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I don’t often comment — at least not under my real name — but I think your letter home proves without doubt that you have been hiding the fact that you are actually a descendant of GC:EG. The secret is now out!

But on to the important matter of sprouts. I am ridiculed by my family for taking the purchase of said cruciferous vegetable so seriously from the moment the first frost arrives and also for my refusal to serve them with bacon at Christmas dinner (a stand also taken by none other than Delia Smith). I was surprised to learn that the practice goes back as far as 1969. At least you make no mention of Yorkshire puddings.

I shall stop writing lest these musings lead to accusations of ‘Bah, humbug!’, but not before wishing you and the supporting cast of Calderonia a very happy Christmas and, as has now become traditional, a better new year.

Yours, Theobrassica

Wow, what a metaphor for life. How life’s experiences leave their mark, and how damage can sometimes be built upon, creating change that is not imperceptible. Conversely … “what we’ve been through together” is a reason to have a deeper relationship with the patched up items in your life.

What terrific Comments! They will give great enjoyment to readers! Thank you very much. Old Lion (Lev) would be tearful to read about the performance of his parable (Calderon, by the way, considered Tolstoy’s short folktales the perfection of his writing). And I had never thought about it before, but I think John Pym is right: not only his grandfather and George were waste-not-want-not-ers, it was an Edwardian Thing.

Those slivers of soap in the Blue Horse… I imagine George in the Edwardian spirit of waste-not-want-not might perhaps have soaked those fragments saved by Kittie, incised them and pressed them down in his shaving bowl – as we all, who brush our faces each morning, should do today, in solidarity with Ukraine.

A heart-warming Ukrainian story. Last night the Christmas lights on the tree which stands at the crossroads in our village – Wootton, nr Abingdon – were turned on. This is an annual ritual on Advent Sunday and is followed by mulled wine and mince pies in the Community Centre. This year, as part of the festivities, the village drama society put on a short Christmas play – an adaptation of Tolstoy’s version of the Russian folktale, Papa Panov. Unbeknown to the cast, there were several Ukrainian refugees in the audience, who were being introduced to the English obsession with amateur theatricals. It is good to report that their views on Russians did not extend to Tolstoy and that one of the Ukrainian children won the Papa Panov quiz we held afterwards. She was the only one who could both pronounce and spell Tolstoy in English (the name of the author had been announced at the beginning).

Patrick: I cannot match your sepia memories, nor the fineness of distinction you make between different times, ages, or epochs (depending on how important one thinks them to be). But as one who still occasionally skates around on these terms I do remember an amusing exchange between Frank Kermode and Malcolm Bradbury where, talking of literary movements (which shadow the larger cultural movements you are exploring), they wondered about the utility of such phrases — then bandied around — as ‘pre-postmodern’ and ‘protofeminist’ in discussion; not to mention monsters like ‘the long 18c.’, with interchangeable heads and tails. (Unless I misread, you yourself allude to the possibility of interchanging the head of Victoria with George V. But can you see her ancient majesty stammering?)

We end up in a Hall of Mirrors in some Intellectual Fun Fair, to which entry is obtained by knowing the password of the month. Even innocent terms like early, middle, and late (late James?) can be refined out of useful existence. I guess that behind all this lies too simple a reliance on that illusory discipline, the History of Ideas. We are encouraged to believe that this idea followed that, like geological strata; we just have to clamber up the cliffs of Lyme Regis with a magnifying glass and all will become clear. But ideas surely don’t behave like that, and never have. One of Blake’s marvellous perceptions: ‘What is now proved was once imagined.’ It is much more likely, and better respects the capacities of the human mind, that most of the ideas we bounce around have been bouncing around, in different places, for a few thousand years. More like magma than stratified minerals. So that volcanology might provide a better image that geology for what we are up to. But it’s hot in there!

Patrick: you talk of being entangled in rhetorical nets! But in this latest comment you have buried me in compost, offloaded a whole Kew Gardens-worth of chrysanthemum lore and logic (not to mention music) which leaves me leafless, stripped bare of argument.

But grasping at straws, I can at least agree with you about the falsity, the artificiality of the word ‘odour’ in the title of the story. Yes; this is perhaps Lawrence going for an ‘upgrade’, getting a bit above himself — which he would normally scorn to do. The word ‘odour’ is as you say from a different register; we would rather expect to (and do) find it in Eliot’s The Waste Land, recycling Enobarbus’s very upmarket Cleopatra: on whose barge ‘strange synthetic perfumes…drowned the sense in odours’ (lines 87-9). It is significant, I think, that in the famous passage in Sons and Lovers where Mrs Morel is startled by the lilies ‘reeling in the moonlight’, Lawrence does not use the word ‘odour’; ‘scent’ and ‘perfume’ are enough for him.

And for her. But how much of Mrs Morel’s interior life — like that of Mrs Bates — is hers, and how much the intrusive author’s, is surely one of those will-o’-the wisp questions which might enable us to do critical somersaults to exercise ourselves but which must remain unresolvable — like the mathematicians’ pi. As Gustave Flaubert said: ‘Madame Bovary, c’est moi.’ Was this a boast, or an inculpation?

Birkin’s and Ursula’s coming together was ‘wordless, and utterly previous to words’… No Jamesian loquaciousness-ness there, then! And yet are the last two pages of ‘Odour of Chrysanthemums’ overwritten? Is all the ‘free indirect speech’ a bit wobbly and unbelievable? Does Lawrence ‘know’ too much here and ‘tell’ too much himself? (‘The children had come, for some mysterious reason’…) I cannot help feeling the story isn’t totally successful despite his rewrites?

I am most grateful to our stalwart follower John Pym for this partial defence of Henry James, delivered, if I may say so, with Jamesian elegance.

One can certainly be pulled up after a wall of words in a James novel by ‘some stiletto observation or line of dialogue’. But might this not be the exception that proves the rule? For me, at least, these pithy observations are as little articulated with the rest of the text as James’s walls of words are with his pages of unrelieved dialogue. I submit that he has a fundamental problem with cohesion and over-writing. However, as I said in my post, the short stories excel.

I gather that James was concerned about the size of his readership, but what a roll-call of eminent contemporaries signed the 1913 letter of congratulations that John Pym quotes! They are all Edwardians to the core.

‘No series of posts about the “Edwardian Era” would be complete without a reference to Henry James, often regarded as its greatest novelist.’ Patrick Miles goes on to identify several Jamesian attributes that he regards, in a sense, as particularly Edwardian. Of these, I would take issue with only one: the terrifying nature of James’s loquacity.

The serpentine sentences require patience, to be sure, but after a while, like the clues to a cryptic crossword puzzle, they open to reveal their meaning — and become (for some of us at least) utterly addictive. The Golden Bowl (1905), for instance, described by Ismail Merchant, the producer of its twenty-first century movie adaptation, as ‘a sort of whodunit’, undoubtedly contains page after page each of which could be characterised as a ‘solid wall of words’, but from time to time, it should be noted, the author deftly inserts some stiletto observation or line of dialogue (a chink in that wall letting in a shaft of light) which turns the plot or a character’s perception in a new direction. To experience such moments, as a reader, is to experience, one might say, the shock of the new.

One significant aspect of Henry James’s greatness is, however, his frequent lack of loquacity — in his many short stories and in such brief compact novels as The Europeans (1878) or The Aspern Papers (1888). New readers could do no better than to start with these two books. Not least, perhaps, because the latter contains one of the purest examples of James’s prose, a description of the equestrian statue in Venice of the fifteenth-century strong-man Colleoni and its complex effect on the story’s nameless somewhat ineffective narrator. Once read, never forgotten.

‘Often regarded as its greatest novelist.’ That phrase pulled me up. How precisely did the Edwardians — the writers of that period, the men and women of the arts — themselves regard Henry James? And if one can suggest an answer, what does that tell us about the Edwardians and their sensibilities?

In April 1913, on the occasion of his 70th birthday, two hundred and seventy ‘Friends’ from both sides of the Atlantic wrote to Henry James offering him their greeting, and the gift of a Golden Bowl. They hoped, too, that he would agree to sit for a portrait by one of their number. James chose John Singer Sargent as the portrait painter but stipulated that his Friends ‘remain the guardians of the result of his labour’.

‘Dear Henry James,’ the letter begins, ‘We unite to send you our greeting, because we wish to-day to give a single expression to a single feeling. You will see when you read our names, that we represent many different degrees of association with you. We are old friends and new; we are friends attached to you by long-standing intimacy and affection; we are friends whose regard for you, not less real, is a later and younger tie. We share with you old memories, of which our names will speak to you, as yours to us; we are newer alliances, slighter relations, names which belong to the further edge of your circle. But we all, at whatever distance from you, however close to you, have this in common, that we love and honour you, and we welcome the opportunity of telling you so with one voice. This is our real birthday present to you, and we believe it is one you will care to possess.’

To read these words today, nearly a hundred and ten years on, is to re-experience their almost palpable intensity, the depth of that collective feeling. And this intensity of feeling, addressed to the master of the unsaid, of suppressed feeling, could not perhaps be decently spoken out loud. It had to be expressed in writing. The love and honour these distinguished upper- and middle-class literary and artistic Edwardians and late Victorians felt for James was one they believe he will care to possess. They can read his mind as surely as he can read theirs. They accepted him whole. The literary carping at his work and reputation would come later. The scraping of the mice at the cathedral door.

I will not quote James’s reply, beginning ‘Dear Friends All’, dated six days after he had received the letter of greeting and the gift of his ‘inestimable’ bowl — it can be found on p. 322 in Volume II of the first collection of The Letters of Henry James (Macmillan, 1920) and it overflows with ‘an emotion too deep for stammering words’. It is composed in one long, considered, carefully crafted wall-of-words paragraph that … takes your breath away.

‘You are the writer,’ his Friends had written, ‘the master of rare and beautiful art, in whose work creation and criticism meet as they have never before met in our language. Our sense of the genius by which a power so original is brought under the ancient discipline of art, is expressed in the proffered symbol of the GOLDEN BOWL, and it is as a symbol that we ask you to receive it.’

Too OTT…? — as we might Tweet today. Well, yes, just possibly. But the united tone of the two-hundred-and-seventy rings true and clear. And as James knew, the world turns and fashions change.

Henry James ends his letter of thanks to his Friends with his signature — and then adds a seven-word postscript, a deceptive, characteristic throwaway: ‘And let me say over your names.’ (A lesser writer today, or a too-hasty sub-editor, might have struck out the word ‘over’.) Among the names — I pick at random — J.M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm, Rupert Brooke, Erskine Childers, Gerald Du Maurier, John Galsworthy, Edmund Gosse, Anstey Guthrie, Rudyard Kipling, Desmond MacCarthy, Edward Marsh, Alice Meynell, Henry Newbolt, Arthur Pinero, John S. Sargent, Logan Pearsall Smith, Ellen Terry, Henry Tonks, G.M. Trevelyan, Hugh Walpole, H.G. Wells and Virginia Woolf.

In this list, which the Master said over, on a spring day in London at No. 12 Carlyle Mansions, in Cheyne Walk, S.W., the Edwardian era — and on its heels our modern world — rises up to greet us.

It is very gratifyingly ‘rooting’ to have one’s preconceptions about the Edwardians (e.g. their love of sport and travel, their hedonism and interest in birth control) tested on the touchstone of demographic data. This is another post by Professor Brockliss that I am sure will be visited again and again, including (judging by past experience) from abroad.

I think his emphasis that ‘what has been defined as distinctive and thus historically noteworthy may be true only of one particular social class or specific group within an occupation’ is very important. For instance, it may have seemed to me typical of George Calderon’s ‘class’ that he committed serious amounts of his time to various social and political causes, but in the light of Professor Brockliss’s post I must recognise that in this he was more typical of a ‘specific group’ of educated activists than a class, since Edwardians were ‘five times less likely than their grandfathers to hold any sort of civic office during their lives’.

I note with interest that the author suggests the death of Charles Darwin in 1882 was a marker of the end of the Victorian Age in that he was ‘the last great amateur scientist’. Would it be possible to say whether Darwin was a typical Victorian in other ways?

One of the purposes of guest posts on Calderonia is to enable experts to stick their necks out, even say something ‘outrageous’, and Professor Brockliss has certainly woken us all up by suggesting that the Edwardian Age should be defined as starting around 1880 and ending in the early 1930s! I see the economic wisdom behind this, but can it be claimed intellectually, psychologically, in terms of mentalité? As soon as I met George Calderon and Archie Ripley through their papers, I knew that by 1895 they were Edwardians, and I still feel (with D.H. Lawrence, it turns out to my surprise) that the Somme and Gallipoli were the death knell for Edwardianism. Yet Brockliss’s evidence for the Great War having ‘in important respects […] consolidated rather than undermined the hallmarks of the Edwardia era’ seems irrefutable.

I am immensely grateful to him, as I judge from their emails numerous followers are too, for such a refreshing and impeccably documented look at the Edwardians. We must all read his forthcoming book on the Victorian and Edwardian professions!

James Whishaw was my great-grandfather. His youngest daughter, Audrey, was my grandmother. She was [born] on the 9th of September, 1901, in Saint Petersburg. I think James left his family in England after the 1905 revolution while he went back to Russia. He like many others in the English community lost everything when the Bolsheviks took over. In the family we have a story that he was about to be arrested by the Red Guards. He managed to escape. He did return to Russia in Archangel in 1918, helping to give financial support to the White Armies. He wrote a book about the Whishaw family, a copy of which is in the Brotherton Library at Leeds University along with other archives from the English community in Czarist Saint Petersburg.

What a wonderful post. Thank you very much for so many reminders of the games I and my sisters played particularly when we visited Granny Thomas (probably my ‘more’ Edwardian grandmother). Her almost identical croquet set was donated to the National Trust’s Nuffield Place only 10 years ago when the family home with a croquet lawn integral to the garden design was sold.

I cannot speak with any authority to Patrick’s query about how, precisely, the use of the ‘MacGuffin’ (or, as one might say, the rarefied red herring) differs from the application of ‘The Rule of Chekhov’s Gun’ in the movies. But I would say that when guns themselves are introduced in almost any film you care to mention, they usually go off – at some point. In two classic 1952 Westerns, however, George Stevens’ Shane and Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, the plots of which are both predicated on the evil consequences of gunplay, the key element in each film is the hero’s pathological reluctance to discharge his weapon.

For the older film buff, the MacGuffin is most closely associated with several movies directed by Alfred Hitchcock. For Hitch, the great trickster, a magician always on the lookout for the diversionary hand movement, the meaningless red herring became something his latter-day devotees cherished – along with his own cameo walk-on appearances. But these MacGuffins were, in my opinion, essentially a publicity stunt. What spectators eagerly talked about, or puzzled over, in the foyer at the end of the show.

As a footnote, I might add, that the Chekhov work with the highest number of firearms over the fewest number of pages must surely be the short story ‘The Avenger’, about a cuckolded husband determined to purchase a weapon with which to shoot his wife and her lover – and for good measure, perhaps, himself too.

As a schoolboy, and aspiring comic actor, I performed in a stage version of the story (there have been at least two in English) taking the role of the prissy gunsmith. This called for a pedantic enumeration of all the weapons on offer in the gunsmith’s shop, together with an emphasis on their correct usage. But everything, including a blunderbuss, seemed too expensive for the indecisive and increasingly frustrated husband… And, by the time the curtain fell, no gun had actually been fired.

Oh Patrick! It took me a while to realise what reading these instalments of your writer-publisher’s Ukrainian Diary was reminding me of – but it is of following your blog in its early days when you posted almost daily updates on George Calderon’s life from the declaration of World War One in August 1914 until his death at Gallipoli in June 2015. The unfolding details of that narrative quickly became gripping, and your expert musings on Calderon’s motivation and physical and mental health issues, plus your research-based insights on the wider progress of the conflict, were unfailingly interesting and useful in informing my own thoughts about the commemoration of the War.

Similarly, I have found myself increasingly eager to read your latest commentary on the war in Ukraine when the link appears in my email inbox; and I am concomitantly saddened to read (16 May) that you do not see yourself continuing it. Personally, I don’t think the delay between something happening and you sharing your diary entry about it matters at all. Why should it when your entries are dated? Nor does it bother me that you feel the need to express your ‘anger and disgust’ at the War so vehemently. I would not expect you to be impartial! Rather, your lifetime of study of all things Russian surely gives me confidence in your opinions. If the Daily Mail runs a story saying that Vladimir Putin has cancer, it seems like wishful thinking or propaganda; if you believe he is being cossetted as a frail invalid, I can dare to believe it.

But publishing your diary may be putting your friends in Russia at risk? Then – of course – you must stop.

Until the War is over?

Fabulous – I hope it turns out to be entirely accurate.

I hear you Patrick and you are right about the absence of NATO strategy. However, quite apart from the impracticality of deploying a substantial number of Western regular, volunteer troops in the Baltic states in midwinter when there was no appreciably increased threat to that area, your proposed action would have had no impact on Putin, since he knew with absolute certainty that the said troops were not going to invade Russia whatever he did elsewhere.

Really interesting post, Patrick. I’ve just been to the Surrealism exhibition at Tate Modern and my main takeaway was a comment about one artist and his expression of ‘a belief in a subjective world beyond reason, or a dissatisfaction with reality’. Even if it only gives temporary respite, there is such joy in creating some really true nonsense – time to get on with some of my own, and I look forward to seeing yours.

Oh dear Patrick! Your 11th April blog shows quite clearly that you really don’t understand the function and limitations of NATO. It is not a world police force with a mind of its own. It is a grouping of sovereign nations who have come together for their own protection against a formidable and untrustworthy potential enemy. With much labour they have agreed the circumstances in which they will take military action against an aggressor and they have all signed up to go to war if any one of the signatory members is attacked. They have not signed up to go to war in defence of an unlucky third party and it would take a difficult and lengthy debate to bring all of those sovereign nations to agree on military action in support of Ukraine, not least because of the probable terrible consequences for all of Europe should they do so. That may seem pathetic, and it is possible that opposing Russia now might in the long term result in less damage than having to do so later, but that is the reality of NATO’s position.

Fascinating Patrick! That explains all sort of things which have been puzzling me about how the Russian people can go along with this brutal tyrant. The answer seems to be that this is what they yearn for; and that implies that when/if they learn that they have been fed a diet of lies, they will simply bury their heads in the sand and deny it. Horrible!

Brilliant analysis and, sadly, all too true. Could this be the beginning of the end of darkness?

Patrick: I too am moved by that photograph you have posted, with the almost anonymous hooded figure mourning the dead mother in Kiev; and by your commentary, which well describes the complex and profound emotions registered on the face. You refer to Bruegel; for me, the helpless open mouth brings to mind the silent wail of Munch.

But somehow, your consolatory ‘Love always wins’ is snatched too rudely from the fire. (I think of the child in Chaucer’s ‘Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, singing ‘Amor vincit omnia’ in ironic counterpoint to the narrative.) How does one set this consolation — which I want to share — with this kind of thing, a response from Ukrainian writer Olena Stiazhinkina which appears (translated) in the London Review of Books for 24 March: ‘These Russians are not people […] This morning, in Berdiansk, one of these monsters from Moscow shot an old man for refusing to hand over his mobile phone […] I promise: my great-grandchildren will hate theirs and teach their children the same.’ Such hatred is surely understandable, and may also (as she says) be handed down. And what does love have to say to this? ‘Love, and be silent’ is a hard injunction to follow. Is the best we can hope for that love may somehow overlay hatred, not extirpating it but insisting, patiently, on a desperate balance between the two? The greatest poets provide an insight into the question: ‘How with this rage shall beauty find a plea, / Whose action is no stronger than a flower?’

Dear Andrew,

I found the clarity, impartiality, and profound wisdom of your insights extremely helpful as I try to understand the situation in Ukraine.

You ask, ‘What are you going to do today to make your bit of difference?’

When I consider the existential threat that is climate change, I can choose not to fly, and I can shun single-use plastics and beef. When I watch ‘Life and death in the Warehouse,’ I can make the effort to walk to Wilko’s for a light bulb, rather than order one on Amazon prime. But night after night I see the obliteration of Mariupol on TV – and I cannot answer your question. I wish, how I wish, that I could.

Thank you Patrick for your post today: and I also thank Philip Andrews-Speed and Andrew Tatham for their responses — especially their clarification of the 1994 guarantee/assurance. It is a real consolation (for us as powerless but concerned observers) to have a commentary such as yours, informed by lived experience and long reflexion, to help those of us on the outside to gain some purchase on these extraordinary and horrifying events — which seem to be accelerating with all the unpredictability and danger of a runaway train. Times thousands.

There was an excellent and chilling documentary programme on the evolution of Putin on the Arte TV channel here in France last night, in the wake of which I find that your summary of ‘inferiority complex, paranoia, and megalomania’ gets all the toxic essentials.

Well, Patrick, your post this morning has provoked some thoughts:

1. Violence begets violence begets violence ad infinitum. And that applies to threat of violence too. Assuming that there will be rational reactions to threats and that that will keep everything in check flies in the face of a long history of human irrationality, and you just need one nutter to ruin it for everyone. There has got to be a better way than constantly threatening and punishing people. Do families or schools that are governed by threats and punishment lead to happy balanced adults?

2. Likewise human irrationality means killing heads of state can provide a rallying point for some people however evil the ‘martyr’ has been proved to be. It certainly doesn’t seem to have provided a deterrent to Putin (though I’ve seen reports that he has repeatedly watched Gaddafi’s end – with one outcome being that he ends up doing terrible things when backed into a corner).

3. It’s difficult for the West to take the moral high ground when:

(a) countries in the West have illegally invaded and destroyed sovereign countries (I still find it amazing that there are many in this country and the US who count the Iraq wars in terms of the number of UK & US soldiers killed rather than the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis) – and that is before you go back into history and see all the wars of acquisition that had nothing to do with who originally had claim to the land.

(b) the West’s major motivating factor for anything is just MONEY without consideration of the full picture of good and evil. Accepting money from all sources with no questions asked has enabled Putin to spread his tentacles around the whole world and believe that he can do what he likes (see ‘Moneyland’ by Oliver Bullough – and also this letter in today’s Financial Times from a retired UK Defence Attaché in Moscow https://www.ft.com/content/857d2ccd-2853-43ba-b6b9-88e04b42ba93). It has also skewed our economies in favour of the super rich and away from doing what is right for this wondrous but troubled planet and the people on it.

4. Why should whoever owned anything at any particular point in history mean anything today? A load of the discussion towards the ‘peace’ treaty after the First World War was based on these sorts of arguments to redraw the borders, particularly in Eastern Europe. And that went well. (see ‘Prisoners of Geography’ by Tim Marshall for a discussion of this as well as how the characters of various nation states have been influenced by the physical realities of their geography).

5. The logical end point of looking for the original owners of any piece of land is to find that no-one owned any of it. And there is a school of thought that says Man only started making war when he started ‘owning’ things. (See ‘Utopia for Realists’ and ‘Humankind: A Hopeful History’ by Rutger Bregman for thoughts about this as well as other possibilities for the future of mankind).
The wrong lessons have been learnt from previous major wars. The victors assert their rights over lands and peoples which fester resentment. Bigger walls and stricter borders are put up which end up dividing people both in space and thought. Greater controls over state media lead to irrational beliefs about the people of other countries including fear of ‘the other’ and claims of racial superiority that ‘legitimise’ terrible atrocities against ‘subhumans’ (whether that’s Jews in the Holocaust or whites in Japanese concentration camps).

Most of the people of the world want an easy life in the face of the strange mysteries and difficulties that affect us all. There has got to be a way of enabling everyone to see that we all share that and that we are all individual human beings rather than faceless representatives of a country or a government or a doctrine.

This all may seem a bit lacking in realism but ‘realism’ seems to lead to us being stuck in this infinite loop. A far greater mind than mine said, ‘Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results’. What can each of us do differently? How can we connect to other human beings in other places and lead to a different outcome?

Each of us possesses a power beyond the limits of our flesh and bone. Look at the history of the world and look at the individuals who have changed it for the better in the face of impossible odds. Once the shooting starts it generally means it’s too late to do anything but fight, but in the in-between times, we’ve got to look further into the future and I would ask anyone reading this, ‘What are you going to do today to make your bit of difference?’

The trouble is, the Budapest Memorandum is just that: a ‘memorandum’, it is not a UN Treaty. Also, it offers ‘assurances’ not ‘guarantees’. So it allows for a lot of wiggle room on both sides; offensive and defensive. Also, times have changed from a period of embryonic trust to one of deep distrust (or worse). Even a formal treaty might not withstand such a dramatic change of circumstance.

I agree with the Sudetenland analogy for the Russian enclaves, but the German invasion was more overt.

Ha! Write on, Patrick. Write on!

I’m sure I’m missing a lot of literary and/or other connotations but even so I read and enjoyed this post all the way through.

Patrick: as the honoured dedicatee of your latest story, I can only repeat my admiration of the way you have provided, without laying a square inch of concrete or tarmac, a bypass round (or through) the heavily-congested area of paralytic, hyperlinguistic para-commentary. To localize the metaphor: it’s a bit like driving down the M6 Toll road, having avoided the worst stretches of the M6 itself round Wolverhampton.

One mystery however remains. How, ever, did the verbigerating Professor Żuk come up with the clever title for his lecture? I suspect that you yourself must have helped him to ‘Blake on White’, incidentally projecting your reader — proleptically — to the relief of the last paragraph.

Patrick: much enjoyed your nightmarish examiners’ board (right in there with the ‘dark, diluvial owls’), on a rainy Sunday morning in Lille. Any retired academic probably has similar visitations. My more modest nightmares, originating in Manchester (where there were no gowns and no Latin in our English department – and no owls that I can remember, though the owl features in the university’s heraldic crest) had more to do with not having marked a pile of papers by the due date, or having scrambled the marks to such an extent that they could not be communicated. General sense of Not Having Done a Good Job.

I often feel, in fact, that the emotional energy we expend on these retirement nightmares (which include not having looked at our post for weeks, losing a pile of old-style UCCA forms, and, of course, failing to find the loo) are the real justification for the receipt of our pensions. I’m sure there must be a good Freudian argument for keeping these index-linked.

Mike attempted to teach me Russian at Ulster University from 1968 to 1972! I was never very good at it, but he did instil in me a lasting love for the language and for Russian literature. I hope I kindled in him a lasting interest in birds and ornithology. I would love to meet him again after so many years.

I type these words on Fourteenth Night,
’Twas good to read your diary,
With Chekhov news and flowers bright –
Permit me one enquiry:
Why speak you of a weight loss urge?
You seem to need no belt,
Your photo tells of no great splurge,
In fact you look quite svelte!
Re Cambridge Tales and ‘The White Bow’,
It seems we’re both in tune;
But when talk turns to the Black Crow
We’ve all had etiuq ghoune!
With Santa gone and all the rest,
One thing remains to do:
I wish you Mileses Alles Best’
For twenty twenty-two.

Dear Damian, humblest thanks… I will fight on
Until I see thee ‘Makar’ crowned at Scone!

A Happy New Year to you, the ninth;
Good Patrick, you deserve a plinth!
In the spirit of Calderon
Blog resolutely, and blog on;
What took him to the Dardanelles
(One of the Great War’s hottest hells)
Will drive you — generosity
Of spirit, and the energy
To make this current — to keep up
The dinner table where we sup
On conversation. You provide
The main course, and then step aside
For others to try out a dish
(Apéritif, or dessert-ish)
Contributed with the intent
To earn from you a kind comment,
Written with scholarship and wit:
The two don’t aye together fit.
Blog on, Macbeth said to Macduff;
None here will tell you, ‘Hold, enough’;
Till Birnam comes to Dunsinane,
Your readers want more of the same!

Mike Pursglove was my tutor & lecturer at the University of Exeter from 1991 – 1995. I am pleased to read he is still going strong.

Dear Jim: thanks for your ‘Dong!’. Not one of those
That Edward Lear met, with a Luminous Nose;
But Dong indeed — reminding one who goes
In search of novelty, he always knows

That nothing changes. Whatever comes along
Eventually turns out to be a Dong
Of some description; rather like a song
We know the tune to, but get the words wrong.

Coeli non animi mutantur qui
Trans mare currunt: all which means that we
Take ourselves with us everywhere; to be
Or not, perhaps; but never differently.

Really terrific to read of a nonJapanese who felt so quickly and deeply at home and who was obviously not only accepted by the Japanese people around him but also truly welcomed. Ringing in the new year is a good way to join in a popular ritual that makes one feel a part of Japanese culture. Brilliant, Jim … and I hope that your tie with Japan will never end….and Kalbi (or ‘Rib’ in Korean) is a great name for a yakinikuya!

Kate Pursglove’s review of the Yesenin translations can be found in East-West Review 20.1.56 Spring/Summer 2021 pp. 27-28

Well, Patrick: the last detail certainly does help. Since the butterfly has long been associated with metamorphosis, transformation and the soul, one understands why a metal vending machine cannot pretend to own one: or to make one commercially available. Does the same condition apply to the members of the restocking army? Or may they keep their souls in the stocking they may hang, hopefully, on the bedpost?

Damian, your Comment is both ludic and carnivalian (thank you), but like all such artistic prose it has a serious centre… I have been unable to find out how many million people are employed in restocking the machines, but they are certainly an army that toils day and night. It’s a full-time job and according to Easley each ‘vending machine worker’ (suggesting that they are actually special bees or ants) restocks/services about 40 machines, including clearing away litter and graffiti. Chicken they can do, but the line is drawn at selling live butterflies, apparently. I hope that helps? Patrick

Patrick: fascinating stuff on Japanese vending machines, today (what, I reflect, will your universal curiosity not get you to write about?). I have always been suspicious of these things since losing sixpence in one when I was small. (It wasn’t an Irish sixpence, either). But one aspect of Tim Easley’s enthusiastic account leaves me unsatisfied. He reports, ‘they were always fully stocked’. But one needs to know how, by whom, and when? It is the unhappy experience of anyone using such machines in the UK that just when you want one, it is undergoing the equivalent of open heart surgery.

Can it be that in Japan, there are some oblique descendants of the Samurai — a cut above Deliveroo — who are bred to this vocation, venturing out in the very waste and middle of the night to replenish the machines? Or is there a super-machine, of a robotic development unknown to us, and a solicitude rarely encountered, which serves these sub-machines with the same regularity, though with the reverse function, as the milking of a cow? Or is the simple solution that they are actually replenished by aliens?

With my own curiosity now fully engaged, I also wonder about the optimum, or maximum, size of articles to be vended (or vented) by the machine. One can get a chicken sandwich, but can one get a chicken? Can one get a LIVE chicken? Bottles we count on (normally small, 25/30 cl); but can one get a real 75cl? A magnum? A jeroboam? It seems to me, from a safe distance, that the technology of the vending machine still has a long way to go.

Great post, Mum! Full of lots of interesting details that I don’t usually think about when I’m reminiscing about Japan and I learned a lot 🙂

Thanks for the pointer to this, Patrick – sounds fascinating and a reminder that there are all different sorts of normal in this world. I’ve added it to my reading list – and here’s one for you, though given your wide reading and interest in biography, my guess is that you’ve already read it: ‘The Quest for Corvo – An Experiment in Biography’ by AJA Symons. It made me think of your Quest for Calderon, the difference being that Corvo was a much spikier and more socially awkward character than Calderon. An important part of the book is that it includes the story of the search for evidence of Corvo’s existence and personality, and that gives a sort of multi-dimensional picture of the nature of human contacts in great variety.

We lived in Far End in the 1980’s. It was a wonderful house and we were very sad to leave. Heartbreaking it is no longer there.

I really enjoyed the haiku – thankyou. May your chrysanthemums flourish.

I have been getting record daily hits for this and Damian Grant’s post, perhaps because of this recent article in ‘The Guardian’: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/aug/30/the-female-gaze-on-dh-lawrence . Unfortunately none of the visitors seems stimulated to Comment!

Patrick: I am grateful for the generous response — from yourself and others — to my Post.

But you can’t expect someone even with dual nationality like me to put Racine in the scale against Shakespeare; and clearly, Lawrence himself would not have done so. Whatever Clifford may think, from Clifford’s author’s point of view Racine suffers from a triple disadvantage. Not only was he not English, but nor was he German or Italian — both languages and literatures that Lawrence knew better and much preferred to French. Significantly, Lawrence does not refer to Racine once in his voluminous correspondence; which shows a low level of engagement. (And none of Lawrence’s own plays is written in classic rhymed hexameters!)

In fact France and French come off rather badly in general in the letters. Lawrence writes from Bandol in December 1928: ‘It bores me so to have to speak French.I don’t know why but the French don’t really interest me, and I never want to speak to them.’ (Though he agrees they are ‘nice.’ ) And thinking particularly of Clifford’s praise for Racine — which you quote, on ’emotions that are ordered and given shape’ — it is even amusing to contrast the terms of another letter written just a week later, where Lawrence weighs in heavily against la belle France itself: ‘…what a mess the French make of their places — perfect slums of villadom, appallingly without order, or form, or place.’ Later on, we find him writing off ‘the whole of France’ (which he hardly knew!) as ‘a ghastly slummy nowhereness’, reserving a particular detestation for dirty and pretentious Paris: ‘The Lord made Adam out of printer’s ink, in Paris.’ But he was keen enough to work for a translation of Lady C there…

But to the main point: the two writers, and what they stand for. When Polixenes defends the artificiality of some flowers against Perdita’s rejection of them because, in her words, ‘there is an art that in their piedness shares / With great creating Nature’, he cleverly (and famously) turns this argument inside out:

Say there be,
Yet nature is made better by no mean
But nature makes that mean. So over that art
Which you say adds to nature, is an art
That nature makes.

I’m not conversant with 17c French dramatic criticism, but I can’t imagine that Racinians would endorse such a radical aesthetic. Whereas it would certainly have appealed to Lawrence.

Thank you deeply, Damian, for what followers have described to me in emails as a ‘beautiful’ and ‘illuminating’ post. I’m honoured to have been able to publish it on Calderonia so many years after you first delivered it viva voce to the D.H. Lawrence Society. In my view, it says important things about the novel and more generally about the ‘paradox’, as you call it (and I agree), ‘underlying much of Lawrence’s work’.

About forty pages after the reference to A Winter’s Tale, Lawrence has Clifford Chatterley read aloud Racine and conclude ‘in a declamatory voice’ that ‘one gets all one wants out of Racine. Emotions that are ordered and given shape are more important than disorderly emotions. […] The modern world has only vulgarised emotion by letting it loose. What we need is classic control’. Do you think Lawrence expected us to take this contrast between (English) Shakespeare and (French) Racine seriously?

Thank you for the extra little asides here. It does show no matter how long a thread is on, it eventually does continue to be seen. I hesitated before adding the little I had here after so long, but it seems it was worthwhile, and that’s always good. Thanks again for the other details. I just ordered two books by Mr Pym from Abebooks, one is coming from Norway and only printed in an edition of 100: A Tour Round my Bookshelves, 1891, so I’ll enjoy reading that when it arrives.

Michael Barlow expands with some telling details on a guest post I wrote five years ago. The post concerned a story, jotted down as a child of eight, by my great-uncle Julian, an invalid naturalist, and later embellished and published by his ‘beloved friend’ the humourist Anstey Guthrie. The artist whose monogram Mr Barlow mentions was Molly B. Evans, a friend of Horace Pym, Julian’s father, and an occasional guest at his home. As well as designing Julian’s bookplate, reproduced in my original post with its lively array of reptiles and amphibians, Molly Evans painted an oil portrait of Julian’s sister Carol and one of Julian himself, aged seventeen. Julian died in 1898, one month after his twenty-first birthday.