I am extremely grateful to James Miles for his vibrant guest post on Schulz and Peanuts. It certainly improved Calderonia’s viewing figures! I am always loth to ‘take down’ guest posts, because they have something unique and often definitive about them. But of course they are not really taken down: they are always there below the blog’s growing edge.
New visitors to Calderonia will not know that I have run a series of posts about modern biography because as well as being about George Calderon’s life, Calderonia is about my biography of him and all that is happening in the rather exciting world of biography at the moment. Thus, odd though it may sound, even posts that do not mention George by name are keyworded ‘George Calderon’ as they are part of ‘his’ set, Calderonia.
But James’s review of David Michaelis’s biography of Charles M. Schulz immediately got me thinking of parallels with George. He had been at Oxford with Max Beerbohm and greatly admired the latter’s cartoons. Initially, George’s own cartoons were heavily influenced by Beerbohm’s (the classic collection of whose literary cartoons is The Poet’s Corner). Beerbohm’s are large, immaculate compositions in subtle colours — works of art, in fact. George’s too, at this stage, were full-page stand-alones. As I understand it, they are just examples of his Sunday painting, although Kittie published four in Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory and I shall include what I think is the best one, a penetrating lampoon of Tolstoy, in my biography.
Beerbohm, I believe, never progressed to the ‘moving’ cartoon, the strip cartoon, which as far as I can tell existed in children’s comics in Edward VII’s reign but did not make it into newspapers until after the First World War. George, though, can be seen to be going that way in the stream of small cartoons that he drew in the left hand margin of his ballet libretto The Red Cloth for Michel Fokine around 1912.
Cartoons from page 1 of the typescript of George Calderon’s ballet libretto The Red Cloth, reproduced by kind permission of Mr John Pym
The really important thing about George’s ballet The Red Cloth is that it is a comic ballet. In fact it comes beguilingly close to being a parody of one of Ballets Russes’ greatest hits, Schéhérazade. George’s cartoons would emphasise this to Fokine, who in Kittie’s words himself had a ‘delicious humour’.
I really think, then, that George would have appreciated strip cartoons when they finally appeared in the press in Britain. Moreover, I’m absolutely convinced he would have heaved with laughter over Peanuts, as Schulz’s soft, absurd, very knowing and at times almost Zen sense of humour comes remarkably close to George’s own.
* * *
Another company of letters to publishers is about to go over the top, poor devils… (Ambiguity intended.)
* * *
After about ten years of procrastination, we have just visited Madeira, more precisely its capital Funchal. I most definitely did not go there because George Calderon had called in for four hours on a recuperative cruise in March 1913. However… Funchal’s Edwardian heyday as a wintering place is palpably present in Reid’s Hotel, the Ritz of 1905, the Tropical Gardens, the wicker toboggans that can still whiz you down from Monte if you don’t fancy the cablecar, and in the villas (‘Quinta’s’) that were let to tourists. Walking around Funchal, I suddenly felt myself in touch with George again. I think my next post, then, must be about the circumstances of his 1913 trip.
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The entrance to Fort Brockhurst (picture from Britain’s Past)
Captain of the 11
Jean Ryckaert, May 1916.
George Calderon c.1901
Patrick Miles in his summer house, 11 December 2016
George and Kittie Calderon 1905
Basic form of the Calderon coat of arms
Christmas 1901 Cartoon by George Calderon
Colonel Sir Walter Coote Hedley c. 1920
Sir Richard Vincent Sutton c. 1913
Unpublished watercolour by George Calderon, Tahiti 1906
Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
Michel and Vera Fokine in “Scheherazade”, 1914 (The Music And Theatre Library of Sweden, creative commons)
K.N. Das Gupta and Margaret Mitchell in an Indian Dramatic Society production of The Maharani of Arakan, 1913?
Frontis piece by Frank Calderon
A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77.
Book sent to George Calderon in Russia by his mother, Christmas 1895.
George Calderon, 1912
Monarch Butterfly Madeira
George L. Calderon, cartoonist
I am extremely grateful to James Miles for his vibrant guest post on Schulz and Peanuts. It certainly improved Calderonia’s viewing figures! I am always loth to ‘take down’ guest posts, because they have something unique and often definitive about them. But of course they are not really taken down: they are always there below the blog’s growing edge.
New visitors to Calderonia will not know that I have run a series of posts about modern biography because as well as being about George Calderon’s life, Calderonia is about my biography of him and all that is happening in the rather exciting world of biography at the moment. Thus, odd though it may sound, even posts that do not mention George by name are keyworded ‘George Calderon’ as they are part of ‘his’ set, Calderonia.
But James’s review of David Michaelis’s biography of Charles M. Schulz immediately got me thinking of parallels with George. He had been at Oxford with Max Beerbohm and greatly admired the latter’s cartoons. Initially, George’s own cartoons were heavily influenced by Beerbohm’s (the classic collection of whose literary cartoons is The Poet’s Corner). Beerbohm’s are large, immaculate compositions in subtle colours — works of art, in fact. George’s too, at this stage, were full-page stand-alones. As I understand it, they are just examples of his Sunday painting, although Kittie published four in Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory and I shall include what I think is the best one, a penetrating lampoon of Tolstoy, in my biography.
Beerbohm, I believe, never progressed to the ‘moving’ cartoon, the strip cartoon, which as far as I can tell existed in children’s comics in Edward VII’s reign but did not make it into newspapers until after the First World War. George, though, can be seen to be going that way in the stream of small cartoons that he drew in the left hand margin of his ballet libretto The Red Cloth for Michel Fokine around 1912.
Cartoons from page 1 of the typescript of George Calderon’s ballet libretto The Red Cloth, reproduced by kind permission of Mr John Pym
The really important thing about George’s ballet The Red Cloth is that it is a comic ballet. In fact it comes beguilingly close to being a parody of one of Ballets Russes’ greatest hits, Schéhérazade. George’s cartoons would emphasise this to Fokine, who in Kittie’s words himself had a ‘delicious humour’.
I really think, then, that George would have appreciated strip cartoons when they finally appeared in the press in Britain. Moreover, I’m absolutely convinced he would have heaved with laughter over Peanuts, as Schulz’s soft, absurd, very knowing and at times almost Zen sense of humour comes remarkably close to George’s own.
* * *
Another company of letters to publishers is about to go over the top, poor devils… (Ambiguity intended.)
* * *
After about ten years of procrastination, we have just visited Madeira, more precisely its capital Funchal. I most definitely did not go there because George Calderon had called in for four hours on a recuperative cruise in March 1913. However… Funchal’s Edwardian heyday as a wintering place is palpably present in Reid’s Hotel, the Ritz of 1905, the Tropical Gardens, the wicker toboggans that can still whiz you down from Monte if you don’t fancy the cablecar, and in the villas (‘Quinta’s’) that were let to tourists. Walking around Funchal, I suddenly felt myself in touch with George again. I think my next post, then, must be about the circumstances of his 1913 trip.
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