Calderonia

‘…but Mr Jones does look a nice dog’

Posted on December 20, 2016 by Patrick Miles

After enduring a long bout of illness and the first anniversary of George’s disappearance at Gallipoli, in the summer of 1916 Kittie decided she must channel her energies into a number of useful and therapeutic activities. One of these was writing to soldiers at the front and sending them whatever they needed. Thus she tracked down George’s last battalion, 1st KOSB, in France, began a correspondence with the officer commanding his old company, and sent them food and clothing. Probably at the sculptor Eric Gill’s suggestion, she also wrote to his twenty-four-year-old apprentice Joseph Cribb, who was at the Somme. She sent him a cake, sweets, and ‘lemonade tabloids’.

The longest series of soldiers’ letters in Kittie’s archive is from an ex-miner, Clement Quinn, who in 1916 was only twenty-one and stationed in Lucknow, which he found extremely trying. Kittie was asked to correspond with Quinn by Robert Holmes, a writer of popular spy-thrillers who happened also to be Sheffield’s first probation officer. Presumably Kittie had met Holmes in London literary circles. Holmes described Quinn’s deprived childhood in a letter of 1 November and asked Kittie to write Quinn ‘improving’ letters — perhaps implying that Quinn had once been in trouble with the police. Kittie said she was incapable of writing ‘improving letters’, but promptly wrote to Quinn and sent him a parcel of tobacco. Quinn replied thanking her on Christmas Day, 1916.

‘Mr Jones’ and Katharine Ripley, 1899

Kittie’s letters to Quinn have not yet been found, but seventeen from him to her have survived, spanning 1914-19. They are remarkable. He writes very clearly, slowly (one imagines), and probably just as he spoke. But he is an intelligent young man. The letters discuss the course of the war, the wartime conduct of the trade unions (he disapproves of the Coal Strike of 1912), barrack and social life (he is very critical of the way the British behave in India), and his plans to train as an engineer when he comes home to Sheffield. Kittie sent him many things, including a fountain pen and John Masefield’s book about Gallipoli. The impression is inescapable that she wrote him long and chatty letters.

On 11 July 1917 Quinn wrote to Kittie requesting a photograph of her ‘if it is your wish for me to have one, as I shall always remember you, for how good you have been to me whilst I have been out here’. Kittie was rather sensitive about portraits of her, most of which she seems not to have liked. In the autumn of 1917, however, she agreed to send Quinn an ‘old’ one. It was the photograph I show above, which was taken when she was still Mrs Ripley, eighteen years earlier. Despite her white dress, she is wearing mourning accessories following Archie Ripley’s death in October 1898. On the back of Kittie’s own copy, George had written ‘equally best’, presumably meaning equal to the one of Kittie that features on this blogsite under ‘Biographies of George and Kittie Calderon’.

Quinn answered from Lucknow on 26 January 1918, after his twenty-third birthday:

Well I do think it is a good Photo, and of Mr Jones. […] You say under your hat there is Gray Hair, but you look quite young yet, but [sic] Mr Jones does look a nice dog.

‘Mr Jones’ was the Aberdeen terrier that Archie Ripley and Kittie had acquired after their marriage. They were both very fond of Jones, as was George. The dog died probably in 1909. Quinn hung this photograph above his barrack bed. On 7 November 1918 he wrote to Kittie speculating about the end of the war. Then he added:

I hope and trust that you have the Honour of seeing your hubby now the Turks are mastered. […] Do you know what I’m thinking of now is when you were skating last winter and the zepps [Zeppelin bombers] came over.

He wanted to meet Kittie at Hampstead when he returned to Britain, but since this was in April 1919 when she was distraught at the confirmation of George’s death, and suffering from pernicious anaemia, it seems very unlikely that he did.

In his last surviving letter, Quinn wrote from Sheffield that he was ‘going down the pit again, as soon as my month leave is up’.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Archie Ripley, Battle of the Somme, biographies, biography, British Expeditionary Force, Clement Quinn, coal mining, comments, Dardanelles, Eric Gill, Gallipoli, George Calderon, India, John Masefield, Jones, Joseph Cribb, Katharine Ripley, King's Own Scottish Borderers, Kittie Calderon, Lucknow, Mr Jones, photographs, Robert Holmes, Sheffield, soldiers' letters, The Great War, The Raj, Third Battle of Krithia, World War I, Ypres, Zeppelins | Leave a comment

Guest post: Clare Hopkins, ‘One Man and his College’

Posted on December 9, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Anyone who has ever watched an episode of Morse or Lewis will know that Oxford Colleges are well supplied with portraits. Founders, archbishops, prime ministers, and Nobel Prize winners gaze grandly down from the panelled walls of Dining Halls. Smaller paintings of distinguished professors, college heads, tutors and benefactors grace common rooms and fellows’ sets. And then, somewhere about the place, a third tier of pictures of the great and the good is usually to be found. In George Calderon’s alma mater Trinity College a large collection of engravings and photographs hangs on the Senior Common Room back stairs: four somewhat shabby flights that link the bar, the fellows’ garden, the kitchen, the hall steward’s pantry, and a series of rooms where the fellows and others hold meetings, eat meals, host receptions, and read newspapers and journals over coffee. At the first turn, as one ascends, Arnold Pienne’s drawing of George Calderon stands out. Its label is different from the rest; it is one of only three or four original art works on the stairs; and it is the only silverpoint owned by the College. ‘Stands out’ is a little misleading, though. George’s grey mount and delicate creamy tones withdraw into almost invisibility against the deep shade of the wall.

Trinity College’s portrait of George Calderon, drawn in silverpoint by Arnold Pienne, 1930

Anyone who has ever had an Oxbridge graduate as a friend will know too that a College is not just for three years, it is for life. This post, then, is an attempt to deconstruct George’s relationship with Trinity, tracing his footprints in the college archives from his first visit, aged 17, to the arrival of his portrait, some fifteen years after his death.

The name George L. Calderon first appears in the Governing Body minutes of 15 December 1886, recording the award of an exhibition worth £40 p.a. for four years [for today’s retail value multiply by a hundred]. This was the lowliest of the seven scholarships and exhibitions on offer, and had been won in a gruelling examination held over several days in the first week of the Christmas vacation. Some of the papers survive: Latin and Greek translation, verse and prose, in both directions; ‘historical questions’; and an English essay entitled, ‘How far is the actual constitution of society a standing mockery of its projected Christian ideals?’.

George came into residence on 15 October 1887. Since 1664 all new members of Trinity have written their own entries in a leather-bound register. That, and shaking hands with the President (the Rev. Henry Woods), made George a ‘Trinity man’. Immediately below his entry is that of Harold Dowdall, a friend from Rugby; above is Arthur Lowry. Turning the pages reveals the names of others who were to become George’s lifelong friends: Laurence Binyon, Archibald Ripley, Michael Furse…

A member of Trinity College, Oxford: George Calderon’s autograph entry in the Admissions Register

As a freshman George occupied a ‘set’ at the top of Staircase 7 (these days, 14) in the corner of the Garden Quadrangle. The staircase servant lit his fire, brought hot water, and delivered breakfast and lunch from the kitchen. Dinner was a communal meal, eaten in Hall, where the scholars and exhibitioners shared the long table nearest the fireplace. The room rent was £5 a term. In October 1888 George moved across the Quad to a first-floor room on Staircase 10 (today’s 17), for which he paid 10 shillings more. One can learn a lot about the lifestyle of an undergraduate from mundane ledgers and buttery books. In his first term George paid a gate charge to come in after 9 pm only once or twice each week; mostly he had the basic threepenny breakfast. I took down a Stores book at random, and leafed through Michaelmas Term 1890. George did not regularly buy coffee or tea, and a single box of biscuits (2s. 4d.) lasted him the term. Then suddenly, on 27 November, he splashed out 18 shillings on claret, and 11s. 3d. on port. Perhaps he was planning a party for his 22nd birthday on 2 December. The ‘Broad Book’ was used to calculate each man’s end-of-term bill. In the summer of 1889, George’s battels (the sum of weekly buttery bills) were the fourth highest in College at just under £20; and the total cost of his term, including university dues, various compulsory subscriptions, and tuition at 7 guineas, was the sixth highest, at £58 6s. 11d.

In the late 1880s Trinity had some 140 undergraduates in residence (in college or digs), of whom up to sixty would participate in Sunday night debates in the Junior Library. Debating Society minutes can suggest a man’s character, even presage his future career. George found his voice in his third term (Archie Ripley spoke much sooner), moving an amendment (defeated). Do I sense a man who enjoyed arguing for the sake of it? Almost always, it seems, he was on the losing side. On 1 December 1889 he moved ‘That in the opinion of this House the measures adopted by Temperance Reformers are incompatible with the dictates of reason and expediency’ – to which ‘the opposition was overwhelming’ and he lost by 20 votes. He was defeated again in January 1890, when he opposed the motion that ‘Realism in Literature and Art is to be deplored’.

George was quickly elected to the debating and paper-reading Gryphon Club. Members met weekly in each other’s rooms; they dined termly; and gathered for an annual photograph. George was funny, and he liked performing. In November 1890, the Oxford Magazine reported that he entertained the Gryphon with a ‘particularly amusing paper on “women”’. The following month he starred in a Smoking Concert (think in-house music hall), giving a ‘specially notable […] lecture on the art of recitation, illustrated by the poem of Burglar Bill’, and closing the first half in an unaccompanied quartet with Mike Furse and two others, singing the comical ‘catch’ ‘My Celia’s Charms’.

The Gryphon Club, 1890.

George (front left) often sits cross-legged in college photographs; and this is not the only one that shows him with a “no. 2” haircut, unusual for men of his class at this date. What with the cane and the waxed moustache, he has the air of an amateur magician — no wonder Herbert Blakiston (middle far left), is giving him such a dirty look. Other friends in this photograph are Archie Ripley (front far right), Laurence Binyon (back far right), Arthur Lowry (seated next to George), and Harold Dowdall (glued into the centre of the back row).

Sport was big in late Victorian Oxford. The Trinity Archive has a charming photograph of George leaning against a wall in a photograph of the 1890-1 Rugby XV. But how fast a runner was he really? A programme survives for the Trinity College Athletics Sports held at the end of his first term. George was one of 20 men competing in the heats of the 150 yards handicap, and was given a penalty of 7 yards. He was not placed, but came second in the mile. In the two years following, he again entered the mile, and again did not win. A keen but not outstanding middle-distance runner, then, at least as a young man.

George sat his Finals in the summer of 1891, and his Second in Literae Humaniores (Latin and Greek literature, philosophy, and history) was published in the University Calendar. And so he went down, as the Oxford jargon has it. But Trinity College remained in his blood. In Trinity Term 1895 George took his MA, that curious Oxford degree by means of which graduates acquire the status of life-long membership of their college and university. Trinity invited its MAs back regularly to college feasts – known as gaudies – while a committee of alumni organised an annual dinner in London. I don’t know if George ever attended, but I see in the battered ledger that equates to today’s alumni database that he updated his address when he returned from Russia: South Hill Farm, Eastcote, near Pinner. And when his close Trinity friend Archie Ripley lay dying, Percy Lubbock’s Sketch attests that George visited him assiduously. I think we can guess one thing at least that they talked about.

In 1902, George published his satirical novel Downy V. Green. Its unkind depiction of Herbert Blakiston has been discussed elsewhere on Calderonia, but let us consider here the setting of the book, the landscape and texture of the story. The moment when Downy is told off for walking on the grass of the Front Quad… His rooms on ‘the ground floor of a third quadrangle, surrounded on three sides by grey crumbling stone buildings, and open on the fourth, but for an iron railing, on to a long and stately garden’… Every detail, every custom of the fictional St Ives College shouts ‘Trinity!’. George was deficient in neither energy nor imagination: this vivid realisation is surely a testament to his deep and lasting affection for the place. A contemporary identified the character Bill Sykes as an ‘unmistakable reproduction’ of the Trinity rowing Blue Hugh Legge, and Sykes’s room as an ‘exact’ double of Legge’s. George drew his own illustration of undergraduates eating breakfast together – and is that the author himself sitting with his back to the window?

A happy memory of Trinity College: undergraduates breakfast together in Downy V. Green, p. 77

We don’t actually know how deeply Blakiston was offended by Downy. George was not the first person to make fun of him, and certainly not the last. Soon after his election to the Presidency in 1907, ‘Blinks’ began listing alumni publications in his annual reports, and George’s books appeared regularly: The Fountain, for example, in 1911. I have searched in vain for any evidence of Blakiston’s reaction to the famous incident in March 1912, when George was called on stage at the end of The Fountain’s first performance in the city and felt inspired to invite undergraduates to join him in a meeting in the Hall to discuss the Miners’ Strike. It is surely significant that it was to Trinity’s large gates on Broad Street that he led them. Trinity was his home in Oxford, and he acted instinctively.

And then, the War. Blakiston followed events closely in The Times. On 15 July 1915 he snipped out the announcement that George was missing – a man whom he had got to know in his first term as a tutor. For four years the President recorded the names of Trinity’s fallen on a scroll in the Chapel – a grim total of 155, each of whom he had known personally. Trinity’s War Memorial is the largest of any college memorial in Oxford, and it was very much Blakiston’s brainchild. Although not the most beautiful, it is undoubtedly the most useful, and arguably the most moving. Gifts of money and books poured in to build and stock the War Memorial Library – a place where the young men never did grow old. Laurence Binyon donated two guineas. Kittie sent a copy of Percy Lubbock’s Sketch of George. The Library was formally opened in November 1928, with the name G. L. Calderon emblazoned in gold letters almost at the top of the board above the entrance. George was the second most senior member of Trinity lost in the War, and the oldest to fall in action. The College does indeed remember them: the names are read in the Chapel every Remembrance Sunday, while for the duration of the First World War’s centenary, a new roll of honour is on display outside the Hall, alongside the earliest surviving manuscript of Binyon’s poem ‘For the Fallen’.

Trinity’s fallen on the Roll of Honour in the War Memorial Library. The names are arranged by year of admission to the College. (Click image to enlarge)

It was almost two years after the Library was opened that Kittie Calderon wrote to Herbert Blakiston, out of the blue, to offer Arnold Pienne’s silverpoint drawing. Her letter of 14 July 1930 runs to three pages.

blakiston-correspondence-1930-2-katharine-calderon-sheet-2

blakiston-correspondence-1930-2-katharine-calderon-sheet-3

Kittie’s letter to President Blakiston, offering the silverpoint portrait, 14 July 1930

Kittie’s tone seems oddly nervous; perhaps she was daunted by the President’s crusty reputation. She seems to have taken a break half way through writing, then picked up her pen to add a rush of detail; almost as if she is trying to offload responsibility for the idea onto Laurence Binyon. Or perhaps the gift was indeed Binyon’s suggestion in the first place, and Kittie is feeling awkward about the whole business. Binyon was a regular visitor to Trinity; he would have been familiar with the picture collection. The label glued on the back of the picture is in his writing.

George’s label, written by his undergraduate friend Laurence Binyon

Kittie calls the drawing ‘very delightful’ – but did she really think that? Patrick tells us she liked very few pictures of George. I very much look forward to reading his expert interpretation of this letter. Personally, I think she was spot-on when she described the drawing as beautiful. It seems so much nicer than the Frederick Hollyer photograph on which it was based (see extreme right in Calderonia’s portrait masthead). The silverpoint is softer, and warmer; George has lost that disdainful, almost audible, sniff. Yet he seems so pale, so mysterious; he looks desperately, achingly, sad. One can almost make eye contact – but then he slips away. He has come home to his College like a ghost. Or like a man who ‘just vanished in the smoke of battle…’

© Clare Hopkins, 2016

Clare Hopkins is the Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford. Throughout the project of researching and writing the first full-length biography of George Calderon, Clare has given me the full benefit of her knowledge as the college’s historian. Moreover, her suggestions, comments and ideas have shaken up my thinking in innumerable productive ways. Patrick Miles

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Archibald Ripley, Archie Ripley, Arnold Pienne, Arthur Lowry, athletics, biography, Clare Hopkins, commemoration, comments, Dardanelles, Downy V. Green, Eastcote, Frederick Hollyer, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Gryphon Club, Harold Dowdall, Henry Woods, Herbert Blakiston, Hugh Legge, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Michael Furse, Miners Strike 1912, Percy Lubbock, Rugby, Smoking Concert, St Ives College, The Fountain, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Trinity College Oxford, Trinity College War Memorial, World War I | 6 Comments

George’s alma maters

Posted on December 7, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I little thought, when I visited the archives of Trinity College, Oxford, on 4 August 2011 to research aspects of George Calderon’s undergraduate years there, that five years later I would still be in invaluable contact with the Archivist, Clare Hopkins, that Clare would become the staunchest of supporters of Calderonia, find time to write a stream of long and intensely thought-provoking Comments on Calderonia, attend George’s commemoration with the Calderonia team at Hampstead on 4 June 2015, and now present a really major piece of Calderonian research for us as a guest post this Friday, 9 December.

But I should have foreseen it, as Clare devoted the whole of her day to me back then in 2011, I bought a copy of her history of Trinity College (Trinity: 450 Years of an Oxford College Community, OUP, 2005) on the spot, and became completely engrossed in it during the four-hour bus journey back to Cambridge… It has since been described to me authoritatively as the best history of an Oxford college, and I can believe it. Of course, it is a mind-boggling documentary achievement, but it is also a slice of British history, and a very humane and at times hilarious narrative.

I am therefore hugely honoured and grateful that Clare Hopkins has undertaken all the extended work of composing her detailed and profusely illustrated guest post One Man and his College for this Friday, 9 December. It is a unique piece of research that massively enhances the biographical value of the blogsite. DON’T MISS IT!

As Clare writes, in One Man and his College she attempts to ‘deconstruct George’s relationship with Trinity, tracing his footprints in the college archives’ from 1886 until the arrival of his posthumous portrait, donated by Kittie in 1930. This means that, although of course there is some factual overlap with the pages in my biography covering George’s university career, there is no conflict or duplication of view whatsoever, as Clare tells the story from within the college archives and I tell it from the letters that George wrote home. In fact, I shall direct readers of my biography to Clare’s post for further factual treatment and a different perspective.

I suppose, strictly speaking, George had three ‘alma maters’ — Rugby School, Trinity College, and Oxford University. As it happens, this year has seen the publication of a history of the University of Oxford by another follower of this blog, Dr L.W.B. Brockliss (The University of Oxford, OUP, 2016). Of course, this is even more a ‘history of Britain’, if one thinks of the part played by the whole university and its members in public life. If Clare’s history of Trinity College reminds me of Turgenev’s Fathers and Children, Brockliss’s resembles War and Peace! It too is replete with comedy and, of course, eccentricity. For the seriously solid reader of top-quality non-fiction with inexorable plots, I recommend both as a Christmas present.

Clare’s forthcoming post One Man and his College will remain up for eleven days. But that turn of phrase is misleading, because it will, of course, ‘always be there’ and is very thoroughly keyworded for visitors.

I cannot thank Clare enough for all her interest and dedication over the last five years.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged alma mater, biographies, biography, Calderonia, Clare Hopkins, comments, George Calderon, Kittie Calderon, L.W.B. Brockliss, One Man and his College, The Great War, Trinity College Oxford, University of Oxford, World War I | Leave a comment

‘He became his admirers…’

Posted on December 6, 2016 by Patrick Miles

W.H. Auden’s ‘In Memory of W.B. Yeats’ describes Yeats’s death in January 1939, culminating in: ‘The current of his feeling failed: he became his admirers.’ I often think the word should be ‘readers’ rather than ‘admirers’, for as Auden himself says in the next stanza: ‘The words of a dead man/Are modified in the guts of the living.’

I walked to Cambridge station (it’s chaos up there for wheeled transport at the moment) to meet someone off a train, and discovered as I approached Station Road that I had ten minutes in hand. I stopped walking, then, and crossed the road to pay my respects at the War Memorial.

I swear I have never seen so many wreaths and crosses around it as this year. There must have been over thirty wreaths on its plinth, mainly from organisations of all kinds and ethnicities, as well as humble wooden crosses with a poppy in the middle and the name of a relative written on them.

The solemnity, and sometimes passion, of the inscriptions — these historically grieving voices — were more moving than I had expected. Two of the wreaths bore lines by Brooke and Binyon: the first sentence of ‘The Soldier’, and the mantric line from ‘For the Fallen’. The latter was written as: ‘They shall not grow old’…

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged British Expeditionary Force, commemoration, comments, For the Fallen, George Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Remembrance Day, Rupert Brooke, The Great War, The Soldier, W.B. Yeats, W.H. Auden, war memorials, World War I | Leave a comment

‘bubbling with wit and good humour’

Posted on December 5, 2016 by Patrick Miles

In a letter to the TLS (9 July 2010) I appealed for unpublished letters or works of George Calderon, but also asked readers to contact me if they had ‘come across references to him in obscure publications’. My thinking was that I would be reading the biographies and autobiographies of George’s closest friends, for instance William Rothenstein, Henry Newbolt and Laurence Binyon, but with someone as sociable as George he might well feature in books of memoirs by people I had never heard of.

The response was magnificent. Even very recently, I received a reference from an old friend to an autobiography that I would certainly never have come across on my own, namely the journalist Michael Davidson’s The World, the Flesh and Myself (1973). Davidson, born in 1897, joined up at the age of seventeen and in the winter of 1915 was training to be an officer at Fort Brockhurst in Hampshire, where Lieutenant Calderon was stationed with the 9th Battalion Ox & Bucks:

I can recall only two of my fellow-officers at Fort Brockhurst — both three times my age and both, in intellect and outlook, delightfully unsoldierly. Neither, obviously, need have joined the Army at all, each could have found some cushy, opulent ‘war-work’. Yet, old as grandfathers, they chose to be junior combatant officers: it’s hard to think of a higher chivalry.

George Calderon, an important dramatist and member of that Hispano-English family renowned in art and letters, was nearly 50 and a subaltern in my regiment: a gay, whimsical, slightly ironical person, bubbling with wit and good humour and ever ready with kindness and the sensible solution of some tiresome military problem. His slim, Iberian good looks were made martial by a little black moustache. In less than a year’s time he was dead at Gallipoli.

This is a very interesting glimpse of George by a young person in the period between January and May 1915 covered on Calderonia in posts exactly a hundred years later; one, for instance, to add to the information conveyed in his letter to Kittie of 10 May 1915 that he had benefited from being welcomed into the family of a fellow ex-Oxford officer, Robert Peel, whose pretty, 24-year-old wife Helen he particularly liked.

The other older officer Davidson mentions was a certain Heneage, from the Grenadier Guards, of whom no more is known.

Davidson was wounded in 1916. He subsequently became a Communist, an anti-Nazi writer, and fairly eminent foreign correspondent. He died in 1976.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, comments, Dardanelles, Fort Brockhurst, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Grenadier Guards, Helen Peel, Heneage, Kittie Calderon, Michael Davidson, Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, Robert Peel, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Times Literary Supplement, World War I | Leave a comment

Some ‘announcements’

Posted on December 3, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I am staggered that my Introduction has passed its latest grilling, been tweaked yet again, and finalised as version 8. Deep down, though, I know I can’t write this sort of thing. To quote another favourite tag of Chekhovians, from Three Sisters: Feci quod potui, faciant meliora potentes (I have done what I can, may those capable of better do so). In this case, ‘those capable of better’ will be editors…

The Afterword has been written, too. It will doubtless be rewritten over the next month, but my main job now is compiling the Bibliography (which will contain the first one ever of George’s publications) and the Acknowledgements, which as far as I can see must thank by name about eighty people! The plan is then to tackle publishers in the New Year. I will discuss the strategy and the problems, but I can say that the intention is by hook or by crook to get the book out in 2017.

Meanwhile, we have decided to create a new genre of guest posts. I have been hugely honoured and gratified by those who have offered to write guest posts for Calderonia, and I know that they find the word limit of 1500 congenial. Please continue to contact me if there is anything you would like to air on Calderonia, with images, that would come out at about that length. The possibility has also arisen of posting longer pieces of actual research, or memoir literature for example, that relate directly to George’s biography. I am delighted to announce that the first of these (next week) will be by Clare Hopkins, Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, where George Calderon was an undergraduate, and will be entitled ‘One Man and his College’. As followers will know from Clare’s Comments on Calderonia, she is a vigorous writer, and you can expect what Grant Richards, advertising George’s Introduction to Chekhov in the TLS, called ‘a deuce of a piece’!

We know from the statistics that one of the search terms that leads visitors to Calderonia is ‘Chekhov’. It seems that the site is accessed by university drama courses, for instance. I was particularly pleased, therefore, to receive Harvey Pitcher’s guest post ‘Calderon on Chekhov’ of 21 October. Pitcher wrote that ‘Calderon touches on most of the subjects that critics have written about at great length subsequently, but he does so with a much lighter touch’. Pitcher himself wrote about George with a deceptively light touch, and joins luminaries like the American professors William Lyon Phelps and Laurence Senelick in praising the Introduction and encouraging people to read it.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, biography, Calderonia, Clare Hopkins, comments, George Calderon, Grant Richards, guest posts, Harvey Pitcher, Laurence Senelick, Three Sisters, Times Literary Supplement, Trinity College Oxford, William Lyon Phelps | Leave a comment

Holroyd on biography

Posted on December 1, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Whenever I re-read my typescript, I check the sources for a few facts or assertions chosen at random. The last time I was re-reading, one of the assertions that struck me as needing checking was that Augustus John had been ‘downright anti-Semitic’ in his attitude to the painter William Rothenstein, who was one of George’s closest post-university friends. The general point I was making was that at this time (1909) Edwardian England itself was pretty anti-Semitic, but with their cosmopolitan backgrounds Rothenstein’s friends George Calderon and Joseph Conrad knew and understood Jews.

The source for the assertion about Augustus John was a letter from him to Ottoline Morrell and it was quoted in Michael Holroyd’s Augustus John: The New Biography (Chatto & Windus, 1996). So I went to my notes and photocopies from this book and checked it. It is on page 171.

However, the first thing that caught my eye when I got out my 2011 notes on Holroyd’s biography was this, which I had written out from his Preface:

For me the virtue of biography is the humanizing effect it can bring to history. To see people as being ‘worth’ a Life on account of their greatness and goodness is a nineteenth-century concept. […] Biography is no longer simply an instrument of information retrieval, though historical and cultural information that is retrieved from these expeditions is a bonus. The biographer’s prime purpose is to recreate a world into which readers may enter, and where, interpreting messages from the past, they may experience feelings and thoughts that remain with them after the book is closed.

I’d forgotten reading this. It’s very good and I agree with every word of it.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged anti-Semitism, Augustus John, biographies, biography, comments, George Calderon, history, Joseph Conrad, Michael Holroyd, Ottoline Morrell, William Rothenstein | Leave a comment

One does the hokey cokey

Posted on November 29, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I said in my post of 6 October (nearly two months ago!) that I was ‘fired up to put the last tittle on my biography by the end of November’, which meant in the first instance writing the Afterword (‘Who George Calderon Was’) and finalising the notorious Introduction…

Have no fear, my post today is not an O fallacem hominum spem! [see 27 July 2016]; I am going to finish the text of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius by this Thursday, which means putting the last tittle on the Introduction and Afterword, and not the least reason for meeting that deadline is that I told followers I would!

I have never suffered from writer’s block, I think. When something has to be written, I clear the decks, powder the wig, and sit down to write it at a rate of 500-1500 words a day. Nevertheless, it never ceases to amaze me how unpredictable and labyrinthine are the routes by which one actually reaches that point. Each of these mazes or algorithms is totally different, a fresh and bracing journey of discovery…

On 6 October, I wrote that I was ‘on course to start writing the Afterword next week’. I thought I was, as all the research had been done and was laid out in order. But within a couple of days, I wobbled: I felt I hadn’t got my head round it all sufficiently, I hadn’t had long enough to digest everything, think about it, let it ‘rest’ like a joint of beef. I immediately set out to read the whole typescript again. With more checking added, that took a week. I re-read all 150 reviews of George’s life and works that came out between 1921 and 1925, which was complex because they are spread over his archive, my file on Kittie 1915-22, my file on his afterlife, my file for the Afterword… I had to keep re-digesting the file for the Afterword, my notes for it, getting a grip on all of that… That took about another fortnight. A lot of connecting up, tweaking, attempting to think outside the box went on. Then I started to write the Afterword.

But I hadn’t got further than a page, before it set me thinking about the Introduction. I started tinkering with the Introduction whilst writing the Afterword. Weird if not fatal, you might think, but there was sense in this, even if I had never had any previous intention of doing it. After two thousand words of the Afterword, I stopped writing it and worked full time on the Introduction, ‘finishing’ it a week ago. It is version 7 and has gone to my critical readers who tore to pieces versions 3-6 (1 and 2 I ditched myself). It might not be final, then, but I really think it must be penultimate.

Now I am on the finale of the Afterword… Naturally, after five years writing you approach a summing up with fear and trembling; magnified in this case by the task of summing up a man and the whole Edwardian ethos. The sheer data-crunching has been demanding. The writing of both the Introduction and the Afterword has been torture, as story-telling (i.e. biography) comes naturally to me, but generalising (synchrony) doesn’t. So to cap it all, my old friend Chronotopia has put her spanner in, i.e. the problem of one’s brain having to switch from one ‘chronotope’, ‘temporality’, or way of thinking of time, to another, or (in the case of the Afterword) having to hold both in one’s mind at once.

Altogether, in this game getting to the point where one is ready to sit down and write is an act of hokey cokey with Chronotopia that even Len Goodman might baulk at.

Simultaneously, I have been working a day a week on a shortish book of dialogue with John Polkinghorne about ‘eschatology’ (i.e. life and death!), akin to the dialogue that appeared in the Church Times on 9 October last year based on our previous conversations that may be found at polkinghorneat85.org.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary, Uncategorized | Tagged 'real time', Afterword, biographies, biography, chronotopia, comments, eschatology, finishing, George Calderon, hokey cokey, Introduction, John Polkinghorne, Kittie Calderon, Len Goodman, writer's block | Leave a comment

‘The Long Shadow’, War Poetry, and Commemoration

Posted on November 22, 2016 by Patrick Miles

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

Faithful followers of this blog will recall my account on 16 December 2015 of Professor David Reynolds’s public lecture ‘Making Peace with the Great War: Centenary Reflections’. I have now read the book behind the lecture (see above) and have no hesitation in saying that if you read only one of the many superb publications about the First World War that are marking its centenary, this should be it.

You will be drawn into the repercussions of the war for all the empires and ethnic groupings of Europe, for a Britain desperate to avoid revolution, for a divided Ireland (repercussions that bedevilled it from the Easter Rising and the Somme to the Good Friday Agreement), for the British Empire (which ‘as a result of the war […] actually grew to its largest extent’), for an America whose racism was ‘masked […] on the international stage [by] its lack of a colonial empire’ and whose ‘Great War’ was actually its Civil War, for the Middle East, for the balance of power in Africa, for China and Japan down to the present day. You will discover a welter of extraordinary facts, for instance that the Germans mounted a successful propaganda campaign in the 1920s to deny the ‘war guilt’ attached to them by the Treaty of Versailles and disprove that they had ever wanted the War, that by the 1930s Britain had ‘the biggest and most committed peace movement in the world’, that during the Second World War disbelief from the 1920s about the atrocities committed by the Germans during the invasion of Belgium in 1914 led people at first to regard stories about Nazi concentration and extermination camps as ‘lies’. And you will be riveted by Reynolds’s storytelling. Most gripping of all is the fact that Reynolds’s book works like the ‘reverse perspective’ on icons, where all the lines actually meet in the spectator: the long historical lines and controversies that he traces intersect in us, the present.

Reynolds strikes me as a pretty rare sort of historian, in that he is emotional, empathetic, artistic by nature (he is the best actor of the television historians and does his own voice impersonations). I have the impression that he has to struggle sometimes to bring these responses under the more cerebral control of being an historian — the more conceptual control, shall we say, of his academic discipline.

Thus in The Long Shadow his treatment of the sacralisation of commemoration and remembrance seems conflicted. ‘The meaning of Britain’s great War was gradually whittled down to one sacred day, the First of July 1916.’ The focus on the Pals battalions is described as ‘almost consecration’; the testimony of British veterans is said to be laid out ‘almost reverentially’; on the Memorials to the Missing at Ypres and Thiepval the dead are ‘religiously named for posterity’. You cannot help feeling that this theological vocabulary is used ambivalently, ironically, and you don’t know how to take it. Does the historian in Reynolds feel that such sacralisation is inappropriate, overdone, sentimental, unhistorical? If so, I believe he should have discussed the problem with his readers.

Reynolds’s attitude to the war poets, particularly Wilfred Owen, is even more conflicted. He is one of a large number of British historians who believe, in Adrian Gregory’s words, that ‘in schools the First World War is taught more as tragic poetry than as history’, that only the British are obsessed with the ‘testimony’ of their war poets, and that as a nation we have to ‘escape from Poets’ Corner’ and ‘understand the Great War as history’. This is a theme reprised throughout Reynold’s book. Yet from his responses to Sassoon’s, Gurney’s and Rosenberg’s verse he is clearly moved by the war poets himself, and he gives as good a description of Owen’s existential situation as I have read anywhere when he says that Owen was ‘the self-sacrificial victim of a war whose immoral nature he abhorred but whose moral demands he could not escape’. Yet Owen and the ‘canon’ of war poets were only ‘sanctified’ in the 1960s anthologies that were ‘bought in large quantities by schools and then recycled year after year by teachers to justify the original investment’…

For clarity of argument, I will number my responses to this:

(1) The only thing historical about a poem is the date of its composition. This implies that the realia named in it are historically accurate, but so what? Being a synchronic artefact intended for experience now, a poem qua poem cannot have a diachronic or trustworthy historical value. A poem can therefore tell us no more about the history of the First World War than The Cherry Orchard can about the history of the Russian Revolution, or Richard III about the Wars of the Roses as an historical phenomenon. Yet the poem or play’s human (synchronic) impact on us may be immense. The First World War was a human tragedy. Is it surprising, then, that people respond more to the war poets than they do to historians’ accounts of the Great War?

(2) I do not honestly know how the First World War is taught in schools today, although when my son was taking GCSEs fifteen years ago I had the impression that the emphasis was on documentary sources and less on received historical accounts as it was when I was that age (1964). When I was at school, there was an influx of bumptiously left-wing English teachers just down from Oxbridge who definitely ‘taught’ Sassoon and Owen as though these recipients of the Military Cross exposed the First World War as an imperialist plot; just as I knew a similarly youthful Russian teacher who seriously taught that The Cherry Orchard was about ‘the coming of the Revolution’. But these were literature and language teachers. In history lessons we were taught the First World War for two years solid, from origins to Armistice, as facts, events, history. I do find it difficult to believe that today at Dulwich College, say, or a Kent grammar school, or Hills Road Sixth Form College, and other schools throughout the land, the First World War is not taught as history by historians in history lessons.

(3) If the British educational system has been spurning historical understanding of the Great War in favour of war poetry for so long, what have the historians of Academe been doing when they should/could have been authoritatively influencing the Department of Education, examination boards and teachers to redress the situation?

But let me return to the greatest strength of Reynolds’s book, namely that he weaves a narrative of irresistible pace that bears you inexorably forwards through a hundred years to the present. By the end, you are stunned by the presence of the ‘long shadow’ as Reynolds has brought it home to you. This is, surely, historical writing of the highest order because (like art) it puts you on the spot, it challenges you about where you are, it questions where the world you are a part of is going. For instance, although I by a whisker voted Remain, at the end of reading The Long Shadow post-Brexit I was left wondering whether historically the wheel of 1914 has simply come full circle. After Mons, let us remember, Kitchener had to go to France to order General French to keep the B.E.F. on European soil, as French could not see what business it had remaining there. Perhaps our ‘forward’ engagement in Europe ever since has been an anomaly in our history? Perhaps after a hundred years the time has come to disengage as we did after 1815, to rediscover our ‘historical’ identity? Perhaps Europe doesn’t need us now?

* * *

One of the most fascinating and stimulating chapters in Reynolds’s book is ‘Remembrance’. It brings home to one how startlingly different from the norm the Maison Forestière Wilfred Owen at Ors is (see Damian Grant’s guest post of 4 November 2016). The historical approach shows how much of our commemoration and remembrance is bound to time and context. If the French memorialisation of Owen had been in England, there would have been outrage and execration at the house in which Owen spent his last night being transformed into a white chocolate confection. But left as it was this house could say nothing to a nation who did not know Owen and his poetry. As the substantial brochure describing the French community’s journey of discovery to a fitting memorial describes, the challenge for them was ‘to come up with the opposite of a monument’:

Simon Patterson [The designer] presented his main idea: to preserve the cellar of the Maison Forestière and encourage the discovery of Owen’s poetic work in the space of the house, emptied from top to bottom. […] The cellar would be preserved bare, filled only with voices, with the minimum number of pointers necessary and sufficient to indicate Owen’s brief presence in it.

The Maison Forestière Wilfred Owen is therefore, the brochure goes on, ‘meaningful only when included in a context where the future matters more than the past. […] What this location invites us to do is less in the nature of remembering than of discovering, or even exploring’. Last year on Calderonia we discussed for months the British commemoration of the war and the fallen, the over-ritualisation of remembrance, even the creation of ‘war porn’ in our exhibitions, media treatments and monuments. With their commemoration of Wilfred Owen the French have, perhaps, shown us a way out of the kind of clichés and obsessions that Reynolds and others deplore.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Adrian Gregory, atrocities, Belgium, Brexit, British Expeditionary Force, commemoration, comments, concentration camps, Damian Grant, David Reynolds, EU, Forester's House, General French, General Kitchener, Isaac Rosenberg, La Maison Forestière, Pals battalions, propaganda, Siegfried Sassoon, The Great War, The Holocaust, The Long Shadow, Thiepval, Treaty of Versailles, War Poets, Wilfred Owen, Wilfred Owen Association (France), World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

A letter to the ‘Manchester Guardian’, 12 May 1919

Posted on November 18, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Sir, — The recent notice in the “Times” of George Calderon’s death in battle on Gallipoli tells his friends that they may hope no longer. To us the loss is inexpressible. That which the theatre has suffered cannot, of course, be estimated, but that it is a heavy one is certain. Calderon died before his work had won the recognition it deserves. Had he lived he must soon have been among the first of our playwrights. He died at the very moment when his powers were ripe for the fulfilment of their promise. The war has robbed the world of so much beauty that upon the loss of this one splendid brain, this one warm and gallant heart, this one delicious wit I need not dwell. It is part of the price that his generation has had to pay for the madness of its forerunners; part of the price of a world’s salvation from a very dreadful danger; part of the price, let us hope, of a saner and more noble life for the men that are to come.

We remain behind to grieve; yet we may be sure that Calderon and his like know no regret, as they knew no hesitation when their call came. His patriotism was a very pure flame; it never blinded him to the merits of other countries. He had real sympathy for all men, of whatever nation they might be, was at home with all, and indeed spoke most of their languages, for his gift of tongues was prodigious. When he went out to war in 1914 it was not against Germany, but against that for which Germany then stood. This he loathed, and when it reared its head to threaten the liberty of the mankind he loved he had but one thought — to share to the utmost in the work of destroying this menace. Though he was long past the then military age, nothing could keep him out of the army. First as an interpreter in the Royal Horse Guards and then given a combatant commission in a line regiment, he went through the earliest of the Flanders fighting, until a wound brought him back to England. The moment he was healed he applied anew to be sent on foreign service, and very soon he was on his way to Gallipoli.

It would have been very easy for him to stay in England. I am certain that the thought never so much as occurred to him. This war, for him, was a crusade; in this cause no sacrifice — not the last — could be other than a joy. It is to this spirit in Calderon — and in how many others! — that England owes her life. He is content — and they. May England, realising what she has lost, use worthily this life that they have given her. — Yours, &c.,

Hampstead, May 10. WILLIAM CAINE

When Kittie accepted in April 1919 that George had been killed at Gallipoli on 4 June 1915, she commissioned Percy Lubbock to write his obituary, as a way of announcing that George’s death was now official. Percy’s very fine piece, which Kittie had of course supervised, was published in The Times on 5 May 1919 and reprinted in numerous places, including the United States. As far as I know, however, the above letter by William Caine was the only other commemoration of George published at the time. This was probably because so many other people had written to her already and she knew that their memories and others’ would go into Percy’s book about George, work on which had already started.

In 1914 George was a long way into two artistic collaborations: one with Fokine on libretti and the other with Caine on a pantomime entitled The Brave Little Tailor. The latter had to be abandoned after 4 August because of its German sources (a Grimms fairytale), and after the London season of Ballets Russes Fokine returned to winter in St Petersburg as he usually did, but was trapped there for the next three years. Caine, then, was the last person to work sustainedly with George in the theatre before his death. He probably asked Kittie if he could write the above tribute for the ‘other’ English newspaper. The Manchester Guardian was particularly appropriate because George had worked closely with Miss Horniman’s Manchester Repertory Company, who staged three of his plays.

William Caine (1873-1925) was a writer of spoofish light fiction; as such, his work suffers from the boyish vapidity of much Edwardian humorous literature. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction even suggests that the version of The Brave Little Tailor published in 1923 ‘gains some narrative sinew from its collaborator’, i.e. George. However, Caine also wrote about fishing, which he really did know about, and his An Angler at Large (1911) is an acknowledged masterpiece in print to this day.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Annie Horniman, comments, Dardanelles, Gaiety Theatre Manchester, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Manchester Guardian, Manchester Repertory Company, military interpreters, obituaries, Percy Lubbock, Royal Horse Guards, The Blues, The Great War, The Times, Third Battle of Krithia, William Caine, World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

Armistice Day, 1937

Posted on November 16, 2016 by Patrick Miles

The first national two-minute silence was held on Armistice Day 1919. In 1945 it was transferred to the nearest Remembrance Sunday, commemorating the fallen of both world wars. After a campaign mounted by the British Legion, in 1995 the two-minute silence was restored to Armistice Day, thus commemorating the end of World War I, but it was still observed on Remembrance Sunday commemorating both.

Three pocket diaries of Kittie Calderon’s have survived, for 1926, 1937 and 1939. However, only that for 1937, when Kittie was seventy and established at White Raven, Kennington, near Ashford in Kent, contains an entry for 11 November. It consists of seven words:

Quietly alone out of doors for silence.

When I first read it I simply assumed that she had visitors (which she often did) and went out into the garden of White Raven for a rest from them, or to clear her mind. Years later, the penny dropped that she meant ‘to observe the Silence’. One wonders what her thoughts were then.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels | Tagged Armistice Day, biographies, biography, British Legion, commemoration, George Calderon, Kennington, Kittie Calderon, Remembrance Sunday, The Great War, two-minute silence, White Raven, World War I | Leave a comment

Guest post: Damian Grant, ‘Wilfred Owen commemorated in France’

Posted on November 4, 2016 by Patrick Miles

WILFRED OWEN AT ORS

We have our own poet, Wilfred Owen,
here in the village of Ors in northern France.
The village lives along the slow canal
tucked under Bois l’Evêque; the railway
(steel scorning water) goes for higher ground.
The nearby military camp has closed.
There is a bare, unbeautiful brick church,
a sober Mairie and a Salle des Fêtes;
one café, a new médiathèque, a school.

And of course the leafless cemetery.
Because our poet is a dead poet,
enlisted in that pale battalion
of young men buried with their mystery.
Owen delivered up his mastery
at the eventual, exhausted end
of a seemingly unstoppable war
that devastated like a lava flow,
travelling unnaturally over the flat land.

He was also an English poet, who
mused a long hour by Shrewsbury clock;
bred to the seamed, compacted language
of Keats and Shakespeare. But he had travelled
in other realms of gold; it was at first
the carefree troubadours took him to France,
then teaching, then the deep trench of the war.
In January nineteen seventeen
he suffered the extremes of fire and ice.

The war might end, but no-one speaks of this.
The Manchesters hunker down in Bois l’Evêque.
Lieutenant Owen writes a letter to
his mother Susan (it will be the last
of some six hundred that he wrote to her).
‘There is no danger here’; nor was there, in
the cellar of the red-brick Forester’s House—
now kept for him, and for those gathered there.
The danger waited at the cold canal.

He died in water but now lies in earth,
here with the men who fell with him, at Ors.
He hated war but gave himself to it
in the unswerving sleepwalk of the time.
November twenty eighteen signifies
a hundred-years-long lamentation for
an English soldier who went out into
the morning mist for his strange meeting with
the poet who sleeps now as one of us.

We have remade the Forester’s House
in ghostly, moonlit white (as if it grew
out of his gravestone), and furnished it
with Owen’s words; those words that understand
the wounded things we are. Whoever drives
down the straight, narrow road from Landrecies
through Bois l’Evêque to Pommereuil today
will ask who lives there. Tell them it is where
our own dead poet lives his afterlife.

* * *

‘Let us sleep now…’ These are the last words of Wilfred Owen’s magisterial poem ‘Strange Meeting’. And Owen sleeps now in the village cemetery at Ors in northern France, a grenade’s throw from the spot where he and eighteen colleagues gave their lives in a doomed attempt to cross the Sambre-Oise canal just one week before the end of the war.

It was the steady stream of British visitors to this cemetery that alerted long-serving mayor Jacky Duminy to the fact that there was something (or someone) exceptional in his back yard. And it was Jacky Duminy’s curiosity, and the reciprocal enthusiasm of these visitors, that led to the formation in 2005 of the Wilfred Owen Association (France), working in close alliance with the parent association in the UK, chaired by the poet’s nephew, Peter Owen. Since this time, the date of Owen’s death — 4 November — has been commemorated annually by the people of Ors (including schoolchildren), local dignitaries, and many visitors; including Peter Owen himself, who has never missed one of these occasions to honour the memory of his soldier-poet uncle.

From the very beginning it was one of the challenges of the Association to rehabilitate the nearby Maison Forestière, the simple Forester’s House where Owen and his men had spent the last days before their fatal mission, and in the tiny cellar of which he had written his last letter to his mother. The house was owned by the Army, which had no further use for it. Collaboration between several groups and individuals, piloted by Jacky Duminy, eventually enabled the French cultural enterprise Artconnexion to approach the English artist Simon Patterson, who came up with an arresting and original design. The house would become an open book, and the interior a kind of light-show for the presentation of Owen’s poems, in both English and French; with recorded readings to match.

The Forester’s House memorial at Ors

This ambitious project was realized thanks to the seriousness and generosity with which the French undertake things cultural. All the financing came from French sources, local, departmental, regional and national; a request for support from the British Council was rebuffed. (One reflects, ruefully, that it is impossible to imagine anything comparable happening in the opposite direction — pre- or post-Brexit.) It was agreed at the outset that the cellar should be left in its original, bare brick state; and a descending circular path, engraved with the text of Owen’s last letter, leads the visitor first down here, where the celebrated letter was written. Only then do we climb stairs into the transformed interior of the house, where Kenneth Branagh stuns the listener with the panic of ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, the gravity of ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’, the resignation of ‘The Send-Off’.

It was a day of great satisfaction and celebration when the transfigured house was officially opened, by Minister of Culture Frédéric Mitterrand, in October 2011. And since this time, thanks to the participation of the Tourist Office in Cambrésis, visits to the house have become an essential part of the trail through WW1 battlefields and memorials. A highlight of the early days, in September 2012, was the first production of Xavier Hanotte’s play La Nuit d’Ors in the purlieus of the house, eerily summoning Owen’s presence and concluding with the writing of that last letter. And there have been other presentations, by Lille’s Goethe Institute and a performance of Stephen Macdonald’s play Not About Heroes (featuring Owen and Sassoon) by the Feelgood Theatre on tour from Manchester. Of course, this house like any other requires maintenance, and it was a matter of relief that the Forester’s House was in June this year accorded the status of a maison illustre, thus removing a financial burden from the local community. It is pleasing to record that Jacky Duminy has meanwhile been awarded the British Empire medal by the Queen, for his tireless work devoted to the memory of Owen and his fellow soldiers who fought in and for France. With the literal centenary due in November 2018, the forces lined up behind Owen and his work are formidable, and the commemoration has every prospect of being a memorable event.

It was my participation in the project as a Member of the Committee of the WOA here in France, and my sense of how thoroughly the local community has adopted the poet, which occasioned the poem ‘Wilfred Owen at Ors’, written in 2012 and published here for the first time.

http://www.wilfredowen.org.uk/the-foresters-house

© Damian Grant, 2016

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Artconnexion, Bois l'Evêque, Brexit, Damian Grant, Forester's House, Frédéric Mitterand, Jacky Duminy, Kenneth Branagh, La Maison Forestière, Manchesters, Ors, Peter Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Simon Patterson, Stephen Macdonald, Susan Owen, Wilfred Owen, Wilfred Owen Association (France), Xavier Hanotte | 1 Comment

‘…you may touch them not.’

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Over the last two years, I have been asked why I chose Wilfred Owen’s line ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not’ as the epigraph to Calderonia; why I am apparently fond of the poem; whether I think Owen is the greatest ‘war poet’.

To be honest, Owen is not my favourite war poet; that would be Georg Trakl, followed by Ivor Gurney. Trakl is a modernist who can produce more disturbing beauty in his war poetry than anyone, and Gurney shares that Hölderlinesque blend of ‘madness’ and music that is necessary to truly shake us in war poetry.

But, yes, I do think Owen is our greatest poet of the First World War. Despite his youth, his ingenuousness in some ways, he was always trying to focus an unwavering and intense light on the ethics of his situation, and he is always experimenting with form, metre, language and rhyme, however Very Late Romantic some of them may seem.

The reason I am so moved by ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not’, the last line of his poem ‘Greater Love’, is that its word-play intertwines two of the most powerful emotions of life and death in the trenches. It encapsulates the worst and the best of our war for national survival. As Santanu Das has shown in his book Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature, camaraderie in the trenches was more tactile than most men had ever before experienced. For all, therefore, either at home or in the trenches, who have lost a loved one at the Front, the loss of literal, feeling touch with them is unbearable — it certainly justifies weeping and weeping (‘you may’) if you ever thought you had to keep a stiff upper lip. But figuratively, ‘touch’ also means ‘approach in value, attain to, equal, rival, compare with’, and this meaning completes the ethical resolution of the poem: strange and even heartrending to say, those (alluded to in the previous stanzas) who know only erotic or Platonic love cannot compare with those who know and practise agapē — who lay down their life for their fellow humans.

Owen’s line is agony, but its lightness and colloquial naturalness (all monosyllables), its almost cruel directness and factualness, its firmness yet gentleness, weave a terrible beauty. It tells an ultimate truth, I believe, about those who went to fight and die, including George Calderon. A tragic truth.

I can’t agree with Santanu Das that the poem is a ‘decadent’ expression of a ‘perverse homoerotic aesthetic’, that it has a ‘powerful undertow of erotic resentment’, or that the last line ‘issues a caveat to women’. I don’t think it can be shown to have a specific gender orientation at all. The last line, however, clearly echoes Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene in the garden after his resurrection (‘Touch me not; for I am not yet ascended to my Father’), so that may say something.

Incidentally, compared with Binyon’s line, what a fantastically strong use of the inverted negative: ‘for you may touch them nót.’ Stressed syllable, full stop, end of poem.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged agapē, camaraderie, comments, erotic love, Georg Trakl, George Calderon, Greater Love, Hölderlin, intimacy, Ivor Gurney, Jesus Christ, Laurence Binyon, Mary Magdalene, Platonic love, Santanu Das, The Great War, touch, war poetry, War Poets, Wilfred Owen, World War I | 3 Comments

And the asp jumped over the chimney sweeper!

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Patrick Miles

A Chimney Sweeper (Odezia atrata)

That time of year is approaching again…the time of public readings of verse four of Laurence Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’. I shall be listening carefully for who says ‘grow-not old’, who ‘grow not-old’, and who indeed ‘not grow old’ (see my posts of 17 February 2016 and 13 April 2016). I am deeply grateful that no-one has asked me to read it aloud myself, as I would find it impossible to drop my voice enough to smother the ‘not’ for the canonical reading of ‘grow not old’ as an inverted negative.

I have come to the conclusion that ‘They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old’ is a botched line. In 1914 when the poem was written, ‘grow’ was surely as affirmative a word as it is now. Putting it in the metrically stressed position makes it, well, grow even more affirmatively (Marvell: ‘My vegetable love should grow/Vaster than empires and more slow’). But Binyon has left it nowhere to grow to, because the point of his line is to not grow (old). You are being asked to articulate a negative statement when the negator is in a feeble metrical position immediately after a viscerally positive word in the stronger metrical position. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many people re-invert Binyon’s negative so that it says what they ‘know’ it means and is metrically stressed: ‘They shall not grow old.’ I think I would either have to do that myself, or carry through the rising power of ‘grow’ in my preferred reading ‘They shall grow: not-old’, where ‘not-old’ is the affirmative state of their being transfigured out of time.

But I fully accept that syntactically the ‘not’ goes with the verb; it attaches limply back to ‘grow’, not strongly forward to ‘old’, despite the fact that metrically (iambically) it does belong with ‘old’. To be more precise, qualifying the verb as an inverted negative is the historical syntax; it is what Binyon thought and wrote in 1914, whereas today ‘not’ overwhelmingly precedes the word it negates. I would put my money on scholars saying, therefore, that we have to accept the historical syntax and read the words ‘in period’ as ‘grow-not’, e.g. perhaps Professor Michael Alexander, author of the excellent essay on Binyon and ‘For the Fallen’ in Trinity College Oxford Report 2013-14, p. 69-72, at http://www.trinity.ox.ac.uk/old-members/publications/ .

There are two drawbacks to this approach, in my view. First, because the inverted negative has practically disappeared from English syntax it is difficult to speak it with any confidence or authenticity (and it was surely verging on an archaic poeticism even when Binyon wrote it). Second, poems are not preserved in historical amber, they live only in the present, as a personal reading or public performance. We want a reading to be a meaningful linguistic event on several levels and personally I think the more natural, modern reading ‘they shall grow not-old’ enhances Binyon’s rather dry and under-performing line.

Although several people agreed with me by email when I last addressed this matter, I accept that for many my ‘reading’ of Binyon’s half-line will appear strained and esoteric. There is a lot of strained interpretation of poetry around, and I’m the first to criticise it. For instance, the accepted grammatical analysis these days of Wilfred Owen’s line ‘His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin’ seems to be that ‘devil’s’ has as its understood object ‘face’, ‘sick’ is an adjective meaning ‘had enough of’, and the whole phrase means ‘like the face of a devil who is sick of sinning so much’. But anyone with native English in 2016 is bound to read the phrase as though ‘sick’ is a noun meaning ‘vomit’ and this ‘sick’ naturally consists ‘of’ sin, since a devil is full of the stuff. I find this reading far less esoteric, more concrete, more vivid, more powerful, more disgusting; moreover a century ago ‘sick’ did have the colloquial meaning of ‘vomit’ that it has now.

Similarly, we are asked by scholars today to accept that ‘chimney-sweepers’ in Shakespeare’s couplet ‘Golden lads and girls all must,/As chimney-sweepers, come to dust’ refers to dandelion clocks, i.e. the seed heads left when golden dandelion flowers have died off, because this was a Worcestershire meaning playing on the resemblance of the seed heads to chimney brushes (‘sweepers’). Such a reading is a bit of a wrench after a lifetime of visualising chimney-sweepers as soot-covered men at the opposite end of the social and chromatic scale from ‘golden lads and girls’, and one wonders how many of Shakespeare’s audience saw them as dandelion heads!

In September of this year the results of a Japanese study were published which established that cows are more likely to give birth during a full moon. It was then seriously suggested in the media that the nursery-rhyme line ‘And the cow jumped over the moon’ referred to the (presumably heavily pregnant) cow jumping because (‘over the fact that’) there was a full moon. This struck me as a typical cerebrist reading: ‘over’ in the sense of ‘about’ is totally abstract, whereas children and everyone else with an imagination know that the cow literally jumped over the moon, just as the gassed soldier’s face was like vomit, not like the abstruse idea of the face of a devil who had had enough of sinning…

Poets can, however, be so focussed on their own particular reading that they forget more obvious ones. In his fine poem ‘Looking Back’, Henry Vaughan perpetrated the line ‘How brave a prospect is a bright back-side!’. He normally knew perfectly well that ‘back-side’ meant ‘arse’ even then (c. 1650), but his thought was so focussed on the childhood side of his life he was looking back upon, that he even placed ‘back-side’ in a metrical position where one could not clarify his meaning by stressing it on ‘back’. He botched this.

As a young man, Joseph Brodsky was extremely taken by the poetry of John Donne; and so was I. When I (22) met Brodsky (30) in Leningrad in 1970, he read me inter alia his translation of Donne’s ‘The Apparition’. It is a great version and he read it with wonderful concentrated passion. But when he got to Donne’s lines ‘And then poor Aspen wretch, neglected thou/Bath’d in a cold quicksilver sweat wilt lie’, I gulped. ‘Poor Aspen wretch’ was rendered as ‘o bednyi Aspid moi’ which means ‘O poor Asp of mine’ — i.e. Brodsky had taken ‘Aspen’ to be an adjective from the serpent ‘asp’. Because at the word ‘Aspen’ I could see an aspen tree that I knew very well which trembled in a breeze as the ‘poor wretch’ might, and its leaves were whitish underneath, like quicksilver, I had always read ‘Aspen’ as a noun…

Brodsky’s interpretation was pretty challenging. But I couldn’t bring myself to raise the subject with him. His version as a whole, and his performance of it, were far more important. Can there be a ‘right’ reading of Binyon’s line, a ‘right’ parsing of Owen’s ‘devil’s sick of sin’, a ‘right’ image of Donne’s ‘poor Aspen wretch’? I don’t subscribe to the Humpty Dumpty reader’s charter, that a word ‘means just what I choose it to mean’, but words change through time in so many ways and both the poet’s apprehension and his/her reader’s apprehension are always unique to them as individuals. ‘Nothing is less than/particular’ (R.F. Langley, ‘Experiment with a Hand Lens’).

Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Andrew Marvell, aspen, chimney sweeper moth, comments, cows, Cymbeline, dandelions, Dulce et decor est, Experiment with a Hand Lens, For the Fallen, Henry Vaughan, Humpty Dumpty, John Donne, Joseph Brodsky, Laurence Binyon, Leningrad, Looking Back, metrical stress, Michael Alexander, nursery tales, R.F. Langley, Stratford-upon-Avon, syntax, The Apparition, To His Coy Mistress, Wilfred Owen, William Shakespeare | 4 Comments

Guest post: Harvey Pitcher, ‘Calderon on Chekhov’

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Some years have passed since I last took down my copy of Two Plays of Tchekhof: Translated, with an Introduction and Notes by George Calderon (1912). I remembered the book with affection, especially the introduction, but going back to old books, like going back to old places, can sometimes be a let-down. In the event, I was far from disappointed.

He describes himself as ‘a fumbling amateur’. Of course, he was nothing of the sort. He was clearly an excellent linguist, and he had done his homework. In the eight years that had passed since Chekhov’s death a considerable literature had built up about him in Russian, with which Calderon appears fully conversant. I wondered if he was as familiar with Chekhov’s stories as with his plays, but a reference to the little-known short story of 1887, ‘Happiness’, shows that he was.

Apart from the two years he had spent in Russia, Calderon had the further advantage in translating the plays of being an active dramatist. He would have appreciated Tom Stoppard’s comment that ‘a play is an event, not a text’: words that are lost on today’s text-oriented academic readers. Translators, of plays in particular, always face the problem that what seems the mot juste in one decade may sound dated a decade later. This is a trap that Calderon avoids. Even his translation of the notorious nyedotyopa, the contemptuous term used by the aged butler Firs in The Cherry Orchard to describe young upstarts like the manservant Yasha, as ‘a job-lot’, has lasted better than many other versions of this impossible word.

In the course of fifteen pages of introduction Calderon touches on most of the subjects that critics have written about at great length subsequently, but he does so with a much lighter touch. Commenting on how unsuited the English style of acting is to Chekhov’s plays, he writes: ‘As each actor opens his mouth to speak, the rest fall petrified into an uncanny stillness, like the courtiers about the Sleeping Beauty, or those pathetic clusters that one sees about a golf-tee, while one of the players is flourishing at his ball in preparation for a blow.’ Calderon played golf, but his choice of vocabulary (‘pathetic clusters’, ‘in preparation for a blow’) conveys an intellectual’s undisguised contempt for the golfing fraternity.

What Calderon offers the reader is his ‘meditations’ on Chekhov, as he calls them. This is such a good word, as it hovers appropriately between thought and emotion. I hope I am not alone in finding the term ‘literary criticism’ unappealing when applied to Chekhov’s plays, as it is too exclusively cerebral and thought-oriented; if one has to choose a term, ‘appreciation’ is preferable, since it covers both exercising judgement and cherishing good writing. But we can all meditate on Chekhov, examine our feelings and think about our reactions, comparing notes and sharing opinions.

Calderon’s choice of plays was intended to show Chekhov at two extremes: The Seagull is easy, not much unlike a Western play, whereas The Cherry Orchard is difficult and very Russian. In a key passage he writes:

The most general idea under which I can sum up the essential characteristics of his plays [not so much The Seagull, but Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard] is this: That the interest of them is, so to speak, ‘centrifugal’ instead of self-centred; that they seek, not so much to draw our minds inwards to the consideration of the events they represent, as to cast them outwards to the larger process of the world which those events illuminate.

This is very open-ended, and rightly so; Calderon is reaching here for that elusive quality which makes Chekhov’s plays distinctive and so unlike the work of any other playwright.

His plays, Calderon writes later, are ‘tragedies with the texture of comedy’. What a godsend for the hard-pressed examiner searching for a ‘Discuss’ question! But as a canny candidate, I don’t think I’d have tackled it. ‘Tragedies’ is a difficult word to apply to Chekhov’s plays, and there is an element here of contrived paradox. The phrase that Calderon uses soon after, ‘the admixture of comedy with pathos’, would have been the easier option.

In the section describing ‘Group Emotions’ in the plays, Calderon writes:

In real life there is nothing of which we are more urgently, though less expressly, conscious, than the presence of other life humming about us, than the fact that our experiences and our impulses are very little private to ourselves, almost always shared with a group of other people. […] For many reasons this truth, however well ascertained, has hardly found its way as yet on to the stage. Tchekhof is a pioneer.

But in the later section about ‘Soliloquies’, we read: ‘the characters seem to converse, but in reality sit side by side and think aloud.’ Both these observations strike me as valid and interesting, but on the face of it they seem inconsistent. They make sense, however, within the wider context of a culture that places special emphasis on the emotions, and in which an individual sometimes feels the need to express the feelings welling up inside him or herself, whether anyone else is listening or not.

More than a hundred years on and the introduction to Two Plays is still required reading for anyone who feels inclined to meditate on Chekhov.

Harvey Pitcher is the author of The Chekhov Play: A New Interpretation (1985), Chekhov’s Leading Lady (1979) (a biography of his wife, the actress Olga Knipper), and Responding to Chekhov: The Journey of a Lifetime (2010). He is co-translator with Patrick Miles of Chekhov: The Early Stories 1883-1888 (1999) and Chekhov: The Comic Stories (2004). His other books include When Miss Emmie Was in Russia (2011), and Witnesses of the Russian Revolution (1994).

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, appreciation, comments, communication, George Calderon, golf, Harvey Pitcher, literary criticism, meditation, soliloquy, The Cherry Orchard, The Seagull, Three Sisters, Tom Stoppard, translation, Two Plays of Tchekhof, Uncle Vanya | Leave a comment

The limits of biography

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I do not know why the popularity of autobiographies and biographies has mushroomed in 21st century Britain. I wish someone would tell us.

Meeting and communicating with people makes the world go round, of course, so perhaps the fact that we are now in touch with people electronically for much of our waking lives has vastly stimulated the national demand for what is another virtual form of communication with others — reading their lives?

In a 2007 homily on kenosis, the Bishop of London, Richard Chartres, said ‘the more you go beyond yourself, the more you will become your true self’, and I am inclined to think that the need to follow other people’s lives through autobiography/biography is part of the very deepest need of each of us to grow our ‘existential knowledge’.

It involves an element of sheer curiosity. I think it is true that in the first instance people want facts, facts, facts about the biographee, but literati have already speculated that this could lead to the death of the traditional manageable-sized biography. The Web has massively multiplied the number of facts that a biographer can retrieve; the temptation exists to include them all; some modern biographies are consequently overweight. But all of the same facts could be put on a website that contains a page for every day of the biographee’s life, anyone could contribute, and an absolutely open-ended biography could be built up that would make a ‘written’ biography superfluous. Or would it?

People also want form in a biography, they want aesthetic pleasure from it, originality (but not too much!), and they expect these to be unique to the particular book and author. It’s undoubtedly true that every biography has to find the narrative form appropriate to the life in question. This involves personal selection, composition and approach. I don’t think, then, that the ‘Web-biography’ is going to supersede written biographies. It will surely become essentially a repository of facts — an ever-growing database. On the other hand, I am delighted that by accident my attempt last year at a day-by-day account of George and Kittie Calderon’s lives between July 1914 and July 1915, through dated posts one hundred years later, created what you might call a Web ‘blography’.

When I re-read the complete typescript of my biography of George and Kittie recently, I was reminded, with a slight shock, that not only did the form I had found for it involve playing with linear chronology, but I had written every chapter in a different way, as though they were a set of self-contained stories… They certainly don’t flow in a single biographical style, although I think and hope they form a consistent narrative that makes you wonder what the next chapter is going to bring. Worse, there are patches of pretty detailed, even ‘highfalutin’ literary criticism, so I will be just as open as Ruth Scurr in Fatal Purity to the charge that I’ve strayed from the remit of biography!

* * *

That remit, at the end of the day, is that you concentrate on the continuum of the life of the subject, the living of this self through time, with the greatest empathy you can muster but without getting sidetracked by, say, their texts as such, their ideas as such, their love of cats, their sex life, where they spent their holidays, etc etc etc. The sense of proportion must be maintained that focuses the book on the life events.

But facts facts facts and events events events make severe demands on a writer’s style. He/she must never make them boring, let alone get bored with them him/herself. When I was writing Brief Lives: Anton Chekhov (2008) I hugely enjoyed writing parts like the beginning (about sneezes), or the poetry of Chekhov’s teenage encounter with a girl at a well in the steppe, or the chapter on Chekhov’s sojourn on Sakhalin, or paragraphs about his views on democracy, or about his marriage and death, as well as the potted accounts of individual works. But the throughline of life-events had to keep moving, and this led to one reviewer protesting that I had ‘no style at all’. Actually, when I had just to tell the facts, I simply tried to be as economical as possible and keep the reader turning the page. I was gratified, therefore, when two readers told me that they had no sooner finished reading the book (113 pages) than they read it again.

It is true, however, that the informational aspect of writing a biography can become boring if you are misguided enough to let it. For me, at least, it is potentially one of the limitations of biography, though I am sure it isn’t for the ‘professional’ biographer. After George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, I shall have written only two biographies and I don’t foresee myself writing another. I want the personal freedom back of writing poems, essays and plays — or anything that takes days or months rather than years.

* * *

There is an aspect of the biography/autobiography question that earlier in this ‘Biography Brainstorm’ series I omitted to mention. To what extent is the biographer’s choice of subject and focus itself an autobiographical phenomenon? For instance, most people assumed that Boris Johnson’s 2014 The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History was a personal statement connected with Johnson’s political career. Having read it, I can say that it is an innovative biography that does not proceed chronologically, is not biographically exhaustive, and enthusiastically examines particular areas of Churchill’s life that could be said to have a relevance to Johnson’s own. But in that case, how do we explain that the next person he chose to write a biography of was Shakespeare?

In her long, superbly written introduction to John Aubrey: My Own Life — the best introduction to a biography that I have ever read — Ruth Scurr describes the deep roots of her personal interest in Aubrey. We can assume, then, that her creation of the book is an important fact in her personal, even emotional, life; hence there is an autobiographical dimension to it, even if that is invisible in the text. Similarly, since she is an historian of ideas, the nature of her biography of Robespierre is an autobiographical statement. Does Matthew Dennison, author of Behind the Mask: The Life of Vita Sackville-West (2014), feel a particular bond with Vita and therefore it is autobiographically significant that he chose to write her life? I felt whilst reading it that this was the case. Was Peter Ackroyd’s Shakespeare: The Biography (2005) just the next blockbuster he had to write, or were there particular personal reasons for him turning to Shakespeare? I think there were, and the somewhat portentous subtitle (‘The Biography’) tends to confirm that.

Of course, no reader needs to know the personal reasons why a biographer has chosen his/her particular subject. They only become significant when that biographer’s own life acquires a high public profile; if he or she subsequently has a biography written of them, the new biographer’s scrutiny ascribes biographical significance to the first biographer’s focus and this focus becomes an ‘autobiographical’ fact. An example of that would be Thomas Carlyle’s work on Frederick the Great.

It has even been claimed that all biography is disguised autobiography. I don’t accept that in an age when good biographers, such as Harman and Dennison, are manifestly committed to objectivity. A modern biographer’s take on something might be autobiographically influenced and autobiographical ‘prejudices’ might even be embedded in his/her text, but they will stick out like a sore thumb if they are not contextually motivated and transparently judicious.

For myself, I don’t think my brief life of Chekhov could be said to be a personal choice, as I never remotely wanted to write a biography of Chekhov…but when I was approached about writing one, of the perfect length for saying what I had to say about Chekhov, and I accepted, the biographiette grew directly out of my personal forty years’ engagement with Chekhov’s work and life. The reasons for that engagement were intensely to do with who I was and am, so I suppose a lot of the book is, implicitly, an autobiographical statement.

Where George Calderon is concerned, as I have said before I did not initially take a shine to him; au contraire. However, for the purposes of a study of Chekhov’s plays on the British stage commissioned from me by the Russian Academy of Sciences, in 1982 I had to set about finding his archival legacy, if there was one. I found his and Kittie’s extant papers in the proverbial attic and as I read them I realised that they and their story were exceptional. They drew me in. As a Russianist myself, who like George lived in Russia for two and a half years, and as a translator and director of Chekhov’s plays, I obviously had certain things in common with George. Many of his concerns about Russia, Russian literature, and Chekhov, were also my concerns, and I confess to having ‘settled a few scores’ of my own on these subjects — strictly within George’s own context — in my biography. Every time I re-read my typescript I slightly wince at these places and mutter ‘that’ll have to come out, it’s obviously me sounding off’. In other words, these places are too ‘autobiographical’ of me, the author. But so far I haven’t removed them…

After all the aspersions I have cast on the confusion of biography with autobiography, am I a barefaced hypocrite?

* * *

Conducting this ‘Biography Brainstorm’ over the last ten days has been one of the most demanding parts of the full twenty-six months of Calderonia’s existence. I feel I have almost become a journalist. Time has now run out for me, however: I must make way, with deep relief and gratitude, for our guest contributor Harvey Pitcher.

I cannot at the moment think of anything more I would want to say about modern biography. I confess, however, that I would have been happy to read two very recently published biographies, which I sense from reviews would be sui generis and interesting: Artemis Cooper’s Elizabeth Jane Howard: A Dangerous Innocence, and Damian Collins’s Charmed Life: The Phenomenal Life of Philip Sassoon. Given that Howard died less than three years ago, I would be intrigued to see what form this biography takes and what light it shines on Howard’s Cazalet novels currently sweeping the country. Philip Sassoon played a creditable role in the WW1 tragedy surrounding Kittie’s friend Constance Sutton. Both new biographies might have stirred me to philosophise on modern biography further…

But I must, of course, get back to finishing finishing (sic) my own biography.