Calderonia

DnA

Posted on May 3, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Longer-term followers of Calderonia will be aware of my preoccupation with Edwardian ‘dilettantism’ and ‘amateurism’. Laurence Binyon, Martin Shaw and Percy Lubbock went out of their way to stress that George was not a dilettante, and the word ‘amateur’ was not derogatory in that period. Nevertheless, since the 1920s George has been increasingly disparaged as an amateur and even a dilettante. If you want to know how I resolve this issue in the concept of ‘Edwardian genius’, you will have to read the Afterword of my biography! I think it is a complex subject.

When I wrote in my post about the gender pay gap that a senior figure in an oil company confessed to me in about 1998 that he could not take women seriously in the workplace, I implied that he described them as ‘dilettantes’. On second thoughts, he may have used the softer word ‘amateur’. The words are not interchangeable, but I would claim that their semantic content today is identical (‘unprofessional’) and ‘dilettante’ merely intensifies it to the extreme of pejorativeness — contempt.

It was not always so. Deriving from Italian for ‘delight’, a dilettante was originally someone who took real and sustained pleasure in the fine arts as a consumer. S/he may not have progressed beyond a pretty superficial enjoyment of them, but they did love them (this was the original sense of ‘amateur’ too). An amateur not only loved them as a consumer, but practised them, and seriously; hence originally an amateur was no amateur in the modern sense (i.e. dabbler), let alone a dilettante in the modern sense (i.e. botcher). As far as I can see, in the eighteenth century dilettante and amateur were neutral words describing different types of people, but with an area of overlap in the concept of taking pleasure in or loving.

By the Edwardian period, the vital point was that s/he practised the given art not for filthy lucre, not for a livelihood, not as a ‘profession’. Practising the art (e.g. cricket, painting, war) for pure love of it was regarded as superior and the amateur was expected to be every bit as good at their art as the ‘professional’, if not inherently better. Where sport was concerned, George certainly subscribed to this notion of amateur. Where his writing was concerned, contemporaries may have regarded him as an amateur because he appeared to have a private income (Kittie’s!), but actually that was not so: he earned a living wage from his journalism, fiction, plays and translations.

Where the literature and theatre of the Edwardian period were concerned, George preferred to think of himself as an amateur because he wanted to stay outside a literary establishment of ‘professionals’ that he saw as stuck in a Victorian rut. Thus in a TLS review he praised to the skies two ‘amateur’ humorous writers (without knowing that they were women) because they were fresh, creative and writing outside the ‘professional’ (his word) box. Conversely, for a long time the Edwardian/Georgian literary establishment regarded those whom we now call the War Poets as amateurs.

For George, amateur in the arts meant innovative, anti-establishment, genuinely creative, serious. Authentic art of that kind we would be tempted today to call ‘professional’. We all know, for instance, that fringe theatre can be professional in the sense of trained skill, and produce more significant dramatic art than some commercial theatre. On the other hand, the worst feature of fringe theatre is when you have directors and actors who are doing it only for themselves. Unfortunately, this self-gratification amongst fringers and amateurs is quite common. Such people do not understand, as real professionals would, that their skills should be selflessly focussed on the work and their audience.

A writer whom I respect referred to ‘the dreaded D-word’ in a discussion about George Calderon. He was right: despite the fact that in 2018 we ‘multi-task’ and have ‘portfolio’ careers, we dread being thought of as dilettantes or amateurs. The phrase ‘it’s what I do’ is used to dismiss all one’s other paid/unpaid activities and stress that ‘really’ one’s vocation, one’s serious and inalienable role in life, is X. People are not at ease with being thought to ‘spread themselves too thinly’ in a perceived dilettante fashion.

I am experiencing this unease myself over publishing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. I can assure followers and potential readers that Sam&Sam are tackling the task of producing a quality book with all the professionalism of which we are capable. However, as I have said, one can’t get round the fact that designing, typesetting and printing a long and complex hardback like this, for which one is going to ask £30, is extremely challenging. We are not ‘professional’ (i.e. commercial) book-publishers. I know that I am not ‘really’ a publisher, what I ‘do’ is writing. I fear the dreaded D and A words…

On the other hand, I have had this amateur role thrust upon me. Were I the bitter type, I would holler that the British publishing establishment has let me down and I would excoriate the politics of publishing. But bitterness is toxic. We must just keep buggering on, as Churchill put it. Is that the spirit of the dilettante, the amateur, or the professional?

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged amateurism, biographies, biography, comments, dilettantism, fringe theatre, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Martin Shaw, Percy Lubbock, publishers, Sam&Sam, self-publishing, semantic, TLS | Leave a comment

Jacketed!

Posted on April 21, 2018 by Patrick Miles

I herewith post the front and back cover of my book, designed by Dan Mogford, who has been a delight to work with and whose first-rate services are not pricey. The front and back flaps are also ready, but I don’t want to post ‘spoilers’.

At the end of a long day, we felt we had no alternative but to use Hollyer’s 1912 ‘iconic’ photo-portrait of George on the cover, as it is artistically the best image of him and likely to be the only one that potential readers have ever seen. At first glance, perhaps, the front cover is a little funereal or ‘black pot’, but to my astonishment some women have spontaneously told me they find George in this photograph ‘very handsome’!

Is it the eyebrows? A touch of Clooney perhaps, or Connery..?

The title on the front and spine will be in gold, as will the frame of the image on the back:

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius Back Cover

Click to enlarge

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, comments, Dan Mogford, Derwent May, Emmetts, Frederick Hollyer, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, George Clooney, Harvey Pitcher, jacket, jacket design, Laurence Brockliss, Sean Connery | 7 Comments

George Calderon and the gender pay gap

Posted on April 17, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Obviously I believe George Calderon’s life is interesting in itself — dramatic, even — but another reason I have written his biography is that many of the issues of the day that he responded to are still with us (e.g. Russian autocracy, the power of trade unions, commercial theatre, public philanthropy), and his take on them was original. Despite his reputation as a Tory (which he wasn’t), George never belonged to an Establishment, political, theatrical, literary, or other. He always strove to think outside the box.

His opposition to votes for women brought out the worst in him. However, since his reasoning, like that of the women anti-suffragists, was essentially based on gender difference (the ‘separate spheres’ argument) and gender differences are still with us, even here he can be relevant, or at least challenging, today.

One of the suffragists’ claims was that enfranchisement would raise women’s wages because it would raise their status (yes, it was italicised as a Latin word and presumably pronounced with a long ‘a’). Correspondence about this erupted on the pages of The Times in April 1909 and George weighed in with a very long letter, which was printed in full presumably because he put ‘Hon. Sec. Men’s League for Opposing Woman Suffrage’ after his name. He treated the wages claim with his malignest sarcasm:

In spite of facts and statistics, the woman suffragists continually do cry that the vote must raise wages; but they can never show any instance where it has. When put to it for the manner how, they take refuge in a meaningless parrot cry of ‘raising woman’s status’. And what is meant by status none of them can tell; it is a word like ‘Mesopotamia’, or the technical terms of metaphysics and theology. If they had to put it into English they could not do it, because there is no meaning in it at all. It is a magical formula, an algebraic symbol of the same order as the square root of minus one. If women workers are to be enriched, out of whose pockets is the money to come?

What George was driving at was that the suffragists could not explain the economic mechanism by which enfranchisement would close the gender pay gap, and in the absence of that it wasn’t going to happen. One of George’s many qualifications was that, unusually for the time, he had studied ‘political economy’, i.e. what today we call ‘economics’. He consequently thought he knew what he was talking about. Indeed, very slyly in his anti-suffrage tract of the previous year he had pointed out that Millicent Fawcett, president of the National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies, was a trained economist and could ‘prick the wages bubble in a moment’. He had also ‘searched Mrs Fawcett’s Political Economy for Beginners in vain for any hint that legislation is one of the possible means of raising wages’. He in fact believed, like a French economist who had studied the subject in 1906, that ‘the cause of women’s low wages lies chiefly in the competition of women for whom the wage is a supplement and not a livelihood’. The economic mechanism, then, that would perpetuate the gender pay gap was, in the words of his Times letter of 13 April 1909, ‘the market value of women’s work’.

The title page of George’s anti-suffrage tract

As we know only too well from the recently published statistics, enfranchisement and equal rights won by women since George’s day have not led to equal pay for women. So was he right about the role of invidious market forces? Yes, and no.

The current public debate about the gender pay gap demonstrates how complex the subject is. To take three of the simpler aspects, are we talking of a gender pay gap for doing exactly the same job, or of some kind of aggregate gap, does anyone have ‘equal’ pay given the existence of performance-related increments, and are the figures for gender pay gaps based on gross pay or income net of tax and benefits?

One thing that men in their right mind seem to have agreed on for centuries is that it is inequitable, insupportable, and indeed incomprehensible, that women should be paid less for doing the same job:

I put a question to him [Samuel Johnson] upon a fact in common life, which he could not answer, nor have I found anyone else who could. What is the reason that women servants, though obliged to be at the expense of purchasing their own clothes, have much lower wages than male servants, to whom a great proportion of that article is furnished, and when in fact our female house servants work much harder than the male? (James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson)

So neither Boswell, nor Johnson, nor ‘anyone else’ in that Age of Reason, could explain why the gender pay gap existed! Since they were men of reason, the implication is that they concluded it was the result of a perverse prejudice. And, of course, that is the short answer. But what still escapes us, it seems, is the substance of this prejudice. What specifically is it that men object to in their women colleagues that even drives employers to break the law about equal pay and the minimum wage?

Here George’s defence of ‘market forces’ can perhaps enlighten us. He was right, and the suffragists who expected enfranchisement to raise women’s pay in a market economy were wrong. But what are the forces that determine the ‘market value of women’s work’? Having identified the economic mechanism, George seems to think he has found an irrefutable, perhaps even objective, explanation of the gender pay gap. But we know perfectly well that there are a host of market forces that are purely psychological — and hence open to prejudices. George himself inadvertently identified one such prejudice, when he wrote that for women ‘the wage is a supplement and not a livelihood’.

In Edwardian Britain, as another Times correspondent pointed out, this statement was literally true, because ‘as the law now stands, a man is bound to bear the whole charge of supporting the family’. Quite possibly, therefore, a woman’s wage was regarded by everyone, including the women themselves, as a ‘supplement’, and competition between the women for a limited number of jobs did drive down the ‘market value’ of their work.

It is a long time since a woman’s salary was just a ‘supplement’ to the family income. However, even though more women are financially independent than ever before, and even though it is an official and legislative truth that they are equal to men, I believe the idea that their income is a ‘supplement’ still lurks in the male psyche. I have been self-employed for most of my life, but whenever I worked in large teams or offices I sensed a perception, perhaps even amongst some women, that they were ‘dilettantes’ at work because, as one male expressed it to me, ‘women can have children and men cannot, so of course they put children before everything else, whereas men have only work to put before everything else’. The implication was that women were only working until their maternity leave kicked in, whereupon they would rush off to do what they were really interested in, and meanwhile could not even be expected to work as hard as men.

I hasten totally to dissociate myself from such views, but we are trying to explain something that is widely thought to be almost an enigma in modern liberal society and I feel George has inadvertently identified the chief prejudice beneath it. The ‘supplement’ prejudice is the market force that produces the income differential when men and women are doing the same job (e.g. in the BBC).

The deeper question then is, why do men persist in the ‘supplement’ prejudice? There can be no rational excuse, but I suggest it is simply because our brains are programmed by gender difference, in this case bearing/not bearing children. Gender difference, as George realised when he considered the fact that most women in 1908 did not want the vote, plays havoc with the equality project. I think this is now being increasingly recognised. A correspondent in The Guardian of 2018, for instance, presents it as a fact that ‘many women prefer jobs aimed at looking after individual people, rather than committing their energy to playing the organisation game’, thus excluding themselves from higher-paid jobs open to them. That fine feminist and anti-suffragist Octavia Hill would have understood.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, comments, economics, feminism, gender difference, gender pay gap, George Calderon, James Boswell, market economies, market forces, market value, Men's League for Opposing Woman Suffrage, Millicent Fawcett, National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies, Octavia Hill, political economy, Samuel Johnson, suffragism, suffragists, The Guardian, The Times, Woman in Relation to the State, women's wages | 8 Comments

Sam&Sam rejoice

Posted on April 11, 2018 by Patrick Miles

The achievement of the deadline is sealed in 2013 Burg Wildeck Riesling Extra Trocken

Sam (aka Patrick Miles) and Sam (aka James Miles) are pleased to announce that they met their deadline of 7 April for completing the typesetting of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius including images and Index, and the first proof has been read.

As followers will know, we ordered two print trials of the images from our printers, Clays Ltd, St Ives plc. The second set were sent out to four readers, all of whose comments were positive. We are particularly grateful, however, to Andrew Tatham and John Pym for their professional attention and technical suggestions. We accepted most of those suggestions and believe they have greatly enhanced the result.

At the same time, the generously offered experience of John Dewey, John Pym, Andrew Tatham and Peter Gibson concerning the problems of modern digital typesetting of text has been invaluable. We thank them warmly. As Sam 1 has acknowledged, for someone whose last self-published book was printed in 1987 by offset litho, producing a hardback book in 2018 that looks as good as a commercially published one is a steep learning curve. We do not claim to have completely mastered it, but thanks to the above-named we have been saved from a lot of egg on our faces. Sam 2 has done a magnificent job with the typesetting and presentation of the images.

So we have now gone into installing first-proof corrections in the text and fine-tuning certain typographical aspects. The whole thing (533 pages!) will then be printed out again, on recycled paper, as the second and final proof. Next week I hope to feature the jacket design by Dan Mogford.

NB. The historical origins of Sam&Sam were explained in my post of 1 March. But sam in Russian means ‘himself’, so the name translates roughly as ‘Him&Him’ (cf. Barker et al., 1971-87, ‘It’s goodnight from me…and it’s goodnight from him’). Back in 1974 my friend and I thought this would be appropriately opaque for the ‘organs’ (KGB), as well as alluding to the word samizdat (self-publishing). However, such is this imprint’s impersonality that any two male persons working together on a publishing project could adopt it, as Jim and I have done. Of course, if one of the two publishers were female, in the name of gender equality it would have to become Sam&Sama, as the latter means ‘herself’. Rather temerariously, gender equality will be the subject of my next post.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Andrew Tatham, Clays Ltd, Dan Mogford, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, John Dewey, John Pym, KGB, Peter Gibson, proofs, publishing, Ronnie Barker, Ronnie Corbett, Sam&Sam, self-publishing, typesetting | 5 Comments

Far End draws closer

Posted on March 31, 2018 by Patrick Miles

On 26 January I blogged about the house Far End at Kingham in Oxfordshire, which I had heard about for the first time from Mrs Mary Lowe, whom we traced as the copyright holder for unpublished works of the American writer Anne Douglas Sedgwick (1873-1935). The Guest Book for Far End, which runs from 1912 to 1963, shows that George and Kittie stayed there in 1912 and 1913, but that Kittie returned in the stressful year of 1919 after accepting that George had been killed at Gallipoli in 1915, despite the fact that his body had not (officially) been found. Her last visit was in 1922, before she moved to Petersfield.

I was fortunate to be the guest of Mrs Lowe in famously hospitable Cumbria on 21st and 22nd of February. Mrs Lowe knows more about Far End than anyone else alive, since she lived there from the 1950s until 1986. Understandably, she is eager to pass it all on to posterity; and I was fascinated to hear it. The story of Far End has, I feel, a unique poetry. This poetry has grabbed me, and I think the only way to do it justice is for Mrs Lowe and I to write an extended article with lavish illustrations for a publication like Country Life, once George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is finally signed off. In the meantime, here are a few facts that may whet your appetite.

The house was designed and built by the literary critic Basil de Sélincourt (1877-1966) in 1907. It was set in four acres of land at the edge of Kingham and came with a five-acre field. Three of Basil’s brothers were also writers and their father owned the Piccadilly store of Swan & Edgar; which was presumably a financial help. After New College, Oxford, Basil seems to have gone into ‘higher’ London journalism, but in 1905 he published a well-received book on Giotto, in 1908 he married Anne Douglas Sedgwick, they settled at Far End, and the following year he published William Blake. I have read the whole (sic) of Blake in my time, and I have read this book. It is not only beautifully written and produced, I agree entirely with de Sélincourt’s evaluation of the glories and weaknesses of Blake’s sensibility. Mrs Lowe tells me that in later years Basil would fulminate about F.R. Leavis (a great Blakophile), but on the evidence of William Blake I do not understand why. In 1914 he published a critical study of Walt Whitman.

Far End shortly after construction

Anne Douglas Sedgwick’s novels sold well, particularly in America. Between 1912 and 1929, for instance, she had three titles in the U.S. top ten for the year, and three of her bestsellers were made into films. I have read Tante (1912), The Encounter (1914), and The Little French Girl (1924). They are extremely well written, but like her readers Sedgwick clearly felt that more is more. Incidentally, in Tante, published the year before George appended the word ‘barbarian’ in Greek to his signature in the Guest Book, Sedgwick used ‘barbarous/barbarian’ several times about unrefined male views and emotions, so maybe she had applied it to George too! The three novels I have read revolve around both strong and controlling women. I have written to Virago Classics suggesting they reprint them.

From Anne’s earnings, she and Basil built a further one-storey range, which can be seen in the next image. This must have enabled them to entertain family and friends on the scale that the Guest Book testifies. But the most interesting thing about this photograph is the glimpse it provides of the enormous vegetable garden. Basil was a passionate grower. He wrote in the mornings and cultivated in the afternoons. Apparently his produce was superb. During the Second World War he turned over Far End’s tennis court to further cultivation and sold vegetables from a stall in the village.

The range built onto Far End later, with vegetable plot

Anne Douglas Sedgwick died in 1935. The last letter in the highly readable book of her selected correspondence that Basil published in 1936 is to Julia Alsop, née Chapin, and this fact is hardly fortuitous. On her deathbed, Anne told Basil that she wanted him to marry Julia, a divorced mother of four, whose old American family she had known for decades. After Basil had corresponded with Julia (whom he already knew) and travelled to the U.S. to propose to her, they were married at Gosport, Hants., on 23 September 1936. He was fifty-nine and Julia forty-eight.

Julia Chapin Alsop by John Singer Sargent, 1909

Julia Chapin Alsop was Mrs Lowe’s maternal grandmother. Mrs Lowe’s father was a colonial administrator and when her parents were abroad she was brought up by Julia and Basil at Far End. Thus Basil de Sélincourt was a father both to Julia’s children by her first marriage and Julia’s grandchildren. He was ‘the most intellectual man I have ever known’, Mrs Lowe told me. ‘All the Russian authors were in the house and Basil fed them to us as we grew up. He considered they translated better into French than English.’ Mrs Lowe describes him as a pacifist (he and Anne Douglas Sedgwick worked in French hospitals and orphanages during the First World War) and an agnostic, but a deeply ethical man and ‘probably a pantheist’.

Basil de Sélincourt, c. 1960

What impresses and fascinates me about Far End is that it was not just a house created by Basil and Anne, but a real literary hub which, unlike Garsington, had not a trace of the dilettantism that was so mercilessly satirized by Lawrence in Women in Love. Both Anne and Basil were professional, hardworking writers. She beautified the house, was herself a celebrated beauty, and he cultivated his garden. They led an intense artistic and intellectual existence together, which contemporaries from Laurence Binyon and George Calderon to Sir Edward Grey and Lady Ottiline Morrell herself were pleased to come and partake of. To some extent, as Mrs Lowe has put it to me, at Far End Basil, Anne, Julia and others lived the Good Life.

Far End in the 1980s

Basil de Sélincourt departed this life in 1966. When his widow died eight years later, Mrs Lowe inherited Far End and lived there with her husband, the distinguished art historian Ian Lowe, for another twelve years. They did not want to leave Far End, but the combination of factors prompting it seemed ineluctable. In 1986 Far End was sold.

That is not at all the end of its story, however. It had been designed by Basil to his personal taste and with his own vision of it as a literary haven, and it proved very difficult to change. For instance, the bathroom was directly off the hall, with windows opening onto the drive, successive new owners tried to move it to the first floor, but the rooms there were planned in such a way that it was impossible. Eventually, in 2008, the whole set of buildings called Far End was demolished for a new development.

On a dark afternoon in April of that year, Mr Lowe visited the site (Mrs Lowe could never bring herself to). He took photographs. On the back of one he wrote: ‘No stone survived except in a bleak nearby cottage. All was neglected in contrast to rest of village and adjacent field which has been turned into a garden. The orchard was a mess too.’ And on another: ‘I could wish that we had never left it and I shed a tear at our having done so. It was a happy house which could not be turned by at least three owners into what they wanted. Basil’s house beat them and had to be destroyed.’

What actually remains is the luminous memory of a successful experiment in living, of a cultural life that attracted some of the most original minds of its age. Reading Mrs Lowe’s accounts of life there, both before and after her birth, and listening to her vivid memories of it, I could not help thinking of a passage in Proust where after his grandmother’s death the narrator visits the resort of Balbec, which he had first made the acquaintance of when she took him there and was so caring towards him. He re-experiences things that happened then, indeed he searingly re-experiences his grandmother. But the ‘presence’ of the ‘past’ has a terrible downside:

On the one hand, I felt again an existence and a tenderness that lived on in me just as I had known them, that is to say which were created for me, a love that found its utter complement in me, its purpose […] and on the other, as soon as I had relived it as present, this happiness, I felt it crossed out by the certainty of a void that had expunged my image of that tenderness, destroyed that existence […] the moment I refound it.

Far End has, and has not, vanished.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Balbec, Basil de Sélincourt, biographies, biography, D.H. Lawrence, Dardanelles, F.R. Leavis, Far End, Gallipoli, Garsington, George Calderon, Giotto, Ian Lowe, Julia Chapin Alsop, Kingham, Kittie Calderon, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Laurence Binyon, Marcel Proust, Mary Lowe, New College Oxford, Oxfordshire, Petersfield, Piccadilly, Sir Edward Grey, Swan & Edgar, Tante, The Encounter, The Good Life, The Great War, The Little French Girl, Third Battle of Krithia, vegetables, Virago Classics, Walt Whitman, William Blake, Women in Love, World War 2, World War I | 5 Comments

Aleksei Remizov: the Imp has landed!

Posted on March 21, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Aleksei Remizov, c. 1907

On 23 April 1914 Bertram Christian, of the publishers James Nisbet & Co. Ltd, wrote to George Calderon suggesting that he produce for them a volume of stories by the Russian writer Aleksei Remizov (1877-1957). There had been a glowing review of Remizov’s fairy tales in the TLS of 9 April 1914 and ‘again today’, Christian wrote, there had been an article about Russian writers which referred to Remizov as ‘a great man [who] may be said to be the writer of the most beautiful stories that Russia is bringing forth’. The author of the two pieces in the TLS was the Russophile Stephen Graham, and at the beginning of the first he had written: ‘Someone of sympathetic genius should translate the new fairy tales of Remizov. These are the most delicate and fresh creations of today.’

Without a doubt, George would have been that ‘sympathetic genius’, as he had spent twenty years studying Russian folklore, relished its humour, and like Remizov loved quirky words. Moreover, as Roger Keys puts it in his profound Introduction to the just-published Sisters of the Cross, Remizov’s style is a ‘singular amalgam of colloquial, literary and folkloric Russian’ and George would have been able to handle all three with precision.

But he didn’t. He was deep in a lucrative contract translating Il’ia Tolstoi’s memoirs of Leo, as well as working on Tahiti, his ballet libretti for Fokine and, probably, his blockbuster on folk religions Demon Feasts. So, dear follower, you have probably never heard of Aleksei Remizov. There was a cluster of book translations in the 1920s by ‘cognoscenti in the west’, as Keys puts it, some of whom knew Remizov in his Paris emigration, and there have been a number of English-language academic publications of Remizov works since 1981, but the first are now antiquarian rarities and the second never penetrated beyond Academe. That is about to change, I hope, with the publication in 2018 of this 175-page translation:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Sisters of the Cross is by common consent Remizov’s best short novel. It will blow your mind. If the opening, in which a pay clerk is suddenly sacked for no apparent reason and sinks to the bottom of society, strikes you as conventional (the ‘little man’ of Russian literature), you will soon realise that the joke is on you. This work is post-Dostoevsky, post-Tolstoi, post-Chekhov. It is a classic of Russian modernism, to be set on a par with Belyi’s Petersburg. You will find yourself in a world where it is an article of faith that dreams and cartomancy tell the truth, where the spirits of woodland and water torment a property developer to death, an old woman goes to hell and comes back to describe it convincingly, houses ignite spontaneously, a man with ‘no head, his mouth in his back and his eyes on his shoulders’ eats so much honey in the comb that he has ‘bees inside him, a whole hive of them’, and sees the salvation of Russia in flies…

The ‘sisters of the cross’ are the women whom the destitute hero, Marakulin, encounters in the vast barrack of St Petersburg flats that he is reduced to living in. Most of them are brutally exploited and abused, especially but not only sexually. Yet the various ways in which these women respond to their oppression and survive are deeply instructive to Marakulin. The women save him from illness, despair and suicide, and he falls tragically in love with one, who is driven into a classy form of prostitution. Some work hard, drag themselves up, soothe others, bring joy into the barrack world by their spontaneity, and are always engaged in helping or at least communicating with others. A paragraph repeated in different contexts in the book is:

If people studied each other carefully and took note of one another, if they all were granted eyes with which to see, then only a heart of stone would be able to bear all the horror and mystery of life. Or perhaps none of us would need a heart of stone if only individuals took note of one another.

Other women just disappear, as if in Stalin’s purges or China today. Three are called Vera (Faith). Several seem to believe that it is their Christian duty to submit, to suffer, to forgive, and one even believes it is her own fault if a revolutionary comrade, and then her own brother, rapes her repeatedly. ‘Nobody should be blamed’, is the cartomancer-holy fool’s refrain. There is a very strong current of Russian Orthodox kenoticism here: the belief in being a strastoterpets, a martyr who gives herself like the Lamb to the slaughter. But if ‘nobody should be blamed’, is nobody guilty, asks Marakulin, and does nobody have self-responsibility? It is an old, old Russian problem.

The last thing I want to do, however, is give the impression that Sisters of the Cross is heavy and depressing. Certainly you need strong nerves to take the brutality of much of it, which I am sure is utterly authentic. But Remizov not only looks like an imp, his whole approach to writing is impish. He constantly catches the reader unawares (‘If only [he] would drink an infusion of horse manure, then everything would be all right’), he plays with the reader, his plot is never predictable, he embeds leitmotifs and refrains in his prose that he dares his reader to notice and appreciate, he suddenly digresses into anecdote and joke. My only reservation about this translation, in fact, is that it does not appear to reproduce all the idiosyncratic paragraphing and typographic layout of the original, but tends to give the impression of a much more assimilated English paragraph structure. I immediately qualify that, though, because a) my copy of the original Russian may not be canonical, b) Remizov himself can produce monster prose periods, so there is no such thing as a ‘Remizov paragraph style’, c) the translators have well over a hundred years between them of working with Russian literature, so one can be sure they know what they are doing, and d) they manage to reproduce the telegraphic pace of Remizov’s prose in English without resorting to his very short (sometimes one-word) paragraphs:

When some teacher or other complained to Obraztsov that the school was damp and cold and only six degrees Centigrade, this is what he replied […]: ‘For heaven’s sake, six degrees,’ he exclaimed, ‘that’s real luxury! Now in Pokidoshenskaia Province when I was carrying out inspections there, I once came into a school where the children were all wearing sheepskins and the teacher was in a fur coat and galoshes. I sat there for a short while and got chilled to the bone myself. I was going to make a note about my visit, but the ink had frozen. The teacher blew and blew into the inkwell, trying to thaw it out, but nothing would work. So I had to leave without making a note. That’s what real cold is like — but you’re in clover here.’

This gag is then applied twice more, and just as hilariously, to ‘overcrowding’ in the school and the ‘masses of frogs’ that infest it. Afficionados of the Gogolian and Chekhovian absurd will never be disappointed with Remizov. But laughter in Sisters of the Cross covers the whole spectrum from irony to farce. Beneath the diabolical realia of Remizov’s world there is always his own irrepressible carnival.

This first-rate translation by two masters of the craft should at last put Remizov on Anglophone reading lists. Sisters of the Cross bears comparison with the best in European modernist literature. The Russian Library of Columbia University Press are to be congratulated on their enterprise in producing it, and I trust that in due course they will seek a famous commercial publisher to bring it to an even larger readership.

Posted in Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Aleksei Remizov, Andrei Belyi, Anton Chekhov, Bertram Christian, biography, Brian Murphy, Columbia University Press, comments, Demon Feasts, fairy tales, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Calderon, Il'ia Tolstoi, James Nisbet & Co. Ltd, kenosis, Lev Tolstoi, Marakulin, Michel Fokine, modernism, Nikolai Gogol, Roger Keys, Russian Orthodoxy, Sisters of the Cross, St Petersburg, Stephen Graham, strastoterpets, Tahiti, Times Literary Supplement | 2 Comments

The Castle…of Oz?

Posted on March 14, 2018 by Patrick Miles

Followers may remember that last year I also worked on a book with mathematical physicist-theologian John Polkinghorne, derived from a year’s conversations we had about his views on eschatology (i.e. nothing less than the life and death of humans, animals and the universe!). It took a long time to edit down the 60,000-word transcripts to a book of five chapters and 31,000 words, but John was pleased with the result and eager to find a publisher. Given John Polkinghorne’s high profile, I felt pretty sure this was going to be an easier ride than George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. However, John wanted to observe the etiquette of approaching publishers ‘seriatim’, i.e. one after the other, whereas I tackle them in fives, and this has prolonged things rather — but I don’t think there’s much doubt it will be published commercially at some time.

After well substantiated rejections from two of John’s previous publishers, I decided to tackle a publisher of short books on ‘spirituality’ and ‘progressive christianity’ that I had found on the Web and that looked very promising. I went to his website (the publishing firm bears his name), found the series in question, and was directed: ‘Please go to Author Inquiry and fill out the form.’ After living in Soviet Russia, I find the word ‘form’ somewhat depressive. The ‘form’ was actually only an eleven-item template. Nevertheless, in retrospect I find the choice of this word profoundly revealing of its author’s mindset.

There were only ten boxes to complete in the template, but some of them naturally demanded a hundred words or more, e.g. About the Author(s), Your Previous Books, Brief Description of Your Book, Any Endorsements. The most surprising feature, however, was that you were invited to ‘attach your manuscript’. I have never known this for an initial approach before. But our manuscript was ready, so I attached it (after a small problem: the programmer had not allowed for upper case file names, which were rejected).

The wall of words about ‘Submissions’ told me that ‘we’ would be ‘getting back to you within days’, and ‘they’ did, saying: ‘interested, need some more detail, which is the next stage, a Proposal, click here’. The words ‘next stage, a Proposal’ bemused me, because the information I had given, together with the entire manuscript, was a Proposal, or would be construed as such by every other publisher I know. However, I clicked the prompt and…a vast and wondrous world opened before me.

I was sent to a distinctly under-designed page of 17 chapters and Appendices, entitled ‘Publisher System Manual’, clicked on chapter 1, ‘The Proposal’, and a magnolia of eight sub-prompts bloomed, including ‘How to complete the proposal’, which was just ‘an invitation to provide us with a little more detail’. When I went to the template for that, it contained twenty bullet points, of which one particularly caught my eye: ‘Supply a minimum of 5000 words [‘a little more detail’!] describing what your book is about’ (but see above: Brief Description of Your Book). Incidentally, at one point the verbiage itself referred to the Author Inquiry as ‘your proposal’.

I had reached a ‘damping’ moment like the one I described in my previous post. Filling out this template and supplying 5000+ words written by John Polkinghorne and myself was going to take ages. I needed to go into mental training before tackling it.

In the meantime, a ‘Publisher at Large’ rang. This is a relatively recently evolved species. They are experts in their field, probably get paid very little, but they are far cheaper than employing editors and the honorific probably appeals to them. The trouble is, they have no power. They are merely middlemen between the author and the publisher, whom they themselves never see. This Publisher at Large was a very nice clerical chap and we had a conversation lasting nearly an hour about the book. He liked it and seemed to think the publisher’s readers he was going to find would like it. Terrific!

A few days later, he rang again. Not only did the readers like the book, but X, the Publisher, wanted to publish it. But there was a problem, the Publisher at Large told me. X said that I hadn’t ‘joined the database’, by which he meant signed up through the Proposal. Well no, I said, because evidently the Author Inquiry, with the whole manuscript, was enough for X to decide he wanted to publish, so it was now time for X to make John Polkinghorne and me a proposal. Ah, right, he would tell X that.

If readers have followed me this far, they may be feeling as I did by then, that this database you had to ‘join’ was as mysterious and impersonal as Kafka’s Castle (see above) and X himself as shadowy a figure as its owner, since it was impossible to communicate directly with him or any other servant of the Castle save the ‘Publisher at Large’… The whole experience was becoming surreal.

But perhaps I am just revealing my advanced Foginess again? Perhaps X is not a figure out of Kafka at all, but a benign little old fairground man who manipulates his intimidating, borderless database as the Wizard of Oz did his voice and image? Perhaps if I stopped ‘over-reacting’ about his cyber-castle, this wise old Wizard of Oz could teach me something I need to know to ‘bring me into the twenty-first century’?

Alas, no. The Publisher at Large came back with the reply from his master that I had to complete the Proposal (for a book already accepted), ‘join’ his database, collect my ID and password, and submit a ‘minimum of 5000 words describing what your book is about’. Since John Polkinghorne is eighty-eight, disabled, and no longer physically able to write, but his mind is as sharp as ever and he speaks brilliantly onto tape, which is then transcribed, he and I decided not to set off up this particular Yellow Brick Road…

Seriously, though, friends, what does this all amount to? Personally, I am amazed that after forty years of personal computers being in common use the websites of organisations like Nielsen UK ISBN and Publisher X are still so primitive. They seem to have been designed and programmed by sociopathic amateurs addicted to length and their own loquacity. These designer/programmers have never heard of Occam’s Razor (‘entities are not to be multiplied more than necessary’); on the contrary, they practise, one might say, Botcham’s Beardificator, producing hirsute fiorituras of luxuriating otiosity…

I call such creations ‘sociopathic’ because they display no evidence whatsoever that their designer/programmers have taken the user into consideration; that they care how difficult the average person may find interacting with them, or how much time he/she will expend on trying to use them. They have never asked themselves how their customers think, or how precious their customers’ time may be.

In fact, such websites are designed to make the customer do the work, rather than the organisation that is supposedly providing the ‘service’. Yet the websites are so inefficient that, presumably, large numbers of under-paid people have to be employed on their Help Desks (which is a benefit for them, but only up to a point). I find the relatively recent idea that profits should be maximised by making the customer do as much of the work as possible — if not torturing him/her to death — profoundly patronising.

A corollary of the fact that large areas of our economic life seem not to apply Occam’s Razor to design and verbal expression is that they have also lost track of Time. One could fritter away days wrestling with Nielsen UK ISBN or X Publisher. Paradoxically, it seems to be precisely the invention of computers that has led to this — at least, in the sense that so many businesses and institutions seem unable to use computers efficiently. Twenty years ago if I wrote to an official on Cambridge City Council I got a letter back within ten days. If I send such an official an email today, I never get a reply. Most institutions seem not to be able to cope with email.

The experiences I have meldrewed on about in this and my preceding post remind me of the ever-expanding, mind-destroying pretensions of current British and EU copyright law. There must be something wrong and vulnerable about a society that has lost its grip on words, regulation, time and cyber-space. The unfitness for purpose, the inanity and logorrhoea that we are exposed to in our attempts to communicate online actually undermine our viability as a society. They must, surely, be part of the elusive explanation for Britain’s notoriously low productivity. It occurs to me that the armed forces may be the only institution left that operates in real time (at least, I hope they do).

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged armed forces, Botcham's Beardificator, bureaucracy, Cambridge City Council, computers, copyright, Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988, databases, email, eschatology, EU Directive on Term of Copyright, Fogeyism, Franz Kafka, John Polkinghorne, Occam', Occam's Razor, programmers, publishers, Publishers at Large, self-publishing, sociopaths, submissions, The Castle, The Net, The Wizard of Oz, totalitarianism, websites, Yellow Brick Road | 3 Comments

Has one become a Fogey?

Posted on March 10, 2018 by Patrick Miles

In 1985, when Sam&Sam needed an ISBN number for N.A. Berdiaev, Aforizmy, I rang up the then registration agency and they sent me a form by post. I filled the form in (by hand, of course) and sent it back to them with a cheque for under £20 (I can’t remember the exact figure). About ten days later, I received a postcard with the number and publication details of the book on. The whole operation had taken fifteen minutes and a ten-day wait.

Today the ISBN service has been, as they say, privatised. It is run by the Nielsen Corporation based in New York. On 12 January 2018 I logged into their UK ISBN Store and was fairly rapidly relieved of £159 for ten ISBN numbers. Note that to buy a single one costs £89, so if you are ever going to publish another book it is in your interest to purchase ten in one go. On the other hand, a comparison of the two figures suggests that £89 is the product of rapacity red in tooth and claw, especially as a modern book has to have an ISBN number… Nielsen have been handed a monopoly!

In effect, I had parted with £159 for a single number, a mere number generated by a computer. Well, not quite, because the text in bold that came with the ten numbers recommended that I use ‘the free online service, Nielsen Title Editor, to supply forthcoming titles and to submit updates to existing product data’. This sounded a good idea, except that it wasn’t free at all, as you could only use it if you had already bought your ISBN number, and of course you had to marry your publication details to the number at some point, because the two weren’t going to come to you on a postcard.

On 22 January at 9.10 I set about registering with the Nielsen Title Editor. It was quite a long template and rejected my data several times. One problem was that it didn’t like the ISBN number I was putting in, another that it kept supplying the wrong telephone number for my address and rejecting the real one, but the worst was that there seemed to be no United Kingdom, Great Britain, Britain, or England on the mile-long alphabetical list of countries to input. At 9.30 I therefore emailed ‘Pubhelp Editorial’. Clearly they are used to such questions, because at 10.01 they emailed me to explain the format in which ISBNs must be input (there was nothing on the template to say) and that ‘United Kingdom’, for some unexplained reason, was ‘5th on the drop down list’. I made these adjustments and at 10.32 received an email confirming my registration. But… ‘Please allow 5 to 10 working days for your name and password for Nielsen Title Editor to be issued.’

(Interpolation: the reason I waited ten days before I tackled registering with the Nielsen Title Editor was that I had received a clear signal from the blurb which came with the ISBN numbers that things didn’t move quickly in this system, so I’d best allow a few days for the numbers to sink into it; also the verbosity of the blurb and the news that it would take 7-10 working days to get an ID and password to me had a damping effect. In a word, the user-unfriendliness of everything so far was a factor in slowing the process down, so I believe the ten-day delay is rightly included in the total experience.)

The following day, 23 January, I received an email from ‘Data Production and Client Services’ at 14.05 asking me how my ‘e-books/digital products are distributed to customers’, as this information was needed to ‘set up your account [never mentioned before] properly’. I supplied the information at 14.23 and at 16.32 came the riveting news that it had been sent to ‘our Supply Data team, who will create the internal codes needed for your organisation, and then send them back to me so that I can continue with your application. This will take a few more [!] working days, and you will be emailed your login details in due course [!]’.

Only two days later I received my username and password (the second so far) from Nielsen, but it came with two riders: (1) although I could access my Title Editor account straightaway, I couldn’t add ‘new title records or make amendments to existing title records for the next 24 hours as any changes made through the site may be lost [!]’, and (2) ‘if you have just registered your first title with us it may take 3-5 [!] weeks to become visible through the Title Editor site’. I waited five weeks, but it wasn’t visible. Another session followed with the Help desk on 2 March, from 11.47 to 12.39, then I got to my record and was able to edit it.

On 5 March came an email from Nielsen informing me that I had ‘registered for Nielsen BookNet Web Online Order Collection Service’, which I had never heard of before. I would have been almost disappointed if it had not come with another ID and password.

Now admittedly the process of acquiring the ten ISBN numbers took only about half an hour (as opposed to a quarter in 1985), but to get my title registered with this ISBN number and visible took two hours and thirty-two minutes of my time and a wait of 39 days compared with ten in 1985. Altogether, the process had taken a quarter of an hour and ten days in 1985 and three hours and 49 days in 2018.

Personally, I think a measured, mature, rational and dispassionate assessment of this process of Nielsen’s suggests that it is not fit for purpose (though the staff are marvellous). However, I am aware that the very act of comparing the purchase of an ISBN number tied to one’s book in 1985 with the process that that involves in 2018 suggests I am just a Fogey. I admit that may be the explanation for my splenetic frustration with the process, but even so the comparison of time intervals is…in-teresting, isn’t it?

In my next post I will look at a more poetic recent case of the same thing, before drawing any Meldrewesque general conclusions about modern life. But in the meantime, I have two questions to followers of the blog and anyone else out there:

1. How/why do the young, i.e. anyone under thirty, who are surely used to efficient, ‘real time’ communication on computers, put up with the sort of torture perpetrated on customers by Nielsen UK ISBN Store?

2. Can anyone with modern business and management experience explain to me how such a nebula of inefficiency and fatuousness comes about?

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged book registration, bureaucracy, capitalism, comments, fatuousness, Fogeyism, ISBN numbers, logorrhea, Nielsen Corporation, Nielsen Title Editor, Nielsen UK ISBN Store, privatisation, Richard Wilson, Sam&Sam, verbosity, Victor Meldrew | 2 Comments

What we are trying to do

Posted on March 7, 2018 by Patrick Miles

We have met our deadline of typesetting the whole book, less Index, by today. However, the printers took a month to deliver to us the sixteen-page ‘print trial’ of text with images embedded in it. They emailed that the images had ‘printed well but we have noticed some faint lines on some of the halftones…we can rectify this on the main run so please don’t worry’. I’m not so sure. The pages only arrived yesterday, after endless hassles, and some images are far better than others. We are going to have to look carefully at them, and possibly take expert advice, before we can decide whether to go ahead and embed them in the text. Until the images and captions have been incorporated in the text (or not) and the whole book repaginated, I can’t complete the Index, or even give the cover designer a spine width. The inordinate delay in getting the trial pages to us means that we may fall behind our own production schedule.

An acquaintance who writes beautiful, slim, best selling books on horticultural history recently complained to me that publishers have become more and more aggressive about her meeting their deadlines, and about the penalties if she doesn’t. ‘Yet,’ she added, ‘once they have got my finished manuscript they take a year to publish it. Why? Authors can get a book out themselves in six months!’ I have heard the latter so often from authors that I adopted it as my own timescale for George Calderon: Edwardian Genius…only to get my arithmetic wrong and allow myself five months (4 June 2018) in which to do it.

Now that I understand how much time and effort are involved in publishing a single hardback, commercial publishers almost rise in my estimation. I seem to have been working flat out since 7 January on the design of the printed text, choice of paper, typesetting, index, insertion of new material, budgeting, accounting, illustrations, ISBN, British Library CIP data, FSC logo, ‘case’ (board and covering, colour and material), ‘foiling’ (spine lettering), choice of jacket material, cover design, 150th anniversary bellyband, blurb, author’s photograph, author’s biography, endorsements, copyright lines, bar code… Of course, a ‘real’ publisher has a team of people who specialise in all these things, who are not doing them for the first time.

What we are trying to do is produce a hardback of about 500 pages that is as good as one produced by a commercial publisher and worth every penny of £30. I would be the first to admit now that it isn’t easy. Of course, we are doing our darndest, we are modelling ourselves on the very best examples, and of three recent commercially published biographies lying on my table two were printed by the printers we have chosen. But, with the exception of our cover designer, we are not trained and experienced book designers, typesetters, blurb-writers etc etc etc. Given the large number of variables, it is statistically unlikely, even impossible, that we will get it all right.

Nevertheless, try we must! It would be considerably easier to produce the book in paperback, but I feel it is something of a magnum opus and deserves to start off, at least, in a limited hardback edition. If, God forbid, it has the odd amateurish touch, let’s hope that enhances its charm and eventual rarity value. And let’s be frank: commercially published biographies aren’t always perfect in their design or execution, either.

The last books I published myself were printed by offset litho, so I have had to learn the ways of today’s digital presses. I am very grateful to all my friends who have run small presses recently for sharing their experience with me so generously. In particular, I wish to pay tribute to the experience, advice and help of John Dewey, who in 2010 published Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Fyodor Tyutchev, and Harvey Pitcher, who in the same year published Responding to Chekhov: The Journey of a Lifetime.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, comments, commercial publishers, Fyodor Tyutchev, George Calderon, Harvey Pitcher, hassles, illustrations, John Dewey, print trials, printers, production timetables, publishers, publishing, self-publishing, typesetting | 2 Comments

Sam&Sam publishers — a brief history

Posted on March 1, 2018 by Patrick Miles

George Calderon: Edwardian Genius will be published under the imprint Sam&Sam. ‘What?’ you ask. ‘What on earth’s that?’ Quite. It was deliberately concocted to give nothing away, because it originated in Russia in the period of samizdat.

Having been a dissident himself, Ul’ianov (‘Lenin’) knew only too well the power of the private printing press, so he made it a criminal offence to own one. To get round this, in the post-Dzhugashvili (‘Stalin’) era, people started pounding out unprintable works on their sit-up-and-beg typewriters. I have seen up to nine carbons on a typewriter beneath onion-skin paper. These copies were then stapled together or professionally bound in the black economy, circulated on the dissident networks, or even bartered for goods and services. The activity was called samizdat, which simply means ‘self-publishing’. I first made the acquaintance of Brodsky’s and other poets’ work through this medium.

A friend of mine was part of a literary group that were specialists in samizdat. He fell in love with an explosive red-headed beauty, a single mother, but his efforts got no further than a distinctly Elizabethan relationship of raillery, tease and (for my friend) agony. He tried everything, including writing Shakespearian sonnets to her in Russian, which he claimed were translations of the works of ‘Samuel Goathead’ (159?-1629). She said these were not translations, as Goathead never existed, and challenged him to produce the originals; at which point he came to my room in the Moscow University skyscraper and asked me to bash out the ‘originals’ (i.e. translations!) on my Olivetti typewriter.

When I got back to Cambridge I published my own, now exceedingly rare edition:

The title page of Goathead’s complete sonnets in Camizdat

Number three in this scholarly edition was the ‘original’ of the first sonnet by my friend to the Titian-haired Maia, the sonnet that started it all off:

Click the image to enlarge

I had smuggled out the odd samizdat work in 1970, after ten months in Russia, but when I went back in 1972-74 my friend was churning out typescripts of excellent works by other people (often deceased), and in the name of Russian culture I decided I should get these into safe keeping in the West. My own typescript-smuggling intensified, therefore, and I also used the diplomatic bag (strictly forbidden for this purpose). In, I think, 1974 my friend proposed that when the ‘weather’ was right we should start anonymously publishing some of his samizdat texts in Britain. The question was, what should we call ourselves that was opaque? Since we were both pseudonymously Samuel, and the sam bit in samizdat means ‘oneself’, the solution seemed obvious…

Sam&Sam published their first book in 1979. It was for children and came out in Russia in 1000 copies. The second was an anthology of ‘aphorisms’ by the Russian émigré philosopher Berdiaev. It had been compiled and typed by my friend and resided with other samizdat works in the dolgii iashchik (‘long gestation drawer’) of my attic. Berdiaev had been expelled from Russia by ‘Lenin’ and was completely non grata in the ‘Stalin’ era. In 1985, perestroika encouraged us to cast his aphorisms on the water. I printed 500 copies in Cambridge in a very small format. About a third, I would say, were bought in Britain. The rest were taken to Russia, where the book was even quoted in the Duma.

After the fall of communism, things took off. The final typescript, corrected by the author, of the Russian translation of Sophie Koulomzin’s Our Church and Our Children, which had lain in my attic for ten years, was retrieved by my friend on a trip to Britain and published openly in Russia in a joint venture with another publisher, Martis, in 20,000 copies in 1993. The following year it was reprinted in 30,000 copies! My friend had been, and probably still considers himself, a member of the ‘catacomb’ church in Russia rather than the nationalist one, but not all the books Sam&Sam published in Russia were religious. Notably, two of them were about Pushkin.

Two publications of the Russian branch of Sam&Sam

I myself have so far published only one other work under the Sam&Sam imprint, and that was in 1987. My main job, of course, was to get the typescripts out of Russia and preserve them from mould for the day when they would be publishable there. Perhaps Sam&Sam’s most considerable achievement in Russia has been to publish with Martis a twelve-volume hardback edition of the works of Georgii Fedotov, a scholar, theological philosopher and democrat who also died in emigration.

The two books I published as Sam&Sam in England were nicely produced, I would say, but in soft covers. A 500-page hardback, with jacket, illustrations and index, is proving a rather different matter. (More next time.)

Samizdat does not qu-ite seem necessary in today’s Russia. There is the Internet. On the other hand, the successors to the KGB continue to tighten their grip on the use of that. But, just as the digital revolution has slashed the cost of printing over here, so too, if necessary, digital publishing could take over in Russia from the old typewriters and carbons.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Pushkin, Camizdat, carbons, comments, Duma, Georgii Fedotov, Joseph Brodsky, Joseph Stalin, KGB, Maia, Martis, mice, Nikolai Berdiaev, perestroika, publishing, Sam&Sam, samizdat, Samuel Goathead, sonnets, Sophie Koulomzin, typewriters, Vladimir Lenin, William Shakespeare | 6 Comments

I accept the white feather

Posted on February 17, 2018 by Patrick Miles

I am hoping to attend the ceremony at Ors on 4 November this year to commemorate the death of Wilfred Owen a hundred years ago (see Damian Grant’s post of 4 November 2016), and thought we might go on from there to Ypres and Bruges. In this connection, I have been reminded that in a blog Comment of 1 November 2015 I wrote:

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 gigantism and marmoreal impersonality that made World War I possible. Many people have said to me that the scale of and the silence of 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 at Auschwitz, which I have no ‘difficulty’ with but which I wouldn’t be able to stomach.

So how do I square that with visiting Ypres in 2018?

It is a good question and in the first instance I would refer new followers of Calderonia to the long dialogue we had about the commemoration of World War 1 following the centenary of George Calderon’s death, i.e. 4 June 2015. Please search on ‘Commemoration’ and you will find a good selection of arguments. You might particularly like to look at my posts dated 3 July 2015 and 22 November 2016, and Comments by Clare Hopkins, Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, dated 20 July 2015, 2 November 2015, and 18 December 2015 (these Comments can be found dated at their end under ‘See All Comments’, series 3, and the dates are in the American style, i.e. 2015/07/20 etc). There is no doubt that the national conversation about commemoration will flare up again with the centenary of the Armistice.

My short answer to the present question is that I had not thought of a visit to Ypres in terms of the Menin Gate and the big cemeteries. I would like to see the town centre that George rode into with the Blues on 14 October 1914 (‘It seemed like history’), and I would like to find the field near Zillebeke ‘where Peety fell’ (i.e. where George was shot in the ankle on 29 October 1914 and invalided home). Thinking about it, though, if we were at Zillebeke I would feel duty bound to visit the small churchyard cemetery there, where George’s commanding officer Lieutenant Colonel Gordon Wilson is buried and the twenty-seven-old-old Alexis de Gunzberg, who was killed at his side after taking George’s place as Wilson’s interpreter. On closer consideration, I wouldn’t mind visiting the Menin Gate, because it is not gigantic, it was there for centuries before 1914, and it was familiar to Tommies during the War before it became a memorial. But I don’t know about attending the commemorative ceremony held there every day…

Yes, I stand by what I said about the sheer scale, ‘marmoreal impersonality’, gigantism, touristic voyeurism etc of the vast cemeteries and monuments like Thiepval, but at the most visceral level it comes down to this: Thiepval, Verdun, Sanctuary Wood, Helles, Auschwitz would render me incoherent with emotion. Since the age of fifteen I have had difficulty holding back tears whenever the Last Post struck up. Since my immersion in British and German World War 1 poetry, and researching and living (pardon the literary exaggeration) every day of Calderon’s war ‘career’ up to the moment of his death, I have become positively brinkish and potentially convulsive.

And this is why, at the moment, I can’t face watching the new film of Journey’s End. I already know, have had the experience of the Front (‘Their uniforms of shit/their lives of shit/their deaths of shit/we live./What means ‘forget’/THE GLORIOUS DEAD?’). Call me a coward, hand me the white feather, but I can’t take any more. Yet. I am also wary of indulging in ‘tragic pleasure’ and what Clare Hopkins has aptly termed ‘war porn’.

I therefore invite followers who have seen the film — which has already been described in the press as ‘the greatest film about World War 1 ever’ — to share their emotions and views about it on Calderonia as Comments or, indeed, a guest post. I know the play, of course. Are its humour and public school idiom irretrievably dated? Have the makers of the film changed the original ending, a direct hit that destroys the dugout? Do they show the blood and body parts that the theatre could not? Is it a national Commemoration comparable to the poppy installation ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’ and Andrew Tatham’s A Group Photograph?

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged A Group Photograph, Alexis de Gunzberg, Andrew Tatham, Armistice, Auschwitz, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, Clare Hopkins, Colonel Gordon Wilson, commemoration, comments, Damian Grant, George Calderon, Helles, Journey's End, Last Post, Menin Gate, Ors, R.C. Sheriff, Royal Horse Guards, Sanctuary Wood, The Blues, The Great War, Thiepval, Thiepval Memorial, Verdun, white feather, Wilfred Owen, World War I, Ypres, Zillebeke | 3 Comments

Cogitations of an indexer

Posted on February 11, 2018 by Patrick Miles

A profound thank you to all who commented or emailed me about the illustrations to my biography. Nearly everyone expressed a preference for having them in the text as close as possible to their mention, so that is what I am going for. It’s true that I have seen some (paperback) books recently in which this is so badly done that the photos produce a kind of surrealist effect by contrast with the sharpness of the type, but it surely should be possible to achieve good resolution these days, on a decent paper? We await the results of the printers’ 16-page sample with trepidation.

* * *

Meanwhile, I would be very interested to hear subscribers’ and visitors’ thoughts about indexes. It seems to me that there is a recent tendency to make them gigantic — perhaps because computers are now commonly involved, although plenty of sources caution against using programs except for rudimentary indexes.

I think what stupefies me most in these recent books is the level of sub-indexing. For example, the index to Jenny Uglow’s Mr Lear runs to fifteen and a half pages of small print in two columns, but the entry on Edward Lear himself runs to six pages with nineteen sub-sections! You can’t help feeling that this is for the benefit of people who don’t actually want to read the book, especially as the main sub-section is ordered chronologically as though it is a précis of Lear’s life. Well, of course, there are people who don’t want to read the whole of a biography, and I have occasionally been one myself: I have needed to go to the biography of an Edwardian painter, say, find out from the index what his relations with X were, or when he was at Y, read those sections, and read not much more before filing the work in my own biography’s bibliography…

In such cases I have always found the information I wanted through the names rather than those atomized subject indexes (‘sending money to sisters for Christmas’, ‘interest in spiders’, ‘tendency to sciatica’). If I wanted to know whether Edward Lear ever visited Malta, for instance, I would look up Malta in the main index, I would not pick my way through the knotweed of ‘Travels’. It seems to me that it is the sub-indexing that has gone mad. I thoroughly accept that an index must not just be names, it must have subjects, but I think Occam’s Razor has to be ruthlessly applied to subject indexes, and its shaving has to be guided by an informed knowledge of what the biography is really about.

So: who actually uses these detailed subject sub-indexes, and how?

Another recent biography, Helen Smith’s The Uncommon Reader: A Life of Edward Garnett, has an index of eleven pages of three columns, and a sub-indexed entry for Edward Garnett himself covering almost two pages. The index to Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life runs to thirty triple-columned pages! There must be vast tracts of this index that have never been wandered in.

I return to my point of whether the modern assumption behind these inflated indexes is that no-one is going to read the whole book: they will just want to find the bits that may interest them. Could this be the result of the recent tendency to gigantism in biography itself? Of course, if you read the whole of a biography, years later you might well want to locate a passage or a mention whose position you cannot find by flipping through it. My own experience in such cases is that it is almost always the name index rather than the subject index that has led me to the spot.

At the moment, the consequence for me of this thinking is that my index must be not longer than twelve book-pages of double columns, only the entries ‘George Calderon’, ‘Katharine Calderon’ and ‘Nina Corbet’ are going to be sub-indexed, and I am employing only about thirty subject keywords (‘amateurism’, ‘games’, ‘humour’ etc).

* * *

If you write a biography, surely you want your reader to read all of it? Surely you should be writing it with a narrative shape in mind that you want your reader to complete, as it were? I know very well that there are parts of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius where some readers’ engagement will flag, but I have done my darnedest to get them through such parts to the story and its shape as a whole.

One wants a reader to read the whole of one’s narrative and remember it well enough to need the index only sparingly.

Why do big works of fiction not have indexes? Because they have concordances (e.g. Dickens, Conrad, Proust). But there is physical parturition between the works of fiction and their concordances; their creators would insist on that, I think.

How much like a work of fiction is a biography?

* * *

When I had to produce author, place, stratigraphic and subject indexes for voluminous up-to-the-minute lists of Russian publications on the geology of the Arctic (from which we eventually made systematic thesauruses of keywords that were input with the bibliographic data and collated into the four indexes by a computer program we wrote), I treasured the rare and wonderful words that passed so briefly through my hands: Etreungtian, montmorillonite, bergy bit, tektites, pingo, dreikanter, porphyry…

But these index terms were never more than nuggets to me. Constructing the indexes to my biography has turned out to be totally different. After the handwritten terms had first been assembled and wordprocessed alphabetically, I started to go through the printout correcting, cross-referencing, improving, and suddenly I saw all the names of people — hundreds of them. As I read each name, I saw the person behind it. I had been living with these people for seven years; I knew them! I know them!

In that moment, just working on something as mundane as an index, I saw all the characters in my biography as a cloud, a world of individuals, every one of them unique, from Ada the parlour maid with no surname, to King Edward himself. But they are dead. It was truly one of those Dantean moments of ‘so many,/I had not thought death had undone so many’. Or, even, I had an experience akin to Gabriel’s at the end of Joyce’s ‘The Dead’:

Other forms were near. He had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not comprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

It reminded me that I had not included every person’s name in the index. But they all belong to the world of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. In that world, they are all of equal value, as we are in this one. I went back to the typescript of the book and made sure every person was translated to the index.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged 'The Dead', Ada, biographies, biography, Charles Dickens, comments, computer programs, Dante Alighieri, Edward Garnett, Edward Lear, Edward VII, geological terms, George Calderon, Helen Smith, indexes, James Joyce, Jenny Uglow, John Aubrey, Joseph Conrad, Kittie Calderon, Marcel Proust, Nina Corbet, Occam's Razor, Ruth Scurr | 13 Comments

Progress

Posted on February 7, 2018 by Patrick Miles

It is now a month since I fired the starting-pistol for publishing George Calderon: Edwardian Genius myself on 4 June 2018. Every writer I know assured me we could bring the book out in six months…but what they didn’t tell me was that it would be as unrelenting hard work as researching and writing the book!

(Having the flu at the time must also have affected my arithmetic: 4 June 2018, of course, is five months after the starting-pistol.)

The basic questions of format, margins, font, design etc took longer to decide than expected, because we had to calculate at each point how many pages in toto they would produce. The latter is important because (a) it affects printing costs, (b) I never wanted to publish a book longer than 500 pages, (c) I do want a page, font and font size that are easy on the eye. These issues were decided (format: Royal, margins: generous, font: Dante, design: unflorid), but it means that so far only a quarter of the book has been typeset. However, that should now speed up.

In addition, I now have an ISBN number (9781999967604), an experienced professional cover-designer (Ian Strathcarron please note!), and the first draft of the index terms (which have taken a week to compile). More about acquiring an ISBN number and doing your own index in future posts. The priority now is to weed and improve the index whilst keeping it a manageable length, and to finish typesetting the paginated text by 7 March so that I can then put the page numbers in the index and hand it to the typesetter.

An unexpected but very interesting question has arisen over the 25 illustrations. I had blithely assumed they would comprise two glossy tranches in the book as every proper biography has had from time immemorial. But this isn’t exactly that kind of biography… It was suggested to me that it would break up the wall-of-words effect and assist the reading of the book as a narrative if the illustrations were printed in the text as near as possible to their mention. I think this is worth considering (and it’ll be much cheaper). The printers are therefore going to produce a sixteen-page sample with a range of my photographs inset in text, to assess whether the quality on such paper would be good enough.

I expect protests from some readers.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, comments, design, fonts, format, George Calderon, Ian Strathcarron, illustrations, indexes, ISBN numbers, layout, printers, publishing, self-publishing, typesetting, walls of words | 5 Comments

Far End: a new Calderonian world

Posted on January 26, 2018 by Patrick Miles

The greatest pleasure to have come out of the hair-tearing ordeal of obtaining permission to publish quotations from scores of letters to George and Kittie written a hundred years ago (see 17 April 2017) has been to correspond with Mrs Lowe, the copyright-holder for the works of the American novelist Anne Douglas Sedgwick (1873-1935). Sedgwick wrote a long, relaxed, sparkling letter to George on 14 November 1914 when he was in a London hospital recovering from the leg wound he had received at Ypres. Not only did she try to cajole him into not returning to the Front (which must have pleased Kittie), but she said that George’s letter about her latest work, The Encounter, was ‘altogether the most delightful thing that The Encounter has brought me’.

Sedgwick’s own letter was headed ‘Far End, Kingham, Chipping Norton’. I had assumed that she and her husband, the literary critic Basil de Sélincourt (1877-1966), were London literati, possibly even living in Hampstead like the Calderons, and that Far End, which sounds far out indeed, was their country bolthole. Far from it! Far End was a house built by de Sélincourt in 1907, the couple lived there after their marriage in 1908, and it became, in Mrs Lowe’s words, ‘a literary hub’, ‘a magical ivory tower’, which was visited by such eminent Edwardians as Bruce Richmond (editor of the TLS), Hugh Walpole, Victoria Cholmondeley, Laurence Binyon, Sir Edward Grey, Lady Ottoline Morrell…and the Calderons. Here is the entry in Far End’s Guest Book for George and Kittie’s visit of 1913:

The Calderons’ 1913 visit to Far End recorded in its Guest Book

How intriguing that George has written in Greek below his name ‘the barbarian’ (or: ‘the foreigner’). Why? What does it tell us about his relation to Anne Sedgwick, whom Mrs Lowe describes as ‘lovely as well as gifted’ and who I have the impression was very much the hostess at Far End? The Calderons were invited for the first time to Far End in December 1912. It may have been because that year George had become famous for his translations of Chekhov’s plays and both Anne Sedgwick and Basil de Sélincourt were enamoured of Russian literature. The couple read the Russian classics in French translation and had doubtless heard that the Goncourts called Turgenev ‘l’aimable barbare’. Perhaps, then, Anne Sedgwick joked that as a Russian-speaker George was a ‘barbarian’ himself? Or was ‘foreigner’ a reference to George’s Spanish heritage? Or ‘barbarian’ a dig at his anti-suffragism? Whatever, the friendship between the Calderons and the de Sélincourts appears to have been deep. In 1919, the year that George’s death at Gallipoli was officially confirmed, they invited Kittie to stay with them, and again in 1921 and 1922. After that, of course, Kittie broke with London and moved to Petersfield.

Alas, physically Far End no longer exists, and I have not yet seen a photograph of it. After Christmas Alison and I visited Kingham (voted ‘England’s favourite village’ by Country Life in 2004) and found where the house had been. Words fail me to describe what has taken its place. However, as Mrs Lowe has said, Far End still exists in her mind, since she was brought up there by her grandmother, Basil de Sélincourt’s third wife, and indeed by Basil himself; she left it in 1986 and has a collection of material about it. I have nothing at the moment about Far End in my biography, yet it seems to me that it was almost as important to George and Kittie as Foxwold in Kent (see passim) or the Corbets’ home in Shropshire. I am very much hoping to meet Anne Sedgwick’s copyright holder in a month’s time, therefore, and feel sure that this will enable me to squeeze a well-informed paragraph or two into a late chapter before the typesetter gets there. I cannot thank Mrs Lowe warmly enough for her sustained interest and generosity with her time.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Acton Reynald, Anne Douglas Sedgwick, Anton Chekhov, Basil de Sélincourt, biography, Bruce Richmond, Chipping Norton, comments, Far End, Foxwold, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Goncourt Brothers, Hugh Walpole, Ivan Turgenev, Kingham, Kittie Calderon, Lady Ottoline Morrell, Laurence Binyon, Petersfield, Sir Edward Grey, The Encounter, The Great War, Victoria Cholmondeley, World War I, Ypres | 1 Comment

Attempting to not-bore for England about limericks

Posted on January 19, 2018 by Patrick Miles

I must apologise to all subscribers for their having received notification last week of a blog post that had no text in it! This was the result of human error, aka Aussie Flu. Unfortunately, when I did write the text for the post, WordPress would not allow me to repeat the notification to subscribers, just as it won’t allow me to lay out limericks properly below. Well, the lost post is viewable below this one as ‘So what IS biography?’, and the real point of it (beneath the parrot) is Jenny Uglow’s biography of Edward Lear.

To what extent should one expect a biographer to be intimately acquainted with their subject’s specialism? Is it reasonable to expect the biographer of Nelson to know the finer points of sailing? Or the biographer of Marie Curie to be thoroughly conversant with nuclear physics? I think not, but obviously they should have acquired a good working knowledge of these important areas of their subjects’ lives.

For readers who feel they have never ‘got’ Lear’s limericks, Uglow’s is the book. She explains that ‘the key quality of the nonsense rhymes is surprise: this is what makes us laugh’ (p. 154). There surely never was a writer so able to produce the unexpected as Edward Lear. A vital part of the power of Lear’s limericks is also the interplay between the verse and the inimitably wonky (‘unexpected’) drawing that goes with it. Essentially, Uglow sees Lear’s limericks as proto-modernist Kafkan allegories of non-conformity, persecution, rebellion, violence, escapism and agony; yet theirs is a ‘cartoon’ world in which nobody ‘really’ gets hurt… All this, if a weeny bit old hat in literary terms (like her gratuitous reference to ‘carnival’), is valid and helpful and stimulating and accompanied by excellent discussions of Lear’s rhymes and the play of sounds in his limericks.

But there is a statement she makes about limericks on p. 310 that appears (and I hope I am wrong) to open a chasm of literary ignorance:

For a while, because of Lear, limericks were all the rage. Poets of Lear’s generation and the next had a go: Rossetti, Lewis Carroll, later Kipling, and even, allegedly, Tennyson. Making up a limerick seemed so easy, old or young, drunk or sober, and it proved a perfect form of pornographic jollity in clubs and mess rooms across the empire.

The popularity of Lear’s published limericks may well have raised the profile of limericks generally, but the limerick of ‘pornographic jollity’ that all these Victorian lads found so irresistible was not the Lear form of limerick. If my memory serves me, I have only ever seen one Lear-form limerick inscribed in a Victorian/Edwardian Visitors Book or album; all the rest have been in the classical limerick form which long pre-dates Edward Lear. George Calderon himself wrote a masterly limerick for his hosts Evey and Violet Pym on his and Kittie’s visit to Foxwold in 1912 — and it’s in the pre-Lear form. (I am deeply indebted to John Pym for permitting me to publish it in my biography.)

Afficionados, addicts and inveterate composers of the ‘classical’ (scatological) limerick hate Edward Lear’s limericks.

The reason, if I can put it as briefly as possible, is that they deplore his having destroyed the epigrammatic punch of a clever new last rhyme-word and replaced it with mere repetition of the last word of the first or second line. They see him as having produced a crashing anticlimax that is the very antithesis of the art of the ‘classical’ limerick. This is true, but I think Lear’s intention is to suggest his characters are trapped in this world of the ever-recurring rhyme-word; the ‘clever’ punch of his limerick is always one extraordinary word in the last line (‘borascible Person’, ‘propitious Old Person’, ‘smashed that Old Man’), or even earlier (‘casually’ in the example I give below).

Limerickians can bore for England about why Lear’s limericks are so awful, and if there are any out there who want to do so as Comments, please feel free. But personally I will limit myself to four examples that illustrate — I intend — (a) the glories of both forms of limerick and (b) why to write a good classical limerick you have to understand the form, and why to write a Lear limerick you have…er…to be Edward Lear:

1. Perfect ‘classical’ limerick [warning: scatological]

There was a young Fellow of Wadham
Who asked for a ticket to Sodom.
When they said, ‘We prefer
Not to issue them, sir,’
He said, ‘Don’t call me sir, call me modom.’

2. Perfect ‘Lear’ limerick [warning: absurd]

There was an old man, who when little
Fell casually into a kettle;
But, growing too stout,
He could never get out,
So he passed all his life in that kettle.

3. Dud ‘classical’ limerick by J. Brodsky, 1969

Our Russia’s a country of birches
and axes and ikons and churches
without any priest
and crosses; at least
our Russia’s a country of searches.

4. Dud ‘Lear’ limerick by P. Miles, 1974

There was a young Russian cried, ‘How
Can I inculcate Marx in this cow?
Whatever I say
She bleats a loud neigh,
Whilst objectively staying a cow!’

(These limerick-critters don’t like intellectuals trying to ride ’em.)

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alfred Tennyson, biographies, biography, comments, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Edward Lear, Evey Pym, Foxwold, Franz Kafka, George Calderon, Horatio Nelson, Jenny Uglow, John Pym, Joseph Brodsky, Karl Marx, Kittie Calderon, Lewis Carroll, limericks, Marie Curie, Rudyard Kipling, Russia, Violet Pym, Wadham College | 3 Comments

So what IS biography?

Posted on January 15, 2018 by Patrick Miles

I began the pre-typesetting read of my book — all 183,000 words of it — a fortnight ago, and immediately relived the never-ending malarkey with the Introduction… Even this late in the day I found myself tweaking the opening paragraph for the twenty-first time. But suddenly this final revisitation seemed to focus for me the underlying issues.

The reason I had eight willing but long-suffering friends read and advise me on this Introduction was that there is a fictive-creative element in this book, it’s not just facts and non-fiction, and I find it impossible to write about something creative that I have created, because if I could have written about it I wouldn’t have created it. In fact I don’t believe one should try to write about something one has created. It’s like trying to describe the self. The self can’t do it. Secretly, I felt that someone else should write the Introduction; but I knew that the convention was against me there and I couldn’t defy it. I compromised by appointing a sort of committee.

The readers’ initial reaction was, quite rightly, that I was not selling George strongly enough from word one, and they suggested various ‘commercial’ angles, most of which I adopted. One reader even rewrote the whole Introduction from what can only, I’m afraid, be called a clichéd marketing point of view, and I even adopted some of that. As I drafted and redrafted, more and more of my readers approved of the result.

Then came the bombshell. I showed the Introduction in this ‘late’ form to one of the most respected and experienced senior literary figures in London, whom I had known for a while and will call Q. His embarrassment, poor chap, was acute. He repeatedly asked me whether I ‘minded’ him telling me this, but the Introduction was fundamentally wrong, a total disaster, because ‘it’s about you, Patrick, it’s all about you’. I did not mind him telling me this, quite the contrary, but it was something I was extremely sensitive about. Also, I couldn’t help wondering why the other readers hadn’t said something similar. Had they been afraid to? However, I knew that in literary terms Q’s opinion outweighed all the rest, so I profusely thanked him, tore the Introduction up, and started yet again.

I could see that it came down to two extremes of Introduction, a ‘solipsistic’ and a ‘non-solipsistic’. The first tells how the author ‘discovered’ his/her subject, what that subject ‘means’ to the author, why he/she feels the subject’s story must be told, why he/she has told the story this way, etc. The second is focussed from word one on the subject of the biography and basically, as they say, ‘sells’ the subject of the biography as hard as it can; the author is discreet, reverential and practically self-effaced.

Well, reading the Introduction this last time before the proofs, I suddenly saw that even if the ‘committee’ had not criticised the Introduction for being solipsistic, i.e. ‘about you, Patrick, rather than George Calderon’, the pull of all their advice had been in the non-solipsistic direction: ‘get his achievement into the opening words’, ‘mention famous contemporaries/friends in the first ten lines’, ‘get the War into the first paragraph’, ‘get stuck into the romance/sex on page one’, ‘rabbit about the Edwardians, who are flavour of the decade’, ‘drop famous names all over the place and make a person casually reading the first sentence believe he/she will be ignorant and deeply unfashionable if they don’t buy the book’. So my re-jigging in those directions had been a substantial move away from me.

But equally, I felt I could see why Q’s response had been so extreme. He surely had little experience of biographies of unknown people. Obviously, if you are writing a biography of someone extremely well known, it would be ludicrous to drag yourself into it (although I daresay even Peter Ackroyd allows himself a bit about what Shakespeare means to him). Yet how someone ‘discovers’ an unknown, what the unknown means to them, and how they came to write his/her life, are profoundly significant: without them, the book would never have been written and they are surely a vital part of the ‘sell’ of the book. Several readers told me as much; they enjoyed reading the ‘personal’ story behind it all. I was hyper-sensitive about the solipsistic element in my Introduction, because I am aware of the parallels between my and George’s experiences of Russia, our involvement with Chekhov, and Russia-related career difficulties. On the other hand, how I first came across George when I was a literary consultant at the National Theatre, my originally negative reaction, my deeper delving after being commissioned to research the history of Chekhov on the British stage, my ‘discovery’ of George and Kittie’s archives, and my realisation of what vibrant people they were, are surely vital to ‘introducing’ the Calderons?

I think I have now got the balance right between the ‘solipsistic’ and ‘non-solipsistic’ in my Introduction, although I fear there will still be too much there about me for Q and some other readers (but the whole book is about other people!). The underlying issue, I see now, is this: biography is not entirely about its subject, or at least it’s about its subject in a peculiar way, because it is the product of a me reacting with that subject. Whether obtrusively or not, the relation of every biographer to his/her subject pervades the whole of the biography he/she has written. As an example, I take the beautiful biography of Edward Lear by Jenny Uglow, published at the end of last year:

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

I have never read a biographical work by Uglow before. She has written so many that I had rather come to regard her as a ‘professional biographer’ who wrote her stories to a very high documentary standard but did so for no particular personal reasons and never got involved much with her subjects. Indeed, she was quoted by Susie Boyt in an article entitled ‘The Experience of Writing a Biography’ (Financial Times 6 June 2009) as saying:

I’m so conscious that it’s dangerous to think of your subject as a friend or to over-identify. It would be completely bonkers to think you could actually get close to them. Liking is dangerous, loving is dangerous because, of course, it will change the way you see things. I hate the idea of things being soppy.

Quite. Thus we get a meticulously informed, densely documented, superbly illustrated, fast-moving account of Lear’s family, youth and early work as a zoological painter that absorbs us and bears us along until…in my case about page 200. At that point I asked myself, where is this going? There had been a minimum of speculation about why Lear’s life was thus — in particular, so restless — what his real ambitions were, what his sexuality was, how good his contemporaries actually thought him as an artist. The impression of motion over substance in Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense is enhanced by the fact that the chapters are short and there are over forty of them.

But I am so glad I persisted, and I recommend others to. All at once I realised that the reason Uglow’s treatment of Lear’s rejection by his mother, his epilepsy, his relationship with Frank Lushington, his on/off interest in Gussie Bethell, his obsession with memory and the past, his relationship with his lifelong servant Georgio, or with Tennyson, or with Foss his cat, is so, well, unexplicit, so discontinuous, so pointilliste, is not that she doesn’t want to probe or pry, but that she understands these problems of Lear’s so well. Gradually, cumulatively, we understand the complexity of Lear’s relationships too. Beneath Uglow’s low authorial intervention, beneath her ‘restraint’, there must be a profound empathy for her to be able to leave us understanding them so well.

Nevertheless, I have to say that the narrative spine here is too weak for me at times to think of it as biography. After you have followed Lear from Britain to Italy, from here to there by steamer, back to Italy, back again to Britain, per Bradshaw’s all over Britain, back to Corfu, or wherever, several times, you yearn for a bit of generalisation and personal interpretation. Again, you want to know what the biographer makes of it all.

Uglow, or Faber, have got round this problem in a most ingenious way. Every chapter is headed by a Lear drawing and limerick, Lear’s verse and accompanying drawings thickly bestrew the text, and every so often there is a fabulous reproduction of one of Lear’s mind-blowing watercolours or oils. Throughout, Uglow quotes Lear’s poetry and letters copiously. Without wishing to sound cynical, one can only describe this as a marketing masterstroke. It means that Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense is really a burgeoning Lear compendium, a grandiflora of all that’s best in Lear, the finest Lear Experience for the uninitiated that has ever been confected.

I instinctively feel this ploy detracts from the book as biography, but I cannot deny that it ends by making you feel you know Edward Lear as well as it is, probably, possible to know him. I stress: this is the achievement of Uglow and Lear, of the two authors in their own mysterious dialogue. You end by feeling you know the vulnerable, kind, despairing, hilarious, indignant, rebellious, supremely tolerant and civilised man who had an impossibly modern sense of beauty, who gave endlessly of his time to children and their parents alike, who worked like a Trojan. And to know Mr Lear is extremely pleasant.