Calderonia

Rachel Cusk and George Orwell: Transitions to…where?

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Transit by Rachel Cusk and Coming up for Air by George Orwell

(Click the image to find Transit on Amazon, click here to find Coming Up for Air)

As I walk into my local Waterstones, the first thing that catches my eye, straight ahead at one o’clock as it were, is three bookcases labelled NEW BIOGRAPHY. Other key subjects are ranged all around, but none of them has three cases. Biography, one would surmise, is the growth area of British publishing. Last year, indeed, Biography outsold History.

But a closer look reveals that two-thirds of the books in these cases are autobiographies, most often of living celebrities, plus various forms of memoir of experiences lived through by their authors. These memoirs must be autobiography in the strict sense, as they are told in the first person, but many of the autobiographies that are so popular were perhaps wholly ghost-written, so are they really biographies, since these ghosts are actually writing about another person (he/she, a ‘third person’), though disguising him/her as ‘I’? Meanwhile, the biographies in the strict sense, i.e. narratives about real people’s lives told in the third person, are mainly of already famous, or well-known, long- dead people: Liszt, Mandela, Marx, James Joyce, Philip Sassoon, Olga Ivinskaya…

Of course, I can understand why all of these genres are lumped together in a bookshop under Biography: the shop needs a simple collective term. However, it is still distorting the meaning of an English word, and when it comes to reviewers and even other writers referring to autobiographies as biographies, one begins to sense muddle and even dilettantism. For true separation of the genres, we need a collective such as LIFE STORIES, embracing all the discrete genres from biographies, autobiographies and memoirs, to literary portraits, people directories and even obituaries.

It is not at all that I object to the mixing of genres as a way forward, of innovating in biography for instance. But by and large people need to know what a thing really is, and it’s a plain philosophical fact that one thing cannot be a substitute for another. If people feel, for example, that they are being asked to accept that a book is autobiography and biography simultaneously, or that a biography is a work of fiction, they suspect fudgery. Worse, they suspect that the author doesn’t know the difference and is a dilettante.

The really interesting statistic, though, is that two thirds of the NEW BIOGRAPHY in Waterstones is autobiography. Obviously, this still sends a strong message that we are interested in other people’s lives, but we are interested in those people’s lives in a special way — as ‘I’s’, when in reality they are as much ‘he/she’s’ to us as Mandela or Ivinskaya. Why is this? Could it be that the ‘I’, and particularly the ‘Ego’ of celebrities, is far more exciting than the ‘he/she’? Again, why? Are we all wannabes really and therefore can identify so much more closely with the ‘I’s’ of once-wannabes who have made it? Is the popularity of autobiography natural in the age of the selfie? Are we living in the most narcissistic period of our nation’s history? Meanwhile, many of the recent autobiographies I have looked inside practise the most blatant self-censorship: they are simply not going to address certain areas of their lives, e.g. their marriages. There is a loss of objectivity in the autobiographies of living people, then, compared with the biography written by an outsider, and I feel that many people have lost sight of that fact.

I am also intrigued by the slide to the first person in fiction. A very high proportion of the short stories I read in magazines or collections are monologues. It is some years since I had anything to do with creative writing courses, but I sense they teach that it is ‘easier’ to write if you ‘identify’ with your hero in the first person; if you ‘become’ the ‘I’… And students find it is indeed ‘easier’, as they already have an ‘I’. But it is not inherently better. And now we have the complication that the fictional first-person narrative is termed ‘autobiographical’ in the sense of actually about the author.

The very interesting writer Rachel Cusk has principally been a novelist. However, in 2001 she brought out her memoir A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother and in 2012 another memoir, entitled Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation. Both were publicly savaged for their personal, i.e. autobiographical, revelations, and Cusk went into Writer’s Block. According to The Times, summarising an interview that Cusk gave, ‘after the memoirs, she found she had written herself into a corner, having run out of autobiographical steam’, but ‘feeling that the only viable form of literature nowadays is autobiography [my italics]’, she decided that the solution to her writer’s block was to ‘attempt […] fictionalised life-writing’ (not, note, ‘autobiography’!). The result of that decision is her ‘novel’ of 2014, Outline, and now Transit, which came out this month.

As followers know, these posts about modern biography are not meant to be reviews, so I will merely say that Transit is well worth buying; it’s been described as ‘middle-aged, middle-class chick lit.’, but Cusk’s writing is in a category far above the three classic chick lit. novels I have ever read! It is often icy cool, frequently downright hilarious. My reason for mentioning it here, though, is that since the first-person narrator is a woman trying to put her life together after a divorce, every reviewer I have read assumes that this novel is still autobiography, and Cusk has encouraged that herself with her preposterous statement that autobiography is ‘the only viable form of literature nowadays’. Actually, this claim is another of those self-referential paradoxes like ‘This statement is not true’, because ‘the author — the person creating — cannot be created in the sphere in which he/she is themselves a creator’ (Mikhail Bakhtin). Cusk is confused about her narrator.

At the same time, I have been reading what I think is the only novel of George Orwell’s that I had never read before — Coming up for Air (1939). Like Transit, this is a first-person narrative. Digressing because I can’t resist the temptation, I was even struck by a grammatical and tonal similarity between the two opening sentences:

An astrologer emailed me to say she had important news for me concerning events in my immediate future. (Cusk)

The idea really came to me the day I got my new false teeth. (Orwell)

The ‘idea’ of Orwell’s first-person hero, George Bowling — and Cusk’s heroine reveals her name only once in the novel, by the way — is to escape mentally and physically from the wife-, dole- and war-threatened present to the village of his Edwardian childhood and the idyll of childhood fishing. Orwell’s evocation of that period and its state of ecological innocence is simply masterly. However, the common critical response to Coming up for Air has been well summed up by his 1991 biographer Michael Shelden:

The one serious defect in the novel is Orwell’s attempt to be the voice of his narrator-protagonist. He does not make a convincing middle-aged, overweight, suburban-dwelling, low-brow insurance salesman, and the book is at its best when Orwell is ‘out-of-character’, speaking in a voice which is recognisably his rather than an imitation of ‘Fatty’ Bowling’s.

It is, of course, nowhere near as easy to write a novel or long short story in the first person as Dostoyevsky or Chekhov may make you think. Cusk has — deliberately? — confused her real-life, autobiographical identity and a fictive identity; Orwell is held to have failed to identify perfectly with his fictive identity, and to have let his own (autobiographical) perceptions and anxieties intervene.

I strongly believe that biography, autobiography and fiction should be kept apart. They are massive enough creative challenges as it is, without muddling them up or trying to pass one off as the other. Both Cusk’s novel and Orwell’s novel are flawed, therefore. But you still feel that the experiment they are attempting is worth it, because it is taking you somewhere else; because these works feel ‘transitional’, or as people say today ‘transgradient’, to other forms, genres, works. In Orwell’s case I would say Coming up for Air is transgradient to his political satire and particularly 1984. In Rachel Cusk’s case, I hope Transit is moving away from ‘autobiography’ and back to real creative fiction.

Posted in Edwardian character, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged autobiography, biographies, biography, Coming up for Air, fiction, George Bowling, George Orwell, memoirs, Michael Shelden, Mikhail Bakhtin, non-fiction, novels, Rachel Cusk, Transit, Waterstones | Leave a comment

Percy Lubbock: ‘Esoteric and intimate portraiture’

Posted on October 18, 2016 by Patrick Miles

George Calderon A Sketch from Memory by Percy Lubbock

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

One of Ruth Scurr’s aims in John Aubrey: My Own Life was to ‘produce a portrait’ of Aubrey, but naturally she did not write it in the biographical genre known as ‘literary portrait’. This genre seems to have grown out of Lytton Strachey’s and others’ journalism. It was particularly favoured by the late Edwardians and not a single recent example of it springs to mind. It seems to have gone completely out of fashion. The nearest that I can think of is the kind of scholarly book that looks at a number of people from the past whom the author did not personally know, for instance Piers Brendon’s fine Eminent Edwardians: Four Figures Who Defined their Age (2003). Otherwise, having presumably started life as the Greek eulogy, the literary portrait has perhaps died into the modern obituary. Lytton Strachey did not personally know the eminent Victorians of his title, but a defining feature of the later ‘literary portrait’, I think, is that it was written by someone who had personally known its subject — and Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921) appears to be a prime example.

Early twentieth century readers definitely regarded the literary portrait as biography. Within a week of publication of Lubbock’s George Calderon, John Masefield was writing to Kittie that ‘the book has made its mark already as a fine piece of biography’. In fact, it was regarded as a superior form of biography. In the words of a review of Percy’s book in Kittie’s voluminous collection of press cuttings:

The mere scaffolding of biography — the skeleton of dates and facts — is almost entirely disregarded; the portraiture is esoteric and intimate. Of course, this is much the most difficult form of biography to write; it demands deep personal knowledge and real interpretative power, and both these attributes are continually at Mr Lubbock’s disposal. Selecting incidents and traits which make for the fabric of character, he gradually builds up a rich and very sympathetic portrait.

The operative words here, I feel, are ‘selecting’ and ‘character’. As a selective composition the literary portrait is by definition subjective and not biographically comprehensive; and ‘character’ suggests something settled, whereas we perhaps prefer ‘personality’ or ‘self’ and think of them as dynamic, changing through time, and even discontinuous!

Percy Lubbock assuredly wanted to create a book in which George was ‘still alive’, as Scurr said of her Aubrey composition, and review after review of Percy’s book confirms that he succeeded — both for those who did not personally know George, and those who did. In a letter to Kittie of 15 May 1921, Mary Cholmondeley hit both literary bull’s-eyes: ‘What a noble and entrancing portrait of a most remarkable and lovable character.’ The next day, William Caine summed up for their friends when he wrote to Kittie: ‘What we wanted was not a detailed account of George’s doings and an elaborate analysis of his various works, but what we have here — this brief and brilliant impression. […] the man himself is there.’

However, one cannot get round the fact that the ‘literary portrait’ is a hybrid; a combination of biographical facts, of ‘horizontal’ movement through a life, with ‘vertical’ contemplation of the ‘character’ of its subject recollected in tranquillity. And the problem with hybrid genres (e.g. John Aubrey) is that they always leave some people irritated by the feeling that the result is neither fish nor fowl. Quite exceptionally, an unnamed writer in the Saturday Review of 3 September 1921 sought to articulate this:

[Percy Lubbock] mentions the facts of George Calderon’s career only to brush them away again as something indeed not irrelevant to his subject, but as failing to illuminate it. His method is odd and he himself is manifestly dissatisfied with its result, but for the reader it is extraordinarily successful. George Calderon is not explained, or weighed, or excused, or much praised in these pages. He looks out of them with his secret, still untold, in his eyes.

I have come across no evidence that Percy Lubbock was dissatisfied with the result of his biographical method — quite the contrary — but there is little doubt that Kittie was to some extent unhappy with it. Despite the fact that, in the invaluable letter discovered by Katy George in a charity shop last year, Kittie said that she thought Percy’s ‘Life’ of George ‘quite beautiful […] utterly and completely true yet perfect in its art’, Lubbock recognised her dissatisfaction when he wrote to her after she had read it for the first time: ‘All I can think of is the way in which I find it impossible to help you as I could wish.’

The reason for this was that she had conceived the book in the memorial genre that was so popular after 1918; it was to be a composition of George’s letters from throughout his life, friends’ testimonies, and a biographical essay by Percy that would draw on Kittie’s own vibrant memoir of George. But, as is thoroughly the tendency in literary portraits, Percy’s own agenda took over. His George Calderon is really a book about Percy Lubbock. As much as his next book, Earlham (1922), it is a recherche du temps perdu in Percy’s inimitable Jamesian/Proustian style, with an inordinate amount about Kittie’s first husband, Percy’s uncle Archie Ripley, and life at 17 Golden Square before George even appeared on the scene. Of course, George becomes increasingly the focus of attention in this Sketch from Memory, but it is still George’s ‘character’ that is foregrounded and discussed. The last forty pages of the book, in which Percy skilfully stitches together extracts from George’s war letters with his, Percy’s, narrative, comes across as the Flood that swept the pre-1914 life of Golden Square and Earlham away.

As followers can well imagine, my own response to George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory is a tad complex. It has also changed over the last thirty or so years. I don’t want to discuss it now, as the focus of this post is the hybrid genre ‘literary portrait’ and its resemblance to modern biographical hybrids, e.g. John Aubrey. But I will just touch on two factors. As Mr John Pym, Percy’s great-nephew, has said to me, ‘Percy wrote his book for Kittie’, and that is why he made it include Archie Ripley and the life of Golden Square (with a wonderful portrait of Kittie’s mother) before George Calderon’s appearance there. It is also perhaps relevant that Percy Lubbock was gay and his uncle Archie Ripley bisexual before his marriage. His portrait of Ripley feels much more empathetic and profound than his portrait of George, who was markedly heterosexual. At the end of the day, I am afraid, I feel that Lubbock’s Calderon is only an ‘impression’, to use Caine’s word, made by George at different times upon a much younger man who shared few of George’s interests and did not penetrate far into them. One can understand why after reading Percy’s portrait a reviewer could describe George as ‘a strange, brilliant creature who wrote plays, studied languages, threw himself into industrial disputes, travelled, plied a delicate pencil — did a number of vivid things brilliantly’ (‘and that’s all we know about him’).

Unless it is written by a contemporary who personally knew his subject, I don’t think the literary portrait can satisfy us today as biography. Its highly selective and often unchronological biographical content is limited. William Caine, surely, described what we, as opposed to George’s friends left behind him, need: ‘a detailed account of George’s doings and an elaborate analysis of his various works.’ By attempting that as empirically, objectively, empathetically and critically as we can, we still display ‘character’ over time for those who want it. I think we are wedded to the idea that a life is extension and not stasis; it inexorably moves forward through Time even if we don’t know everything about every segment of it. The scientific age demands, in the first instance, the best facts available.

Nevertheless, where would I be without the salient biographical pointers that Percy Lubbock provided me with originally? And there is always enormous interest for the later biographer in how his subject looked to his ‘friends’. If we write literary portraits at all now, they should use biographical facts but never pretend to be biographies.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Archie Ripley, biographies, biography, character, comments, Earlham, empathy, George Calderon, Golden Square, Henry James, John Aubrey, John Masefield, Katy George, Kittie Calderon, literary portraits, Lytton Strachey, Marcel Proust, Mary Cholmondeley, Percy Lubbock, Piers Brendon, Ruth Scurr, William Caine | Leave a comment

Ruth Scurr: ‘A book in which he is still alive’

Posted on October 15, 2016 by Patrick Miles

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

If in her first biography Ruth Scurr’s identity approached that of Robespierre as a ‘friend’, in John Aubrey: My Own Life (2015) she seems to have merged her identity with Aubrey altogether. The fundamental problem of modern biography, Scurr has written elsewhere, is ‘always the same: how to find a narrative form that fits the life (or lives) in question’. To quote from her Introduction to John Aubrey, after many false starts she decided to ‘write Aubrey’s life as a diary’, ‘construct’ Aubrey’s diary, ‘conjure’ a diary for Aubrey, by collecting the ‘fragmentary remains of his life […] from manuscripts, letters and books’ and ‘arranging them carefully in chronological order’. She has used ‘as many as possible of his own words’, but ‘added words of my own to explain events or interactions that would otherwise be obscure and to frame or offset the charm of Aubrey’s own turns of phrase’. ‘Ultimately,’ she writes, ‘my aim has been to write a book in which he is still alive.’

The result is a gloriously enjoyable, almost unputdownable long read (422 pages of text and 39 of source-notes); but it is impossible, I think, not to to be aware of the contradictions latent in Scurr’s choice of narrative form. In the first place, is it really that difficult to write a book in which Aubrey is ‘still alive’, when the book is overwhelmingly (one assumes) written by Aubrey? It is overwhelmingly a first-person narrative, the first person in question has the most frank and engaging personality, and the writer Aubrey indubitably deserves to be a bestseller!

If the ‘I’ of the book — Aubrey — wrote most of John Aubrey: My Own Life, in what sense did Ruth Scurr ‘write’ it? Surely it must be an autobiography, as its title informs us, and Scurr merely edited it? But she, Michael Holroyd and Hilary Mantel refer to it as a biography. And indeed, Ruth Scurr created it (is that the sense in which she means ‘wrote’?); she has absolute control over Aubrey. As the creator of last resort, then, the creator of a literary life not her own, she must be called a biographer; the autobiography is a biography… Yet as an autobiography there has to be a lot that is missing from it as a biography (see the Comment from Clare Hopkins, Archivist of Aubrey’s alma mater, Trinity College, Oxford, of 13 October 2016). Finally, Scurr says that she wanted to ‘produce a portrait’ of Aubrey, but a portrait (synchronic) is the opposite of a biography or an autobiography (diachronic)… Yet Scurr’s compositional method has created a portrait of Aubrey, at rest as it were where his autobiography-biography was always moving forwards.

I imagine that Ruth Scurr relishes these paradoxes in John Aubrey. She cannot possibly be unaware of them. More likely she has consciously constructed them, just as she set up the conflict between ideography and biography in Fatal Purity. They are the contrarian heart and soul of her innovativeness as a biographer, and innovation always invites a dual response: you either love it or you dismiss it as fudgery.

Where will Ruth Scurr go from here? There are signs in both of her biographies that she might move towards novelised biography, or even write a novel proper, but her academic discipline and attachment to non-fiction would seem to argue against that. I have read somewhere (but can no longer remember where) that she has been engaged for some time on a book that would address the whole subject of biography — such questions as ‘why we tell the stories of earlier lives’, ‘what is the nature of the relationship between biographers and their subjects’, and whether we ‘honour or betray the dead when we write about them’ (‘Lives, some briefer than others’, The Guardian, 28 February 2015). This would be wonderful for the rest of us and surely a valuable contribution to the study of dialogism. But could it prove a blind alley for her as a biographer? Whatever she publishes next, I thoroughly expect the unexpected from this author.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, Clare Hopkins, comments, diaries, Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution, Hilary Mantel, John Aubrey, John Aubrey: My Own Life, Maximilien de Robespierre, Michael Holroyd, Ruth Scurr, Trinity College Oxford | Leave a comment

Ruth Scurr: ‘Fatal Purity’ and dangerous identity

Posted on October 13, 2016 by Patrick Miles

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

The most innovative biography of 2015 was Ruth Scurr’s John Aubrey: My Own Life, and it is still reverberating (it was published in the U.S. last month and following this Scurr lectured on it in America). Long-term followers of Calderonia will remember my enthusiastic posts about it last year (29 April and 5 May), and my no less enthusiastic ones about Scurr’s published views on biography as ‘an art form open to constant experiment’ (6 March). I became curious, therefore, about her other biography, which was of Maximilien de Robespierre and published in 2006 by Chatto & Windus. It is available in paperback by Vintage and I have now read it.

I must immediately admit to a phobia for the French Revolution. It literally makes me feel sick. As a young Russianist, I had to study the Bolshevik Revolution for three years, I then lived in Communist Russia for two and a half, and in the late 1960s/early 1970s the air there was still rancid with fear pheromones. Although not an historian, I subsequently had to make a minute study of Stalinism and the Great Terror. I am aware of how consciously the Bolsheviks imitated the French revolutionaries. At Moscow University in 1970 I once woke up terrified from a dream I had very similar to the one Wordsworth recounts in The Prelude, of ‘long orations which […] I pleaded/Before unjust Tribunals, with a voice/Labouring, a brain confounded’. I have only to read the word ‘executed’, therefore, whether it is by bullet in the back of the head or by guillotine, and I go tense and pale. The French revolutionaries and the Bolsheviks disgust me.

Ruth Scurr opens her biography of Robespierre with a short Preface in which she quotes a list of those condemned to death during the Reign of Terror — ordinary people, guillotined for things like ‘writing’, or ‘sawing down a tree of liberty’ — and then examines the Paris statistics for the last five months of Robespierre’s reign, when as many as sixty people were condemned by a single tribunal in a morning and judicially murdered on the same scaffold in the afternoon. It is an opening that will shock any reader, not just me, and presumably Scurr intends it to. However, in the Introduction that immediately follows she describes her biographical approach thus:

Fatal Purity […] expresses neither partisan adulation nor exaggerated animosity; instead it is motivated by the open-minded interest Robespierre deserves. It tries, whenever possible, to give him the benefit of any rational doubt. […] I have tried to be his friend and to see things from his point of view. But friends, as he always suspected, can be treacherous; they have opportunities for betrayal that enemies only dream of.

I think the least one can say of this statement is that it is ‘contrapuntal’. Of course Robespierre deserves ‘open-minded interest’, but is it possible to give manifest psychopaths like Robespierre, Lenin or Stalin ‘the benefit of rational doubt’? What does it mean to do so? Similarly, one should never write a man’s biography if one does not attempt 100% to ‘see things from his point of view’, but what does ‘try to be his friend’ mean? It sounds gauche and the suggestion that such a biographer has undreamt-of ‘opportunities for betrayal’ looks like coy self-dramatisation.

As I see it, this counterpoint undermines the success of what, I agree with Stuart Kelly in the TLS of 25 February 2015, is a ‘slyly radical biography’ — an original experiment that takes the kind of risks from which Scurr has rightly said ‘good books result’ (The Guardian, 6 February 2016).

Historians have told us that Robespierre is enigmatic because little is known of his pre-revolutionary life and many of his personal documents were destroyed after his execution. In that case, Scurr has performed wonders of investigation, discovery and collocation, because this does read like a detailed cradle to grave biography, despite its reliance on the published political speeches of Robespierre and those addicted to the sound of their own voices around him. Although there are discontinuities, there is certainly a narrative spine, which is even reinforced by a five-page Chronology right at the end.

But there is a great psychological and moral vacuum at the heart of this book, and the reason in my opinion is that it is not only a biography in the traditional sense. Along the journey we may be told that ‘Robespierre became the living embodiment of the Revolution at its most feral’, that he believed he was the instrument of Providence ‘to the point of insanity’, or that he increasingly suffered from paranoia; but we are also fed extraordinarily ingenuous comments like ‘by all accounts he was remarkably odd’. If Scurr’s book were a traditional biography, the process of sustained empathy with her subject would have produced a comprehensive diagnosis of his psychosis and a detailed analysis of his ethics. She does not actually practise authorial empathy in this book, however, but a degree of professional identification with her ‘friend’.

Its title is not Robespierre: A Life, but Fatal Purity: Robespierre and the French Revolution. The ‘purity’ is the ‘perfection’, the ‘incorruptibility’, of the disembodied ideas that Robespierre and the Revolution were equally possessed by (truly in the Dostoyevskian sense). Ruth Scurr is an academic. More particularly, she is an historian of Political Thought, i.e. an historian of ideas. There is an understandable impersonality, therefore, about her interest in ideas that, whilst of course qualitatively different from Robespierre’s, dangerously hovers over it. This nebulous identification is dangerous for two reasons. First, biography is about the life of a person, therefore if this person is obsessed with ideas the biography should address the ontology of their ideas, not the metaphysics. After all, the words ‘democracy’ and ‘virtue’ — two of Robespierre’s favourite shibboleths — are merely abstract nouns describing actions: democracy is a way of doing things without killing people, virtue is the enactment of your moral values. Scurr’s focus on political ideology therefore etiolates her biography. The other danger of detaching political ideas from reality is…fatally obvious.

I need to stress that, like my other posts on biographies, this is not a review. Scurr’s experiment in combining life-story with history of ideas is without doubt innovative and interesting. What particularly interests me is her use of self-identification with/being a ‘friend’ to her subject, rather than empathy (whose limits must be understanding). There are long stretches of her book that are written with superb pace, and as she says, ‘no backdrop can match the French Revolution’. I am also struck by the fact that both Charlotte Bronte and Fatal Purity are enclosed by prologues and codas (is this a fashion?), and both Harman and Scurr end their books with what are in effect extended hypotheses of their own. But these hypotheses could not be more different in kind.

Harman presents the empirical evidence for Charlotte Brontë’s French professor having communicated/not communicated with her as Rochester communicates from afar with Jane Eyre, or Cathy with Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights, and leaves the hypothesis open. The hypothesis is based on fact and Harman does not tell us whether she believes it.

When the badly wounded Robespierre was laid on the plank of the guillotine, his executioner removed the bandage that was holding Robespierre’s face together and Robespierre screamed an animal scream, seconds before being decapitated. Scurr then gives us a final paragraph almost a page long in which she speculates about what this scream ‘was’. It was ‘the point of severance, when Robespierre’s precious vision of a democratic republic, pure and founded on virtue, finally left him […] perhaps his vision went out into the world on the back of that scream […] [perhaps it was] the end of the bright hope for a democratic Republic […] as a biographer, I hear it as the agonised separation of Robespierre and the Revolution: the man and what he lived for’.

I’m sorry, but this is novelistic speculation and even romantic fantasy. Robespierre’s scream was a scream.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, Bolsheviks, Claire Harman, Communism, empathy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Heathcliff, history of ideas, history of political thought, identification, Jane Eyre, John Aubrey, Lenin, Maximilien de Robespierre, Rochester, Ruth Scurr, Stalin, The French Revolution, The Russian Revolution, William Wordsworth, Wuthering Heights | 3 Comments

Claire Harman: An exemplary modern biography

Posted on October 11, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Charlotte Bronte A Life by Claire Harman

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

In September 1910 George Calderon visited the World’s Fair in Brussels with Walter Crum, the Coptic scholar. He wrote to Kittie from there: ‘I just met an old gentleman in the street who knew the headmistress in Villette and the French Professor. The street was pulled down 5 months since to build a new railway station.’

I’m a great admirer of the Brontë sisters’ writing, and especially of Charlotte’s ‘impetuous honesty’, as Thackeray called it, but I’d never felt the urge to read everything they wrote (as I did with Jane Austen) and therefore hadn’t read Villette when I came upon this postcard of George’s. By chance, however, two copies of the novel kept surfacing in the house as we were cataloguing some late relatives’ books, so I took the hint and read Villette. Astonishing! Astonishing in its modernity.

On the back of that experience, I decided to read this new biography of Charlotte Brontë by Claire Harman. I can honestly say that this has left me wanting to read all Charlotte’s and Anne’s other works, because Harman teases out so sensitively and enthrallingly not just the sisters’ personal relations but the way they fertilised each other’s writing. Love Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights and after this book you will want to read them all.

Harman has written Charlotte Brontë: A Life to coincide with the bicentenary (2016) of Brontë’s birth. Doubtless she has written it to reach as wide a readership as possible, and doubtless she has succeeded. I imagine this is why she has produced what looks like a traditional ‘cradle to grave’ biography. Each chapter has a brief, dry title and beneath it the years the chapter covers. The chronology is in your face. The reader cannot get lost in any Proustian ‘tourbillions of Time’, thank you. In Virginia Woolf’s words about traditional biographies, it ‘plods forwards in the indelible footprints of truth’…

Except that it doesn’t plod for one moment. Harman has enclosed her linearity in a thematic circle. From all the richness and tragedy of Charlotte Brontë’s life, she has chosen to begin with a five-page Prologue entitled ‘1 September 1843’ describing the nadir of Brontë’s despair in Brussels when she, a fierce Protestant, even forced a Catholic priest in the city’s cathedral to listen to her confession — presumably, that she was hopelessly in love with a married man and at the end of her spiritual tether. Concluding her biography, Harman returns to the theme in ‘Coda’ (undated), in which she describes the full human aftermath of Charlotte’s death but concentrates on the behaviour of Constantin Heger, the married ‘French Professor’ who dangled Charlotte on a subtle thread of his own making for the rest of her life. Sensationally, for this reader at least, Harman juxtaposes Charlotte’s assurance to Elizabeth Gaskell that Rochester’s voice crying to Jane Eyre from a great distance was ‘a true thing; it really happened’, with a letter written by Heger to one of his former female pupils forty years after the novel’s publication, describing his own ability to evoke her (the pupil’s) image and ‘communicate’ with her from afar. ‘Was it his habit to attempt such mental communion across long distances and adverse circumstances?’ Harman asks, ‘Or had he simply been reading Jane Eyre?’

Enclosing her cradle to grave biography in this theme is daring, and in my view absolutely right. The relationship that developed between Heger and Brontë in the long dialogue of his teaching her was surely the seminal one of her life. Charlotte returned to it, and him, again and again in her novels, and you could say that that level of ‘soul-to-soul’ communication is the great theme and discovery of her writing. I don’t know whether the hypothesis that Harman puts forward in the closing pages of her biography is original to her, but it certainly gives the book a very satisfying and convincing form.

This biography, despite its overwhelming linearity, subtly exemplifies some of the best features of modern biography. The social, historical dimensions are effortlessly blended in and although Charlotte is always the centre of the narration, you are equally effortlessly (it seems) drawn into the life of the siblings, the Parsonage, the community, Victorian literary London… This is not remotely one of the old ‘great person’ biographies, but democratic and inclusive. Equally, Harman obviously has a deep empathy with her subject, but she ‘comes out of’ that empathy again; occasionally, her style seems touched by Brontë’s, her voice echoes Charlotte’s, but it is very subtly done, never obtrusive. Where sheer information is concerned, the computer age has doubtless helped Harman achieve an impressive sense of exhaustiveness, as it does other modern biographers, though she always scrupulously acknowledges the scholars behind her facts.

So: although not showily innovative, innovative nonetheless and a model of modern biography. How long will it be read, how long will it be the biography of Charlotte Brontë?

Such questions are naive. Like translators, biographers ‘in sequent toil all forwards do contend’, as Shakespeare said of waves. It’s in the nature of human effort that translations and biographies are primarily of and for their time; there is no such thing as a definitive biography or translation. But even if the ‘general reader’ reads only the latest biography, you can be sure that other biographers of Charlotte Brontë will always read Harman — just as any biographer of Chekhov must read Izmailov (1916) and any biographer of George Calderon read Percy Lubbock!

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Belgium, biographies, biography, Brussels, Charlotte Bronte, Claire Harman, comments, Constantin Heger, George Calderon, Jane Eyre, Kittie Calderon, Percy Lubbock, Villette, Walter Crum, World Fair, Wuthering Heights | Leave a comment

Biography brainstorm

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Patrick Miles

For the next ten days, I shall be blogging only about biography. On 21 October Harvey Pitcher, the doyen of Chekhov studies in this country, will present a guest post about George Calderon’s famous Introduction to his pioneering translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard (1912), and on 4 November, the anniversary of Wilfred Owen’s death, Damian Grant, Visiting Professor at the Universities of Burgundy and Lille 3, will post about Owen’s commemoration in France.

I intend to write mainly about very recent biographies, because as a biographer myself (momentarily) I have to keep abreast of what others are doing; but I shall definitely look at Percy Lubbock’s 1921 George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory, and probably refer to other biographies from the past.

These posts will not be reviews, they will be discussing aspects and issues of contemporary biography. This is because, as followers of Calderonia in March, April and May 2015 will remember, there is a lot going on at the moment in the genre of biography, it is an exciting time when all kinds of ideas are flying around, and as someone who has tried to produce an innovative sort of biography I am very interested in it all.

I am also very interested indeed in what other people’s thoughts and experiences are. So do please weigh in with Comments, both about the posts and about biographies that you have recently read/are reading!

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, biography, comments, Damian Grant, George Calderon, Harvey Pitcher, Percy Lubbock, Wilfred Owen | Leave a comment

‘A paradox, a paradox…’

Posted on October 8, 2016 by Patrick Miles

As part of my preparation for writing ‘Who George Calderon Was’, I have just re-read all the personal memoirs that Kittie asked George’s friends to write for Percy Lubbock’s book about George (the memoirs themselves have never been published). Undoubtedly the best is by Laurence Binyon, as he pulls no punches but always expresses reservations in a way that could not possibly offend Kittie.

Talking of George when they were both at Trinity College, Oxford, Binyon writes:

There seemed to be a freakish vein in his mind. Paradox attracted him. All were agreed about his gifts, but no-one was confident of the direction in which they would carry him. I confess that at that time I underrated the quality of his mind. […] His dialectical skill seemed rather sterile. But this did not prevent him from being entirely attractive and lovable.

It would have been great to have had some examples from Binyon of George’s early paradoxes, for there is no doubt that paradox features heavily in his published writings. For me in my Afterword, it raises two questions: (a) do George’s paradoxes actually add up to much? (b) were the Edwardians generally lovers of paradox?

Clear examples of ‘simple’ paradox can be seen in George’s classic deconstruction of Tolstoyism (‘The Wrong Tolstoi’, 1901), where he has a field day with the cognitive dissonance at the heart of Tolstoi’s ‘thought’, and in Downy V. Green (1902) and Dwala (1904). In Downy V. Green Oxford is fiercely debating whether to abolish Greek as a condition of admission, but the American Rhodes scholar who has come to sit at the University’s feet argues strongly for keeping it and it is clearly implied that Oxford could learn a thing or two from America. In Dwala the hero starts as a Javan hominid but transforms himself into an Englishman who becomes prime minister! Both Downy and Dwala are walking literary paradoxes.

However, in George’s most successful play, The Fountain (1909), you have a leading character, James Wren, whose natural mode of expression is paradox:

This general ignorance is the oddest feature of modern life. I knew a case of a temperance mission entirely supported by brewery shares.

Given that Wren is a Fabian and the play is partly about rent racketeering, it is not surprising that reviewers compared Wren to Tanner in Shaw’s Man and Superman, and The Fountain to Shaw’s Widowers’ Houses. George robustly refuted these ‘misconceptions’ in a preface to the published play, but he never mentioned the similarity of language. Shaw was famous as a ‘paradoxer’, as practically any page of his plays will show. I have randomly opened my Complete Plays of Bernard Shaw and my eye falls on:

If you hint the slightest doubt of Hector’s courage, he will go straight off and do the most horribly dangerous thing to convince himself that he isn’t a coward.

(Heartbreak House, Act 1)

One could say that paradox is Shaw’s most natural mode of theatrical expression. We are meant to be delighted by it for its own sake, and we often are.

But the paradox most typical of George’s writing is different; in fact I am not sure that ‘paradox’ is the best word for it. The following example, which both George and Kittie were fond of recounting, is archetypal. It was told to George by a tramp or a hawker, and I quote it in the version retold by George to the composer Martin Shaw and published in the latter’s autobiography Up to Now (1929):

My father told me to chop some wood. I met another boy who said, ‘Where are you going with that chopper?’ I said, ‘To chop wood for my father.’ He came with me into the yard and watched me chopping. After a while, he said to me, ‘Let me have a chop.’ So I gave him the chopper. We got playing about and he said to me, ‘I bet you a penny you wouldn’t put your finger on the block and leave it there while I bring the chopper down.’ So I said to him, ‘I bet you a penny you wouldn’t bring the chopper down if my finger was there.’ So I puts my finger on the block and he raises the chopper. Now you see he thinks to himself, ‘He’ll never dare leave his finger there when he sees the chopper coming down’; and I thinks to myself, ‘He’ll never dare really bring his chopper down on my finger — he’ll only pretend.’ So each of us relies on the other. Down comes the chopper and off goes my finger.

In ‘Lipa Sidorovna’ (1898) a Russian widow is obsessed with building a shrine in St Petersburg over the grave of her murdered only son, but when this son returns as an escaped convict from Siberia (he has substituted his papers for the man he murdered), she turns him over to the police: he ‘is’ and he ‘is not’ her son. In ‘The Lieutenant’s Heroine’ (1900) a Russian lieutenant in the Caucasus believes in the cards’ prediction that he will marry an ‘heroic’ woman and when he is drafted to defend an isolated farmstead and meets the owner’s daughter Varvara Petrovna, a ‘tall, handsome young woman, with a high aquiline nose and a commanding presence’, who joins the soldiers in blazing away at the Chechens, he just knows it will be her, even though ‘I can’t stand your masculine women’. The narrator, an Englishman, does not believe in the cards or Fate, but when he meets the lieutenant a year later and discovers he is married, he assumes he did marry the heroic Varvara Petrovna, but not a bit of it: he married her little slender cousin who was afraid of mice, fainted when a bullet grazed her hand, yet risked her life to go outside the house to fetch water for a wounded Russian soldier, whereupon the Chechens chivalrously withdrew. Thus the cards’ foreknowledge is ‘disproven’ (he did not marry the heroic woman) and ‘proven’ (he did marry an heroic woman). Similar conundrums underlie the plays Geminae (1913), The Two Talismans (1913/14), The Lamp (1914/15) and even an incident at Gallipoli when George came upon an unexploded bomb:

[An officer buried it.] A sergeant said it ought to be ‘handed in’; so I dug it up again and carried it across the camp. Six soldiers pronounced it dangerous and recommended reburial. I left them digging its grave. One said, ‘the fuse is set to time’. I said: ‘I expect the time’s expired now’.’ They were silent awhile then one laughed and they all laughed.

Of course, George said casually ‘I expect the time’s expired now’ to put the wind up them — and succeeded — but also to watch their audience response when they realised (a) it could not have expired, (b) the timer could be broken, (c) it was probably a dud. It was about to explode…and it wasn’t!

The Calderonian paradox is a set of conditions (an identity, wager, prediction, vow) that is complicated by an unstated or invisible set of other conditions. For a while it produces a tantalising mirror-facing-a-mirror effect (in the chopper story an infinitely slow-motion series rather like Zeno’s arrow). There is a self-referentiality, a vicious circularity, about it that might well evoke the adjective ‘sterile’, but in George’s literary handling the conditions eventually cancel each other out, bringing a resolution. It is reminiscent of the ancient ‘liar paradox’ (all solicitors are liars, says the solicitor; so is he telling the truth or not?) and more recent ‘barber paradox’ (a barber shaves all the men in a town except those who shave themselves; so does the barber shave himself?).

I gather that Bertrand Russell did not author the barber paradox, it was suggested to him as an example of his own Russell’s Paradox (1901), viz. ‘is the set of all sets which are not members of themselves, a member of itself?’ (If it is, says my dictionary of philosophy, then it is not; if it is not, then it is…) Unfortunately, my maths is not up to saying whether the Calderonian paradox is a literary form of Russell’s paradox, but it is quite possible that George had been following developments in set theory in the 1900s, as he was an excellent mathematician.

What I do know, is that when I was ploughing through Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus fifteen years ago I came across Wittgenstein’s refutation of Russell’s Paradox. I couldn’t understand his refutation because I am not a mathematician, but I do remember how it concluded: ‘And that’s Russell’s Paradox disposed of’! According to the Wikipedia entry on the barber paradox, even Russell denied that it was an instance of his own, describing it as a ‘form of words [that] is just noise without meaning’!

So do George’s paradoxes say anything profound, or are they just cerebral acrobatics and noise without meaning? I haven’t reached a conclusion about this yet — indeed the whole of this post is just thinking onto the screen, so I shall really value Comments and responses. I know that many, perhaps most, readers of George today do find his paradoxes vacuous. Certainly it is deeply unfashionable today to base a play upon such things.

But perhaps this is the wrong way to approach them. The Edwardians delighted in cleverness on the stage and in humorous writing, there is no doubt about that. They liked laughing a lot and wanted to be surprised by verbal and intellectual ingenuity. It did not greatly matter to them whether a paradox was ‘true’, ‘profound’, ‘serious’, or not — in any case, one could argue that all paradoxes are only apparent contradictions. Today we may ask more from our plays than paradoxes, but it would be po-faced not to recognise the sheer wit behind much Edwardian drama, including Shaw’s (which seem to have almost gone out of fashion). The Edwardians relished paradox, I feel, and there must be a direct line from the epigrams and paradoxes of Oscar Wilde to George Bernard Shaw, St John Hankin, George Calderon, Noel Coward, Joe Orton, or Tom Stoppard… Paradox can be simply ‘joyful’, as the Times reviewer has just described Patrick Marber’s production of Stoppard’s Travesties. In Shaw’s case particularly, it can also ‘make strange’ à la Brecht — it can make us question our assumptions.

Altogether, paradox is an important aspect of the problem of Edwardian ‘superficiality’.

Postscript

On 13 February 1899 Calderon had lunch with Mary Hamilton, Kittie’s mother, at 17 Golden Square, Soho. It was four months after the death of Kittie’s husband Archie Ripley and six weeks after the death of Ripley’s mother, Laura. Kittie was at Earlham, the Ripley family home in Norfolk, and George was looking after her dog Jones at his lodgings in Eastcote. After lunch with ‘Mammy Ham’, as Kittie called her mother, George wrote to her:

Dear dear Kit, I led Mammy Ham on at lunch for the pure delight of paradoxes; I could not help talking of you. She thinks you will never marry. Women marry twice, but they never love deeply twice. You have loved so well, that you cannot love much again; and without loving (we were both agreed) you could never marry again. Dear darling woman. Do you know your own value?

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Archie Ripley, barber paradox, Bertolt Brecht, Bertrand Russell, Caucasus, comments, Dardanelles, Downy V. Green, Dwala, Gallipoli, Geminae, George Bernard Shaw, George Calderon, Golden Square, Joe Orton, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Lev Tolstoi, liar paradox, Lipa Sidorovna, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Man and Superman, Martin Shaw, Mary Hamilton, Noel Coward, paradoxes, Patrick Marber, Percy Lubbock, Russell's Paradox, St John Hankin, The Fountain, The Great War, The Lamp, The Lieutenant's Heroine, The Two Talismans, Tom Stoppard, Widowers' Houses, World War I, Zeno | Leave a comment

Kittie Hamilton

Posted on October 6, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I have returned from holiday fired up to put the last tittle on my biography by the end of November and get copies to the interested publishers immediately afterwards. This means writing the Afterword (‘Who George Calderon Was’), radically improving the ill-fated Introduction, producing the Bibliography, and composing voluminous and fulsome Acknowledgements. I think it is possible to do this without ‘O fallacem hominum spem!‘ [27 July 2016] striking, as I am on course to start writing the Afterword next week…

A blog is a very wonderful thing; or at least, it has proved so for me. As I explained last year, I was very sceptical about its value to begin with, but it led to incredibly enriching dialogues with followers by both Comment and email, it even led to the discovery of new Calderoniana, and in a way it produced a new form of biography (‘blography’). Most recently, it has enabled me to moot on the screen some key issues of my Afterword, such as the ‘nastiness factor’ and the ‘hero complex’, and impelled three subscribers to recommend further reading on the Edwardians that I have found useful. Thank you!

I will touch on only one more aspect of George’s character as an Edwardian, and that will be on Saturday, 8 October. Meanwhile, though, I think it would be appropriate to address some issues concerning Kittie.

The principal one must be that to the modern woman she seems not remotely modern. Her failure to ‘get a life of her own’ must indeed seem exasperating and sad. Her support for anti-suffragism would appear to confirm her lamentable ‘backwardness’. In her memoirs she describes utterly convincingly how George needed her when he was based at home; if she had to go away, ‘he at once seemed to feel left and lost’. Yet when he had to go away on a solo adventure, e.g. to Tahiti, it looks as though she simply waited patiently and meekly at home like a doormat to welcome him back. As a trained artist and believer in the Arts and Crafts Movement, why did she not exhibit paintings, make and sell handicrafts, design things? Why does her work as a VAD during the war seem so half-hearted? Why couldn’t she put all that dynamism of hers into nursing or hospital administration? She was only forty-eight when George disappeared at Gallipoli, so why didn’t she do something full-time on the Home Front that might have opened into a career, as it did for many women? Was Kittie’s identity, her life, her ‘fame’, entirely and only derived from her devotion to George, who manifestly did not need her as much as she thought?

Let me briefly address these points. There was nothing unusual about Kittie not wanting the parliamentary vote. The overwhelming majority of upper/middle class women didn’t want it either, because they did not like what they saw of men’s political life, they wanted their own separate sphere, and they wanted to do the maximum good for society through voluntary caring and nurturing, particularly in local communities and politics, where they already had the vote. (Edwardian society would have fallen apart without them.) We know that as soon as George left on one of his ‘adventures’ Kittie went to stay with Nina Corbet, or at least in a Corbet property where Nina could visit her, or with another of her woman friends. Her relationship with Nina always has to be taken into account in her relationship with George; it entirely complements it. Although in her late twenties Kittie worked terrifically hard at her painting, she came to acknowledge that she did not have the originality or technique to pursue it professionally. She did, however, encourage many younger artists, and her contacts in Arts and Crafts were invaluable to her in designing the posthumous edition of George’s works. We know from George’s letter to William Rothenstein of 1 January 1915 that throughout the war Kittie was chronically ill (at first gynaecologically, then with pernicious anaemia). She had bursts of energy, but I don’t think she could have sustained full-time work in the Red Cross. However, dare I say it, nursing is not a job, it’s a lifetime vocation, even a way of life and a spiritual belief. She had nursed her first husband for three years, her mother for about six years, and was all her friends’ counsellor and nurse in sickness, miscarriages and stress. Her personality was not self-advancing or political, it was kenotic.

But underlying modern, perhaps feminist disappointment with Kittie is, I believe, the feeling that she should have earned her own living. This, of course, would have meant having a career, and for reasons I have already given it’s difficult to see how that would have been possible, even if she had wanted it, which I think before she married Archie Ripley she did. Financially, however, she did not need to work because in 1906 she inherited a large house in Hampstead and some capital from her mother (i.e. it was Simson money, not Hamilton money, because her father died penniless), and after 1898 she had an income from Ripley’s trust fund. This, surely, is the aspect of Kittie’s life that we find most difficult to accept today, whether we are feminists or not. So few of us have any experience of a private income that we may automatically protest that it is wrong. Yet the idea that Kittie did not ‘work’ because she did not ‘need’ to, would be simplistic. The fact is, she had so many altruistic commitments which her money enabled her to meet without paid employment, that she used her unearned income to do those things (i.e. work at them) all the time it lasted — which it only just did. She not only ran her own affairs very impressively after George’s death, she travelled all over southern England ministering care and advice to friends, the Pyms, Calderons, Mrs Stewart… By 1937 she was diagnosed as suffering from chronic exhaustion.

Of course, having a private income was a very Edwardian phenomenon. To what extent, then, was Kittie herself an unreconstructed Edwardian? As far as I know, she never used the adjective Edwardian of herself, but a memoir that she wrote at the end of her life contains a very strong attack on the Victorian age. She felt that it was rooted in the love of money. She disapproved of the poverty, squalor and ignorance that it produced, and she was convinced that Victorian imperial hubris would end in disaster. As I have said before, I believe that the Edwardian period witnessed the greatest explosion of democratic discourse — in politics, on the streets, in the theatre, in print — that Britain has ever known (and it nearly blew the country apart). I think that both George and Kittie saw themselves as part of the great democratic experience. Perhaps because of the long post-WW1 Left consensus, it is difficult for us now to see that. In historical party political terms, George and Kittie were almost certainly Liberals, but today their views on suffrage, trade unionism, the Community, or defence, approximate them more to radical Conservatism. Kittie followed national and international politics closely in the 1930s. I think she felt that her and George’s politics were ‘progressive’ because they were ahead of their socialistic times — she several times implies that in her memoirs.

In my opinion, a very important point is that many of Kittie’s activities (her ‘work’) were enabled by her being a Hamilton, i.e. the scion of an English family that could trace its ancestry to Edward I; a member of a top Anglo-Irish family; the daughter of John Hamilton the Good (see my post of 3 August 2016). She moved very confidently in society, networking came naturally to her, and this was the source of her success as George’s agent. She very rarely comes across as bossy, but her manipulative and diplomatic skills were inbred and her social authority recognised everywhere. She usually got her way. This enabled her to play a leading role in charitable ventures at Hampstead, Petersfield and Kennington. Although she always had ‘Mrs George Calderon’ emblazoned on her suitcases, in a sense she was really always Katharine Hamilton.

I have written the above somewhat off the top of my head, thinking onto the screen — as has been so beneficial whilst mulling over my Afterword about George as an Edwardian. I don’t know whether I shall discuss Kittie as an Edwardian or anything else in the Afterword. To some extent, the life and personality of Kittie embrace the whole book; and this is intentional. It starts with her marriage to George’s friend Archie Ripley (whilst George was in Russia), it covers the whole of her fifteen-year marriage to George, and it continues for another thirty-five years without him. I don’t know about attempting to sum her up. The temptation to ‘defend’ her in the Afterword may prove irresistible, but really the whole book should show what she was: a vibrant, long-suffering, lovable, and emotionally intelligent woman. Numerous people, including a great-niece of hers, have told me that ‘really’ I am most interested by Kittie and the book is ‘really’ about her! Well, I don’t know about that. As a theatre person and ex-Russianist, I was naturally first drawn to George, but after their marriage I became more and more conscious of their symbiosis.

However, I do think — no, I know — that when Kittie died in the Hove nursing home on 30 January 1950, having given instructions that her funeral should be private, with no flowers, and her ashes scattered (we don’t know where), she felt that she had done all that she wanted with her life, that she was completely fulfilled.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged anti-suffragism, Archie Ripley, Arts and Crafts, biographies, biography, Calderon family, comments, Conservative Party, Dardanelles, Eliza Stewart, feminism, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Hove, John Hamilton, Kennington, kenosis, Kittie Calderon, Liberal Party, Mary Simson, Mrs Stewart of Torquay, Nina Astley, Nina Corbet, Petersfield, Pym family, suffragism, Tahiti, The Great War, The Red Cross, Third Battle of Krithia, trade unionism, VAD, William Rothenstein, World War I | Leave a comment

Guest post: Alison Miles, ‘Living with George and Kittie since the mid-1980s’

Posted on September 26, 2016 by Patrick Miles

When I first heard about George Calderon it was the mid-1980s and my time was mainly taken up with small children. However I realised that something big was starting when Patrick went to Scotland to visit an attic full of lumber, in mid winter. There was snow on the ground even in Cambridge and it was so thick in Scotland that his train got stuck in a drift. When he returned I heard about the invigoratingly cold attic where he found letters, papers and other items relating to George and Kittie. This was ‘the archive’ which, 30 years later, has moved temporarily to Cambridge.

There were many other visits to Scotland to catalogue the archive, and marathons of train and taxi travel to places that were of huge importance to Kittie Calderon, including one to Foxwold and her home at Kennington, White Raven. It was after this visit, also in the 1980s, that I heard about the three elderly Pyms whom Patrick met at Foxwold, one of whom, Jack Pym, had designed White Raven. It was then I discovered ‘White Raven’ was also Kittie’s nickname while that of her best friend, Nina Corbet, was ‘Black Raven’.

So by the start of the 1990s I was aware of several key players in Kittie Calderon’s life. But I did not know much about George – he was an enigma and continues to be so even though I know far more about him now.

Kittie is a real person. Is this because much of what she did is familiar territory or is it that the archive of letters and papers is her collection? Her style of living was similar to the views and behaviour of my grandparents, and her photos mirror those of our family from the early 20th century. Kittie’s hand is on literally everything from her suitcase (see Calderonia 15 January 2016) to her ordering and labelling of papers.

Through Kittie I have met both her contemporaries and her (and her friends’) descendants. Communicating with and meeting people ‘keeps the world going round’ so it has been wonderful to be on the fringes of Kittie’s huge network. I feel as though I have met them all, past and present.

What about George and his family and friends? I know about him, his parents and his siblings, but I do not feel I have met them. None of their descendants lives in Britain. My understanding of George (if that is possible of someone I’ve described on several occasions as a maverick) is mainly through Kittie. But his wonderful Christmas card (see Calderonia 27 June 2015) did give me a real insight into his talent for comedy and fun.

It may seem odd to have ‘met’ people from the past, but the work that Patrick has been doing on George and Kittie’s lives has created a sense that we are living 100 years ago. There was a particularly freaky time during the 1914-15 blog, written continuously exactly 100 years later in 2014 -15, when it was all too easy to feel we were living 100 years in the past. In 2015 I often caught myself referring to the present as 1915.

Part of my parallel life in ‘George-and-Kittie-land’ has been to get to grips with family trees. Many of them are complex because there were second marriages following death or divorce, in some cases no male children to inherit and of course family tragedies. The 1914-18 war took its toll as did illness. A lasting memory, from our visit several years ago to Moreton Corbet churchyard, is the ‘missing statue’ (of Mercury) above Vincent Corbet’s grave (see Calderonia 2 September 2016). The statue has since been recovered but seeing the statue-less plinth created such a powerful sense of loss, unhappily familiar to so many people at the time.

Moreton Corbet, November 2009 (the poppy commemorates Jim Corbet, killed in action at Givenchy 15 April 1915)

This leads me on to places. It has been a great privilege and delight in more recent years to visit a range of places that were important to both George and Kittie. The trip to Tahiti following in George’s footsteps has yet to happen but it has been discussed – I am not optimistic!

Kittie’s first husband, Archie Ripley, was brought up at Earlham Hall in Norwich. Our visits there have spanned a long enough period of time to see it steadily change from a fairly run-down version of the house his family rented (Archie’s mother’s first husband was one of the Gurneys) to a wonderfully restored building in splendid grounds. As well as the house itself, the lawns and paths match the 19th century idyllic garden described by Percy Lubbock, a nephew of Archie’s, who visited regularly as a child. The descriptions bring the place to life and it is lovely to be able to visit what was a childhood paradise.

Eastcote, near Pinner, is where George lived when he was ‘courting’ Kittie. That word does not match George and he was certainly not ‘going out’ with her. His approach was more of a sensitive campaign. He walked or cycled from the house where he lodged and, thanks to local historian Karen Spink, we were able to follow his route on paths that still exist. In 1904 George and Kittie visited Cap Gris Nez, staying at La Sirène which is now a restaurant – we ate there looking westwards in the evening sun across the beach and the rocks (hence the name) that Kittie and George sat on to be photographed. They painted the landscape, so we were able to match the old pictures with the present views.

Cap Gris Nez, 2013 (the large white building on the left is on the site of the original hotel that George and Kittie stayed in, September 1904)

After George’s death Kittie had two ‘new’ homes of her own, near Petersfield and at Kennington, both of which we have seen – and to me they came alive both from her accounts and photos and through today’s local historians. She had strong associations with Foxwold over a relatively long time. It provided her with a stable base where close friends lived (and their descendants still do, near by) and to whom she provided support from time to time. At White Raven she was only forty miles or so from Foxwold.

White Raven, 1986

It is easier to associate George with words and ideas than places. He visited Cambridge when it was very different from now despite the core of old buildings. It was an eventful and unpopular visit because he tried to drum up support from undergraduates to work in the mines during the 1912 strike, one of many examples of taking action in aid of his strong belief in a cause. This is one side of this multi-faceted man. Another is his amazing ability to relate to children from being on holiday with the Pym children in 1914, the very ones 70 years later that Patrick met when he visited Foxwold, to entertaining small children who stayed with them (‘Let’s play Queen Elizabeth and Sir Walter Raleigh and the cloak, and I’ll be the mud’).

Living with George and Kittie is going to carry on for many years – what an opportunity!

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alison Miles, biography, Cambridge, Cap Gris Nez, comments, Eastcote, Elizabeth I, Elizabeth Pym, Foxwold, George Calderon, Jack Pym, Jim Corbet, Karen Spink, Kennington, Kittie Calderon, La Sirene, Moreton Corbet, Nina Corbet, Patrick Miles, Petersfield, Robin Britcher, Roland Pym, Scotland, Sheet, Sir Walter Raleigh, Vincent Corbet, White Raven | 2 Comments

‘Things are still coming up’

Posted on September 24, 2016 by Patrick Miles

The rather shaken and stirred papers of George and Kittie Calderon were finally married and chronologically sorted five years ago, and the surviving 247 books of their library were carefully flipped through revealing fascinating photographs, visiting cards, notes and even letters. I was therefore flabbergasted to discover, when I was recently reading Kittie’s copy of the 1924 Chekhov volume, that she was using this as a bookmark:

caption

It was not surprising that it had never revealed itself before, as it is thin, pressed absolutely flat, and was tucked right in the seam between pages. Naturally, it was instantly captured in a polyester sleeve (in which it was scanned above), catalogued and filed.

It is interesting. We don’t actually know where George was on 5 October 1913. On 23 July he and Kittie had left for Foxwold and the beginning of their summer holidays. A month later they were at Acton Reynald for the popular celebration of the coming of age of Sir Roland James Corbet, Nina’s son Jim. In my biography I’ve written that they probably returned to Hampstead as usual in September. This half-a-cheque would seem to corroborate that. For if George made it out on 5 October and it was cleared by Lloyds at Hampstead on 8 October, the chances are that it was signed in Hampstead for some service or commodity obtained in Hampstead. Not long after, George was definitely at home in Well Walk, preparing for a theatre production of his Maharani of Arakan.

Most interesting of all is the fact that George’s bank was based in Norwich. He had a bank account in Oxford when he was a student there, but we don’t know with which bank. The letters ‘AIN’ before ‘NORWICH’ on this 1913 cheque suggest that in 1913 he was banking with Barclays & Company Limited at Bank PLAIN, Norwich.

Why would George do this?

Kittie’s first husband, Archie Ripley, had been related to the famous Gurney bankers of Norwich through his mother. When he died in 1898, a trust fund was set up for Kittie that was administered by her solicitor William Ripley in Norwich and the investments in it were managed by Gurney’s Bank. In 1896 Gurney’s and other banks were merged into Barclays & Company Limited. Norwich, then, was where Kittie’s capital and credit lay, and this cheque is perhaps further proof that George had made a ‘prudent match’.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Acton Reynald, Archie Ripley, Barclays Bank, Foxwold, Gurney's Bank, Hampstead, Jim Corbet, Laura Gurney, Laura Ripley, Lloyds Bank, Nina Corbet, Norwich, Oxford, polyester sleeves, Rabindranath Tagore, The Maharani of Arakan, Well Walk, William Ripley | Leave a comment

‘Edwardian bastards’ — a personal note

Posted on September 23, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Periodically I have to remind myself that in the 1950s I met plenty of Edwardians, in the sense of people whose character and values were formed in the longer Edwardian period of 1897-1916 and who were thought of as being from that era. My grandmother and grandfather, for instance, born in 1892 and 1888 respectively, spoke affectionately of only one monarch, ‘Teddy’, and in retrospect I can see that (perhaps rather unusually) the furnishings of their home were essentially still late Edwardian.

My grandfather signed up in September 1914 and went through the whole war as a private and an artillery man, from the home front to Gallipoli, then Mesopotamia, finally Ypres. It is clear to us all now that he returned suffering from PTSD and this affected his civilian life ever after. No-one acknowledged the fact, however; it seems certain that they did not understand it and he repressed it. He seemed to me quiet, somehow crushed, and very gentle. But he could still inform me that ‘the only good German is a dead one’ and assure me that the Muslims he had lived amongst as a soldier had the best punishment for thieves — cutting their hand off. At the age of eight, I was stunned and frightened when he said such things. He had been a Scout from the start and gave me Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys to read. I found the book a bit bizarre and simply could not understand what the Chief Scout was referring to when he kept going on about male ‘purity’ that one had to preserve at all costs.

It so happened that there were also quite a few retired army officers in the area where I grew up, who had been in the First World War. They struck me as cheery, but strangely one-dimensional: they never seemed to relax and just chat like normal people. Their style of dress was also very buttoned up. To me as a small boy there always seemed something potentially dangerous about them: they usually had rather cold eyes and bristly moustaches and I felt you could never be sure that they might not turn nasty. I was sure that, for all their bluffness, they believed (like the numerous retired schoolmasters of the same vintage) that a ‘sound beating’ was good for a boy.

And under it all, even in the 1950s, was a residual belief in class. I myself rarely saw that turn nasty, but everywhere there was awareness of people’s social and financial position, and a tacit deference towards it. When it came to studying the Great War in depth at secondary school, one knew instinctively that class had bedevilled officer-men relations and perhaps been a factor in the military bungling that we spent a considerable part of our time analysing and excoriating. I would go so far as to say that in 1966 I would not have been half so shocked to read this account by a private in World War I as I was when I came upon it last year:

The eyes of the man [on the stretcher] next to me were large with pain. I smiled at him, but instead of smiling back at me, his lip curled resentfully, and he turned over on his side so that he could face away from me. As he did, the blanket slipped from his shoulder, and I saw on his shoulder strap the star of a Second Lieutenant. I had committed the unpardonable sin: I had smiled at an officer as if I had been an equal, forgetting that he was not made of common clay. Once after that, when he turned his head, his eyes met mine disdainfully. That time I did not smile. […] I cursed him and the system that produced him.

(Quoted by Peter Hart in his Gallipoli (London, Profile Books, 2013), pp. 392-93.)

I imagine that some followers have been surprised by my choice of the words ‘nasty’ and ‘bastard’ in discussing the Edwardian mindset. Unfortunately, I can think of none more appropriate and I feel it is important to acknowledge that the Edwardians felt empowered to be those things.

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Belgium, class, comments, Dardanelles, Edward VII, Edwardians, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Mesopotamia, Peter Hart, Robert Baden-Powell, Scout Association, The Great War, World War I, Ypres | 3 Comments

Intemperance and ‘Heroism’

Posted on September 22, 2016 by Patrick Miles

On 30 August 1920, Kittie received through the post the first draft of Laurence Binyon’s ode to George’s memory, see https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/57345 . She was at Constance Sutton’s Tudor home in Herefordshire, Brinsop Court, and wrote to Binyon next day that she had read his poem ‘in the beautiful courtyard of this wonderful house […] a lovely spot to read it for the first time’.

As he explained in his covering letter, Binyon had just returned from a holiday in Brittany and had written ‘the verses’ there. The fair copy he was enclosing had been transcribed by his wife Cicely. He had many doubts about the poem, which he set out to Kittie at length, and he asked her to be ‘exact in your turn — and exacting’. ‘There may be false notes perhaps. There are certainly things that could be better.’

Given Kittie’s definitely ‘exacting’ critical standards, it is amazing that she took exception to only one word. The poem swept her off her feet. ‘I just can’t find the words, I think it is so beautiful and so him’, she told Binyon. She loved all of it, but particularly the last stanza, where she felt George was ‘there […] standing before one’.

The word she had difficulty with was ‘Temperance’ in Binyon’s original second line:

Wisdom and Valour, Faith,
Justice and Temperance, — names
Of virtue’s quest and prize, —
What is each but a cold wraith
Until it lives in a man
And looks thro’ a man’s eyes?

‘Was George “temperate”?’ Kittie asked Binyon. She found it ‘very difficult’ to say why she did not think ‘Temperance’ was appropriate, and I am sorry that for copyright reasons I cannot quote the hundred and fifty or so halting, dash-marked, underlined and disjointed words in which she struggles to define her meaning, because they convey a vivid image of her thinking onto the paper. She tussled with it, because she felt it was a very important question that she had to resolve. George was not, she stresses, ‘intemperate’, ‘but but [sic] there was a swift white heat about him that with all his gentleness and tenderness burnt things up without hesitation’. It did not ‘always’ burn things up, Kittie continues; sometimes it was a positive ‘driving force’; but whatever George did he did ‘with a sort of passion’. This ‘never blinded his justice or integrity’, yet ‘it did burn up’.

What Kittie is describing is precisely what I feel to be George’s and other Edwardians’ uncontrollable urge to go at things like a bull at a gate. Thinking twice, risk assessment, analysing where beginnings might plausibly lead before acting, was boring to them. They had instantly to ‘get up and go’. They saw this as ‘adventure’, as their ‘propensity to act’, their ‘enterprise’, without realising that often they just wanted the fix. (This explains George’s unfinished or barely started projects.) Further, they saw this rush at things, this ‘burning up’ as Kittie calls it, as heroic. Thomas Carlyle’s writings about the ‘hero’ and the ‘great man’ still affected them (we know from George’s library that he was a fan). Personally, I feel that this is the most likely explanation for Newbolt’s and George’s intensity in the ‘icons’ of them that I discussed in my last post. In a letter to Grant Richards, George describes Chekhov as ‘a great man’. Maybe; but it is impossible to imagine Chekhov, or even Tolstoi, posing as great men in their photographs…

With Binyon’s agreement, the words ‘and Temperance’ were removed from the second line of the ode and the metre filled out with an adjective: ‘the lofty names’. Binyon also made a dozen changes of his own before the poem was published.

In the First World War the Edwardians paid a terrible price on the battlefield for their unpondered, essentially self-gratificatory conception of heroism. George, though, was already critical of heroism before 1914, as his and Hankin’s hilarious send-up in their 1913 play Thompson amply demonstrates. And as Susan Chitty writes:

By the end of 1915 Newbolt was struggling to keep up his spirits. The ill-fated invasion of the Turkish peninsula of Gallipoli had failed. Calderon had died there. The next patriotic book to encourage boys to the front was due but, not surprisingly, Newbolt’s attitude to war was changing. ‘I write about heroic deeds and hairsbreadth escapes as if they were children’s games, with no real pain or danger in them,’ he admitted to Alice [Hylton].

(Playing the Game: A Biography of Sir Henry Newbolt (London, Quartet Books, 1997), pp. 227-28.)

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alice Hylton, Anton Chekhov, Battle of the Somme, biographies, biography, Brinsop Court, Cicely Binyon, comments, Constance Sutton, Dardanelles, Gallipoli, George Calderon, Grant Richards, Henry Newbolt, Heroism, iconography, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Binyon, Lev Tolstoy, St John Hankin, Susan Chitty, temperance, The great man, The Great War, Third Battle of Krithia, Thomas Carlyle, Thompson, World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

The Nastiness Factor

Posted on September 20, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I have ‘worked with’ the Edwardians, so to speak, for a while now. I feel that if I were dropped into London society around 1905 I would know my bearings and could hold my own. There is much that, having come to know them better, I admire: their energy, their enterprise, their versatility, the fact that in their time, as Roy Hattersley has put it, ‘a modern nation was born’. But if there is one thing that mystifies me about them, it’s the streak of nastiness that seems to have run through so many; a nastiness of which they usually seem to have been unaware and for which they did not apologise.

Take George’s close friend Henry Newbolt (1862-1938). Today Newbolt is remembered for his poem ‘Vitaï Lampada’ with its refrain ‘Play up! play up! and play the game!’, for the doggerel-wobbles in his immensely popular naval verse, and his propaganda written to encourage boys to join up in World War I. That was his official persona, but both Susan Chitty’s biography Playing the Game (1997) and The Later Life and Letters edited by Newbolt’s wife (1942) show him to have been likeable, civilised, and the author of some almost first-rate private lyrical poetry. Yet this is how Newbolt wanted to look:

Henry Newbolt, c. 1912

Close-shaven, starch-collared, tight-lipped, there is no doubt that this is the perfect image of an Edwardian male. Perhaps I am wrong — perhaps, for instance, there is a hint, just a hint, of humour in those eyes — but to me it says: ‘I am a bastard, don’t trifle with me.’ There is something Hitlerian about it. And, indeed, Newbolt could be a bastard, apparently without noticing it. For instance, at the age of twenty-two his son Francis was so badly shell-shocked at Ypres that he returned to England demented, shaking and unable to speak. When, after three months, he was granted a two-month extension of leave, Newbolt’s comment was: ‘I’m sorry that he isn’t doing more for his country.’

This photo of Newbolt was used as the frontispiece of his Later Life and Letters and dated by his wife Margaret. The photo of George below is dated by me c. 1912 because that was his most public year, both in the theatre and as a political activist. He spent a lot of time in 1912 rushing all over the country addressing meetings, which would account for the overcoat, whilst the white scarf was part of the uniform of an Edwardian theatre man. He probably needed to have an impressive photograph to present to fans. The portrait was taken by celebrity photographer Frederick Hollyer and has become the ‘iconic’ image of George, used by Kittie as the frontispiece of Percy Lubbock’s Sketch from Memory and the most commonly reproduced image of George since.

To me, at least, the right eye (right as we look at it) seems to suggest a certain vulnerability, even angst, whilst the faraway look in the left is not so much romantic as sadly resigned. But I have to say I think the overall impact when one first sees this photograph is ‘in your face’ like Newbolt’s: to us, surely, the pallor and the tight lips project self-assurance, arrogance, even menace. I well remember thinking when I first saw this image as a twenty-year-old: ‘Another Edwardian bastard’…

That is why I now prefer not to use this image of George! I know from researching his life that he was not a bastard, so I particularly favour the previously unpublished photograph of him laughing and smoking that features second from the left in Calderonia’s banner. But the fact remains that when it came to a posed studio photograph, this is how he wanted to look. I discern some of the same intention as Newbolt’s. In a word, neither of them looks likeable, and some people might say they look positively nasty. Yet both of their wives were content for these images to represent their husbands to the world.

George Calderon, c. 1912

In his love letters to Kittie in 1899, George admits he is ‘brutal’, ‘blunt’ and ‘coarse’ at times — ‘It is no use my trying to keep up any illusion that I am a man of admirable character’ — but at least he is honest and says sorry. His ‘nastiness’ was caused by the stresses of their falling in love so soon after the death of Kittie’s first husband, George’s friend Archie Ripley, and there is not a hint that he was ever like this once they were married. But there are numerous examples of him being publicly nasty (of course, some would say that being anti-suffragist and a ‘strikebreaker’ was nasty by definition). In the case of his public nastiness, it seems all too characteristic of the Edwardians; he does not appear to have regretted it; and unfortunately it was difficult to undo.

In his 1902 bestseller The Adventures of Downy V. Green, Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, which made George’s reputation as a humorist/satirist, there is a junior fellow of ‘St Ives College’ (instantly recognisable to Trinity College alumni as their own), who is described by the narrator as ‘thin and sickly-smiled’, with ‘a moist and lifeless hand’, and depicted by George in his illustration as diminutive, weedy and nervous. He is characterised aloud by Downy as ‘a slimsy boy, with a kink in his chest’ and a ‘design’ of a moustache, then sotto voce as ‘the rancourest little sarpent topside dirt’! George’s Trinity contemporaries saw in this figure a portrait of H.E.D. Blakiston, who in 1907 was to become President of Trinity. Doubtless they laughed at some aspects, but there could be no doubt that the portrait was ‘nasty’, even vicious. Understandably, it seems to have complicated George’s relations with his old college after 1907, and perhaps even Kittie’s after George’s death.

Then in 1909 at the Queen’s Gate Hall George took on the suffragette Helen Ogston (who had brandished a dog-whip at a recent gathering) in a public debate of the motion ‘That in the Opinion of this Meeting the Parliamentary Franchise should be extended to duly-qualified Women’. Continuing in Percy Lubbock’s words, for Percy was there:

The lady began it; her fluent, attractive appeal was listened to in a charmed silence, broken occasionally by a few happy sighings and purrings; she was a beautiful figure of a Diana, earnest and free. The audience rose to her eloquence; the thorny quarrel was raised to the level of a large, splendid, wind-swept passion; it was the contest of Milanion and Atalanta […] And then […] George began his reply, and it was as though Mephistopheles had landed upon the shore of a Greek island. With his arguments and his sarcasms, his crude interrogations, his facts and his dates, the atmosphere was chilled and the shining spaces contracted. From fervent souls the listeners were changed to mere pouting and hissing human beings; they turned upon the intruder who so degraded them […] the lofty passion had become a squall of exasperated dissent.

Nasty! That is how George had come across, and one has to assume that is how he wanted to come across. Yet it was all totally unnecessary: if, instead of being determined to project himself as some kind of Juvenalian satirist, he had identified the (glaring) Achilles heel of the motion and employed his irresistible charm and courtesy to attacking it, he might even have swung it by a few votes. But for some people he always remained essentially a ‘nasty’.

I could quote many cases of eminent Edwardians who made no secret of this streak and displayed no shame about it, for instance the imperial consuls Cromer and Curzon (both active in the anti-suffrage movement), Baden-Powell, G.B. Shaw, or Emmeline Pankhurst, and I have given it a lot of thought. What produced it in so many otherwise admirable people? If I say that I feel it was the result of Edwardian chauvinism and imperialism, I risk appearing to suggest that these people personally were all chauvinists who believed that, in Curzon’s words, the British Empire was ‘under Providence, the greatest instrument for good the world has seen’. Manifestly some, for instance George, G.B. Shaw and Pankhurst, were not chauvinists.

However, what I have come to believe is that the unstoppable growth and apparent stability of the Empire under the Edwardians produced an all-pervading national confidence, self-assurance, belief that, in Cecil Rhodes’s words, Englishmen had ‘won the first prize in the lottery of life’, and this rubbed off on everyone (except, perhaps, the King) without their being aware of it. It rubbed off on them as an unselfconscious arrogance. They were ‘right’ and this gave them the right even to be nasty. In fact in their eyes it wasn’t nastiness, it was just…being right.

(In my next post I shall consider a slightly different perspective.)

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Archie Ripley, biographies, biography, Cecil Rhodes, comments, Downy V. Green, Edward VII, Emmeline Pankhurst, Frederick Hollyer, George Bernard Shaw, George Calderon, H.E.D. Blakiston, Helen Ogston, Henry Newbolt, iconography, Juvenal, Kittie Calderon, Lord Cromer, Lord Curzon, Margaret Newbolt, nastiness, Percy Lubbock, righteousness, Robert Baden-Powell, Roy Hattersley, Susan Chitty, Trinity College Oxford, Vitai Lampada | 3 Comments

Afterword ‘spoilers’?

Posted on September 16, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Veteran followers of this blog will know that my estimates of how long it is going to take to complete any given piece of writing connected with my biography of George and Kittie Calderon are usually out by a factor of at least three (O fallacem hominum spem! — see post for 27 July). Nevertheless, I cannot resist the temptation to say that I think I am now half way through my preparation for writing the Afterword and might write it swiftly in the first ten days of October.

Since I completed the body of the biography (i.e. 1867-1950) months ago, and basically know what I think about George (the subtitle of the Afterword is: ‘Who George Calderon Was’), you could be forgiven for wondering why the 4000-word Afterword is taking me so long. The answer is: I am reading the entire typescript yet again, noting relevant quotations and highlighting forty facts for re-verification, I have to go over meticulously and internalise what George’s friends said of him in their memoirs (commissioned by Kittie), I need to reconstruct meticulously the narrative of his revaluation in the media through the 1920s, I need to complete the theatrical and radio history of his plays from 1950 to the present, and above all I must understand/evaluate him in the context of Edwardianism (1897-1916) as a whole

The latter has involved identifying all the possibly relevant books about the Edwardians that I had not read already. I found fourteen. There were only three or four that I felt I needed to read extensively, although in nearly all of them I noted something potentially quotable. If anyone would like to recommend a book about the Edwardians that they have found particularly enjoyable or profound, please do!

Generalising terribly, I have found that the drawbacks with most British books about the Edwardians from my point of view are that they are either concerned with the ‘thick’ political and cultural history of the period, or they focus on key personalities like Baden Powell or Marie Lloyd, or they are polarised towards the uppermost class and the working class, when I want to know more about the mores of the upper middle class. Thus Anita Leslie’s Edwardians in Love (1972 etc) or Juliet Nicolson’s The Perfect Summer [1911]: Dancing into Shadow (2006), or George Cornwallis-West’s Edwardians Go Fishing (1932) are highly readable and revealing, but almost restricted to the highest echelons of Edwardian society, which is not surprising given the aristocratic pedigrees of their authors.

What really interests me is attempts to identify the constituents of the Edwardian psyche or character and suggest what conditioned them. For example, I know about George’s obsessiveness, ‘amateurism’, adventurism, or love of paradox, but how typical were these of the Edwardians generally, and what were their causes? Nearly fifty years after it was first published, the best ‘diagnostic’ study of this kind, in my view, remains Samuel Hynes’s The Edwardian Turn of Mind. My own favourites to set beside it would be Paul Thompson’s The Edwardians: The Remaking of British Society (1975 etc), Roy Hattersley’s The Edwardians (2004 etc), and Yvonne Bell’s The Edwardian Home (2005 etc). Obviously, I have read many biographies of individual Edwardians and even more studies of special subjects (theatre, suffragism, Gallipoli etc). These are very instructive. But what I am really after is psychology. How do the Edwardian mind, and the minds of George, Kittie and their set in particular, compare with our own?

At the risk of ‘spoiling’, over the next few weeks I will look at a few psychological facets of George and Kittie that I touch on in my Afterword, and how they might relate to the Edwardians as a species of people-in-time, our own forefathers, our semblables. Meanwhile, in this month’s guest post my wife will spill the beans about living with George and Kittie for thirty years…

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Afterword, Alison Miles, Anita Leslie, Baden Powell, biographies, biography, comments, Edwardians, George Calderon, George Cornwallis-West, Juliet Nicolson, Kittie Calderon, Marie Lloyd, Paul Thompson, psychology, Roy Hattersley, Samuel Hynes, spoilers, Yvonne Bell | Leave a comment

Kittie absolved, Lydia looks in

Posted on September 8, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I received my copy of the second edition of George’s Two Plays by Tchekhof from a distinguished bookseller in Cumbria, and promptly set about comparing its Introduction with that of both the first edition and the Chekhov volume edited by Kittie and published in 1924. George made six changes to the Introduction for his second edition, including the philosophical-religious one my last two posts have been about, and the last paragraph in the second edition is identical to that in the 1924 edition. Kittie could not, therefore, have made the change in the last paragraph that I have been discussing.

Nevertheless, I think she must have been pleased to see that in his revision of the last paragraph George replaced his pantheistic (Taoist?) suggestion that the meaning of life is immanent in ‘this husk of a planet’, with the insistence that we ourselves ‘put meaning into it’. The synonyms he gives for this meaning are unchanged since the first edition: ‘hope itself, God, man’s ideal’. George’s mention of God may well have surprised Kittie, as he hardly ever used the word and was, as we know, an agnostic. Note, however, that he is merely listing forms of meaning that other people put into the world. He is keeping the concept of God at arm’s length. Moreover, he completes the sentence by saying that all these forms of meaning, including God, ‘continually progress and develop’, so there cannot be anything absolute and finished about them; they too are grounded in the human spirit, they are products of unending human endeavour.

All this is very reminiscent of Chekhov himself, who has been paradoxically described by Harvey Pitcher as a ‘devout humanist’. One of my favourite letters of Chekhov was written to Diaghilev on 30 December 1902 and contains this:

Modern culture is the beginning of work in the name of a great future, work that will continue for tens of thousands of years perhaps, in order that, if only in the distant future, humanity will know the truth of the real God — i.e. not hazard guesses about this truth, not look for it in Dostoyevsky, but know it clearly, just as humanity discovered that two times two is four.

George refers indirectly to this letter in one of his footnotes, and it may well have influenced him in writing his last paragraph.

* * *

Interestingly, the cover of the second edition of Two Plays by Tchekhof, published like the first by Grant Richards, is green, not red. So if you ever come across a copy of the book without its title page, the colour of the cover should be diagnostic. A quick clincher, however, would be whether page 24 looks like this:

Cast lists as they appeared from the second edition onwards

As long as the cast lists are on page 24 and consist of three sets, as above, you may be sure it is the second edition, because when the first edition appeared on 29 January 1912 the London production featuring Lydia Yavorskaya as Nina had not taken place. The verso of the second edition’s title page says ‘Second Edition . . October 1912‘, and by then the London production had come and gone.

Lydia Yavorskaya, c. 1910

The launch of Two Plays by Tchekhof was cleverly crafted by Grant Richards, and George himself contributed to its marketing. In December 1911 Yavorskaya had staged the first London production of Gorky’s On the Bottom of Life. She had probably met George through the Stage Society. She invited him to give a lecture on Gorky in the theatre and it drew a large audience. In return, George persuaded her to act in a performance of The Seagull at the Little Theatre with that theatre’s actress-manager, Gertrude Kingston. The performance was timed as close to the publication of George’s translations as Yavorskaya’s theatre engagements would permit — Sunday 25 February 1912.

A biography of the bisexual and magnificently outrageous Lydia Yavorskaya (1871-1921) would be sensational. Having abandoned her first husband in Kiev, she rapidly slept her way to the top of the Moscow theatre. Chekhov was both attracted and repelled by her. He had a brief affair with her in 1894 and it was rumoured he was going to marry her. Instead, she created priceless publicity by marrying Prince Vladimir Baryatinsky in scandalous circumstances. She was mendacious, manipulative, determined and very hard-working. The Prince’s opinion was: ‘You either adore her or you can’t stand her.’

But as Chekhov himself said, she was intelligent. She had been professionally coached with her stage English, but was not going to perform in The Seagull until she was sure that George’s translation was bona fide. She seems therefore to have taken herself off to Brighton, where her great friend Kropotkin lived (Yavorskaya was very left-wing), and asked him to vet it, as his English was excellent and he knew Chekhov’s work well. Quite possibly it was as a result of this process that the performance was postponed a month, to 31 March 1912. However, without Kropotkin having pointed out a few errors of translation in the first edition, and supplied a new footnote, George might not have revised Two Plays by Tchekhof for the October edition at all.

There is an intriguing sentence tucked away in one of George’s footnotes that suggests he had sussed Yavorskaya. She discreetly put it about London’s theatrical world that Chekhov had written The Seagull for her and that she was Chekhov’s original Nina. In fact she had turned down the play and the part in Russia and Chekhov’s friends recognised her as, in Aleksei Bartoshevich’s words, ‘the prototype of the cabotine [ham actress] Arkadina’. Now, in London at the age of forty-one, she was insisting on playing the teenage part. George concludes his footnote on the kind of ‘star’ actress Arkadina was: ‘In The Seagull Arcadina [sic] would have insisted on playing Nina.’

Ouch.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Edwardian marriage, Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, biographies, biography, comments, Diaghilev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, George Calderon, Gertrude Kingston, Grant Richards, Harvey Pitcher, Kittie Calderon, Little Theatre, Lydia Yavorskaya, Maksim Gorky, Prince Baryatinsky, Taoism, The Seagull, Two Plays by Tchekhof | Leave a comment

‘Yes, but — ‘

Posted on September 2, 2016 by Patrick Miles

The reason I suspected it was Kittie who changed George’s words about the meaning of life at the end of his Chekhov Introduction when she edited his selected works, was that she could rarely resist expressing her own views on religious belief when George committed himself in writing on the subject. A prime example is her comment literally on a letter that George wrote to her on 21 October 1903 following the death of Vincent Corbet.

Vincent Stewart Corbet, c. 1895

Vincent Corbet was the extremely lovable elder son of Sir Walter and Lady Caroline Corbet, and the latter (‘Nina’) was Kittie’s soul-mate. Vincent had been a page boy at Kittie’s wedding to Archie Ripley in 1895. He died of appendicitis at Eton College on 17 October 1903, aged thirteen. Quite apart from the fact that Vincent was the heir to the baronetcy, he had always been loving and protective to his younger brother Jim, he was a popular boy at school, and adored by his parents. The effect of his death on the Corbets and their wide circle of friends can therefore be imagined.

A first service for Vincent was held at Eton on 19 October. Three days later, a full funeral and interment took place at the Corbets’ ancestral home of Moreton Corbet in Shropshire. Nina sent Kittie a red leather wallet containing the order of both services and embossed in gold ‘K.C. 1903’. There is no doubt that Kittie attended the funeral.

The reason George did not, is probably that he was nervously exhausted after completing Dwala and was anxiously waiting to hear from Smith, Elder & Co. that it had been accepted. His health at this time was unstable. On the other hand, although he knew Vincent well, he may have wanted not to intrude on Kittie’s special relationship with Nina.

But on 21 October he wrote Kittie a long letter from Heathland Lodge:

My dear Kee, You will get this just about the time of poor little Vincent’s funeral. That over they will all be able to settle down to a dull progression of getting used to it; a feeling of finality. The great thing to go on is certainties. One thing certain is that a sweet and definite little personality has existed, and is so much to the good; whatever is lost in the future, the past is not lost and is all pure gain — the loss of the future is a miscalculation of the unknowable; the past remains, unspoilt by any of the chances of maturer life.

This letter is a model of George’s technique when responding in writing to births, engagements, bereavements, strong feelings, sudden revelations, unforeseen developments etc. He usually begins with something so ‘in your face’ as to be almost offensive — as here — but it shakes the addressee out of any ingrained mood or conventional feelings that they may have adopted, which means that he has got their full attention and can then express himself more reasonably:

Any comfort that can be found more than that verges into uncertainties. Clerical comforts will not stand abrupt strains: it must be with survivors as it is with people dying; they suddenly doubt the clerical comfort — so a parson has told me, so far as concerns dying people — though certainly he put it in the form of a sudden onslaught of the Devil. Every man and woman must have onslaughts of Agnosticism when brought closely face to face with the hard fact.

This was the end of George’s paragraph and ‘all’ he had to say on the subject. But it was too much for Kittie. At some point (probably after she returned to Heathland Lodge, as she seems to have used George’s own pen!) she wrote in the space that followed, in an unwontedly neat and precise hand:

(Yes, but the Love of God asserts itself to the inner consciousness at such times — not our faith, but the power of God and his love. K.)

They had had long discussions about religious belief, established religion and Christianity before they became engaged in 1899, and they agreed to differ on the subject. Kittie even said in later life that George’s practical christianity (sic) sometimes made her feel like a pagan. Clearly, though, here she felt she must record her view in opposition to George’s, possibly for George himself to read, possibly just for posterity.

But in fact George had not said his last word. He had said all he wanted to in an ‘objective’, ratiocinative, dry and infuriating manner, but he continued:

Give Nina my very best love and sympathy. Vincent presents himself to me most vividly in his bedroom, just in bed, me visiting him — I think by invitation; perhaps not. Eagerly playing the host, entertaining me, keenly watching me, hoping he could please: showing me his Waverley Novels — pointing the way to them rather, from his bed — asking me how I liked the wallpaper, which he had chosen; sorry when I went; blinking in a quick way when the words were trying to get out.

My own feeling is that when Kittie, and perhaps Nina, read this, it slayed them. After the outrageously knowing male lecture on death, George had turned his deeper, artistic side on. He so often finished letters of this kind with a supreme act of empathy. Through its combination of tentativeness and eidetic recall, his description of Vincent enacted what he had written at the beginning of the letter, namely that ‘the past is not lost’: George’s own words had brought Vincent ‘alive’ again for his reader(s).

In 1905 George numbered off three hundred pages of a thick exercise book that was intended to be the first in a series examining chapter by chapter the ‘canonical books of the Christians, in chronological order; so far as one can easily arrive at it’. The project seems to have been his personal fundamental attempt to consider the evidence for Christianity, and especially the divinity of Christ. He abandoned it after fifteen pages. Kittie then turned the book upside down and used it from the new front for the homilies and lessons she gave her Sunday School children!