleton of history we’re often left with. Blessings to those who made drawings and annotations for those of us desperate for information in the future.

Dear Harvey, thank you for this powerful, beautifully compact post. Several people have told me how moving they find it, and Rabeneck’s account. I appreciate that the post sums up so much both for you personally and for Anglo-Russian relations.

That 2004 occasion does seem like a high point in genuine cultural exchange with Russia. In 1987, on behalf of the British Council, Alison and I organised the UK-USSR Colloquium in Cambridge entitled ‘Chekhov on the British Stage’, which had the personal endorsement of Gorbachev, and genuine cultural exchange in Chekhov studies flowered through the next decade. But by 2007 the eminent Chekhov scholars Mikhail Gromov, Lidiia Opul’skaia, Aleksandr Chudakov, Emma Polotskaia, and others, who had worked on the Academy edition of Chekhov and all passionately believed in Anglo-Russian contacts, were dead. In the next decade, Chekhov’s house in Yalta even became caught in the crossfire between Ukrainian nationalists and the Putin dictatorship.

I think Russians are ‘more finely tuned to other people’s emotions than we are’. They have had to be in order to survive in such a repressive and murderous society. With certain Russians — in the Soviet period, at least — I often felt that as I was speaking, they were reading my body language so skilfully and fast that they were four or five jumps ahead of me in the discourse. Also, I think Russians became so adept at reading emotions because they could not place any trust in the actual words their compatriots were uttering, as everyone in Soviet life indulged in coded speech or brazen vran’e (compulsive lying).

Can Russia pull itself out of the obsessive victimhood, paranoia, and nationalist-fascist coal sack it has thrust itself into? If not, I don’t see the good times in Anglo-Russian relations and cultural interchange returning in my lifetime, either.

Thank you Patrick for revisiting the ‘existential situation’ out of which your story (sort of) arose. I’ve not read as much Dostoevsky as you would think I shouldn’t have done, but I do remember the story — ‘The Double?’ — about the character haunted by his Doppelgänger. This must surely have been festering somewhere inside you also, at the time. (This story was once rather convincingly adapted for TV: early on, back in the 70s?.)

It’s fascinating to me, given the strong, almost magnetic parallels, that you did not know Beckett’s Film at the time. It’s as if ideas are around in the air like spores at a given time, and may be picked up by different writers and developed in different ways. And the more I reflect, the more I have to admire the way you can seize on a subject as it were out of the corner of your eye: certainly not the common stock that lies (often done to death!) in the middle of the road.

I’m intrigued, Patrick, by your (very) short story posted today. And not just by the description ‘brown-man,’ — Cambridge shorthand? — which puzzles me. No; it is the intensity of the emotion which is stimulated by the fact of being seen. More than simply paranoid, there is the hint of something existential.

And then something clicked, and I remembered Samuel Beckett’s bizarre text Film (published in 1967: included in Faber’s Complete Dramatic Works, pages 321-34). Beckett prefaces this text with the Berkeleyan axiom: Esse est percipi. And the drama is played out, visually, between percipi and percipere; seeing and being seen, being and being known or felt to be. Beckett’s own summary: ‘Search of non-being in flight from extraneous perception breaking down in inescapability of self-perception.’ (As another dramatist once put it: ‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all.’) Beckett’s character suffers ‘an agony of perceivedness’, very like the alarm/trauma of your ‘brown-man.’ He is disturbed by being observed by his dog, his cat, his parrot, and even a fish. More pointedly, by a print on the wall ‘of the face of God the Father, the eyes staring at him severely’. He then looks at a series of photographs of himself at different ages, in each of which he is being attentively observed; and all of which he tears up. Only at the end does Film make it clear that this is a parable of agonized self-consciousness.

Now, Patrick: is it not possible that you as a switched-on drama man might have known this text — or seen the film, which was made in 1965? And half-remembered it as you wrote your story. It’s uncanny that as he shrinks from being pointed at, your character also ends up with the photograph (of his shrunken self?) on the mantelpiece. Your story, one notes, is captioned by a Kafka drawing. Perhaps you were superintending a Cambridge confluence, here, of two masters of self-interrogation? Congratulations, anyway, to your younger and your older self!

The very perspective, rarely undisturbed by “redevelopments”,
the little brown man can still tight rope across from Caius to Great St Mary’s.

And Winifred’s 1939 diary entry for 11th July states that Kitty Calderon and Marchesa de Rosalis arrived at the Shelbourne. They lunched with the Verschoyles and then the Verschoyles brought them for a drive (a favourite pastime) to Lucan and the Phoenix Park. Then they dined.

Thanks very much Patrick. I wouldn’t recognise the Ospringe photos but Winifred’s greatniece ( grand-daughter of Dorothea Letts and her husband Arthur Williams, who lived in Ospringe) might. But that is for another day. The relationship may not be just literary – as Kitty was the daughter of John Hamilton (1800-1884) of Brown Hall and St Ernan’s Donegal, she was related to Winifred’s husband, William H.F. Verschoyle .
The relationship is difficult to work out but I think it is thus (using Burke’s Peerage and Virginia Mason’s book on the Verschoyle families):
Reverend William Henry Foster b. 1796, d. 1861
married in 1821
Catherine Hamilton b. 1803, d. 1873, the (half?)sister of John Hamilton above.

Rev William Henry Foster and Catherine Hamilton had 3 children including Catherine Helen Foster (married name Verschoyle) d.1901, who was the mother of Winifred Letts’s husband, WHF Verschoyle.

So Kittie was a first cousin of Catherine, mother of Winifred Letts’s husband … I think.

Looking at Letts’s 1927 diary, it appears that she visited the Hamilton home at Brown Hall and St Ernan’s for the first time in that year of 1927, a year after her marriage to the widower WHF Verschoyle.

Fascinating connections!
Thanks again

I am currently working on compiling information about the life and works of the writer and warpoet, Winifred M Letts (1882-1972), who married WHF Verschoyle in 1926 in Dublin. Letts’s 1937 diary (unpublished) tells of her journey from Dublin to stay with her sisters in Ospringe in midJuly 1937 and states that Kitty Calderon came to tea with Marchesa Louise de Ordono de Rosalis (July 17th 1937) and that, the following day, they ‘all went over to see Kitty at White Raven’, where Letts’ nephew took a lot of photographs. I wondered if there is any reference in Kitty’s 1937 diary to the same occasion or if there are any photos from the visit by any chance?

Two years and one day before the death of Chekhov, the Campanile, the famous old watchtower of Venice, collapsed into Saint Mark’s Square, miraculously avoiding damage to the Basilica and the Ducal Palace. The enormous pile of rubble became a magnet for scavengers – and soon fanciful photographs, postcards and engravings began to appear purporting to illustrate the magnitude of the catastrophe. A few days ago Sarah Quill, the eminent photographer who’s been recording the buildings of Venice since 1971, gave an illuminating lecture on the Fall and Rise of the Campanile to our local Fine Arts society illustrated with several of these ‘fakes’. One genuine photograph was embellished in the engraving made from it by the presence of several colourful long-skirted lady souvenir-hunters. By 1912 the Campanile, thanks to a huge national effort aided by outside benefactors, was triumphantly reopened – largely rebuilt from its own wreckage.

Nice to read this – if it’s the same Damian Grant, I remember some very enjoyable tutorials from my time as an undergraduate at Manchester University in the late 1980s.

Greatly taken by John Pym’s subtle post, I asked him if he could lend me back (as it were) the copy of Terminations illustrated — which I had never read — and this Mr Pym did. Needless to say, it’s a queer, light headed feeling, reading a copy inscribed by George, given by him to Kittie, and then cut by her as she read it; even though she does not appear to have left any annotations.

I found myself wondering why there seem to be no mentions of Henry James in the whole George Calderon corpus, yet Kittie owned about a dozen of his books. Similarly (perhaps a nod to Damian Grant here), I can remember no general or specific reference to contemporary politics in these four stories by James, whereas any full-length fictional work of George’s is full of both.

What particularly struck me is that every story is concerned with a form of ‘celebrity obsession psychosis’ (they are not all literary celebrities — one is a ‘thinker’, another seems to be a powerful public figure, but as offstage characters they are less concrete than Mrs Mainwaring). Some of the victims of this mania ruin themselves in the service of their hero, others actually destroy him.

One can hardly deny that this is a very modern, relevant subject. James does stir the psychological depths of it. At about the same time, Chekhov was addressing the phenomenon in stories such as ‘A Passenger in First Class’ and ‘My Name and I’ (better known as ‘A Tedious Tale’), and above all in The Seagull.

I must confess I don’t know the stories by Henry James that John Pym comments on here, but they are clearly cut from the same block as ‘The Aspern Papers’ and other attempts by James to fictionalize his own creative process — and the problems it encounters, both technical and circumstantial. (One remembers that passage in one of his Prefaces, where he admits that the handling of this technical process is in the end more interesting to him than sorting out the merely human convolutions of the plot.)

It is clever — and entertaining — of Pym to update the satirical edge of these stories to the present time; the revelation about disguised gender here is really something (though we should remember that 19c women authors knew a lot about this stratagem, from force of circumstance). It occurs to me to remark, however, that worse than the fate of a country house party that pillories an author is the fate of an author and editor, today, arrested at St Pancras station by the British police on a tip-off from French police, because he had dared to share the displeasure of the French public with the president’s most unpopular policy on retirement. (I refer to the case of Ernest Moret, 28-year-old editor at Editions de la Fabrique, who was arrested and questioned for twelve hours last week.) Losing your liberty is more perilous than losing your manuscript; and it is to be hoped that protests made in connection with this case in both France and the UK will throw light on such scandalous police proceeding.

AN INTERLUDE
by
Katharine Calderon

BRIGHTON PIER, 1912. A blustery morning. TWO GENTLEMEN are deep in conversation about a forthcoming London theatrical production. One wears a dark suit and an Oxford college scarf wrapped several times round his neck. He carries a Gladstone bag. The other sports a neat goatee and a straw boater with a gaily coloured band. From time to time he gesticulates for emphasis with a pince-nez.

The wind shivers the leaves of the birch trees along the front. In the distance a lone sheep bleats forlornly on the South Downs.

CALDERON (a translator and theatre director): My dear Anton, I cannot for the life of me think who we could engage for the rôle of Madame Arcadina. Or indeed that of Nina, daughter of a rich landowner.

TCHEKHOF (a playwright): May I venture to suggest, George, Miss Gertrude Kingston and Mme Lydia Yavorska? Just a thought, dear chap – your decision is final of course!

CALDERON: Capital, dearest Anton, capital! You are a genius! And I believe they share the same agent…

CALDERON reaches into his Gladstone bag and retrieves a mobile phone. As he begins to scroll through the list of contacts, a HERRING GULL swoops and seizes its breakfast! A few moments later, the bird alights on the iron railing at the head of the pier and drops the device with disdain into the waves.

Blackout. Curtain.

Thank you Jim for your post yesterday, which turned on the French series Dix Pour Cent; or, Englished, Call my Agent! Living as we do in France (Lille), my wife Madeleine and I were enthusiastic watchers of the series in the original. And so although we can’t comment on the subtitles I thought it might be worth saying a word, in response, to one thing which this series underlines: the prestige of the cinema in French culture.

It strikes me repeatedly that news of and from the film industry regularly makes the main news in France, particularly on an ‘elite’ channel like French/German bilingual Arte; and indeed news items which have nothing to do with the cinema are often explored via film treatments of the subject. It is very common on the programme 28 Minutes, for example, for a director (if possible young, female, and black) to be invited to join a discussion of issues treated in their film. Equally, established actors and directors are asked for their opinions (after generous reviews of their careers), in an almost reverential manner.

No doubt it is true everywhere that the media lionize media personalities; but I do believe that this is more markedly the case in France. Dix Pour Cent is happily complicit in the very processes it (gently) satirizes. (The only bad guys are the double-dealing managers.) Stars replace the Royal family — and of course, Netflix’s The Crown scored a double six in this respect.

East of the Rhine, (so far)
Brilliant piece to ponder and find shafts of personal reflections.

Thank you Patrick for this. (Incidentally, Radio Scotland was actually referred to by Pedroc Trelawney on Radio 3 this morning: giving the results of a singing competition.) I think that Babel is a good image for so many of these new contraptions, each one sleeker, faster, more expensive, and more unintelligible than the last. Are they not, in fact, presages of entropy, the return to elementary disorder? I am made to think of the last lines of The Dunciad:

Lo! thy dread Empire, CHAOS! is restor’d;
Light dies before thy uncreating word;
Thy hand, great Anarch! lets the curtain fall;
And Universal Darkness buries all.

(Zuckerberg and Musk are surely better candidates than Colley Cibber for the Anarch.)

Thank you for this glorious post, Damian! One appreciates — ‘experiences’, so to speak — the full gamut of your emotions from intense irritation with Siri to sheepish contrition and a resurgent, Sisyphean hope…that is dashed. But don’t you, as a Blakean, find it somehow encouraging that even such fantastically clever Satanic technology can unaccountably go barmy? I am reminded of a sentence in Chekhov’s story ‘In the Hollow’: ‘They put a telephone into the Council offices, but it soon stopped working as bed bugs and German cockroaches bred in it.’ A neighbour, by the way, was given the British version of your HomePod by her husband for her birthday (but it is green and squat, like an unfinished Tower of Babel) and complains that it won’t give her the one thing she wants — Radio 4!