26/10/15. It was remiss of me, in my last Comment, not to address the first paragraph of Clare Hopkins’s last Comment, which concerned commemoration. Clare began the paragraph by asking ‘Can there ever be a last word on the subject of commemoration?’ As new followers of the blog may ascertain by searching on ‘Commemoration’, we debated this subject over the year, with reference to World War I, a great deal.
I think it possible, therefore, that I subconsciously answered ‘no, there can’t be a last word on commemoration’, and moved on… Equally, back in August I was feeling ‘warred out’ and ‘commemorationed out’ and simply had nothing more to say. That situation has been changed by a visit that I made this weekend to the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in Hampshire, which was conceived and painted by Stanley Spencer.
In my own Comment of 6 August I said that the images and all that I know of Auschwitz and the Holocaust constrain me from visiting Auschwitz. I would he incoherent with emotion. The same is true for me of the Helles Memorial at Gallipoli or visiting the battlefield itself (to go to the spot where George Calderon was killed would be totally impossible). But Clare reasonably remarked that she saw ‘nothing wrong in being incoherent’ and that ‘to stand in numb or anguished silence’ at Helles or in Auschwitz ‘seems an entirely appropriate act of commemoration’.
Although I still know I couldn’t go to these places, I accept Clare’s View here. I have come to feel since August that the completely empathic response to such terrible events and individual sacrifice is ‘not enough’, in the sense that it’s only half of the act of commemoration. I’ve come round to this because of my personal experience that the subjective, holistic-empathic response reaches a limit where you have no more to give. Indeed you are exhausted, ‘gutted’ by it. Ceremony, ritual, more impersonal, rational and objective forms of commemoration, have to take over.
Another difficulty I have always had with memorials like Helles, Thiepval, or the daily ceremony at the Menin Gate, is their sheer scale. Certainly they create an awe-ful sense, but their size and architecture also seem uncomfortably ‘imperial’ — partaking even of the very gigantism and marmoreal impersonality that made World War I possible. Many people have said to me that the scale of and the silence at these memorials are what has
made the deepest impression on them. I can’t help feeling, though, that I wouldn’t be able to get that experience from them myself with so many hundreds of other people present. There is an undeniable element of tourism at these memorials, even Auschwitz, which I have no difficulty with but which I wouldn’t be able to stomach.
The reason I have no difficulty with this commemorative tourism, or even with what Clare Hopkins aptly termed in her Comment of 30 July ‘war porn’, is that it surely does not matter how people are brought to a realisation of the horror of these events and, dare I say it, the sanctity of the victims, as long as they are brought to it. Of course the simply ‘educational’ value of a visit to such places is gold. And, as I say, the monument, war grave, ceremony, service or ritual seem to complete (close?) somewhat unemotionally an act that untrammeled empathy cannot.
But I have to say that Spencer’s nineteen frescoes in the Sandham Memorial Chapel are the most satisfying commemoration of World War I that I know. There are no corpses, gunfire, attacks and carnage in them, very few discernible weapons even, but the horror of actual warfare is the great Unspoken at the back of your mind as you study them. What the panels draw you into (and you could spend all day discovering new things in them) is the
most basic human life of the war, from scrubbing floors in hospitals, sorting the laundry, setting out kit for inspection, to scraping dead skin off frostbitten feet, buttering sandwiches in a hospital ward, map-reading or making a military road. All of the scenes are collective ones. As the excellent National Trust brochure puts it, they celebrate the ‘human companionship of war’. The sheer positiveness of this companionship — the utter humanity of the paintings — triumphs.
At the same time, Spencer’s personal and wonderfully modern christianity (the small letter seems appropriate) shines through everything, especially the vast altarpiece ‘Resurrection of the Soldiers’. In the centre of it are two mules waking from death and craning their necks round to look at the almost unnoticeable white figure of Christ in the mid-distance, to whom the resurrected soldiers are bringing their crosses. Apparently, Spencer believed that animals have souls and that is why he wasn’t invited to the consecration of the chapel by an Anglican bishop. It also explains why a soldier waking far right from his grave is touching two hilarious tortoises (the scene recalls Spencer’s war service in Greece and Macedonia), who presumably have also been resurrected.
It will take me ages, I think, to get my head round Spencer’s masterpiece (surely it is one of the greatest works of art of the twentieth century), but at the moment I would say that the reason I find it such a satisfying commemoration is that its celebration of common life, its astounding evocation of ‘ordinary’ men and women, is empathetically totally engaging, whilst his personal religious conception of the work provides ‘meaning’, a tentative, almost indefinable rational closure to the empathic. Spencer wrote of the altarpiece: ‘The truth that the cross is supposed to symbolise in this picture is that nothing is lost where a sacrifice has been the result of a perfect understanding.’ Not an exclusively Christian, or religious, truth, then; all can accept it as a moral and humanistic one.
I have several approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!
Related
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
George Calderon, 1912
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George Calderon c.1901
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Captain of the 11
Watch this Space
26/10/15. It was remiss of me, in my last Comment, not to address the first paragraph of Clare Hopkins’s last Comment, which concerned commemoration. Clare began the paragraph by asking ‘Can there ever be a last word on the subject of commemoration?’ As new followers of the blog may ascertain by searching on ‘Commemoration’, we debated this subject over the year, with reference to World War I, a great deal.
I think it possible, therefore, that I subconsciously answered ‘no, there can’t be a last word on commemoration’, and moved on… Equally, back in August I was feeling ‘warred out’ and ‘commemorationed out’ and simply had nothing more to say. That situation has been changed by a visit that I made this weekend to the Sandham Memorial Chapel at Burghclere in Hampshire, which was conceived and painted by Stanley Spencer.
In my own Comment of 6 August I said that the images and all that I know of Auschwitz and the Holocaust constrain me from visiting Auschwitz. I would he incoherent with emotion. The same is true for me of the Helles Memorial at Gallipoli or visiting the battlefield itself (to go to the spot where George Calderon was killed would be totally impossible). But Clare reasonably remarked that she saw ‘nothing wrong in being incoherent’ and that ‘to stand in numb or anguished silence’ at Helles or in Auschwitz ‘seems an entirely appropriate act of commemoration’.
Although I still know I couldn’t go to these places, I accept Clare’s View here. I have come to feel since August that the completely empathic response to such terrible events and individual sacrifice is ‘not enough’, in the sense that it’s only half of the act of commemoration. I’ve come round to this because of my personal experience that the subjective, holistic-empathic response reaches a limit where you have no more to give. Indeed you are exhausted, ‘gutted’ by it. Ceremony, ritual, more impersonal, rational and objective forms of commemoration, have to take over.
Another difficulty I have always had with memorials like Helles, Thiepval, or the daily ceremony at the Menin Gate, is their sheer scale. Certainly they create an awe-ful sense, but their size and architecture also seem uncomfortably ‘imperial’ — partaking even of the very gigantism and marmoreal impersonality that made World War I possible. Many people have said to me that the scale of and the silence at these memorials are what has
made the deepest impression on them. I can’t help feeling, though, that I wouldn’t be able to get that experience from them myself with so many hundreds of other people present. There is an undeniable element of tourism at these memorials, even Auschwitz, which I have no difficulty with but which I wouldn’t be able to stomach.
The reason I have no difficulty with this commemorative tourism, or even with what Clare Hopkins aptly termed in her Comment of 30 July ‘war porn’, is that it surely does not matter how people are brought to a realisation of the horror of these events and, dare I say it, the sanctity of the victims, as long as they are brought to it. Of course the simply ‘educational’ value of a visit to such places is gold. And, as I say, the monument, war grave, ceremony, service or ritual seem to complete (close?) somewhat unemotionally an act that untrammeled empathy cannot.
But I have to say that Spencer’s nineteen frescoes in the Sandham Memorial Chapel are the most satisfying commemoration of World War I that I know. There are no corpses, gunfire, attacks and carnage in them, very few discernible weapons even, but the horror of actual warfare is the great Unspoken at the back of your mind as you study them. What the panels draw you into (and you could spend all day discovering new things in them) is the
most basic human life of the war, from scrubbing floors in hospitals, sorting the laundry, setting out kit for inspection, to scraping dead skin off frostbitten feet, buttering sandwiches in a hospital ward, map-reading or making a military road. All of the scenes are collective ones. As the excellent National Trust brochure puts it, they celebrate the ‘human companionship of war’. The sheer positiveness of this companionship — the utter humanity of the paintings — triumphs.
At the same time, Spencer’s personal and wonderfully modern christianity (the small letter seems appropriate) shines through everything, especially the vast altarpiece ‘Resurrection of the Soldiers’. In the centre of it are two mules waking from death and craning their necks round to look at the almost unnoticeable white figure of Christ in the mid-distance, to whom the resurrected soldiers are bringing their crosses. Apparently, Spencer believed that animals have souls and that is why he wasn’t invited to the consecration of the chapel by an Anglican bishop. It also explains why a soldier waking far right from his grave is touching two hilarious tortoises (the scene recalls Spencer’s war service in Greece and Macedonia), who presumably have also been resurrected.
It will take me ages, I think, to get my head round Spencer’s masterpiece (surely it is one of the greatest works of art of the twentieth century), but at the moment I would say that the reason I find it such a satisfying commemoration is that its celebration of common life, its astounding evocation of ‘ordinary’ men and women, is empathetically totally engaging, whilst his personal religious conception of the work provides ‘meaning’, a tentative, almost indefinable rational closure to the empathic. Spencer wrote of the altarpiece: ‘The truth that the cross is supposed to symbolise in this picture is that nothing is lost where a sacrifice has been the result of a perfect understanding.’ Not an exclusively Christian, or religious, truth, then; all can accept it as a moral and humanistic one.
I have several approaches to publishers in the air, but if you have any ideas about plausible ones yourself, for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, please don’t hesitate to email them me through my Website http://patrickmiles.co.uk. Thank you for reading!
Share this:
Related