As part of my preparation for writing ‘Who George Calderon Was’, I have just re-read all the personal memoirs that Kittie asked George’s friends to write for Percy Lubbock’s book about George (the memoirs themselves have never been published). Undoubtedly the best is by Laurence Binyon, as he pulls no punches but always expresses reservations in a way that could not possibly offend Kittie.
Talking of George when they were both at Trinity College, Oxford, Binyon writes:
There seemed to be a freakish vein in his mind. Paradox attracted him. All were agreed about his gifts, but no-one was confident of the direction in which they would carry him. I confess that at that time I underrated the quality of his mind. […] His dialectical skill seemed rather sterile. But this did not prevent him from being entirely attractive and lovable.
It would have been great to have had some examples from Binyon of George’s early paradoxes, for there is no doubt that paradox features heavily in his published writings. For me in my Afterword, it raises two questions: (a) do George’s paradoxes actually add up to much? (b) were the Edwardians generally lovers of paradox?
Clear examples of ‘simple’ paradox can be seen in George’s classic deconstruction of Tolstoyism (‘The Wrong Tolstoi’, 1901), where he has a field day with the cognitive dissonance at the heart of Tolstoi’s ‘thought’, and in Downy V. Green (1902) and Dwala (1904). In Downy V. Green Oxford is fiercely debating whether to abolish Greek as a condition of admission, but the American Rhodes scholar who has come to sit at the University’s feet argues strongly for keeping it and it is clearly implied that Oxford could learn a thing or two from America. In Dwala the hero starts as a Javan hominid but transforms himself into an Englishman who becomes prime minister! Both Downy and Dwala are walking literary paradoxes.
However, in George’s most successful play, The Fountain (1909), you have a leading character, James Wren, whose natural mode of expression is paradox:
This general ignorance is the oddest feature of modern life. I knew a case of a temperance mission entirely supported by brewery shares.
Given that Wren is a Fabian and the play is partly about rent racketeering, it is not surprising that reviewers compared Wren to Tanner in Shaw’s Man and Superman, and The Fountain to Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses. George robustly refuted these ‘misconceptions’ in a preface to the published play, but he never mentioned the similarity of language. Shaw was famous as a ‘paradoxer’, as practically any page of his plays will show. I have randomly opened my Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw and my eye falls on:
If you hint the slightest doubt of Hector’s courage, he will go straight off and do the most horribly dangerous thing to convince himself that he isn’t a coward.
(Heartbreak House, Act 1)
One could say that paradox is Shaw’s most natural mode of theatrical expression. We are meant to be delighted by it for its own sake, and we often are.
But the paradox most typical of George’s writing is different; in fact I am not sure that ‘paradox’ is the best word for it. The following example, which both George and Kittie were fond of recounting, is archetypal. It was told to George by a tramp or a hawker, and I quote it in the version retold by George to the composer Martin Shaw and published in the latter’s autobiography Up to Now (1929):
My father told me to chop some wood. I met another boy who said, ‘Where are you going with that chopper?’ I said, ‘To chop wood for my father.’ He came with me into the yard and watched me chopping. After a while, he said to me, ‘Let me have a chop.’ So I gave him the chopper. We got playing about and he said to me, ‘I bet you a penny you wouldn’t put your finger on the block and leave it there while I bring the chopper down.’ So I said to him, ‘I bet you a penny you wouldn’t bring the chopper down if my finger was there.’ So I puts my finger on the block and he raises the chopper. Now you see he thinks to himself, ‘He’ll never dare leave his finger there when he sees the chopper coming down’; and I thinks to myself, ‘He’ll never dare really bring his chopper down on my finger — he’ll only pretend.’ So each of us relies on the other. Down comes the chopper and off goes my finger.
In ‘Lipa Sidorovna’ (1898) a Russian widow is obsessed with building a shrine in St Petersburg over the grave of her murdered only son, but when this son returns as an escaped convict from Siberia (he has substituted his papers for the man he murdered), she turns him over to the police: he ‘is’ and he ‘is not’ her son. In ‘The Lieutenant’s Heroine’ (1900) a Russian lieutenant in the Caucasus believes in the cards’ prediction that he will marry an ‘heroic’ woman and when he is drafted to defend an isolated farmstead and meets the owner’s daughter Varvara Petrovna, a ‘tall, handsome young woman, with a high aquiline nose and a commanding presence’, who joins the soldiers in blazing away at the Chechens, he just knows it will be her, even though ‘I can’t stand your masculine women’. The narrator, an Englishman, does not believe in the cards or Fate, but when he meets the lieutenant a year later and discovers he is married, he assumes he did marry the heroic Varvara Petrovna, but not a bit of it: he married her little slender cousin who was afraid of mice, fainted when a bullet grazed her hand, yet risked her life to go outside the house to fetch water for a wounded Russian soldier, whereupon the Chechens chivalrously withdrew. Thus the cards’ foreknowledge is ‘disproven’ (he did not marry the heroic woman) and ‘proven’ (he did marry an heroic woman). Similar conundrums underlie the plays Geminae (1913), The Two Talismans (1913/14), The Lamp (1914/15) and even an incident at Gallipoli when George came upon an unexploded bomb:
[An officer buried it.] A sergeant said it ought to be ‘handed in’; so I dug it up again and carried it across the camp. Six soldiers pronounced it dangerous and recommended reburial. I left them digging its grave. One said, ‘the fuse is set to time’. I said: ‘I expect the time’s expired now’.’ They were silent awhile then one laughed and they all laughed.
Of course, George said casually ‘I expect the time’s expired now’ to put the wind up them — and succeeded — but also to watch their audience response when they realised (a) it could not have expired, (b) the timer could be broken, (c) it was probably a dud. It was about to explode…and it wasn’t!
The Calderonian paradox is a set of conditions (an identity, wager, prediction, vow) that is complicated by an unstated or invisible set of other conditions. For a while it produces a tantalising mirror-facing-a-mirror effect (in the chopper story an infinitely slow-motion series rather like Zeno’s arrow). There is a self-referentiality, a vicious circularity, about it that might well evoke the adjective ‘sterile’, but in George’s literary handling the conditions eventually cancel each other out, bringing a resolution. It is reminiscent of the ancient ‘liar paradox’ (all solicitors are liars, says the solicitor; so is he telling the truth or not?) and more recent ‘barber paradox’ (a barber shaves all the men in a town except those who shave themselves; so does the barber shave himself?).
I gather that Bertrand Russell did not author the barber paradox, it was suggested to him as an example of his own Russell’s Paradox (1901), viz. ‘is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves, a member of itself?’ (If it is, says my dictionary of philosophy, then it is not; if it is not, then it is…) Unfortunately, my maths is not up to saying whether the Calderonian paradox is a literary form of Russell’s paradox, but it is quite possible that George had been following developments in set theory in the 1900s, as he was an excellent mathematician.
What I do know, is that when I was ploughing through Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus fifteen years ago I came across Wittgenstein’s refutation of Russell’s Paradox. I couldn’t understand his refutation because I am not a mathematician, but I do remember how it concluded: ‘And that’s Russell’s Paradox disposed of’! According to the Wikipedia entry on the barber paradox, even Russell denied that it was an instance of his own, describing it as a ‘form of words [that] is just noise without meaning’!
So do George’s paradoxes say anything profound, or are they just cerebral acrobatics and noise without meaning? I haven’t reached a conclusion about this yet — indeed the whole of this post is just thinking onto the screen, so I shall really value Comments and responses. I know that many, perhaps most, readers of George today do find his paradoxes vacuous. Certainly it is deeply unfashionable today to base a play upon such things.
But perhaps this is the wrong way to approach them. The Edwardians delighted in cleverness on the stage and in humorous writing, there is no doubt about that. They liked laughing a lot and wanted to be surprised by verbal and intellectual ingenuity. It did not greatly matter to them whether a paradox was ‘true’, ‘profound’, ‘serious’, or not — in any case, one could argue that all paradoxes are only apparent contradictions. Today we may ask more from our plays than paradoxes, but it would be po-faced not to recognise the sheer wit behind much Edwardian drama, including Shaw’s (which seem to have almost gone out of fashion). The Edwardians relished paradox, I feel, and there must be a direct line from the epigrams and paradoxes of Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw, St John Hankin, George Calderon, Noel Coward, Joe Orton, or Tom Stoppard… Paradox can be simply ‘joyful’, as the Times reviewer has just described Patrick Marber’s production of Stoppard’s Travesties. In Shaw’s case particularly, it can also ‘make strange’ à la Brecht — it can make us question our assumptions.
Altogether, paradox is an important aspect of the problem of Edwardian ‘superficiality’.
Postscript
On 13 February 1899 Calderon had lunch with Mary Hamilton, Kittie’s mother, at 17 Golden Square, Soho. It was four months after the death of Kittie’s husband Archie Ripley and six weeks after the death of Ripley’s mother, Laura. Kittie was at Earlham, the Ripley family home in Norfolk, and George was looking after her dog Jones at his lodgings in Eastcote. After lunch with ‘Mammy Ham’, as Kittie called her mother, George wrote to her:
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?
Related
The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George Calderon, 1912
George Calderon c.1901
Captain of the 11
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
‘A paradox, a paradox…’
As part of my preparation for writing ‘Who George Calderon Was’, I have just re-read all the personal memoirs that Kittie asked George’s friends to write for Percy Lubbock’s book about George (the memoirs themselves have never been published). Undoubtedly the best is by Laurence Binyon, as he pulls no punches but always expresses reservations in a way that could not possibly offend Kittie.
Talking of George when they were both at Trinity College, Oxford, Binyon writes:
It would have been great to have had some examples from Binyon of George’s early paradoxes, for there is no doubt that paradox features heavily in his published writings. For me in my Afterword, it raises two questions: (a) do George’s paradoxes actually add up to much? (b) were the Edwardians generally lovers of paradox?
Clear examples of ‘simple’ paradox can be seen in George’s classic deconstruction of Tolstoyism (‘The Wrong Tolstoi’, 1901), where he has a field day with the cognitive dissonance at the heart of Tolstoi’s ‘thought’, and in Downy V. Green (1902) and Dwala (1904). In Downy V. Green Oxford is fiercely debating whether to abolish Greek as a condition of admission, but the American Rhodes scholar who has come to sit at the University’s feet argues strongly for keeping it and it is clearly implied that Oxford could learn a thing or two from America. In Dwala the hero starts as a Javan hominid but transforms himself into an Englishman who becomes prime minister! Both Downy and Dwala are walking literary paradoxes.
However, in George’s most successful play, The Fountain (1909), you have a leading character, James Wren, whose natural mode of expression is paradox:
Given that Wren is a Fabian and the play is partly about rent racketeering, it is not surprising that reviewers compared Wren to Tanner in Shaw’s Man and Superman, and The Fountain to Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses. George robustly refuted these ‘misconceptions’ in a preface to the published play, but he never mentioned the similarity of language. Shaw was famous as a ‘paradoxer’, as practically any page of his plays will show. I have randomly opened my Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw and my eye falls on:
One could say that paradox is Shaw’s most natural mode of theatrical expression. We are meant to be delighted by it for its own sake, and we often are.
But the paradox most typical of George’s writing is different; in fact I am not sure that ‘paradox’ is the best word for it. The following example, which both George and Kittie were fond of recounting, is archetypal. It was told to George by a tramp or a hawker, and I quote it in the version retold by George to the composer Martin Shaw and published in the latter’s autobiography Up to Now (1929):
In ‘Lipa Sidorovna’ (1898) a Russian widow is obsessed with building a shrine in St Petersburg over the grave of her murdered only son, but when this son returns as an escaped convict from Siberia (he has substituted his papers for the man he murdered), she turns him over to the police: he ‘is’ and he ‘is not’ her son. In ‘The Lieutenant’s Heroine’ (1900) a Russian lieutenant in the Caucasus believes in the cards’ prediction that he will marry an ‘heroic’ woman and when he is drafted to defend an isolated farmstead and meets the owner’s daughter Varvara Petrovna, a ‘tall, handsome young woman, with a high aquiline nose and a commanding presence’, who joins the soldiers in blazing away at the Chechens, he just knows it will be her, even though ‘I can’t stand your masculine women’. The narrator, an Englishman, does not believe in the cards or Fate, but when he meets the lieutenant a year later and discovers he is married, he assumes he did marry the heroic Varvara Petrovna, but not a bit of it: he married her little slender cousin who was afraid of mice, fainted when a bullet grazed her hand, yet risked her life to go outside the house to fetch water for a wounded Russian soldier, whereupon the Chechens chivalrously withdrew. Thus the cards’ foreknowledge is ‘disproven’ (he did not marry the heroic woman) and ‘proven’ (he did marry an heroic woman). Similar conundrums underlie the plays Geminae (1913), The Two Talismans (1913/14), The Lamp (1914/15) and even an incident at Gallipoli when George came upon an unexploded bomb:
Of course, George said casually ‘I expect the time’s expired now’ to put the wind up them — and succeeded — but also to watch their audience response when they realised (a) it could not have expired, (b) the timer could be broken, (c) it was probably a dud. It was about to explode…and it wasn’t!
The Calderonian paradox is a set of conditions (an identity, wager, prediction, vow) that is complicated by an unstated or invisible set of other conditions. For a while it produces a tantalising mirror-facing-a-mirror effect (in the chopper story an infinitely slow-motion series rather like Zeno’s arrow). There is a self-referentiality, a vicious circularity, about it that might well evoke the adjective ‘sterile’, but in George’s literary handling the conditions eventually cancel each other out, bringing a resolution. It is reminiscent of the ancient ‘liar paradox’ (all solicitors are liars, says the solicitor; so is he telling the truth or not?) and more recent ‘barber paradox’ (a barber shaves all the men in a town except those who shave themselves; so does the barber shave himself?).
I gather that Bertrand Russell did not author the barber paradox, it was suggested to him as an example of his own Russell’s Paradox (1901), viz. ‘is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves, a member of itself?’ (If it is, says my dictionary of philosophy, then it is not; if it is not, then it is…) Unfortunately, my maths is not up to saying whether the Calderonian paradox is a literary form of Russell’s paradox, but it is quite possible that George had been following developments in set theory in the 1900s, as he was an excellent mathematician.
What I do know, is that when I was ploughing through Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus fifteen years ago I came across Wittgenstein’s refutation of Russell’s Paradox. I couldn’t understand his refutation because I am not a mathematician, but I do remember how it concluded: ‘And that’s Russell’s Paradox disposed of’! According to the Wikipedia entry on the barber paradox, even Russell denied that it was an instance of his own, describing it as a ‘form of words [that] is just noise without meaning’!
So do George’s paradoxes say anything profound, or are they just cerebral acrobatics and noise without meaning? I haven’t reached a conclusion about this yet — indeed the whole of this post is just thinking onto the screen, so I shall really value Comments and responses. I know that many, perhaps most, readers of George today do find his paradoxes vacuous. Certainly it is deeply unfashionable today to base a play upon such things.
But perhaps this is the wrong way to approach them. The Edwardians delighted in cleverness on the stage and in humorous writing, there is no doubt about that. They liked laughing a lot and wanted to be surprised by verbal and intellectual ingenuity. It did not greatly matter to them whether a paradox was ‘true’, ‘profound’, ‘serious’, or not — in any case, one could argue that all paradoxes are only apparent contradictions. Today we may ask more from our plays than paradoxes, but it would be po-faced not to recognise the sheer wit behind much Edwardian drama, including Shaw’s (which seem to have almost gone out of fashion). The Edwardians relished paradox, I feel, and there must be a direct line from the epigrams and paradoxes of Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw, St John Hankin, George Calderon, Noel Coward, Joe Orton, or Tom Stoppard… Paradox can be simply ‘joyful’, as the Times reviewer has just described Patrick Marber’s production of Stoppard’s Travesties. In Shaw’s case particularly, it can also ‘make strange’ à la Brecht — it can make us question our assumptions.
Altogether, paradox is an important aspect of the problem of Edwardian ‘superficiality’.
Postscript
On 13 February 1899 Calderon had lunch with Mary Hamilton, Kittie’s mother, at 17 Golden Square, Soho. It was four months after the death of Kittie’s husband Archie Ripley and six weeks after the death of Ripley’s mother, Laura. Kittie was at Earlham, the Ripley family home in Norfolk, and George was looking after her dog Jones at his lodgings in Eastcote. After lunch with ‘Mammy Ham’, as Kittie called her mother, George wrote to her:
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