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Patrick: exhausted all over again just by reading the summary you provide of your trial by publisher, I can’t surely be the only one to feel that this experience, and your alternately optimistic and disabused commentary on its unfolding, represents in itself something worth making into a book. Of course, you would have to find a publisher…

Further: with all the book prizes around, it’s time there was a prize for the best book not to find a publisher. Here, the only problem would be finding a suitably well informed panel of judges…

All the best with Plan B!

What a splendid post this is! Shimmering with enthusiasm for the nitty-gritty of archives (well done that visitors’ book) – and reverberating with the satisfying clunk of puzzle pieces falling into place.

I have to admit that there have been times during the past three years when I have felt distinctly cross with Kittie Calderon. Somehow, your consistent presentation of her and George’s relationship as ‘symbiotic’ never quite rang true. Typing ‘symbio-’ into the Calderonia search-bar in order to check the veracity of this impression led me quickly and usefully to your post of 6 October 2016 – ‘Kittie Hamilton’ – where you enumerate the ‘issues’ that ‘the modern woman’ might have with Kittie. That woman does indeed sound remarkably like me, except, more than anything, I just wanted Kittie to be a bit more selfish [which word should be in italics, if not bold and capitals as well]. Your defence – that to ‘get her own life’ was impossible for her ‘kenotic personality’ – was unarguable, though depressing, and at the time I reluctantly accepted that Kittie was happy to be ‘like a doormat’ waiting for her husband and others to need her services. My frustration extended to Kittie’s relationship with Nina, which you described in that post as ‘entirely complement[ing]’ her marriage. To me it sometimes seemed sadly one-sided, with little evidence of Nina doing anything to reciprocate Kittie’s generous support with childcare.

But now… Hip Hip Hoo-bloody-ray!! The realisation that Kittie was bisexual does not feel like a tweak; it feels like a sea-change. SHE COULD BE SELFISH. For Archie to have protested like that, Kittie must have intimated that she would prefer to share the marital bed with Nina when the opportunity arose; similarly she must have made it clear to George that there would be times – whole weeks on end – when she’d like him not to be around. I am delighted to learn that Nina hurried to provide intimate physical comfort when Kittie was depressed. Even the childcare feels different. Might you now reconsider your statement (6 May 2015), that ‘Lesbia was not the child [Kittie] wished she and Nina had had’?

Incidentally, I recently followed the link you provided to your very first post on paradoxes (8 October 2016). Both then and a fortnight ago I was perplexed by George’s report of lunching with Kittie’s mother in 1899:

“Dear dear Kit, I led Mammy Ham on at lunch for the pure delight of paradoxes; I could not help talking of you. She thinks you will never marry. Women marry twice, but they never love deeply twice. You have loved so well, that you cannot love much again; and without loving (we were both agreed) you could never marry again. Dear darling woman. Do you know your own value?”

Perplexed, because I couldn’t see why such a clearly expressed opinion was a paradox at all. But now, I would be very interested to read your analysis of that conversation in the light of the subjects discussed in this post. Was Mrs Hamilton warning George that her daughter loved another? Or had Kittie and George been discussing as paradoxical the fact that one person could be in two exclusive relationships at once?

Is George’s ‘temperance mission entirely supported by brewery shares’ actually a paradox at all? The mission board can sell the shares whenever they wish – so their failure to put their money where their mouth is is surely nothing more than a case of out and out hypocrisy.

Indeed, is hypocrisy (from the point of view of a century later) just one more thing that puts us off the Edwardians? Those educated and liberal men who praised the abilities of women – but denied them the vote. And the wealthy and privileged women who campaigned for birth control – as a means of controlling the working classes. Or the military leaders who recruited men – and sent them off to die like cattle. All clichés of course, but…

Pondering on the relationship between the paradoxical and the hypocritical has given me a headache. Perhaps pure paradoxes can by definition never really exist in real life. Do they always have to be something else as well? We could say that George’s own life ended paradoxically – he wanted to write about the War, so off he went to fight, lost his life, and therefore couldn’t write about it. It may be a paradox, but more than anything, it is a tragedy.

P.S. I’m getting on so well with the Edwardian novel (now on chapter 4 of my second) that I’m starting to feel I could tackle anything. Is The Fountain ever performed? You have made me really want to go and see it!

Something I omitted is the much more accurate version that considers what happens when an object moves at close to the speed of light. Randall Munroe wrote a good article about this regarding a baseball.

The short version is that everything/everyone within a mile or so is destroyed, akin to a bomb detonation, and the destruction beyond that tails off a little, to the upset of those living within at least a 10 mile radius.

His model is for a baseball at 0.9c. For a cricket at 1.1c we have to assume an infinite quantity of energy and presumably the destruction of the entire universe – a big bang level of paradigm shift to sheer nothingness. I don’t know what happens. No-one does.

I believe “thought experiments” have always been a tool of science and understanding, and I don’t think they are particularly more “all the rage in science today” than they have been in the past. I have heard the phrase used extensively with no bias towards the modern day.

As an example, it has often been pointed out that humans understood the world was spherical long before “Christopher Columbus proved it” (as has occasionally been ignorantly taught in schools) and one reason is that ships “disappear downwards” as they are observed sailing to the horizon.

This is – in my opinion – a simple form of thought experiment. “What if the world were a ball? Would we observe ships disappearing downwards as they sailed to the horizon?” … “What if the world were flat? Wouldn’t ships just get smaller and smaller rather than disappearing downwards?”

If that seems a little weak and more like just plain reasoning than a true thought experiment, how about Plato’s The Republic? Outlining the effects and implications of his proposed hypothetical city-state Kallipolis is thought experiment on a grand scale!

As for the cricket in the matchbox, if everything is taken at face value (and we – with great reluctance – try not to get into a discussion about whether the cricket – or indeed anything – can jump at 1.1 times the speed of light) then the matchbox opens, we see a little bit of cricket, a little bit more, a little bit more, a little bit more, and then, at the exact moment the box is open enough, the cricket leaps away at 1.1 times the speed of light and to us the box is now empty. We don’t perceive the cricket to have jumped; to us it looks like it has simply disappeared. While photons from that leap unquestionably will have reached our eyes, that’s simply not enough for our visual system to work with. This effect would be the same for the cricket moving more slowly than the speed of light. Our eyesight is good, and it’s fascinating to read deeper into it (e.g. we can perceive “flashes” certainly as brief as one 500th of a frame per second), but it’s nowhere near good enough to perceive anything moving close to (or indeed grumble grumble beyond) the speed of light.

Now, if you meant that the cricket doesn’t leap away, but returns to its exact same position (all magically at 1.1c – I think I see where you were going with the “earth’s gravity” part but if the cricket leaps at superlightspeed then that doesn’t mean it returns at superlightspeed, earth’s gravity or no, we do need to fudge it a bit in true thought experiment fashion), then I believe for certain that we would perceive it to be just chilling still in the matchbox. For justification, the screen you are reading this on is refreshing at somewhere between 50Hz and 120Hz – yet to you (at least looking straight on) it appears to be a flat picture rather than a flickering one. The lightspeed cricket trounces that “refresh rate” and will look similarly motionless.

Dear Patrick, I feel ready to report back on the challenge that I set myself a fortnight ago: I have now read 60% of an Edwardian novel, ahem! It has been a very thought-provoking experiment, and, against all expectations, I find that I have rather enjoyed it. I anticipate reading to the end with some pleasure. The novel that I chose was Arthur Quiller-Couch’s The Mayor of Troy. It was published in 1906, so falls bang in the middle of the period, and it is set in his native county of Cornwall. There is much interest these days in Q the professional Cornishman.

So what have I learned? You were absolutely right that reading an Edwardian novel in a modern format would make it more palatable. On the Kindle there were no distractions from the thickness, fragility or smell of the paper, nor from the size, spacing or serifs of the font. The characters are all much larger than life; strongly drawn, with detailed descriptions of their foibles and of various notable incidents in their lives. The plot turns around their typical plans and activities. The background and setting of the story are discrete and specific – Troy (based on Q’s home of Fowey) is a small town where the residents have smuggling in their blood, but are living in fear of a Napoleonic invasion. What the whole scenario most reminds me of, I realise, is situation comedy. Indeed, the book could almost be a forerunner of ‘Dad’s Army’! (Those poor Edwardians, with no telly to watch in the evenings…) It hasn’t yet made me laugh out loud – as Wodehouse might, pace your experiences – but yes, I have found it surprisingly entertaining.

I have also found myself comparing it to the only other Edwardian novel that I have read (so far) – George Calderon’s Downy V. Green. The characters are similarly exaggerated; the action (I hesitate to call it a plot) is episodic and dependent on their idiosyncrasies; and there is a distinct ‘situation’ in the self-contained Oxford college community. I can’t help wondering if George really intended it as satire at all – or just good old crowd-pleasing ROFL comedy.

Your point about telling not showing also holds good. The narrative of The Mayor of Troy has a very strong authorial voice – with frequent first-person asides addressed to the reader. I don’t recall that George does this. As I click through the pages, I can almost sense Q twinkling at me. It occurs to me to wonder if he knew George. They didn’t overlap at Trinity College, although they only missed each other by a year. Both were the first of their family to be ‘up’ at Oxford, and both had won academic awards but failed to take First Class Honours. Both lived extravagantly as undergraduates, and both went on to forge profitable careers as writers. Allegedly, Q wrote his first novel to pay off his student debts. Might he have inspired George in some way? The dons and older scholars must surely have talked about his success. Then again, the two men had very different views on the big stuff like religion, and there are no letters from George in Q’s archive. Have you encountered him at all in your research?

I particularly like how the rose looks like a figure with a head and two arms, one raised. I thought I’d seen a drawing or painting exactly like it, but the closest I could find is the Pokémon Roselia.

Thank you, Patrick, for such detailed answers to my questions. I really am not qualified to engage in anything so grand as a dialogue on this, but here goes with a very tentative response.

Edwardian novels then. Your unappealing fonts theory sounds very plausible. The kindle store denied all knowledge of poor old Daisy Woods, but I have now downloaded ‘the Major Works of Arthur Quiller-Couch’ and will see how I get on absorbing his language in different sizes. The difference between ‘telling’ and ‘showing’ is also interesting, and I will try to keep an eye out for instances of this along the way.

I am shocked to learn that I was so memorably rude about George Calderon’s writing when you first visited the Trinity archive! But I am proud to say I have since read Downy V. Green not once but twice. Realising that the story was set in a barely-disguised Trinity College of circa 1890 was undoubtedly what made it readable for me. It is also very short. As I recall, there were two things in particular that I initially found off-putting. The misleading title was the first – it sounds like a sporting fixture, but V. is in fact the initial of the eponymous hero’s middle name. I still find it surprising that George engaged in this irritating verbal trickery – or at least, why did he not then develop the joke in the text? (To digress, was there ever a less engaging book title than John Buchan’s ‘thriller’ The Island of Sheep? I once yawned my way through that in a holiday cottage.) My second difficulty with Downy was his painful American accent. Am I alone in finding the phonetic spelling out of regional speech deeply tiresome and very little help at normal reading speed?

So, Swallows and Amazons. My experience of this is very different from yours. I’m afraid my opinion was entirely based on a distant memory of reading the series as a child. Unlike you, I didn’t love Ransome once upon a time; I read his stories because I read anything that I could get my hands on. There seemed to be never enough books in the world then. Swallows and Amazons is the only Ransome title I can remember in any detail – though not the illustrations as it turns out. Looking (online) at his drawings now, I don’t agree with you there – I think they are rather sweet! But you are dead right about the name Titty. That was embarrassing – and I wonder if this whole ‘weirdness’, or ‘creepiness’ thing is actually nothing more than that: embarrassment for the characters. These were children old enough to sail boats with remarkable skill and competence – so why were they still playing babyish make-believe games? They had real boats, tents and islands – but they chose to waste their long hours of freedom pretending to be pirates. (At least poor, damaged, friendless Christopher Robin had the excuse of being trapped in his nursery!)

You say that the world of Swallows and Amazons is ‘genuinely childlike’ – but this seems to contradict your earlier remark that your ‘whole experience of the playground and classroom world was the opposite.’ I wonder if my struggle to ‘get it’ was somehow tied in with the asexuality that you identify. Was I sensing the unreality of idealised children playing nicely (‘nicely’ being a synonym for ‘unnaturally’) in a late and subtle manifestation of that Victorian notion of childhood innocence and ‘purity’?

Then again, it may simply be that I was just not sufficiently interested in sailing. Oh dear. Sincerest apologies to all you enthusiasts at the other end of the Ransome spectrum. Do tell – which were the books that you didn’t much like as kids….?

Like autism, like Asperger’s, like everything perhaps – is not enthusiasm for the works of P.G. Wodehouse on a spectrum? I wouldn’t go out of my way to read a Blandings novel, but if it was the only available book in a holiday cottage, say, I would find it acceptable enough. Despite being a woman!

Confronted by a choice of two, I would definitely pick Wodehouse over Ransome. (And not because the latter wrote for children. One of the guilty pleasures of holiday cottages, surely, is reading Enid Blyton.) The main defect of Wodehouse, I have always thought, is simply that all his novels are essentially the same. Whereas Swallows and Amazon – yes, you are exactly right that it feels creepy. But why? Could you elaborate on this? It can’t just be the lack of realism or the self-contained world; and I hope you don’t mean that, conversely, it is the class system that makes me able to empathise with the Famous Five!

This is as good a moment as any to bring out another deep literary question from the back of my mind – but with apologies if you have answered it somewhere on your blog already. What is it about Edwardian novels that makes them so very difficult to read? I don’t think I am alone in finding this to be true. I have had some professional engagement with Arthur Quiller-Couch and Margaret L. Woods, for example. Both were hugely popular in their day, but – dear me, what a struggle. Do you have any top tips – things to bear in mind perhaps, or allowances to be made – to make fiction of the period more palatable?

Thank you indeed. A Comment of this brilliance, however, demands a reply from master rhetoricians of the order of D. Grant. I hope Damian and others are watching!

Being archaic myself, I used the word as the present participle of the verb ‘swinge’. I don’t understand why Sophie Elmhirst doesn’t tell her readers what that ‘very archaic verb’ means. It means to tear strips of flesh off, lacerate, excoriate. Personally, I think it’s an all too visual verb: the torturers ‘swing’ the lash, then it bites deep with the addition of the ‘e’…ghastly.

I totally agree with you, and David Foster Wallace, about the use of footnotes. My trouble before writing this biography of George was that in practically every piece of non-fiction (‘academic’) prose I’d written I had HAD to employ footnotes and was fed up with the disease. George’s biography was a heaven-sent opportunity not to use them, as it is basically a narrative of his, Kittie’s, their friends’, Edwardian Britain’s lives, hence should be read more ‘fictively’. I’ve justified this in the swingèd Introduction thus: ‘Every fact presented has its material source. Letters quoted are held by the collections named in my Acknowledgements. Books and authors quoted are to be found in the Bibliography.’

There are some sparing, but hilarious ‘authorial’ footnotes in Chekhov’s early short stories.

For those – like myself – unfamiliar, Sophie Elmhirst’s New Statesman piece conveniently explains the term “swingeing” (…or does it?).

As usual, Google provides a shorter route to understanding: {adjective} [BRITISH] (severe or extreme in size, amount, or effect).

“It’s a real word; deal with it” …I tell myself, before making a record of the preceding in the ol’ cranial wax tablet.

Regarding footnotes, I don’t wish to suggest that they ought to feature in this book, but David Foster Wallace did believe them useful as a general tool, and employed footnotes liberally [even – indeed especially – in his fiction]. A trademark was his “nested” footnote, wherein the reader is taken on a [wild goose] chase delving further away from narrative and more closely to the direct authorial voice¹.

¹ Or, perhaps, further from it and closer to a second, meta-voice².

² Or not, depending on your point of view, of course³.

³ Obligatory nested nested footnote.

A word of advice: publishing is only half the story, in many ways the easy half, marketing being the other half. Good marketing starts with good design. It looks like you have made a good start with the Calderonia blog, but I’d be doubtful about your aim of publishing in 2017; at least not if you want to publish and market, as the latter takes at least six months. I can recommend a good publisher who markets worldwide if you want one.

Thank you very indeed much for this recommendation, Clare. I have heard some snippets and entirely agree. And I daresay that, as author of the first play about Thomas Cromwell, George would too…

May I alert everyone who is following Patrick’s ongoing exploration of the interface between history and fiction to Hilary Mantel’s Reith Lectures, broadcast this week on BBC Radio 4? I have just listened to her first – ‘The Day is for the Living’ – and (I’m afraid only a cliché will do here) it was a fantastic tour de force.

“As soon as we die, we enter into fiction…”

“You become a novelist to tell the truth…”

I don’t think she actually used the ‘B word’… but it was so good I am going to listen to it twice.

As soon as I read this entry your descriptions rang alarm bells that the book itself was fiction, presented as fact. A fashionable modern technique – or, perhaps, always a fashionable literary technique? (Is that, then, “fashionable”?)

But…the way you clarify the fictionality of the book at the end of this entry still leaves some uncertainty in my mind. It is fiction? Isn’t? Surely, it must be?

Does Masters ever clarify, himself, in the book at some point after meeting “Laura”, as to the reason the diaries were in a skip in the first place? For me this is such a killer McGuffin that it gives away the conceit. Then again, some things have to be true because if they were made up then no-one would believe them.

I suppose I will have to read the book for myself!

Ah Patrick… Do I recognise that nugget of advice – that you should make ‘all reasonable efforts’ to identify the owners of obscure unpublished letters and then, by implication, just give up – from an email of mine? I am shocked that despite these protestations about your strict adherence to the Law of Copyright, you quote my words of wisdom with neither acknowledgement nor permission! But perhaps you thought I would get into some kind of trouble with the Archive Police for suggesting something so legally dubious… And doubtless dozens of your other correspondents have taken an equally common-sensical view.

Of course you have my permission, if needed. And my deepest sympathy. Your final push to the publication line sounds utterly exhausting. But I do feel a bit of sympathy too for the staff in those institutions that have as yet failed to reply to your enquiries. Rather than striking a blow against the tyranny of the Copyright Act, more than likely they are simply failing to meet their speed-of-response targets as they struggle against budget cuts, redundancies, crumbling buildings, conservation emergencies, inadequate IT systems, and the unrealistic expectations and demands of readers – to name but a few of the problems that beset many twenty-first century archives. And I also feel rather sorry for those well-meaning legislators who sought to give small, insignificant individuals the same protection as the famous and the important – only to be blamed for the resultant morass of impossible requirements.

I idly wondered whether the difficulty of hunting down the ‘collateral descendants of Kittie’s gardener’ counts as a First World Problem. See, for example

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/10262207/First-world-problems-revealed-in-study.html

But no. The annoyances on this list are much, much worse!

I wanted to thank you for this good read!! I definitely enjoyed every bit of it. I have you saved as a favorite to check out new things you post…

I hadn’t heard of Janina Ramirez until I saw the first of her and Alastair Sooke’s ‘Art Lovers’ Guide’ series, currently on BBC4. This dealt with Amsterdam and was very impressive. Unlike many ‘cultural tour guides’ on TV she clearly knows her subject inside out. Her enthusiasm for Renaissance era books was particularly infectious. Now I’m looking forward to viewing the second programme, on Barcelona, recorded on Monday. Next week the series closes with St Petersburg, which I’m guessing should be a treat for both of us.

It could have been worse – she might have exclaimed “Scatology?” or “Holy Crap!”

More seriously, it does sound very interesting – and an example of where a bookshop and a good dose of curiosity can take you. Keep going and good luck with it all.

How interesting! I used a quotation from John Polkinghorne only last week, in a lecture in Venice (in a stunning lecture room on the Grand Canal – it can be hard being an academic!). The idea is that in linguistics we need baselines to measure from, just as normally we measure, say, length from zero. If you set up several such measures, which is the Canonical Typology enterprise, there may be no actual attested example that meets them all. That troubles some people, but it shouldn’t. … after all, this is part of a much more general issue:
“… there are so many more ways of being disorderly than there are of being orderly, so that disarray wins hands down.”
John Polkinghorne. Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction

I have to confess that until a few months ago I did not know what prosopography is. But following Laurence Brockliss’s guest post I am a total convert!

Prosopographical studies like the one carried out by Professor Brockliss and his team should be invaluable to biographers. A study of a good sample of a profession can contextualise a biographical exponent of that profession, put his/her activity in proper perspective, and should be consulted by the biographer asap. I daresay many biographers do not ask themselves what the reality and status of their subject’s profession was at all, and others only grope towards discovering that. Prosopographical studies like Professor Brockliss’s will prevent biographers from having to ‘discover America’.

I greatly regret having fallen into the latter category myself. When I started research on the chapter about George in Russia (1895-97) I was mildly surprised that, with no experience of student journalism at Oxford (as far as we know), and no publications but plenty of rejections between graduation and 1895, he was able to slip into being a special correspondent in Russia for the Pall Mall Gazette and Standard, and even cover the coronation of Nicholas II for them. I put it down to his eminent Victorian father’s networking with editors — for which there is enough documentary evidence. But Laurence Brockliss’s post indicates that the decisive features were just as likely George’s having attended Oxford and Rugby. These gave him the cachet and the entrée (he had edited a magazine at Rugby, incidentally).

Equally, Brockliss’s marvellously informative post has belatedly led me to distinguish an elephant in the room. I remember reading an American Slavist’s description of George as ‘the English journalist’ and guffawing… For ‘us’, English Calderonians, George is, of course, the man who put Chekhov on the British stage, the witty and deeply satirical author of Downy V. Green, Dwala and The Fountain, the prescient dramatist of Revolt, the so light-penned author of Tahiti, the political activist, the self-sacrificing war hero… But between 1895 and 1903 he contributed on average three articles a year to the newspaper and periodical press, between 1907 and 1910 he published 51 reviews in the TLS, and there wasn’t a year between 1911 and 1914 when he did not write something for the press, usually The Times. He was a journalist, a journalist!

Since the 1930s, at least, the problem with George’s reputation has been that he is viewed as ‘too versatile’, too ‘polymathic’, not ‘focussed’ enough, too ‘maverick’, possibly ‘amateur’, possibly (horreurs!) ‘dilettante’… I assume that is what Clare Hopkins means by ‘multifarious (and perhaps unstable)’ in her very fine Comment on Professor Brockliss’s post. As followers over the past nearly three years will have gathered, my own thesis is that he was not a dilettante, but an ‘Edwardian genius’, which is someone who passionately believed in excellence, freedom of development, versatility, and fulfilling the whole person. I can no longer deny, however, that the ONE ‘stability’ of George’s creative career was his journalism. Well, I might rephrase that as ‘writing’ — whatever else he was, he was always a born writer — but if you look at his writing career biographically, the single most continuous thread is his writing for the press, which Professor Brockliss’s post demonstrates he had exceptional access to amongst Edwardian ‘journalists’ because of his education. Whether George actually ever met W.T. Stead, the ‘greatest journalist of the age’, there is no doubt that their paths crossed; in particular, they were both the object of attentions from the extremely influential London Tsarist agent Olga Novikoff. George’s supreme contribution in The Times to appreciation of Ballets Russes’ values when Diaghilev’s company came to London in 1911 is testimony to his relatively high status in Edwardian ‘journalism’.

I am slightly tweaking my final chapter, ‘Who George Calderon Was’, in the light of this superb guest post.

Dear Laurence,

Your extremely interesting post has brought to the surface a question that I had lurking at the back of my mind. When I was researching the relationship between George Calderon and his Oxford college, Trinity, I found myself pondering on a final “What if…”.

What if George had not been killed at Gallipoli? Would he, like his undergraduate friend Laurence Binyon, have ended his days as an Honorary Fellow of his college?

The professions were and are very well represented in the ranks of Trinity’s honorary fellows. But the 20th-century electorate (the actual fellows) were characteristically snooty in their selection of eminent churchmen, judges, professors, and ambassadors. Cecil Lubbock (who took up a scholarship at Trinity in the year that George graduated) served as Governor of the Bank of England, and was awarded a knighthood. But the Oxford accolade that he most coveted was always denied him, on the grounds that, to the dons, banking smacked of ‘trade’. I assumed that journalism – given its close association with the ‘dirty’ work of printing and its popularity with non-graduates – would have been similarly tainted, however great George’s writing about the First World War might have been. I am pleased, however, to discover (from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography) that the two Oxford-graduate journalists whom you mention, C. P. Scott and Geoffrey Dawson, both became honorary fellows of their colleges (Corpus Christi and Magdalen) in 1923 and 1926. But not on account of their skills as hacks; they were honoured for their influential positions in society as long-serving editors of their newspapers.

The multifarious (and perhaps unstable) George Calderon, surely, could never have stuck to one job like that. But what if he had written the play or plays about the aftermath or the commemoration of the War? I dare to think that then he might have got the call. And I hope that he would have been pleased.

He’s written to his MP? Excellent idea! Our legislators are surely at a loose end just now…

Seeking Permission

In Peter Cameron’s novel The City of Your Final Destination, Omar Razaghi, a naive doctoral student from the University of Kansas, arrives unannounced at a neglected estate in deepest Uruguay with the intention of gaining permission to write the biography of a half-forgotten literary lion. On the estate live the surviving, discontented members of the dead writer’s extended family – and they can’t, it seems, make up their minds on what to do about Omar’s request. Will the biography boost sales of the dead man’s books? Will uncomfortable truths be revealed? Beneath the surface of his light, engaging comic novel, Cameron has something serious to say about the perils of biography-writing and the burden literary reputations place on the shoulders of the next generation. Poor Omar, however, is just a kid trying to get his feet on the lower rungs of the academic ladder. Seeking permission from the executors – leaving aside all those other permissions he’ll need – is uncharted territory for him.

Omar doesn’t realise what he’s got himself into – the widow, the brother, the mistress! – all in limbo, each with his or her own undefined agenda. But having come so far, this personable young man is invited by the family to stay at the estate: yet as time passes no one, it seems, will give him a definite answer. Omar settles in. He comes to find the whole set up quite agreeable. He is unbuffeted by experience! And he’s in a time-warp where nobody’s capable of making a real decision. Perhaps, it is suggested, if he were to engage in a little jewel smuggling escapade he might gain his ‘permission’. Then while rigging up some netting, Omar is stung by a bee, falls out of a tree, breaks a bone and goes into an anaphylactic coma. His capable girlfriend is summoned from Kansas to deal with the situation. By which time, though, Omar has fallen half in love with the young mistress of the deceased literary lion – and she with him. Well, matters are finally sorted out, thanks to the intervention of the brother’s partner – a Japanese man with a refreshing sense of practicality – and Omar gets his permission. But back home in the Midwest, and faced with the drudgery of the academic life, the scales finally fall from the young man’s eyes. He’s not cut out to be a biographer – and he hasn’t even read the Calderonian guide to the potholes of copyright law – so he wisely decides to throw in the whole project, return to Uruguay and act on his feelings for the last love of his one-time subject.

I haven’t read any of Jane Howard’s novels (yet), but I think it’s very unusual for someone whose fictional writing is so closely based on their own psychodrama to go on to write a full-length autobiography as well. I speculate that in both she was desperately trying to create order from the chaos of her life. Perhaps she spent all her life grappling with that in her writing; and from what Martin Amis has said, she succeeded in making sense of her life in her writing (‘penetrating sanity on the page’). There is something heroic about that. It’s not surprising people loved her.

I’m glad you had such a great holiday in Madeira, Patrick. This comparison of your visit with George’s is fascinating. And what a poignant contrast you make between two ‘sadly tinged’ women of his acquaintance. On the one hand, we have the solitary traveller Pippa Strachey being teased and patronised by a chauvinistic George on board ship; and on the other, Kittie Calderon, left ‘all alone in [a] big rambling house’ and forced to justify her husband’s regular absences with the distinctly dubious line that ‘a man can’t have completeness of adventure if he has got a woman with him’. (I can’t help observing that a package tour to the Canary Islands doesn’t sound quite such as an adventure as, say, Pippa Strachey’s independent journey to India in 1900-1…but let us not digress.)

These two women would seem to have had quite a lot in common. Did they know each other socially, despite their political differences? They were born five years apart into upper middle class families, and they both received a typically genteel education. Kittie specialised in painting; Pippa played the violin. Both were very involved with the lives of their friends and relations, and both assumed the role of carer for their elderly parent(s). It was in their aspirations that their lives diverged. Pippa chose a life campaigning for women’s rights and, whether by choice or not, she never married. Kittie chose a domestic role, and married twice.

I am sure you are right when you say that ‘Lesbia was the daughter Kittie Calderon wanted and never had’. George must have been aware of his wife’s yearning for motherhood, and it occurs to me (belatedly, perhaps) that he may sometimes have found living with Kittie ‘pretty demanding’ too. I wonder if the palpably sad atmosphere which Lesbia detected was due not so much to him being away, as to Kittie’s awareness that her relationship with Lesbia was the nearest she would ever get to having a child of her own?

Both women ended their days in nursing homes. The cheerful Pippa presumably reflected with some satisfaction that she had voted in more than a dozen General Elections. And Kittie?

This question is probably best answered by Schulz himself:

“I don’t like the name of my strip at all. I wanted to call it Good Old Charlie Brown, but the person at the syndicate who selected Peanuts just picked it at random from a list of possible titles he jotted down. He hadn’t even looked at the strip when he named it. The syndicate compromised on Sunday, though. Once I rebelled and sent it in without any title. We finally agreed to put Peanuts at the top and include Charlie Brown and His Gang in the sub-title on Sunday.”

But why would the word be on ‘a list of possible titles’ in the first place? Apparently it was a term (of endearment?) for children, popularised by a 1947 TV programme The Howdy Doody Show, which had an audience section for children called ‘The Peanut Gallery’. That’s according to The Schulz Museum, here.

While I’m talking about names, I’ll clarify that ‘Sparky’ is used throughout the biography (as in the pictured excerpt) to refer to Charles M. Schulz and was a family nickname after the horse Spark Plug from the Barney Google comic strip. I thought it was cool that the nickname came from a comic strip, and I think Michaelis probably did too, as he uses it broadly throughout the book.

‘Peanuts’ is an intriguing title. I’ve never thought about it before. Can you enlighten us, James? After all, in Anglo-English it means ‘something piffling’, yet Schulz is one of the greatest philosophers of the age!

Patrick: Barthes may be out of fashion, or vieux jeu, but there is nothing truer than his proposition that the meaning of a work lies with the reader rather than the author: for the simple reason that the reader is (temporarily) alive to call the tune, while the writer has decently departed the scene–or, left his text to fend for itself. It should not surprise us therefore that George Calderon’s play The Fountain was put on at the Strand Theatre in 1925 by members of the I.L.P. Arts Guild. If the Guild found something provocative in the play, so much the better for the play (and for them).

Remember Orwell’s Animal Farm, which has been turned inside out and back again by people in search of its ‘real’ political meaning; and even his currently chart-topping Nineteen Eighty-Four has been (and is being) dragged through a hedge backwards, to emerge ideologically bedraggled. Orwell may well have protested, in an essay, that everything he had ever written was ‘against totalitarianism, and in defence of democratic socialism’, but once he has floated off his raft of fiction, there is no way to predict what contradictory currents will take it where, and who may climb aboard to hoist the Jolly Roger.

If literal, monologic Lenin could venerate Chernyshevsky, and abominate Dostoevsky, what does this tell us about the relation between politics and literature? Political discourse ends with a vote (or a revolution), whereas, as Keats persuasively put it, poetry ‘ends in speculation’; speculation which Lenin and his like had no time for. One is reassured that the I.L.P. (one recalls, the only party of which Orwell was ever–briefly!–a member) did.

Jenny’s comment and this article from Das Magazin are equally compelling. Could it be that we are also ‘suffering from’ history repeating itself? I found myself reminded of How Domesday Book Got Its Name – from the widespread and unsettling feeling that “they” know everything about “us”. Some – I hope many! – Calderonians may live long enough to commemorate the millennium of the Norman Conquest. It is sobering to reflect that nearly a thousand years have passed and once again the population of this little island is preoccupied with the thought of invaders from across the English Channel.

We are offered endless speculation about the post-Brexit future of Europe. Have we come full circle from World War One? I suspect the truth is, only time will tell.

I’m afraid, Patrick, that your friend was backing a winner when he said, ‘‘It rather looks as though the Brexit vote split along lines of education.’ Published just yesterday (6th Feb) is the BBC’s more detailed breakdown of Brexit voting per ward – don’t bother to read all this, but take a look at the very highly-clustered graph entitled: “Wards with more graduates had lower Leave vote”.

Of course, what this convincing graphic tells us is only that people with degrees tended to vote Remain. It certainly does not tell us what Patrick’s friend (and/or others from the cosy elite classes) may have been thinking, in Patrick’s words, that ‘those who voted Leave weren’t educated enough to know what they were doing’. Far from it, it could even give us a pro-Brexit message that those without degrees are having a rough time in our globalised society and were smart enough to see they could do better if Britain left the EU.

Phew, I’ve managed to sound politically neutral on Brexit (despite being an unashamed Europhile and an ‘if-only’ Remainer). But moving on swiftly….

I read Patrick’s post last week, the same day that I happened to read an article published on Motherboard website (a spin-off from Canadian news/culture magazine, Vice). The article, by Hannes Grassegger and Mikael Krogerus, and originally published in German in Das Magazin, is here:
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/how-our-likes-helped-trump-win

Both Patrick’s and Das Magazin’s articles expose the power of number crunching in understanding social trends. And both of them major on the role of ‘education’ – or shall we say “information” – on democracy.

The Das Magazin article suggests that Trump’s team successfully used ‘big data’ (aka number crunching) to help Trump win the presidential election, probably using the services of a UK firm called Cambridge Analytica. Would Trump say that this article contained ‘fake news’, in his words? Maybe, and I did feel there was a lack of hard fact in Das Magazin’s article, perhaps too much quotation from the Cambridge Analytica’s CEO (bearing in mind that this firm might have something to gain from a story on its vote-manipulation prowess).

But the main arguments of the article are demonstrably true. Big PR firms use Facebook and other social platforms to deliver advertising messages via enjoyable or shocking ‘virals’, which rack up millions of views. Many of these have a definite anti-establishment feel to them (to make them fun to share) and it is really easy to include a message to target groups of recipients, who will spread the message and/or be influenced by it. The example given is the inclusion of ‘videos aimed at African-Americans in which Hillary Clinton refers to black men as predators’ – easy to see how this would erode Clinton’s vote.

Over to the ‘Guardian readers’ (I use this term lightly and in jest) to bemoan the use of Facebook as a news source. Probably the Edwardians felt the same about the information sources that the then non-franchised classes could access.

Just back on Brexit to finish off (sorry). Das Magazin made passing mention of Brexit, but didn’t seem to have any real story here. With the British political parties claiming, variously, and unbelievably in both senses of that word, that Brexit would mean the NHS would have more money, that Brexit would cause financial ruin, and (via the infamous poster) that refugee migrants equate with EU nationals free to work in Britain, there was a vacuum of hard fact and no need for any sinister manipulation of opinion. I’m with Patrick in linking ‘contemporary political instability and rudderlessness’ with ‘the products of politicians’ incompetence’, albeit in a different century. And in 100% supporting democracy over ‘Philosopher Kings’!

For information: the latest view among historians is that celebrity dates from the 18th century and that Rousseau was its first ‘casualty’: an ordinary man thrust into the limelight: see the recent book by Antoine Lilti. My own view is that the first celebs in this country were Emma Hamilton and Queen Caroline: Caroline could cope, Emma couldn’t.

On education and democracy, it is worth remembering how small a percentage of the Edwardian middle-class actually attended a public school and Oxbridge. As a result the extent to which even the prosperous in Britain before the First World War had profoundly imbibed the notion of public service and imperial sacrifice can be exaggerated. Most members of the middle-class (or middle classes, if you prefer) had local, family and civic identities and were not particularly philanthropic. Their focus was local rather than national politics, despite the railways.

Patrick: in your Post today, you scrupulously use home-grown Brexit as an example (or an example offered to you) of a democratic decision split on educational lines. But surely, as we reel from Trump’s scything of the American political scene, we observe once again the implicit antagonism of differently educated sections of the community? So many American writers and politicians have admitted, since 8 November last year, that they simply didn’t know what was going on in the country. There’s a curious contradiction between horizontal connectivity (the linking of like-minded people and groups) and the mutual sealing off on the vertical scale. A net–‘reticulated at its intersections’, as Dr Johnson famously defined it–may be more one-dimensional than we think. And at this moment of social media, this certainly does not help democracy to deliver.

I greatly enjoyed this post – yet another book added to my must-read list. But it does raise the GC question. Was George Calderon a nature lover? I know he once lived on a farm, and was proud of his horsemanship, but he still gives the impression of an essentially urban type. All those cafes and theatres! Your description of him encouraging his men to pick and chew ‘the leaves of a certain shrub’ as they went into battle is extremely powerful (Calderonia 4 June 2015); but I can’t help thinking this relates more to psychology than to botany.

Then there’s the other GC… John Lewis-Stempel’s strikingly beautiful cover implies that his study is confined to the Western Front. So what about the Gallipoli Campaign? Did British countrymen find any comfort or inspiration in those arid Turkish dunes? Or were the landscape and wildlife just too different from home?

As it happens I have recently been reading the letters of another Trinity College graduate who fell at Gallipoli – the brilliant young physicist Henry Moseley, who was born in the year that George Calderon came up to Oxford. (See J.L. Heilbron’s excellent biography, H.G.J. Moseley: The Life and Letters of an English Physicist 1887-1915 (University of California Press, 1974).). Harry, as his family called him, was very keen on the natural world, and gives a flavour of the plants, birds, and animals that George might have encountered. He arrived on the Gallipoli peninsula in early July, 1915, and in his first letter home noted that the ‘centipedes 8 inches long and very fat look terrifying’. Stationed on the coast, he admired ‘a gorgeous blue and red heron’, but informed his mother there were ‘no flowers left here except a few purple cistus and various heath like shrubs’. Moving inland, there were ‘large land tortoises… The birds are very interesting, lots of them, nearly all strange except nightjar and plentiful turtle dove.’ His attempt to introduce a pet to the mess was a failure – ‘the local tortoise is a very brisk walker.’ The men soon started collecting specimens for their lieutenant’s inspection – ‘a land crab…insisted on departing before my arrival… So did a large hedgehog brought in by one of my linemen. Then there are frogs that sing all night, mantises that v. seldom pray and grasshoppers innumerable. If I was not rather busy I could spend all my time examining the local fauna… The sage and thyme and many other herbs smell delicious.’ Henry Moseley’s last surviving letter was dated 4 August, and the only wildlife mentioned is flies. He was killed by a sniper at Chanuk Bair on 10 August 1915.

May I urge every reader of Calderonia to follow the link in John Dewey’s comment to his blog post on the Brimstone Press webpage? It is a great polemic that had me cheering by the end!

John, I hope you will be cheered to know that I just looked on the online SOLO catalogue, and found that there are no less than four copies of your biography of the Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev reposing on the shelves of various libraries within Oxford University. Including one in the hallowed and eternal stack of the mighty Bodleian itself. That’s a lot more than can be said for the ‘mass of trashy pulp’ on sale in Waterstone’s and Smith’s….

Good luck with finding a publisher (and I think that unfortunately luck does play a large part). As you say, trying to interest a commercial publisher has to be the first path to go down, however fraught with obstacles it may be. My own dispiriting experiences in this field are outlined in a blog which I wrote some time ago for Brimstone Press, the self-publishing outlet which I was eventually fortunate enough to come across: https://brimstoneauthors.com/john-dewey/
Don’t be discouraged by my experience, though: I’m sure your biography stands a very good chance of being published commercially.

He damns one who writes in the cold? (4,3)

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to all!

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s “Shed Man”!

I wonder what his superpower is. The ability to teleport instantly to a shed anywhere in the world, perhaps?

I like this picture!

I was very interested to read Clare’s post having worked on the metalpoint drawing as a conservator working for the Oxford Conservation Consortium (of which Trinity College, Oxford is a member). Metal points generally produce a very delicate impression as the marks are made when a metal stylus is dragged over a “rough” (prepared) surface to leave traces of the metal behind. Unlike drawing in graphite, chalk or charcoal, the tone is very even and pale. It is not possible to make a darker line by applying more pressure – that can only be achieved by using a different metal (e.g. lead) and depth of tone is built up using repeated strokes placed close together. Many old masters such as Leonardo and Michelangelo used the metalpoint medium but it became less common as graphite became more readily available.

The Pienne drawing was interesting as it was clearly executed on a commercially available “prepared” sheet of paper – indicated not least by the perforations along its left edge where the sheet had been removed from a pad of paper. I was not in a position to identify the exact metal used – it is likely to have been silver but without analysis, I cannot say for sure. I am also uninformed about the use of metal point specifically for commemorative portraits.

In general metalpoint drawings are collected and sometimes shown in Museums (both The British Museum and the National Gallery of Art in Washington had big exhibitions of metalpoint drawings in 2015) but you are right that their visual impact requires close examination and can be somewhat lost in the larger context of some museum galleries.

For further information see :-
Joseph Meder, The Mastery of Drawing; James Watrous, The Craft of Old-Master Drawings; and Thea Burns, The Luminous Trace: Drawing and Writing in Metalpoint.
‘Drawings under Scrutiny: The Materials and Techniques of Metalpoint’ in Drawing in Silver and Gold: Leonardo to Jasper Johns – Washington 2015, p.21, note 1.

On Clare’s post, I was thinking as I read it how much a trail of details gives us some kind of view of a person in the manner of pixels painting a grainy picture.

On the further discussion, I agree with Patrick that Pienne’s silverpoint appears to be have been deliberately made ‘softer and warmer’. I sought out the image of the original photo once more and feel that there are three significant differences, none of them accidental: the head has lost the belligerent angle; the mouth is less pursed; the eyes show more iris and lose the slightly menacing narrowed look.

“A wraith”, says Patrick. Now that life’s fight is over, the sternness is no longer needed: instead, wisdom and calm.

I wondered if silverpoint was chosen as a medium because of the commemorative nature of the picture copying. I had never heard of silverpoint, and looked it up in Chambers, to learn nothing more than it being “the process or product of drawing with a silver-tipped pencil”. Perhaps silverpoints are not shown much in galleries because they do blend in so dreamily with their surroundings, or perhaps they are not often produced. I further wondered if the silvery compound used presented any kind of challenge to the archivist or conservator.

In any case, there is real beauty in the thoughtful pale picture hanging quietly in the background of the vibrant progressive current-day college.

Many thanks Patrick for your comment – though it seems very odd for me to be saying that on your blog!

I am delighted to know that Kittie Calderon really did like Pienne’s portrait of George. That thought will give me pleasure whenever I walk past it on the stairs. And as my eye falls on the silverpoint I will also feel pleased that you are writing George’s biography. He thoroughly deserves to emerge from those shadows and be better known in the college today.

You mention Kittie’s failure to contribute to the War Memorial Library. I was so astonished by this that I went back to check the printed list of subscribers several times – and again, just now, to make sure. There is no way she didn’t know about it. President Blakiston ran a massive fund-raising campaign, during which he wrote 1,200 personal letters to alumni and families of the fallen. Donations were made by relatives of 74 of the 155 men named on the memorial board. There was an impressive response from graduates: 17, for example, from George’s year, and 22 from the year below. It is surely not a coincidence that his friends were among the most generous: Frederic Lowndes pledged £30; Horace Dowdall, £20; Arthur Lowry, £15… But by far the biggest donor was Herbert Blakiston himself. The President gave £1,200 (equivalent, approximately, to £120,000 today). Every loss had felt to him like a bereavement.

With our rosy commemorative spectacles on it is easy to feel sentimental about all of this. But I will follow you in sticking my neck out and say that I think Blakiston would have been moved by the final sentence of Kittie’s letter, when she said, somewhat awkwardly, ‘you must have felt [an] extraordinary sense of something splendidly accomplished after all your hard work when the War Memorial became an actual living fact.’ The point about an Oxbridge College is that it is not just a pile of ancient buildings; it is a perpetual – living – community. Blakiston was fully aware of this when in October 1914 he described the War as ‘the greatest crisis in [Trinity’s] history since the siege of Oxford’. (For several months in 1646 the college administration had entirely broken down; it had been, in effect, ‘every man for himself’.) It is perhaps the sense of a multi-generational pseudo-family that is so distinctive about an Oxbridge college. This is just as true today as it was a century ago – although I am very glad to say the community is no longer restricted to white men from English public schools. Blakiston would doubtless be horrified at the international mix of today’s Governing Body, and the way that modern colleges seek out able applicants from all schools and ethnicities… Next year Trinity College will even welcome its first female President! But if ‘Blinks’ could see his Library now – greatly expanded with a basement and gallery, bristling with tech, open 24/7, and packed with hard-working students – I think he would be very proud indeed.

Dear Clare,

I think it is wonderful that you have managed to reconstruct for us the story of Trinity’s portrait of George, and contextualise it within the College’s gallery, as it were. Also, your description of Pienne’s silverpoint work at the end of your guest post is most moving and appropriate.

I’m sure you are right that even Kittie wasn’t confident about tackling Blakiston. She was out of her comfort zone. Moreover, it was a very busy summer for her, dashing hither and thither from Petersfield, so perhaps she had to interrupt the writing of her letter. But what I can’t help feeling is that she was now rather embarrassed at not having contributed any money to his War Memorial Library project. She could be ‘contrarian’ — or, well, she was certainly her own woman — and liked to give to charities of her own choosing, so perhaps that’s why she opted not to give money but to pay for a young artist to make this portrait that would go to the College. It can’t have been cheap, and she commissioned another portrait from him that summer, of Evey Pym’s future daughter-in-law, Diana Gough. Kittie believed in encouraging up and coming artists: other examples would be Percy Lubbock and the young architect Jack Pym.

I really think she did like it. She had a facsimile made of it for herself, which she kept with her at ‘White Raven’ to the end, whereas the 1910 drawing by the great portraitist William Rothenstein, which she owned, went missing for a hundred years and there is no mention of it in her Will (which there is of the Pienne facsimile). I am sticking my neck out and saying that I think she instructed Pienne to make it softer and warmer. Hollyer’s original photograph is an Edwardian ‘icon’, a bit of theatre PR. Pienne’s version is perhaps a portrait for the post-war age; a portrait into which the personal, vulnerable, sad element could be allowed to intrude; certainly a wraith, but a wraith she could still love and did. I totally agree with you that it is beautiful.

Yours ever,

Patrick

Patrick:

I thank you (on this 4th of November) for your post on Owen yesterday, and for your sensitive and perceptive reading of the last line of “Greater Love”: ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.’ You are dead right to castigate the dubious interpretation offered by Santanu Das, which lifts the line from its moorings on the swell of his own hard-ridden thesis, and leaves it twisted and discoloured like a piece of driftwood. The shift of subject through the four stanzas–from lips, to attitude, to voice, to heart–progressively detaches the poem from any such sexualized reading; I agree with you that (especially by the end), the poem has ‘no specific gender orientation at all.’ I read the poem as hingeing on the contrast between love as ‘kindness’ (‘Kindness of wooed and wooer’)–the famous ‘milk of humankind-ness’ as repunctuated from Macbeth–and the greater love, the ‘fierce love’, of sacrifice: written in blood, not milk.

(Or, thinking of your ongoing Binyon discussion, should I repunctuate for clarity ‘not-milk’?)

Jon Stallworthy once told me of a conversation he had with Tom Boase, the art historian and head of Magdalen while he was researching his book on Owen. Boase was a notoriously prickly individual and seen by undergraduates and fellows as something of a cold fish. Quite out of the blue, according to Stallworthy, he began to talk about life in the trenches (Boase won the MC). Boase told him that in the course of the war, he had developed a close relationship with his batman, a butcher’s boy from Abingdon. One day as they were talking with one another the trench took a direct hit and the butcher’s boy was blown to smithereens. Since then, Boase confided, he had never been able to relate to another human being.

Perhaps there is another reading of the Binyon, where “not old, as we that are left grow old: age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn” is parenthetical, as though there was a silent “but” between “grow” and “not”? The bacchiac phrase “They shall grow” is then alluding to their growth in our memories in “we will remember them”, and their progression towards immortality in the final stanza?

Patrick: it’s difficult to keep up with the churn of your ideas on biography (particularly as one travels around, this week, getting on the wrong train at Euston and aiming for Glasgow rather than Manchester!). I’m amazed by how much of the stuff you have read. In Waterstone’s yesterday I fingered a number of recent ones, but remembering I had to lug these back to Lille I desisted–except for Dominic Hibberd’s Owen, which I conspicuously lacked.

Two points occur to me. You lament the need to respect ‘the facts’, and the way coping with these can flatten out the biographer’s style; turn biography into chronicle. But doesn’t Virginia Woolf make exactly the same complaint in the context of fiction? From memory: ‘The intolerable narrative business of the novelist, getting from breakfast to lunch, and from lunch to dinner.’ Whatever genuine distinctions there are (and you have reviewed them), this is one thing they share; fiction and biography both serve Chronos, though their rites may and must vary.

Then: you conceive in your last post of a collective, comprehensive biography (or compendium of biographies) on the net, which would render written biography superfluous. But then such a concept has been tried out (though just in print) before–and I don’t recall your having considered this example. I’m thinking of Edward Nehls’s Composite Biography of D H Lawrence (date somewhere 60s/70s?), in which he deliberately eschews the form and style imposed by one biographer in favour of assembling different, overlapping but also contradictory points of view. Before you retreat into hibernation, nestling in your typescript, I’d be glad to have your views on such a venture.

You have set me thinking about the biographer as ‘friend’… I don’t know Ruth Scurr’s Robespierre, but I have read her Aubrey, and this quality struck me very forcibly. At times I even wondered if on some subconscious level she was in love with him!

Experiment surely has to be a Good Thing and I am sorry if this will sound unduly critical. One man’s meat and all that. Aubrey was very impressive in many respects, but, as with you and Robespierre, I sensed a vacuum at the heart of it. For me, the missing ‘meat’ was any evidence of archival research (as opposed to reading books). There were some important areas where Aubrey’s own words and Scurr’s cleverly woven tapestry just did not provide enough information – his broken engagement for example, or the complicated process by which he lost his estate and his fortune – and I felt a bit of work with some court records would have added a lot. It also gave me a headache to be constantly wondering where Aubrey’s ‘own’ words stopped and Scurr’s began: personally I would have felt happier to see a clear separation by the use of two different fonts. But of course I realise that to have introduced these elements would have seriously undermined the whole point of the experiment.

Is there a difference between a biography of a real friend, as opposed to an imagined or assumed one? It’s a long time since I read Elizabeth Gaskell’s life of Charlotte Brontë, but I recall thinking that she’d done a great job. Percy Lubbock on the other hand! You once said on Calderonia that you didn’t think his life of George was a biography, but I sense you have done something of a U-turn there. When I first encountered Percy, many years ago, I found his sheer Lack of Facts simply maddening. It seemed both lazy and shoddy and I mentally categorised his life of George as Bad Biography. I am however looking forward to being persuaded otherwise by your promised post on the subject….

Patrick,

Till now I have resisted the temptation to write a response to your accusation of ‘nastiness’ among Edwardian men.

Those of us who went to UK private (‘public’) schools in the 1960s/early 1970s may have experienced the end of an era when toughness, duty and stoicism were considered to be the most important values. My grandfather’s generation went to the same school in the Edwardian era and all volunteered to join up in WW1. One even fought in WWII as well, in Italy.

The key was this: yes a man could be tough on others within the context of the task in hand, but he should be even tougher on himself. ‘Never complain, never explain’. And, look after your men first, before you look after yourself.

Going back to the Edwardian era: how could men like Robert Falcon Scott and Ernest Shackleton have endured what they did, and in the way they did, if it was not for this ‘Edwardian’ outlook? Of course, a gentleman should also display charm and courtesy as well as toughness, duty and stoicism. But what an impossible mix to achieve for most.

Philip

Many thanks Alison for sharing your personal experiences of Patrick’s George Calderon project. You are in the unique position of having lived in close contact with the raw materials of this biography for three decades, and I found your insights very thought-provoking. I don’t think it is the least bit odd to feel you have ‘met’ people from the past through their letters and papers; rather, it is strong indicator that there is enough substance there for them to be brought to life – surely the goal of any biographer – in a ‘mere’ book (as Patrick once described his blog).

It is interesting that you have found Kittie so much easier to engage with than George. Yes, he was a maverick (a synonym, I presume, for ‘genius’); yes, the pattern of her life is ‘familiar territory’; and yes, you have got to know the descendants of people who knew her well. But I think you put your finger on the crucial reason when you say, ‘the archive of letters and papers is her collection.’ Although this is often overlooked, there is indeed something very powerful and significant in what someone selects for preservation, and in how they choose to arrange it.

We all have our prejudices. I have to admit that I am always predisposed to like a biography if I know the author has made the effort to walk in the footsteps of the subject, and visit the places connected with his or her life. So it was particularly nice to read of you and Patrick tramping the by-ways of Middlesex, exploring remote Shropshire churchyards, and analysing the view of Cap Gris Nez as you sat down to dinner there one evening. George’s habit of travelling the world makes his a difficult trail to follow of course. But seriously, is it not your duty to finish the job and take a trip to Tahiti? I see that one can fly there via LA, and look – http://www.tahiti-tourisme.co.uk – you don’t even need a visa!

Very moving piece Patrick – I did enjoy reading it.