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.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Alfred Tennyson, biographies, biography, Bradshaw's, comments, Corfu, Edward Lear, Faber & Faber, Foss, Frank Lushington, George Calderon, Georgio, Gussie Bethell, Introduction, Italy, Jenny Uglow, Kittie Calderon, Peter Ackroyd, solipsism, Susie Boyt | 1 Comment

Some notes on orthodoxy

Posted on January 7, 2018 by Patrick Miles

A very happy New Year to all Calderonia’s subscribers, followers, and casual viewers! (If you are one of the latter, please consider subscribing top right.)

This is ‘the year’… Following an almost complete absence of response to my last reminders to half a dozen publishers in December, I have decided to go it alone. I intend to publish George Calderon: Edwardian Genius in a limited hardback edition on 4 June 2018, the anniversary of George Calderon’s death at Gallipoli. The one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of George’s birth is 2 December 2018, when we shall have another selling blitz. I aim to more or less sell out the hardback by this time next year, then transfer to Kindle and Amazon Paperback.

The imprint I’ll use will be my old Anglo-Russian one, ‘Sam&Sam’, which has produced about thirty titles here and there in the last forty years. The printers will be the best in the business, Clays of St Ives. I will explain the origins of the name Sam&Sam in a future post: believe it or not, it involves a fictitious Elizabethan poet…

The not so good news, for potential purchasers, is that the book will cost £30. Jenny Uglow’s beautiful Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense (which I will review next time) costs only £25, as does Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life (also printed by Clays), and someone complained to me recently about paying £30 for a new biography (mind you, in paperback). But I feel that the job we make of this book should be worth £30 and it has to do better than break even if I am going to remunerate a smidgeon of my own labour. Moreover, Helen Smith’s biography of Edward Garnett just off the presses, The Uncommon Reader, which is very comparable in length etc to mine, is priced at £30. I would be very interested to hear subscribers’ reactions to this price, and whether they feel it should include postage if they are not be put off even more from buying the book.

* * *

NOW LET ME SAY WHAT A BLISSFUL RELIEF IT IS NOT TO HAVE TO DEAL WITH ANY MORE PUBLISHERS! O FRABJOUS DAY! I AM AS HAPPY AS A LAMB IN SPRING! IT IS SUCH AN IMMENSE, STRESSFUL BURDEN OFF MY MIND AND SOUL! I FEEL AS THOUGH I HAVE RECOVERED MY LIBERTY AND CAN NOW JUST CONCENTRATE ON DOING AS GOOD A JOB AS POSSIBLE OURSELVES!

A Christmas-card correspondent who follows Calderonia wrote that to judge from my blog I had done nothing all last year except look for a publisher. Well, that’s not quite true; for instance, I also created the book of John Polkinghorne’s and my conversations, which is now going the rounds of publishers who have dealt with John before. And, of course, I had to sort the Permissions for the biography, compose the Afterword, the Acknowledgements, the Bibliography, rewrite the Introduction for the umpteenth time, add some new material, check and re-check the body of the text…

But, yes, it has been a year to the week since I opened my campaign to find a commercial publisher, and a hell of a lot of time, energy and nervous fibre has gone into it. Here are the results:

Publishers approached: 47
Firm acceptances received: 2
Rejections received: 18
No responses received: 27

As I have said before, I suppose that to have received two offers from publishers is not bad. It was unfortunate that these offers contained very deleterious downsides and I just had to let them go. Nevertheless, I don’t think the year-long exercise was a waste of time, as I have learned an enormous amount about the realities of publishing at the moment.

The irony, though, is that I have already decided I am never going to use that knowledge, because I am adamant that I am never going this way again. I am not going to go to publishers in future, they are going to have to come to me. This resolution is reinforced by the knowledge that in all the previous cases of commercial publishers publishing my books, I have had some kind of personal contact there first, they have turned to me for the books, and in all of those books not an iota was changed by editors.

Conversely, the kind of publishers I have tangled with over the past year talk about refashioning and rewriting your book (‘editing’) before they have even read it all. It is the same with agents: they immediately tell you how they are going to ‘reconfigure’ your book to ‘position it in the market’. These editors and agents fancy themselves as writers. When I told a writer friend that I had decided to bring out the book myself, he said he was glad because he was sure I would have ‘fallen out’, as he put it, with a commercial publisher, ‘before you had got very far’. That perhaps suggests I am thin-skinned — some publishers and ‘editors’ would doubtless claim so — but I don’t think I am; I think I can truthfully say I have gritted my teeth and borne a lot of …. from people in academe, publishing and the theatre in my time.

The dark side of the year’s experience has been the arrogance, rudeness and sheer inanity of those publishers who have, or more often have not, responded to my exceedingly carefully researched and crafted approaches. Step forward in particular two grey-suited Editorial Directors, one in Cambridge and one in Oxford. The only reason I have not sent them the floral orange card (see my post of 30 November) is that I have only one of it. I know they are literally men in grey suits, because I have seen a video and photographs of them on the Web!

* * *

Obviously, I want to move on as fast as possible. Now is the time, however, to honour the pledge in my post of 30 September 2017 to respond to John Dewey’s well-argued views on the subject. Please refer to John Dewey’s comment of January 2017 and click on the link there to access John’s essay on the Brimstone Press blog. Click here to access George Orwell’s original preface to Animal Farm, which deals with a particular form of publishing orthodoxy in Orwell’s day and which John quotes.

When I set out to find a commercial publisher this time last year, I certainly admitted to myself that I was unlikely to succeed because the ‘bottom line’, the litmus test, was going to be: can it sell 6000 copies? Publishers have repeatedly quoted this figure to me in the past five years. Well, actually, I have always believed they could sell 6000 copies if they marketed it properly. The reason I believed it, was that I thought the book’s story and substance could catch the imaginations of people who can read.

However, really I knew they would tell me they couldn’t sell anywhere near 6000 copies. Why did I know this? Because I sensed deep down that publishers are process-driven people, not risk-takers. This has been borne out by all my experience over the past year. They just want to feel they are in sole control of their ‘process’, as though they were some kind of officials, or cultural civil servants. Hence they create Procrustean beds of ‘series’ that a book can’t, or ‘has to’, fit into, and refer to books as ‘units’. They set up interminable processes of ‘refereeing’ by people who have a vested interest in trashing perceived rivals. There is something Gogolian about publishing today: hardly any of it appears to operate in real time, but in a special chaotic time not corresponding to any known to science or philosophy. I know someone for whom the refereeing and rewriting process ran into the ground after eighteen months, but three years later he was staggered to receive a letter offering him a contract. Most publishing is bureaucratic.

I think John Dewey will agree, however, that the root problem is orthodoxy — what George Orwell in his preface calls ‘the gramophone mind’, the uncritical absorption of ‘the record that is being played at the moment’. What stalled the publication of Animal Farm (I have seen figures from 4 to 37 quoted for the number of times it was rejected) was political orthodoxy, or as we might say today political correctness: the British intelligentsia’s ‘uncritical loyalty to the USSR’ and to the mass-murderer ‘Stalin’ in particular. My efforts in the past year have not suffered from that species of orthodoxy, although it is interesting that numerous kind souls advised me not to mention George Calderon’s anti-suffragism or strike breaking in my approaches to editors, as the latter would immediately reject the book for ‘reasons’ of political incorrectness (on my part, presumably, for taking these subjects seriously rather than censoring them!).

No, the underlying cause of my, John’s, and thousands of other writers’ problems is orthodoxy tout court — orthodoxy of thought and institution. Commercial publishing is a vast agglomerated institution and therefore by nature bound to produce its orthodoxy. It will tend overwhelmingly to play ‘the record that is being played at the moment’. X have published a thin biography of Victoria Beckham, so we should rush one out. We must publish ‘new’ biographies of Shakespeare, Austen or Dickens, even though they contain less than one per cent new material, because people always want ‘new’ biographies of very famous people by well known biographers; it’s a tried recipe that ‘works’. That way orthodoxy always lies, although I would never suggest that orthodoxy does not change or even innovate; it’s not stable, it just changes/innovates/wobbles at the slowest pace necessary for its survival.

Although George Orwell analyses political orthodoxy brilliantly in his preface, what we are talking about here is a general anthropological-psychological phenomenon, which some might describe as simply fear and incomprehension of the new. ‘Nobody we know, nobody like us, has ever heard of George Calderon, so he can’t possibly be worth bothering with.’

I once happened to hear some people talking about me on the other side of the room (it is rather dangerous to have such sensitive hearing) and one said: ‘He’s not an establishment man, he’s never been part of an establishment.’ No, but I am certainly a passionate team-player, especially in the theatre. The point about establishments and orthodoxies is that you can only improve the design of boats by rocking them.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Animal Farm, biographies, Brimstone Press, Charles Dickens, Clays Ltd, comments, design of boats, George Calderon, George Orwell, Jane Austen, Jenny Uglow, John Dewey, John Polkinghorne, orthodoxy, publishers, publishing, Ruth Scurr, Sam&Sam, Victoria Beckham, William Shakespeare | 5 Comments

An Edwardian Christmas

Posted on December 21, 2017 by Patrick Miles

Happy Christmas to All Our Readers,

and thank you for following Calderonia into its fourth year!

The Calderons’ 1907 home in Hampstead

At Heathland Lodge, George and Kittie’s home from 1901 to 1912 in the Vale of Health, they always staged a large family Christmas, despite the fact that they had no children of their own. The secluded house giving directly onto Hampstead Heath had been built in the 1860s but made over by the Arts and Crafts architect George Birch in the 1890s. It was very comfortable and had at least fifteen rooms. Everything was done on a grand scale at Christmas (see George’s cartoon), with friends and relations sitting down to dinner with them, games, singing, and a full-length charade written by George. Kittie was stage manager, wardrobe mistress and programme designer, George played the lead, and there were always parts for his brother Frank’s children, Philip and Joan. In Kittie’s words, she and George invited ‘a large audience of all our friends who had children to bring and some who had not. These charades were capital elaborations […] Sometimes the show was repeated at Frank’s later’.

Christmas 1907, however, was different. The Calderons had shared Heathland Lodge with Kittie’s mother, Mary Hamilton, who had taken out a mortgage on it. Mrs Hamilton died on 30 August 1906 as George was on his way back from Tahiti, and it is possible that by the time he arrived in London on 30 October 1906 Kittie had already vacated Heathland Lodge for probate or financial reasons and moved a mile away to apartment 33 at Buckingham Mansions (see above today). The Calderons failed to sell Heathland Lodge in 1907, but let it quite lucratively and did not reoccupy it until 1908. At Christmas 1907, then, they were living in a flat and although it was spacious this changed things somewhat, as the only surviving diary of George’s illustrates:

Saturday 21. St Thomas.

K. called on the Briton Rivières. G. to tea at Frank’s (children back) to prepare charade etc. Memo: Tahiti.

Sunday 22. 4th in Advent. Peace Sunday.

Jones [Johnny Jones, their Aberdeen terrier, see passim] became ill.

Monday 23.

Jones ill. G. to BM after lunch, met Binyon & wife at tea.

Tuesday 24.

Jones convalescent. 4-7 children’s party at the Armsteads (Streets, Hugh Armsteads, Calderons). G. dined at Frank’s preparing charade.

Wednesday 25. Christmas Day.

Jones restored to health. K. & G. lunched at the Grays. Dinner [possibly pheasant supplied by George] at Frank’s (Hetty, Lotty, Mother, Marge), afterwards came Aunt G., Clara Sumner, Draper, Lowden and wife. Charade.

Thursday 26. St Stephen. Boxing Day.

Jones relapsed. 4.00 Sangster (vet.) to see Jones. K. to visit the Lubbocks.

Friday 27. St John, Evan.

Vet. again. G. to BM after lunch. K. & G. to dine with Mother (Clare Sumner, Ethel, Frank).

Saturday 28. Holy Innocents

G. to BM after lunch.

I have cut very little from these entries. Obviously they are minimal (it is only a pocket diary), but one drama looms large. George and Kittie had Christmas lunch and dinner out, they appear to have had few callers at 33 Buckingham Mansions over the Christmas period, and the annual long charade composed by George for Philip and Joan was postponed until Twelfth Night at their parents’ house. By 27 December George was back in his chair at the British Museum working on Tahitian history. And Johnny Jones, who did NOT die, had cost his owners a fortune in vet’s fees…

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Arts and Crafts, biography, British Museum, Briton Rivière, Buckingham Mansions, Catherine Lubbock, Christmas, Clara Calderon, Clara Sumner, comments, dogs, Ethel Armstead, Frank Calderon, Frederic Lubbock, George Calderon, Hampstead, Heathland Lodge, Helen Binyon, Joan Calderon, Johnny Jones, Jones, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Marguerite Calderon, Mary Hamilton, Philip Calderon, Tahiti, Vale of Health, vets, W.H. Gray | 2 Comments

Own a commemorative masterpiece

Posted on December 7, 2017 by Patrick Miles

For details of how to buy this book see below.

I first wrote about the above book on 10 February 2016 . I suggest going now to http://www.groupphoto.co.uk/the-book for Andrew Tatham’s own description of it and how it came about. As you will see, it has been praised to the skies by communicators from Jeremy Vine and Melvyn Bragg to William Boyd and Gyles Brandreth.

Now that I have revisited Andrew Tatham’s book many times since I first read it in 2015, I feel qualified to sum up what I find truly great about it and why I think everyone should consider owning a copy.

The whole Group Photograph Project, with its travelling exhibition, animated film, multi-media presentation by Tatham, ethereal tree drawings of the families of the men in the photograph, time-lapse photography of their relatives gathering for a ‘new group photograph’ today, and of course book, is an ARTWORK.

This means that the project is both an aesthetic and a profoundly HUMANE experience. The historical basis of the book is impeccably researched and documented, but the 2000 photographs, and especially the ‘stained glass portraits’ that Tatham has designed for each of the 46 men, comprise a magnificent piece of visual art, whilst the text takes us back into the men’s lives before May 1915 and forwards to their families’ lives today. As Tatham has written, a lot of his aim was ‘to go from that original picture of soldiers and show the fullness of them as human beings’. And he has succeeded: if you are at all interested in people, you will never tire of the life- and family-stories contained in this book and historically focussed on the Battle of Loos… I know people who, as well as reading it straight through, dip into its humanity at random, at odd times, or at Armistice time, for instance.

Altogether, I feel that ‘A Group Photograph’ is the only work of art produced by the 1914-18 commemoration so far that is on a par with Paul Cummins’s and Tom Piper’s installation ‘Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red’. Both artworks were refused state subsidy and have been created at their authors’ own substantial financial risk. Both have caught the imagination of the British public and I am certain both will live on.

In the case of the ceramic poppies of Cummins’s and Piper’s creation, the public have connected with it so emotionally that they have wanted to own part of it by buying one of its poppies. One can imagine these poppies being passed down through future generations of these families as ‘living’ markers of this great 2014-18 commemoration. And I see Tatham’s book rather similarly. It lives for me now and I think it will for future generations. My wife and I want to hang a copy in as many branches of our combined families as possible, for their and their descendants’ enjoyment and satisfaction, so have decided to make it our staple Christmas present. We have bought copies taking advantage of Tatham’s special offer of ten for £180 including postage (a saving of £38) . I realise this may be a bit of a ‘spoiler’ for those family members who follow the blog, but all of you, historians, scientists, artists, whatever, are going to be wowed by this book!

To buy the book A Group Photograph, go to the link given in the second line of this post. To buy ten or more copies at the reduced rate, or to book its author’s inspiring talk about the project, email: andrew@groupphoto.co.uk .

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged 8th Battalion Royal Berkshire Regiment, A Group Photograph, Andrew Tatham, artworks, Battle of Loos, biographies, Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, commemoration, comments, family histories, George Calderon, Gyles Brandreth, Jeremy Vine, Melvyn Bragg, Paul Cummins, poppies, Royal Berkshires, The Great War, Tom Piper, William Boyd, World War I | Leave a comment

The ‘politics’ of publication

Posted on November 30, 2017 by Patrick Miles

I bought the above postcard on impulse in about 1975, thinking: ‘That’s hilarious! It would be difficult to take serious offence at receiving it, yet the message is unmistakable! I’m bound to need one of those some day…’

And I have. But I haven’t yet sent it. It has disappeared for the odd decade at the back of a drawer, then surfaced during the next move, been refiled where I could find it if I needed it, and now rests only an arm’s length away at the back of a card rack on my desk. I would never admit this, but probably the reason for its promotion is that in the last year of wrestling with publishers I’ve come closer than ever to sending it. I have actually extracted it from the rack, placed it in front of me with a view to signing and addressing it, incandescently contemplated its visceral and acerbic message, then…put it back in its rack.

The ‘politics’ of publication (by which I mean ‘personal politics’, of course, not the ideological variety, although they can enter into it) are turbid and tetra-toxic. Take last Monday and Tuesday. I decided to make a final, final list of publishers to tackle (I had so far approached 47), by collating the notes from my last four visits to the Biography section at Waterstones AND going through the 65 pages of ‘Book Publishers UK and Ireland’ in Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook 2017 for the very last time.

It did not take long to extract the marrow from my notes, but since the list in Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook comprises over 500 publishers, re-examining them was slow work. It is no exaggeration to say, though, that the process was accompanied by an internal monologue something like this:

Ah, Caligula…he once sent me an ‘advance’ of £1000 after I’d flatly refused to work for him, assuming I suppose that I would take the poisoned bait…

Aaaargh, X Publisher…it’s a complete tragedy that I can’t tackle them, they are one of the most suitable, but they would give it to that ghastly Russianist to read who is so competitive that said person would diss it on principle and steal my material…

Hello, there’s that formula ‘no approaches except through a respectable agent’ again…could those two publishers separated by ten pages be owned by the same person? Goodness yes, they are and he diddled me in the 1980s… How on earth does he know what a ‘respectable’ agent is?

(Sigh) It really is a pity about Y Publisher…couldn’t I possibly reconsider them? No: they offered me a contract then told me the book didn’t ‘read well’. Of course, they might be right, but their examples revealed them as literarily naive. In any case they are rude. Who tells their own author ‘you can’t write’?!

Ah, Z Publisher… I’ve done four books with them…when did I write to that smarmy bloke up there…what, 28 August! Not even to reply to my proposal, which took four hours to compile according to their template, is downright insulting… He’s a candidate for the orange card, if anyone is.

Hang on, what is this outfit? ‘Biography’…how did I overlook them? Authors include…eminent names…Kim Philby…Donald Trump… Er, I don’t think so!

I could, of course, go on, but you get my drift. The theatre is a piranha pool of ‘politics’, but at least you can see the piranhas, distract them, sweet-talk them, take evasive action and so forth, but most of the time with publishers you can’t get anywhere near them physically, you can’t see the whites of their eyes, you only have written communication which enables them to behave outrageously and get away with it… Yes, publishing is profoundly personally politicised and one must take that very seriously if one is not to waste one’s time. I have even been prevented from taking on the best (‘respectable’) agent in the country for a book like mine by the fact that they represent a well-known Russianist virago whom they would be bound to consult.

By the end of last Monday, I had that ‘final, final’ list of publishers to approach and it consisted of twelve. I spent all Tuesday morning researching them and their personnel on the Web. By lunchtime I had to reject them all, for one reason and another, sometimes objective, sometimes purely ‘personal’, such as, alas, the look of their editors’ portraits…

Yes, finding a publisher is, as John Dewey has said, a matter of luck. Or chance. Or contingency. Or personal politics. All my past experience tells me that. Publishing is what mathematicians, I believe, would call ‘a system near to the edge of chaos’. Quite by chance, I notice that a very bright publisheress, with whom I had good dealings back in 1998, has taken over in a ‘distinguished’ firm that I was warned off three years ago because it did ‘no marketing’ (London literati). Now they do do marketing. Will she remember me? I have written her such a careful, subjunctive letter as Proust himself might be proud of.

Someone, though, at the end of this exercise, is going to get the floral card from me, I just know it; unless, after forty years, I can’t bear to part with it and I convert it into a kind of witch’s doll (technically, I gather, a ‘poppet’) that I take out every so often to mutter over, in order to exorcise my wrath, then replace in the rack.

Meanwhile, the decision about who is going to publish George Calderon: Edwardian Genius will be taken around 15 December as promised, but not announced until the day after Twelfth Night, so as not to disrupt the next two posts. I heard today from our chosen printer for self-publishing that we will have four months from the beginning of January to get the hardback designed and typeset to appear on 4 June 2018, so we should manage that. That date is, of course, the anniversary of George Calderon’s death at Gallipoli. The idea would be to have a second launch/marketing storm to coincide with the end of the War and George’s 150th birthday on 2 December 2018. After that, the book would go to Kindle and Amazon paperback.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, Caligula, chaos theory, comments, Dardanelles, Donald Trump, floral messages, Gallipoli, George Calderon, John Dewey, Kim Philby, literary agents, personal politics, piranhas, publishers, The Great War, virago, Waterstones, World War I, Wrietrs' and Artists' Yearbook | 5 Comments

Alan Coren touches root

Posted on November 24, 2017 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Giles and Victoria Coren have done a magnificent job in selecting and presenting these 420 pages of their late father’s writings 1960-2007, very many of which are masterpieces. I hope they will not mind me invoking paragraph 8.7, sub-section a(ii), of the MHRA Style Guide: A Handbook for Authors, Editors, and Writers of Theses (‘quotation of brief passages of copyright material for academic purposes’), in order to reproduce these two paragraphs by Alan Coren from page 170:

One of the major headaches with which booksellers are invariably racked is the astonishing intractability of authors. The division between these two twin curators of our literary heritage is over which of the two syllables of the word ‘bookshop’ is the more important. How rarely can an author be found who considers, before even setting pen to paper, the marketability of his product! How often has an author rung a bookshop to say: ‘I’m thinking of doing a book, what’s the best weight to go for?’ or enquired as to the exact dimensions of the bookseller’s most popular paper bag, so that something may be written to fit it?

Hopefully, GOLFING FOR CATS will change all that. A new era of inter-literary cooperation, it is not too much to say, may well be dawning. For not only has this book been put together at the optimum size and weight, it also concerns the three most perennially popular subjects to be found on the bedside tables of the reading public, viz. golf, cats, and the Third Reich.

Did I say ‘academic’? There is nothing academic about this statement, it’s the trewf! Like other great institutions I could mention, publishing really works top down, not bottom up, and it would have been better for the author of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius if he had asked publishers what kind of book they wanted him to write, or remotely whether, before even setting pen to paper…

I wonder if the surname Coren comes from Russian koren’, a root?