18 December
‘Bewildered of Cambridge’
It feels like a new record: a week has passed since our, in their own words, ‘very striking’ advertisement of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius appeared in the TLS, and it hasn’t brought us a single sale!
The line between self-justification and rational analysis is very thin in such cases… But I did say when we decided on the ad. that the only way to find out whether they work was to do it, so what lessons can one draw?
It appeared in an issue supposedly devoted to Russia (there was a ghastly portrait of Stalin on the cover). My rationale, therefore, was that it would be read by every professor of Russian Studies in the country, and perhaps further down the subject’s Table of Ranks too, as well as picking up some ‘normal’ readers. Every Russianist in the country should read the book, as it will reveal to them where they have come from and perhaps where they are at. But I know from a lifetime’s experience that these people are extremely slow off the mark. Perhaps some sales will dribble in when they have pierced the plastic on their mailed copies in a couple of months time.
Meanwhile, there were five or six ads from other smallish publishers in the same issue. What could their motive be? Well — obviously — even if their ad. doesn’t sell many copies, it must raise awareness of their very existence. At least 32,000 people will have seen it (and in our case it was very prominently positioned on a recto with the issue’s main article). In terms of raising profile, then, it has to be worth it. This is in fact the first time an ad. for Sam&Sam has appeared in a national newspaper in the U.K. or Russia.
Decision: we will advertise in the Russian issue of the TLS next May, but this time it will showcase Sam&Sam the publisher and push four or five separate English/Russian titles.
The background to this whole experience is that independent publishing has gone viral since 2018 and especially during lockdown. The market is flooded. I would advise anyone publishing a book of theirs that is in any way ‘specialist’ to print no more than 200 copies. (Clays printed 459 copies of George and we have shifted 58%).
If a small but apparently reputable publisher takes on your book with a subvention from yourself, be very wary about being drawn into a second edition. I know people who have paid their subvention to the second edition, the publisher has then pretty soon announced they are going to remainder, and the authors have felt bound to buy back say 400 copies and sell them themselves; which is difficult and not helped by the fact that there will be plenty of copies available by then on Amazon and ABE.
22 December
I bumped (metaphorically) into a neighbour who was delivering his Christmas cards. His mother, aged about ninety and in a care home, is very fed up with the latest Christmas restrictions. Although he has been able to visit her for 30 minutes once a week, she cannot see her family over Christmas itself. His response was robust: ‘Never mind, mother: think of March! The days will soon be getting longer and we must all just think of Spring!’
He didn’t tell me how she reacted, but he is right: the worse it gets, the harder we must think of Spring, which only cosmic disaster can prevent coming. In that spirit, I offer a sequence written in Russia forty-six years ago to celebrate the event there:
Note that these were written in the early days of English haiku, when the syllable count was flexible. On this occasion I decided not to capitalise the sulphurous butterfly. Haiku 4 was published in Presence 35, May 2008, p. 16, and the crow in 5 seems prophetic!
30 December
I had the huge honour of reading two pre-publication electronic versions of Andrew Tatham’s I Shall Not be Away Long: The First World War Letters of Lt Col Charles Bartlett, but the experience can’t compare with a slow reading of the final superbly designed and produced book published last month. This reading, which has taken me five weeks, has significantly altered my appreciation; greatly deepened it, I feel.
When I originally read the book, it was still in the context of our national experience of the centenary of the ‘Great War’. Followers of this blog will know what I mean: our personal empathy and agony day in day out. My foci, therefore, were (1) the military narrative of the Battles of Loos and the Somme as told in Bartlett’s letters, (2) the life stories of the men he commanded, knew, and loved, but who were slaughtered around him.
This time I found myself concentrating on Bartlett’s own story and character, his wife Margaret’s story and character, and the story of their relationship. This may sound more like reading a novel — being absorbed by psychology and a love interest — but there is no conflict here with the twin foci of the epic military narrative. The latter are as integral to Tatham’s ‘novel’ as the psychological development. Think of War and Peace.
Where personality and personal relationships are concerned, these letters constantly prompt you to speculate — and that is hugely enjoyable, even if you know you may be wrong and that you will never know the truth. For instance, this slow reading produced a strong feeling in me that I understood why, despite all his credentials, Charles Bartlett was never permanently promoted to Lieutenant Colonel of the 8th Berkshires at the Front (a fact which depressed him no end). His attitude to the war was simply not that of the stereotypic upper class officer. He says things in these uncensored letters that stiff-upper-lipped officers were not supposed to say. Nor does he care that his superiors are reading them. But (such is my theory) his superiors concluded he wasn’t ‘sound’. In fact his letters demonstrated that he wasn’t ‘one of us’. Remember that at the time of most of the following excerpts he was acting CO of the battalion:
‘It [Loos] has been a ghastly business too awful to describe. […] God what a sight it has been’ (p. 83). ‘We have had another dusting and done no good’ (p. 107). ‘The strain and reaction is telling and I cannot eat or sleep’ (p. 116). ‘I have several men who are trying to get out of going into the trenches with various excuses […] Personally I hate going’ (p. 132). ‘Am just fed up to the teeth with soldiers’ (p. 226). ‘I don’t think I am any more efficient now to command a Battn than I was [six months ago], in fact I think less as I am more frightened than I was’ (p. 240). ‘I am sorry to say I am FED UP with this bloody war’ (p. 246). ‘Our new tin helmets have saved any amount of lives, and it seems a pity we did not have them before’ (p. 283). ‘The Battle of Loos was nothing to this [Somme] and you cannot imagine the noise stink or number of dead about. It is awful, & rather gets on one’s nerves’ (p. 290). ‘I am rather disappointed with my new men […] but carrying heavy loads in pitch darkness when one has had no experience must be a bit trying, & I am sure I should chuck my load down & run for the nearest shell hole if I had to do it’ (p. 333). ‘I feel so depressed about the show I don’t know what to do’ (p. 343). ‘Am sorry I have not given you much news lately but when one is living in mud up to one’s knees & doing only what one is forbidden to talk about, it is rather difficult to say much’ (p. 365).
But it is vital to stress that he also NEVER GIVES UP. In the Battle of Loos only two of his 20 officers and 184 of his 900 Tommies are left standing, but ‘we made our objective […] and if others had done as well we should have gone further on’ (p. 82). Though he hates going into the trenches as much as his men do, ‘I don’t say and [I] pretend I like it’ (p. 132). The noise of the artillery drives him mad, he can’t wait for leave, but he always returns to the task. He is freezing cold, soaked to the skin, up to his waist in mud and water, infested with lice, forced to defecate in his own trousers, plagued with lumbago, prey to all the trench infections going, deeply depressed, shocked and nauseated, but he still goes on and right to the end his concern is the state of his men and the performance of the battalion. I would never describe Bartlett as a ‘war hero’, but to hate the whole show as much as he does and yet fight on with utter dedication is, surely, heroic-grade grit. It’s this combination of normal uncensored responses that any of us would be capable of, with dogged determination that I’m sure I wouldn’t, which makes him so likeable.
My slow reading has also made me see Margaret (‘Peggy’) differently. She never joined the Red Cross and worked tirelessly in a hospital in France, say, because, I now realise, being ‘the Colonel’s wife’ was a full time job. She had to communicate with the families of her husband’s soldiers, even visiting bereaved parents in various parts of the country; she had to send a constant stream of food parcels to Bartlett and his officers at the Front, along with clothing, medicines, reading matter, daily letters and news; she had to meet returning officers and take them out to lunch; she had to negotiate with her husband’s superiors at home over such delicate matters as his lack of promotion and securing a cushier posting… I had not previously realised that ‘the Colonel’s wife’ was as much a full time job, and expected to be, as being ‘the vicar’s wife’. Like a vicar’s wife, Peggy is not paid a penny for it, but seems never to complain.
There was another expectation of ‘the Colonel’s wife’ that she fulfilled perfectly, too: she was ten years younger than him, attractive, always fashionably dressed, well manicured, and sexy. As befits ‘the Colonel’s wife’, when she is photographed next to her husband and with other officers on the Promenade des Anglais at Nice in 1917 you can see that she is ‘the centre of attention’ as Tatham puts it (p. 377).
Why Bartlett had a fling with another woman once when he was home on leave, and why his very vibrant-seeming marriage broke up in 1922, I find myself speculating about endlessly; and that is another pleasure of Tatham’s creation. With some knowledge of the Edwardian theatre, I am tempted to think that Peggy (a starlet of London musicals) thought Charles a better financial catch than he turned out to be. One could come away from the letters thinking she was manipulative, spoiled, contrarian and impossibly demanding… There is a suggestion in one letter (p. 46) that she was having to fend off men’s attentions herself; but she may also have been a compulsive flirt… Then there is the suggestion (p. 150) that she wanted more babies; but, argues Bartlett, ‘I fail to see how you can say it is my fault’… Did communication, affection, even sex, eventually fail between them because the Bartlett who had been through the war was an utterly different person from the one who had set out for it?
All life and death is in Andrew Tatham’s two masterpieces, A Group Photograph and I Shall Not Be Away Long. Read them in that order. They are the English War and Peace of the 1914-18 catastrophe.
5 January 2021
Today I started my second reading of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in three months. The reasons for this will emerge in my next post, on 1 February. We are going to devote five posts from that date to Women in Love, which some people consider the greatest English novel of the twentieth century (1916). The first guest post will be by film critic John Pym about Ken Russell’s 1969 film of the novel, the second by seasoned Lawrentian Damian Grant about the novel itself, and the third by historian Laurence Brockliss about what Edwardian marriage was really like. Expect fireworks.
A very happy New Year to you all!
Patrick Miles
The haiku-accompanying icicle image came from this Icicle of the Day entry on “Christine’s blog”, the butterfly image is by Calderonia-follower Katy George, and the hare below it is from this Wildlife Trusts entry.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
Related
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
George Calderon, 1912
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon c.1901
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Captain of the 11
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
From the diary of a writer-publisher: 13
18 December
‘Bewildered of Cambridge’
It feels like a new record: a week has passed since our, in their own words, ‘very striking’ advertisement of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius appeared in the TLS, and it hasn’t brought us a single sale!
The line between self-justification and rational analysis is very thin in such cases… But I did say when we decided on the ad. that the only way to find out whether they work was to do it, so what lessons can one draw?
It appeared in an issue supposedly devoted to Russia (there was a ghastly portrait of Stalin on the cover). My rationale, therefore, was that it would be read by every professor of Russian Studies in the country, and perhaps further down the subject’s Table of Ranks too, as well as picking up some ‘normal’ readers. Every Russianist in the country should read the book, as it will reveal to them where they have come from and perhaps where they are at. But I know from a lifetime’s experience that these people are extremely slow off the mark. Perhaps some sales will dribble in when they have pierced the plastic on their mailed copies in a couple of months time.
Meanwhile, there were five or six ads from other smallish publishers in the same issue. What could their motive be? Well — obviously — even if their ad. doesn’t sell many copies, it must raise awareness of their very existence. At least 32,000 people will have seen it (and in our case it was very prominently positioned on a recto with the issue’s main article). In terms of raising profile, then, it has to be worth it. This is in fact the first time an ad. for Sam&Sam has appeared in a national newspaper in the U.K. or Russia.
Decision: we will advertise in the Russian issue of the TLS next May, but this time it will showcase Sam&Sam the publisher and push four or five separate English/Russian titles.
The background to this whole experience is that independent publishing has gone viral since 2018 and especially during lockdown. The market is flooded. I would advise anyone publishing a book of theirs that is in any way ‘specialist’ to print no more than 200 copies. (Clays printed 459 copies of George and we have shifted 58%).
If a small but apparently reputable publisher takes on your book with a subvention from yourself, be very wary about being drawn into a second edition. I know people who have paid their subvention to the second edition, the publisher has then pretty soon announced they are going to remainder, and the authors have felt bound to buy back say 400 copies and sell them themselves; which is difficult and not helped by the fact that there will be plenty of copies available by then on Amazon and ABE.
22 December
I bumped (metaphorically) into a neighbour who was delivering his Christmas cards. His mother, aged about ninety and in a care home, is very fed up with the latest Christmas restrictions. Although he has been able to visit her for 30 minutes once a week, she cannot see her family over Christmas itself. His response was robust: ‘Never mind, mother: think of March! The days will soon be getting longer and we must all just think of Spring!’
He didn’t tell me how she reacted, but he is right: the worse it gets, the harder we must think of Spring, which only cosmic disaster can prevent coming. In that spirit, I offer a sequence written in Russia forty-six years ago to celebrate the event there:
Note that these were written in the early days of English haiku, when the syllable count was flexible. On this occasion I decided not to capitalise the sulphurous butterfly. Haiku 4 was published in Presence 35, May 2008, p. 16, and the crow in 5 seems prophetic!
30 December
I had the huge honour of reading two pre-publication electronic versions of Andrew Tatham’s I Shall Not be Away Long: The First World War Letters of Lt Col Charles Bartlett, but the experience can’t compare with a slow reading of the final superbly designed and produced book published last month. This reading, which has taken me five weeks, has significantly altered my appreciation; greatly deepened it, I feel.
Available from: www.ishallnotbeawaylong.co.uk
When I originally read the book, it was still in the context of our national experience of the centenary of the ‘Great War’. Followers of this blog will know what I mean: our personal empathy and agony day in day out. My foci, therefore, were (1) the military narrative of the Battles of Loos and the Somme as told in Bartlett’s letters, (2) the life stories of the men he commanded, knew, and loved, but who were slaughtered around him.
This time I found myself concentrating on Bartlett’s own story and character, his wife Margaret’s story and character, and the story of their relationship. This may sound more like reading a novel — being absorbed by psychology and a love interest — but there is no conflict here with the twin foci of the epic military narrative. The latter are as integral to Tatham’s ‘novel’ as the psychological development. Think of War and Peace.
Where personality and personal relationships are concerned, these letters constantly prompt you to speculate — and that is hugely enjoyable, even if you know you may be wrong and that you will never know the truth. For instance, this slow reading produced a strong feeling in me that I understood why, despite all his credentials, Charles Bartlett was never permanently promoted to Lieutenant Colonel of the 8th Berkshires at the Front (a fact which depressed him no end). His attitude to the war was simply not that of the stereotypic upper class officer. He says things in these uncensored letters that stiff-upper-lipped officers were not supposed to say. Nor does he care that his superiors are reading them. But (such is my theory) his superiors concluded he wasn’t ‘sound’. In fact his letters demonstrated that he wasn’t ‘one of us’. Remember that at the time of most of the following excerpts he was acting CO of the battalion:
‘It [Loos] has been a ghastly business too awful to describe. […] God what a sight it has been’ (p. 83). ‘We have had another dusting and done no good’ (p. 107). ‘The strain and reaction is telling and I cannot eat or sleep’ (p. 116). ‘I have several men who are trying to get out of going into the trenches with various excuses […] Personally I hate going’ (p. 132). ‘Am just fed up to the teeth with soldiers’ (p. 226). ‘I don’t think I am any more efficient now to command a Battn than I was [six months ago], in fact I think less as I am more frightened than I was’ (p. 240). ‘I am sorry to say I am FED UP with this bloody war’ (p. 246). ‘Our new tin helmets have saved any amount of lives, and it seems a pity we did not have them before’ (p. 283). ‘The Battle of Loos was nothing to this [Somme] and you cannot imagine the noise stink or number of dead about. It is awful, & rather gets on one’s nerves’ (p. 290). ‘I am rather disappointed with my new men […] but carrying heavy loads in pitch darkness when one has had no experience must be a bit trying, & I am sure I should chuck my load down & run for the nearest shell hole if I had to do it’ (p. 333). ‘I feel so depressed about the show I don’t know what to do’ (p. 343). ‘Am sorry I have not given you much news lately but when one is living in mud up to one’s knees & doing only what one is forbidden to talk about, it is rather difficult to say much’ (p. 365).
But it is vital to stress that he also NEVER GIVES UP. In the Battle of Loos only two of his 20 officers and 184 of his 900 Tommies are left standing, but ‘we made our objective […] and if others had done as well we should have gone further on’ (p. 82). Though he hates going into the trenches as much as his men do, ‘I don’t say and [I] pretend I like it’ (p. 132). The noise of the artillery drives him mad, he can’t wait for leave, but he always returns to the task. He is freezing cold, soaked to the skin, up to his waist in mud and water, infested with lice, forced to defecate in his own trousers, plagued with lumbago, prey to all the trench infections going, deeply depressed, shocked and nauseated, but he still goes on and right to the end his concern is the state of his men and the performance of the battalion. I would never describe Bartlett as a ‘war hero’, but to hate the whole show as much as he does and yet fight on with utter dedication is, surely, heroic-grade grit. It’s this combination of normal uncensored responses that any of us would be capable of, with dogged determination that I’m sure I wouldn’t, which makes him so likeable.
My slow reading has also made me see Margaret (‘Peggy’) differently. She never joined the Red Cross and worked tirelessly in a hospital in France, say, because, I now realise, being ‘the Colonel’s wife’ was a full time job. She had to communicate with the families of her husband’s soldiers, even visiting bereaved parents in various parts of the country; she had to send a constant stream of food parcels to Bartlett and his officers at the Front, along with clothing, medicines, reading matter, daily letters and news; she had to meet returning officers and take them out to lunch; she had to negotiate with her husband’s superiors at home over such delicate matters as his lack of promotion and securing a cushier posting… I had not previously realised that ‘the Colonel’s wife’ was as much a full time job, and expected to be, as being ‘the vicar’s wife’. Like a vicar’s wife, Peggy is not paid a penny for it, but seems never to complain.
There was another expectation of ‘the Colonel’s wife’ that she fulfilled perfectly, too: she was ten years younger than him, attractive, always fashionably dressed, well manicured, and sexy. As befits ‘the Colonel’s wife’, when she is photographed next to her husband and with other officers on the Promenade des Anglais at Nice in 1917 you can see that she is ‘the centre of attention’ as Tatham puts it (p. 377).
Why Bartlett had a fling with another woman once when he was home on leave, and why his very vibrant-seeming marriage broke up in 1922, I find myself speculating about endlessly; and that is another pleasure of Tatham’s creation. With some knowledge of the Edwardian theatre, I am tempted to think that Peggy (a starlet of London musicals) thought Charles a better financial catch than he turned out to be. One could come away from the letters thinking she was manipulative, spoiled, contrarian and impossibly demanding… There is a suggestion in one letter (p. 46) that she was having to fend off men’s attentions herself; but she may also have been a compulsive flirt… Then there is the suggestion (p. 150) that she wanted more babies; but, argues Bartlett, ‘I fail to see how you can say it is my fault’… Did communication, affection, even sex, eventually fail between them because the Bartlett who had been through the war was an utterly different person from the one who had set out for it?
All life and death is in Andrew Tatham’s two masterpieces, A Group Photograph and I Shall Not Be Away Long. Read them in that order. They are the English War and Peace of the 1914-18 catastrophe.
5 January 2021
Today I started my second reading of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love in three months. The reasons for this will emerge in my next post, on 1 February. We are going to devote five posts from that date to Women in Love, which some people consider the greatest English novel of the twentieth century (1916). The first guest post will be by film critic John Pym about Ken Russell’s 1969 film of the novel, the second by seasoned Lawrentian Damian Grant about the novel itself, and the third by historian Laurence Brockliss about what Edwardian marriage was really like. Expect fireworks.
A very happy New Year to you all!
Patrick Miles
The haiku-accompanying icicle image came from this Icicle of the Day entry on “Christine’s blog”, the butterfly image is by Calderonia-follower Katy George, and the hare below it is from this Wildlife Trusts entry.
SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS
‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement
‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine
‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian
‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review
‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter
‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer
‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18
A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.
A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.
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