Ukrainian journal

Posted on August 1, 2024 by Patrick Miles

27 June 2024
A Russian opposition group called the Congress of People’s Deputies, consisting of over sixty exiled politicians who were once MPs in the State Duma, has met this week in Warsaw to discuss their plan to overthrow the Putin regime. They argue that it can only be done by force and this means assassinating key oligarchs and propagandists, presumably culminating in Putin. The group’s military wing, the Freedom of Russia Legion, has already killed two important pro-Putin figures inside Russia. The Congress’s ‘Victory Plan’, whilst also calling for tougher sanctions and more weapons for Ukraine, states that ‘it is no longer an option but simply the duty [of the West and NATO] to encourage revolutionary action’ within Russia. They argue that it is morally justified.

One can see that it might be morally defensible in the state of brutal war that exists between Russia and Ukraine, on the analogy, say, of the assassination of the architect of the Holocaust, Heydrich, in a joint British-Czechoslovak operation. But, quite apart from the fact that we did not think it politic to kill Hitler during the War, I’m afraid that in the perspective of Russian history it would be a very bad idea indeed to unleash a campaign of assassinations inside Russia. Impatient for ‘progress’, in 1879 the Russian Populist movement split into two parties, of which ‘The People’s Will [or Freedom]’ was dedicated to assassinations. International terrorism as we know it today is traceable to this development. Lenin and the Bolsheviks inexorably followed suit. The last thing any Russian political party should be doing today is perpetuating Russia’s 150-year-old cycle of party/state violence, which is simply a death cult that mutates into genocide. The Congress of People’s Deputies is falling into a trap. I would much rather hear from them what structures they are going to create when in power to ensure the survival of democracy, the rule of law and an open society in Russia for longer than the usual ten minutes.

It is also depressingly predictable that Russian oppositionists are telling the West that it should be solving Russia’s political problems for it (‘no longer an option but simply the duty’). This is what I call Russia’s ‘Invited Ruler Syndrome’, going back to the supposed founding of Rus’ when foreigners were implored to come in, ‘rule and reign over us and establish order’. It was the father of cop outs. Under communism both dissidents and emigrés demanded of their western sympathisers that the West transplant democracy for them and massively invest in their country; then Russians changed their minds and decided the West was interfering. Nothing is really going to change in Russia until they themselves want real democracy and they themselves establish and safeguard it.

29 June
Another lesson that Russia’s nineteenth century history offers us is that defeat in the Crimea (1856) can lead to rapid political and social change. I am convinced that if Ukraine could swiftly recapture Crimea it would precipitate the end of Putin’s regime and the war. One can see how it could be done, as Crimea is attached to Russian-occupied territory by a not too wide neck in the north and the very vulnerable Kerch Bridge in the east. The Ukrainians have now sunk most of the Russian Black Sea Fleet and the rest of it is holed up in the Azov Sea and Havana Harbour. God forbid they should attempt to retake the peninsula with seaborne landings à la Gallipoli. But they are slowly disabling Russian air bases on Crimea and one can see that a surprise multi-directional attack involving drones, missiles, special operations and an invading force from the north could succeed. However, the Russians have (apparently) packed Crimea with troops, and the Ukrainians simply would not be able to rustle up a big enough crack force to take it. That, of course, is Ukraine’s direst need now: people for their army. How long can they go it alone?

In an article in the Spectator today by Ivan Krastev, political scientist and founding member of the European Council on Foreign Relations, he argues that fear of a declining population is actually what has driven Putin’s military operations. At its present rate, Russia’s population of 146 million is projected to fall to only 140 million in 2039. ‘The biggest single boost in recent years came when the country annexed Crimea in 2014, adding 2.4 million inhabitants.’ Certainly, demographic need is entwined with Putin’s messianic fantasy of restoring the Russian Empire. Putin has only his own criminality to blame for Russia’s human hollowing out: 600,000 of its citizens have left the country since 2022, at least 150,000 Russian soldiers have been killed so far, in 2010 a respectable poll in Russia indicated that 73% of the population did not want to live in their own country. Mind you, the drain started ten years before Putin came to power: between 1990 and 2010 four million Russians emigrated to the USA — over 1% of the latter’s population.

One wonders what there is left to like in Crimea. Small businesses, especially IT start ups, soon left in 2014 faced with Russian interference and expropriations. Now, according to Twitter, even resorts like Koktebel’ are empty. In the Soviet period, it seemed, everyone could take a cheap holiday in Crimea offered by their workplace. I visited Yalta in the summers of 1970 and 1973. The most sunny, colourful, inspiring place was Chekhov’s villa and garden, where I was shown around on my own by a wonderful friend of his sister’s. Of ‘sunbathing’ on Yalta’s uncomfortable slate beach I have only monochrome memories:

Yalta beach, June 1970

15 July
Budanov, Ukraine’s military intelligence chief, has warned today that Russia is preparing another attempt to invade from the north and take Kyiv. He is doubtless right and NATO is well aware of it. Quite simply, because Russia does not have a problem with cannon fodder and is running a war economy (about 40% of government spending), it could well mount an attempt to reverse the fiasco of its armoured column assault of 2022. Again because of Ukraine’s shortage of troops, it is feasible that the Russians capture at least a northern swathe of Ukrainian territory, if they don’t actually reach Kyiv. It would be yet another front for the Ukrainians to fight. I want Trump’s ‘Peace Plan’ as little as Zelenskyy or the Ukrainians do. But it looks increasingly doubtful that enough hardware alone can be supplied by the West fast enough for Ukraine to inflict defeat or a stalemate. We are helping the Ukrainians fight but not win, as the saying goes. If Ukraine continues to lose the ground war, the only solution is for the sovereign countries of the US, Poland, Britain and France to send their soldiers in — not ‘NATO troops’, you understand. According to a Polish government source, the Americans have already threatened to ‘defeat the Russian occupiers with superior American conventional forces if Putin attacks Ukraine using nuclear weapons’. We need here to define ‘A Third World War’ as a nuclear one of mutual assured destruction, not as the offensive participation of Ukraine’s allies’ ground forces in the defeat of the Putin fascist state by conventional means.

Kyrylo Budanov: a tough nut

20 July
Yesterday Zelenskyy addressed a meeting of the British cabinet — the first foreign leader since Bill Clinton in 1997. His key message was the need for his de facto allies to ‘permit’ Ukraine to launch long-range missiles into Russia to destroy the bases from which Russian missiles have reduced Ukraine’s electricity output by 61% and killed hundreds of civilians. His message at the European Political Community Summit the day before was the same. At the NATO summit the week before, Zelenskyy’s thrust was the same. There, Starmer told Zelenskyy that the UK’s military aid, including (Anglo-French) Storm Shadow missiles, could be used as the Ukrainians saw fit. Next day, a Ministry of Defence spokesperson said that ‘the policy on this has not changed’. So is NATO permitting Ukraine to use these long-range missiles defensively-aggressively, or not? Can Ukraine do with the Anglo-French missiles what Starmer has ‘permitted’, or not? Can the UK take unilateral decisions where the Ukrainian war is concerned, or has it to abide by a NATO consensus partly determined by decisions like Germany’s refusal to hand over Taurus missiles in case they are ‘used to hit targets in Russia’? Is NATO brain dead as Emmanuel Macron warned five years ago? Can it win a war already being waged against it?

If Trump wins in November, what price the EU’s and NATO’s repeated promise to stand by Ukraine ‘for as long as it takes’? If they should break it now…as Hamlet said.

27 July
Putin’s purge of the military goes on. Shoigu was moved sideways from being Minister of Defence, Gerasimov seems under threat since his deputy was detained pending trial, and at least four other top brass have been arrested. As far as we know, none have been shot, so the comparison with Stalin is not quite exact. They have ostensibly been removed because of corruption. From day one of the ‘special operation’, however, I have never been convinced that the Russian general staff’s heart is in it. They project a kind of deep stupor. They were never warned about the invasion in advance and Putin’s intelligence men were so wrong about Ukraine’s morale that they made the military look fools. Soldiers don’t forgive that. I still believe that a younger generation of generals could mount a coup. There is no tradition of that succeeding in Russia; historically, it has been members of the aristocracy who have taken things into their own hands — i.e., today, oligarchs.

31 July
What are Russia’s writers doing, people might ask, why aren’t they protesting against the war and the regime? To ask that would be the height of naivety. At the start, along with scores of Orthodox priests, writers did speak out, loudly and bitterly. But they have been forcibly gagged or terrorised into silence by Putin’s martial laws. Last week Yevgeniia Berkovich was jailed for six years for her poems about the war. Others have simply gone to live abroad like the hilarious satirist Viktor Erofeev, who declared: ‘I didn’t leave Russia, Russia left me.’ Russkii dom (‘The Russia House’) seems culturally empty. It indeed gives you the feeling of those bleak, monochrome photos of Stalinist Russia. OK, then, I’ll end with a colour photograph I took of the windows of Chekhov’s study in his house Buiurnuz (Tatar for ‘As You Like It’) at Yalta; a house with inimitable, unforgettable feng shui.

Yalta, July 1973

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Adolf Hitler, Anton Chekhov, assassinations, Buiurnuz, comments, Congress of People's Deputies, conventional forces, Crimea, Donald Trump, Evgeniia Berkovich, Freedom of Russia Legion, Gallipoli, genocide, Ivan Krastev, Keir Starmer, Koktebel', Kyiv, Kyrylo Budanov, NATO, nuclear war, Populism, Reinhard Heydrich, Russia, Sergei Shoigu, terrorism, The Crimean War, The People's Will Party, Ukraine, Valerii Gerasimov, Viktor Erofeev, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, Yalta | Leave a comment

A second Family Bible

Posted on July 15, 2024 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Laurence Brockliss, Emeritus Professor of History at Oxford University, is no stranger to Calderonia’s followers. For ten years he and his research team worked to create a relational database that crunched biographical information from online sites, archives, newspapers and other sources, on 750 families and 16,000 individuals across Britain throughout the nineteenth century. In guest posts for us, Professor Brockliss used some of the findings to refocus sharply our ideas about George Calderon as a journalist, about George and Kittie’s marriage, and above all about what the ‘Edwardian Age’ and ‘Edwardianism’ really were. This odyssey of ‘digital history’ has now been published.

The professions that the book addresses include the traditional three of the Church, Law and Medicine, but it was in the decades 1840-8o that the ‘modern’ professions were born, and between 1851 and 1911 the number of British ‘professionals’ rose from roughly 275,000 to nearly a million — ‘more rapidly than the population as a whole’ (p. 6). Thus the book is dealing with nearly forty professions that were either recognised or coming into being during the Victorian and Edwardian periods, from accountants to vets. Its ‘cohort’ of male professionals from eight British provincial towns originates in the 1851 census, from which the study extends ‘longitudinally’ between the end of the eighteenth century and the mid-1920s by tracing the 750 families over four generations. Nor are women remotely excluded! Although expanding, the number of professions that women could work in during this period was severely limited (unbelievably, nursing was not recognised as a profession), but since this is a study of families women feature on nearly every page. A whole fascinating chapter 9, ‘Wives and Daughters’, is devoted to them.

This is a statistical study with lots of tables, but it is no exaggeration to say that it is a truly vibrant book — for two contrasting reasons, of which the second strikes me as unusual and highly skilfully managed. On the one hand, the authors analyse and evaluate their statistics most judiciously. It is a sheer pleasure to follow them weighing evidence, considering hypotheses, playing with arguments, arriving at their own conclusions, which are all the more convincing for their empirical basis. And these conclusions often shake up the historical orthodoxy and our stereotypical notions of the Victorians and Edwardians.

For instance, in reality there was no strict system forcing the eldest son into his father’s profession, and among the professionals there was astonishingly little snobbery about occupations in trade and manufacturing; ‘any hard division between the professional and the entrepreneurial or capitalist class was an illusion’ (chapter 2, ‘Male Occupations and Career Mobility’, p. 80). Being a self-employed professional was precarious; there was a vast range in professionals’ income; the ‘extraordinary conclusion’ is that ‘virtually all the better-off cohort families became poorer, not richer, over time’ (chapter 3, ‘Male Family Members and Intergenerational Wealth’, p. 120). Families tended to be attached to their home ground, for cultural and networking reasons, and it was ‘only in the third generation that the regional attachment of the majority of cohort families began to break down’ (chapter 4, ‘Moving About’, p. 147). ‘Membership of a church in some form or other was all but de rigueur’ (p. 220); no more than 15% of the cohort were ever involved in national or local affairs; the cohort’s enthusiasm for pursuits outside the home ‘waned dramatically’ among their sons, and their grandsons seemed only interested in sport (chapter 5, ‘Male Leisure’). Where ‘Family, House, and Home’ are concerned (chapter 6), popular beliefs are overturned by the fact that nearly 90% of men married and the average age of marriage was as high as ‘just under thirty’ (p. 227); moreover, the Victorian/Edwardian nuclear family was ‘porous and […] many households, for a time at least, contained permanent visitors [!] whose presence complicated the traditional picture’ (p. 241). Chapter 7, ‘Fathers and Sons’, radically revises notions of the importance of public schools and Oxbridge in this period; for a variety of reasons even the richest professional families were content to send their sons to a local grammar school. Divorce or annulment was ‘fairly rare’ (p. 333), almost every marriage was ended only by death, and the family really was as strong a social unit as we probably expected: ‘A close circle of relations and friends provided a network of succour and comfort which helped individual families through the bad times as well as the good’ (chapter 8, ‘The Domestic Circle’, p. 368). Chapter 9 is replete with new fact-based insights into women’s lives, from which the authors draw the conclusion that the strictly gendered ‘separate spheres’ conception of nineteenth century British society is inaccurate. This is important, because ‘separate spheres’ was the main argument of the Edwardian anti-suffragists (of whom George Calderon was one). Similarly, in chapter 11, ‘Concluding Remarks’, it is shown that the professions were not a separate ‘class’ as many social historians have asserted, and that the term ‘middle class’ itself is an ‘overused and often hackneyed social referent’ (p. 470).

By profession I am not a historian, but I would put money on this book shaking up their cohorts. It is the first statistical study of its kind. The team behind it deserve our sincere thanks and congratulations on their stupendous effort.

Something that I am, perhaps, better qualified to comment on, is its nature as writing. This is the ‘second reason’ for its vibrancy. Brockliss’s and Smith’s prose never stops punching forwards. There is an admirable and amusing robustness to their style (‘he idled his life away’, ‘died worth £54’, ‘quick descent into drudgery and poverty’, ‘she hit rock bottom’, ‘both families need a leg-up’, ‘egregiously disloyal’, ‘she was no shrinking violet’ etc). The authors discuss how the novelists of the period have influenced our perceptions of its professionals (pp. 12-15), and they reference Dickens, Austen, George Eliot, Gissing, Trollope and others throughout. But the authors themselves have produced a kind of novel: beneath the surface of the statistics and historical analysis, as it were, flows the life of the myriad individuals named, whose biographies are skilfully narrated, either piecemeal from chapter to chapter or at some length in self-contained paragraphs, and whom you get to know, become involved with, believe in the warm existence of. To create a statistical study that is so humane, a human comedy in itself, is a rare achievement; I can only conclude that Brockliss and Smith have been appropriately influenced by the Victorian novelists they have read. I defy anyone, for instance, to forget the stories of ornithologist John Latham (p. 371), or Dennis Henry Wickham (p. 449), or Thomas S. Boase (p. 452), not to mention John Stanhope Baines, whom we featured in 2020.

Of particular interest to Calderonians would be chapter 10, ‘The First World War and Beyond’, which traces the lives of the cohort’s descendants in the Great War and after. There are marvellous sidelights — for instance that the empirical evidence ‘would suggest there was widespread reluctance to play the hero’ (p. 430) — but the authors also address major, familiar issues about the interpretation of the War and its aftermath generally. Amongst the cohort’s descendants, the war was not ‘a Damascene moment’; you might have expected some of them to ‘lose their faith and others to have been radicalized’, but ‘no clergyman in the third generation abandoned the cloth, and no grandson is known to have become a pacifist’ (p. 448). But was the War a watershed in these families’ history? Most survivors went back to their pre-War occupations, and the digitized information suggests that ‘there was no visible alteration to the rhythm of their family life’ (p. 451). On the closing pages of this chapter the authors movingly describe the ‘visceral feeling of loss’ that still existed in British families marking the recent centenary of the Great War, and how the War was commemorated; not so much officially, as ‘by the people’. It is very gratifying to see Andrew Tatham’s book singled out for praise here.

Thanks to online computer databases, more people are researching their family history than ever. In the past, the family tree with its births, marriages and deaths used to be inscribed on the inside covers of the Family Bible. I suggest that any family that has had Victorian-Edwardian antecedents who were in the professions should immerse themselves in Brockliss’s and Smith’s book — and keep a copy beside the Family Bible.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian marriage, Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Andrew Tatham, Anthony Trollope, biographies, career mobility, Charles Dickens, Dennis Henry Wickham, digital history, Edwardianism, Edwardians, Family Bible, family histories, George Calderon, George Eliot, George Gissing, Harry Smith, Jane Austen, John Latham, Kittie Calderon, Laurence Brockliss, occupations, Oxbridge, professionals, professions, prosopographical studies, prosopography, public schools, relational databases, The Edwardian Era, The Great War, Thomas S. Boase, Victorians, women, World War I | 4 Comments

‘Immaturity’ and ‘youth’ in poetry

Posted on July 1, 2024 by Patrick Miles

I was amused (for reasons about to emerge) that the first hit I had for my last post, ‘Quetzalcoatl’, came from Mexico…but I was astonished that no-one wrote in to ask why on earth the poem was called ‘Quetzalcoatl’ and what it is all about. Perhaps you are all too polite! For, although I headed it ‘Poem after a summer rain shower in Moscow, 1970’, the context was surely so opaque as to make the poem impenetrable.

A poem written by a young person that has no common context with the reader, that is therefore pretty incomprehensible to a reader, and seems to have been written only for the poet’s satisfaction, is an immature poem; and ‘Quetzalcoatl’ is just that. After the longest, coldest and most depressing winter in Moscow that I ever experienced, even the Russian spring was so violent as not to lift the spirits much. But a sudden, soft, sun-soaked shower of rain in early summer, complete with rainbow, was, as they say, an epiphany. Before me was a dusty Moscow square. Heady with joy, I imagined the arc of the rainbow zooming down into the middle of the square, as in a cartoon, or comic (‘shh-tunk!’).

And what would it do next? Well, it was the incarnation of all colours, defying all the grisaille of Moscow and, frankly, Soviet life, so this creature would dance! And as soon as I saw it doing that before me, I thought of Quetzalcoatl, the radiant ‘plumed serpent’ Mexican god, who was a happy, joyful, dancing god amongst so much Aztec fatalism, morbidity and death. He threw his bird beak in the air (‘beakproud’) and shook all his gorgeous, quetzal bird feathers (‘the jewels flew’).

But — I jest not — this is a political poem. The rainbow took shape for me as Quetzalcoatl because I had been translating (in Moscow) a book from German for Cambridge University Press about the Spanish Conquest of South America, so I was very aware of Quetzalcoatl’s place in the Aztec pantheon. He was opposed to human sacrifice. As a twenty-two-year-old in the USSR, I felt I was living in another society that was built on human sacrifice (the genocide of Stalinism was actually presented by some Russians as a ‘necessary’ sacrifice for the Communist future). Therefore when in the second half of the poem the rainbow takes on Quetzalcoatl’s other nature — as a snake — and ‘eels’ through hearts, he is ‘lacing’ together again those hearts that were ripped out and flung on the Aztec/Soviet altars; healing them in enactment of his new faith of life and joy.

Alexander Pushkin as a fifteen-year-old schoolboy. An 1822 engraving by G.-J. Geitman from a drawing made from life at the Imperial Lyceum by an unknown artist.

Obscurity, not to say pretension, combined with extreme ‘Romantic’ solipsism (‘written for your own satisfaction’) are what marks an immature poem. But ‘immaturity’ in poems is not the same as mere ‘youth’, because you find immaturity in quite old poets! The clearest example of a body of ‘young’ poems that I can think of in literature is Pushkin’s hundred or so ‘Lyceum Poems’, which were immensely popular in his lifetime. They were written between the ages of fourteen and eighteen, so they are by definition ‘young’. But they are not ‘immature’, because they are always free of pretension. They sparkle with wit, self-irony, verve and virtuosity. Consequently, they give an impression of surprising maturity. On the other hand, he did keep revising them up to the age of thirty…

‘Quetzalcoatl’ is an immature poem — mercifully short — but I would never deny that its sense of excitement, its pace, its genuine spontaneity, breathe youth — my own. Although it was writtten down over fifty years ago, I recognise an authentic youthful energy in it, which is why I have chosen to include it in my collection The New Dark Blue Cowboys and foreground it against such a fantastically vibrant painting of Kandinsky’s.

Postscript: I’ve never read D.H. Lawrence’s novel The Plumed Serpent, although I had read his Mornings in Mexico long before I went to Russia, and loved that book.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Pushkin, Aztecs, Communism, D.H. Lawrence, G.-J. Geitman, genocide, human sacrifice, immaturity, Imperial Lyceum, Joseph Stalin, Lyceum Poems, Mexico, Moscow, poetry, quetzal, Quetzalcoatl, rain, rainbows, Russia, Spanish Conquest, The Plumed Serpent, USSR, Wassily Kandinsky, youth | Leave a comment

Poem after a summer rain shower in Moscow, 1970

Posted on June 17, 2024 by Patrick Miles

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged allegory, Aztecs, cannibalism, D.H. Lawrence, dance, human sacrifice, Mexico, Moscow, Painting with Green Centre, Plumed Serpent, poems, political poetry, Quetzalcoatl, rain, Russia, summer shower, The Plumed Serpent | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 29

Posted on May 15, 2024 by Patrick Miles

5 April 2024

I have received from a cousin the above image of our grandfather’s regimental sword. This plate on its scabbard seems to supply some context to what I knew about his military career. He joined up in 1894 when he was nineteen, and would normally have retired after twenty-one years. His military record, however, tells us that on 2 June 1914 he was ‘permitted to continue in the Service’ beyond that and was promoted to Regimental Sergeant Major on 25 August 1914. He was discharged on 15 December 1919. It rather looks, then, as though the Northamptonshire Regiment decided they would need him in the war that was widely anticipated (and only two months away), so they held out to him the prospect of becoming their RSM if he stayed on with them; which he did, and by July 1918 they appreciated his contribution warmly enough to present him with this sword. We know from his record that he did not go to the Front, he stayed at regimental HQ Northampton on the parade ground. So he must have been mainly employed in training the intake of (very) young officers. This would perhaps explain the family anecdote about him saying to an officer as the company which the latter was drilling marched into the distance: ‘Well say something to them, sir, if it’s only goodbye!’

I told my wife that he must have been engaged to train such men, and we both fell silent. How many of those young Northamptonshire Regiment officers did my grandfather ever see again? Alison immediately said, ‘It was like in Andrew’s book — the gaps in the photograph as they went down one by one.’ Exactly; their usually brief lives after leaving the parade ground for the Front, whether Loos or the Somme. As vital sources to the chapter about George Calderon’s military career in my biography of him, between 2014 and 2018 I read an awful lot of books about the First World War. But six years after the centenary I am more convinced than ever that the two most meaningful and permanent books to have come out of it are Andrew Tatham’s A Group Photograph and I Shall Not Be Away Long. I thought a military historian of my acquaintance was exaggerating when he said ‘every British home should have a copy of these two books’, but he was not.

17 April
So my version of Hölderlin‘s poem ‘Wenn aus der Ferne’ was posted on this blog two days ago. To say it was much worked on would be daft — the poem was long lived with before I even started writing it down in English. Unfortunately, today I spotted a typo in it: stanza 5 begins ‘Aspect’, when it is just the completion of enjambement from the previous stanza so the word should not have a capital letter. Dear me, dear me, how on earth had I missed that? It can’t be corrected now, because the text in the post is not wordprocessed — you can’t easily do that Alcaic stanza layout in WordPress — it’s a scan of my typescript that only Blogmaster Jim Miles could set up for me in Calderonia. Possible explanations for the typo: (1) I forgot that my own convention in this translation was not to use capital letters for the beginning of each line as Hölderlin does, because I wanted a more flowing, natural look to Susette’s speech, (2) the sheer force of the capital A in ‘Aussehn’ (look, aspect, mien, appearance) as the first word of the new stanza (qua abstract noun it always has a capital letter in German) bewitched me into doing the same in English, (3) the sheer force of this extraordinary enjambement (‘Aussehn. Wie flossen Stunden dahin, wie still’…) knocked me over, suspended my typographical judgement. BUT: ‘[man] of sombre/Aspect’ grows on me more and more and I may leave it like that. The portentous use of the capital A in English suggests Susette is gently — so gently — mocking Hölderlin, in order to shake him out of his seriousness and self-absorption; and I like it, because only someone who loved him as deeply and knew him as completely as she did could do that.

2 May

Swirling koi clouds by Caitlin Pirie, The Clay Akita

The above clay brooch, 4 cm across, was given to me by Jim for Christmas. Caitlin Pirie creates modern jewellery from clay with different glazes and other materials, often with a Japanese motif as her workshop is named after the affectionate Japanese Akita dog. It looks to me from the Web that my brooch is a one-off — unique! Well, Jim couldn’t possibly have given me a more appropriate subject, as I love watching koi carp. Caitlin has captured beautifully the effect of clouds in the water which I once alluded to in a haiku. She has even enhanced that sense of the sky by placing a kind of sun in the middle. It would be interesting to know what were her own intentions.

The English anorak badges

The brooch has two pins at the back and was just asking to join the menagerie on my anorak (yes, I am an anorak and proud of it). So for a while that’s where it was. But I thought it was so fascinating and dynamic that I moved it to my desk where I can see it all the time. By the way, the solid old fish with barbels, beneath the vivid Small Tortoiseshell on my collar above, is a Tench.

5 May Another emailed expression of regret that I said I was closing this blog down on its tenth anniversary, 30 July 2024. I was beginning to hope that someone would email or Comment to the effect that they were pleased it was finishing, high time, enough is enough, get off the stage etc etc. O fallacem hominum spem! Now that my book of short stories won’t come out until Christmas, I obviously must continue beyond then, to publicise the book… I have drawn a serious lesson from all this: if you have a blog, you do not need to become tethered to it. I no longer have to post every day, as I did in 2014-15, or even every month. So relax. Keep it there, available for ‘whenever’.

13 May
I’ve received a long letter from team Foreign Office about Ukraine. It begins: ‘Russia’s assault on Ukraine is an unprovoked, premeditated and barbaric attack against a sovereign democratic state […] an egregious violation of international law and the UN Charter.’ Correct. It describes ‘a significant uplift in UK military aid — providing £2.5 billion the next financial year, an increase of £200 million on the previous two years’, as well as ‘£245 million throughout the next year to procure and invigorate supply chains to produce urgently needed artillery ammunition for Ukraine’. The UK was ‘the first European country to provide lethal aid to Ukraine and this played a crucial role in stalling the Russian advance’. Correct. The letter then details, with statistics, our deliveries of materiel and training for Ukrainian forces. For such a small country, the UK’s support is quite impressive. The last paragraph begins: ‘As the Prime Minister told President Zelensky again at the NATO Summit in Vilnius in July 2023, Ukraine’s rightful place is in the NATO Alliance.’ Ah, not so good. I do not for one moment believe NATO was courting Ukraine to join NATO in the decade before the Russian invasion, as the paranoid murderer Putin supposedly convinced himself, but this kind of prime ministerial statement plays straight into his hands. For Putin it is post facto proof and reinforces his paranoia. It is also irresponsible of NATO members like Britain to raise Ukraine’s hopes: it’s not permissible (I always thought) for a country to become a member of NATO whilst that country is in territorial dispute with a neighbour, which Ukraine is likely to be for a long time.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged A Group Photograph, Alcaic metre, Andrew Tatham, anoraks, badges, British Expeditionary Force, brooches, Caitlin Pirie, Charles Miles, comments, Foreign Office, Friedrich Hölderlin, George Calderon, haikus, I Shall Not Be Away Long, Japan, Jim Miles, koi carp, military aid, NATO, Northamptonshire Regiment, paranoia, swords, The Clay Akita, The Great War, typos, Ukraine, verse translation, Vladimir Putin, World War I | Leave a comment

Susette speaks

Posted on April 15, 2024 by Patrick Miles

Mask of Susette Gontard by Landelin Ohnmacht

For the context of this poem by Friedrich Hölderlin, see here
© Patrick Miles, 2024

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged 'If from this distance', Aether, Alcaic metre, beyond the grave, death masks, dialogue, dreams, Friedrich Hölderlin, German literature, life after death, logosphere, love, lovers, madness, mistresses, paradise, poems, poetry in translation, Susette Gontard, translation, Wenn aus der Ferne | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 28

Posted on March 25, 2024 by Patrick Miles

Costume parade after completing ‘Armageddon’ in 49.18 minutes

11 February 2024
Do not be put off trying an ‘Escape Room’ because you fear claustrophobia: you aren’t actually locked into it, you simply have to solve a series of problems (often involving locks) in order to complete a narrative within a set time and thereby regain your ‘freedom’.

Yesterday Sam2 gave me for my birthday an hour in one in Cambridge with the rest of the family. We were ‘locked’ in a very realistic space station whose task was to stop an approaching asteroid from annihilating Earth (‘Armageddon’). We had to work out in an hour how, in the absence of the incapacitated crew, to put the correct information into a large control panel that would enable us to fire a missile at the asteroid and destroy it.

To get the information, you had to notice everything around you very quickly and work out how it might be connected. Lateral thinking. Rather arithmetical at times. The four of us noted different things, then pooled our information to solve one puzzle after another. Being a family, we found working as a team easier than we had expected. At times you bounce along, at others you are stumped. We were doing very well until the last clue needed to fire the missile. It seemed that we had exhausted everything. I had noticed a tiny symbol inside a letter on a notice board that we hadn’t used. I kept coming back to it, but concluded each time that it was irrelevant. With time running out, we had to phone the games master for a clue. It turned out that the ‘symbol’ depicted the workings of an unassuming item in the room, which we had all thought was simply functional and not part of the puzzles. When we interacted with it, we could see the digits on its components that we needed to fire the missile.

Truly, I haven’t enjoyed a game so much in ages!

24 February
On Twitter a sickening video, probably taken by a drone, of a large bird of prey feeding off the neck and brain of a dead Russian soldier.

An acquaintance’s Russian friend writes: ‘Our life more and more resembles living on a desert island. Railway communications with Europe have been suspended and now the Post has announced that it’s not accepting items for abroad. There are fewer and fewer air services, and very few airline desks open in Moscow. The sanctions are impacting more and more on people’s everyday lives.’

Russians also seem increasingly insulted by the cynicism of the ‘election’. The murder of Navalnyi (a catacomb Christian) was obviously a brutal desperate measure. On television, even Putin cronies like Medvedev and Peskov are beginning to sound and look desperate.

3 March
We are now two months behind with producing my book of stories The White Bow:Ghoune, which Sam&Sam were to bring out this spring. There are all kinds of extraneous reasons for this, but the main one is that I started writing the penultimate story intending it to be 10,000 words and it is expanding towards 25,000. It could easily be made into a short novel, but I shall never go there. It’s subtitled ‘A science fiction’ and the scientific dimension, I must admit, took longer to research than I was expecting. It concerns the scents that male butterflies shower the females with during courtship. These can be smelt by humans, whereas the scents produced by the female butterflies to direct males cannot. The male of the continental Cleopatra Brimstone, for instance, scatters a scent described in a classic publication of 1945 as ‘rich and powerful, freesia’. I remember a hyperactive little colony of Green-Veined White butterflies when I was a boy that smelt subtly of lemon (1945: ‘lemon verbena’), but I did not know at the time what produced it.

Male of the Cleopatra (Gonepteryx cleopatra)

10 March
I finished the first draft of my translation of Hölderlin’s poem ‘Wenn aus der Ferne’ on 3 February and have been fiddling with it ever since. It’s time now to leave it alone…until the next time. I think I have rendered the Alcaic metre as closely as I can in English. The metre will certainly have a weird effect on some readers. But that all goes with the other-worldly, some might say ‘mad’, sense of the poem. The most unsatisfactory part of the version (for me) is that I have had very slightly to pad it with adjectives because German nouns tend to contain more syllables than English ones, leaving feet to fill. The choice of these monosyllabic English adjectives has been agonising. On the other hand, adjectives are one of the English language’s most natural strengths, so I don’t think they stick out in the translation; which I entitle ‘Susette speaks’. I will post an image of it on 15 April.

15 March
I am going through my library trying to create a bit of space here and there for new books. This morning I came upon three by a Russian prose writer whom I will not name, but who was born in 1937 and regarded in the late Soviet period as highly original, off piste and somehow dissidental. One of them, a collection of short stories, was given to me in Moscow in 1970 by a very literate Russian friend, and I understood that the book was much sought after. The second is an offprint of a long short story published in 1988 and inscribed to me by the author on his visit to Cambridge that year. The last is his first long novel, nicely published in Russia the following year (350 pages plus 50 pages of self-commentary), which caused a stir amongst Russianists so I thought I should buy it.

The sad fact is, I have tried to read these works on at least four separate occasions over the years, but never been able to get further than the first few pages. Let me leave that fact there. It doesn’t necessarily mean anything. What sticks in my mind about this author is the day — I see from his lengthy inscription that it was 19 July 1988 — that I spent taking him round Cambridge at the request of the British Council. I showed him places associated with famous Russian cultural figures, such as Newnham College where Turgenev met women undergraduates, the Senate House where Tchaikovsky received an honorary degree, the sports shop in Trinity Street above which Nabokov lived as an undergraduate, then I suppose we had lunch somewhere, although I can’t remember it, and in the afternoon he had a mission: to go to the Singer Sewing and Knitting Centre in Cambridge and buy for £130 a sophisticated sewing machine. We did this. He paid in cash and took the machine away with him, first to London then to the USSR. However, he was so well informed about the export sale of British sewing machines that he knew he could claim back the VAT on it (£20) if he filled out a special form in the shop, with his Moscow address, passport number etc, which he did. Obviously, there was no feasible means of Singer refunding him in Moscow, so the ruse was for me to give him the £20 there and then and Singer to pay me the refund by cheque later, which they did.

As it happened, I did not have an extra £20 in my wallet, so before accompanying the writer and his sewing machine to Cambridge station we went to an ATM that had recently been installed in a wall off the market. The writer had never seen such a device before and hung back warily when I went over to it. ‘What,’ he exclaimed, ‘do you mean to say people can just take money straight out of a wall?!’ ‘Well,’ I replied as I got the cash out, ‘you do have to have it there in the first place! One day, perhaps Russia will have them.’ ‘No it won’t!’ he thundered at me with sudden vehemence. ‘Russia will have a path of its own! It will always do things its own way, not imitate you in the West’. It turned into a veritable tirade. I must admit I was slightly shocked, and I remember blaming myself for making such an unguarded comment. But in retrospect I shouldn’t have been shocked. This man was a Russian ‘intellectual’ through and through, almost a parody of one in his extreme literary cleverness, and time has shown that ‘scratch a Russian intellectual and you find a Great Russian nationalist underneath’ (to paraphrase V.I. Ul’ianov).

23 March

Russian icon, 16th century

My favourite icon subject is The Myrrh-Bearing Women. This was the second earliest depiction of the Resurrection, but it became superseded by the apocryphal subject Christ’s Harrowing of Hell. Note that in the example above, the resurrected Christ is not present in the background as the ‘gardener’; he’s not there at all. In his place is a terrifying archway, with a symbolic city above it. Both archways are mouths of Hell. The angel in the foreground, the empty tomb and the haloed women are the strongest possible opposites to that nothingness and death, hence they embody the triumph of the Resurrection. For us, perhaps, it is too easy not to realise that this icon works through visual counterpoint.

Happy Easter!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Aleksei Navalnyi, androconia, Armageddon, asteroids, birds of prey, Brimstone butterflies, butterflies, catacomb Christians, Christ's Harrowing of Hell, counterpoint, Dmitrii Medvedev, Dmitrii Peskov, drones, E.B. Ford, escape rooms, games, German language, Green-Veined White, Hölderlin, icons, Ivan Turgenev, metres, Petr Tchaikovsky, puzzles, resurrection, Sam&Sam, Sam2, scents, science fiction, space station, The Cleopatra, The Myrrh-Bearing Women, The White Bow:Ghoune, Twitter, verse translation, Vladimir Putin, Vlamiri Nabokov, Wenn aus der Ferne | 1 Comment

George Calderon: A complete new work surfaces

Posted on March 4, 2024 by Patrick Miles

Garry Humphreys, author of a forthcoming book on Arthur Somervell (1863-1937), and I have now received from the archives of the Royal College of Music a link to the score of Somervell’s music for George’s ballet libretto The Blue Cloth (which means the music is now in the public domain), as well as digital copies of the typescript-manuscript version of the libretto from which Somervell worked.

Now that I have read The Blue Cloth, I can say that a number of my suppositions in the earlier post were wrong. Its title page bears the typed address ‘Heathland Lodge’, which we know was where the Calderons lived until late 1912, but that address is crossed out and ‘Well Walk’ handwritten in. Consequently, the typescript of The Blue Cloth must have been created before the Calderons moved to 42 Well Walk, Hampstead, but George worked with Somervell on the ballet after they moved. The typescript The Red Cloth, which was previously the only known copy of the libretto, bears only the typewritten address ‘Heathland Lodge’, so it must predate the version that George and Arthur Somervell worked from, namely The Blue Cloth.

This might suggest that The Blue Cloth is the ‘definitive’ text of the ballet’s libretto, but that too would be wrong! It is, in fact, simply something entirely different. The Blue Cloth is a many-times expanded version of The Red Cloth, divided into numbered acting/dancing passages with gesture-by-gesture descriptions by George and a timeline down the right-hand margin in minutes. In other words, it is the working copy for Arthur Somervell to compose his score from and this is borne out by Somervell’s jottings of bars on the typescript as in the image that follows.

Page 6 of the libretto The Blue Cloth

Moreover, we can say that The Blue Cloth is George’s working copy of the libretto too, as nearly every page (and particularly the ending) contains cuts and changes in his hand. Thus it is hardly the definitive libretto text, more a work of stagecraft-in-progress for his collaboration with Somervell. Despite the fact that The Blue Cloth postdates The Red Cloth, it isn’t a finished work for publication. The latter, ironically enough, is the almost clean typescript The Red Cloth, with George’s careful illustrations. Being earlier (1911-12), The Red Cloth must be the version he worked on with Michel Fokine and which, we know from later events (see George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, p. 434), was going into the book of George’s ballet libretti for which Fokine offered to write the preface.

To sum up, The Red Cloth (1911-12) is the slim libretto of the work, almost its barest ‘treatment’ as a ‘Comedy without words’ (its subtitle), and The Blue Cloth (1912-14), subtitled ‘A wordless Comedy’, is the full production libretto. One could say that The Red Cloth is the Ballets Russes libretto, as they were the company that it was intended for under their choreographer Fokine, and The Blue Cloth is the Moscow Arts libretto, as both Somervell and Kittie attest that the Moscow Arts was going to stage it in October 1914. I was therefore quite wrong to suggest the title was changed from ‘Blue’ to ‘Red’ because red in Russian traditionally meant ‘beautiful’; more likely it was changed from ‘Red’ to ‘Blue’ because in the Russia of 1914 red was the colour of subversion. On the front page of Somervell’s copy of the libretto, Red is crossed out of the title The Red Cloth and replaced by Blue, but to complicate matters a square label proclaims the title as ABU-NÂSI, the name of the ‘young donkey’ who plays a vital part in the plot, and ABU-NÂSI is the only title given on page 1 of the typescript of The Blue Cloth. Perhaps George’s use of an Arab word is further evidence that the ballet is a parody of Scheherazade.

Even though The Blue Cloth is a greatly expanded and sometimes radically changed version of The Red Cloth, one cannot say it is a ‘completely new work’ by George Calderon. But taken together with Somervell’s score signed and dated ‘October 1914’, it certainly qualifies as a ‘complete new work’ by George because it is so different from the text of The Red Cloth and thanks to Somervell was finished and ready to be staged.

The last page of Arthur Somervell’s score for The Blue Cloth

Plot of The Red Cloth. Setting: the harem of a Cairo sheikh in the early nineteenth century. The Sheikh (40) comes down to breakfast and is conducted to a divan by his wife Hanesha (20), who makes a fuss of him. He eats a ragout that makes him feel queasy, but still goes off to work. Hanesha and her Odalisques make merry. They take a red cloth from a coffer and wave it from a window. Hanesha’s lover Shemseddîn sees the signal and appears. Jubilation and merrymaking. Suddenly they hear the Sheikh returning with stomach gripes. Shemseddîn departs. The women tend the Sheikh, leave him sleeping, and go off to market. Enter a servant to tidy the room. He takes the red cloth, which has been serving as a table cloth, and shakes it out of the window. Shemseddîn reappears, the Sheikh rouses, chases Shemseddîn round the room, bundles him into the coffer, locks it, and goes off to seek justice from the Pasha. The women return, hear Shemseddîn’s knocking, release him, fetch the pet donkey Abu-Nâsi, talk into his ear, put him in the box, and relock it. They hear the Sheikh returning with the Pasha and executioners, and run into the garden with all their wares from the market. The Sheikh describes dramatically how he fought with Shemseddîn. The women return as if from market and Hanesha is flung before the Pasha. The Sheikh opens the coffer imprisoning his wife’s lover, to reveal it is only a donkey. ‘Everyone is astonished and then indignant with the Sheikh’, but the Odalisques explain the Sheikh’s ‘hallucination’ by ‘indigestion’, he ‘laughs heartily at his own mistake’, and the red cloth is spread on the table for celebratory food.

Plot of The Blue Cloth. The setting is still the Sheikh’s harem, but the period is later: his wife smokes cigarettes. She is called Zillah. The set is different and the blue cloth ‘hangs over gallery balustrade up R’. The Sheikh’s entry is more portentous and Zillah ‘blandishes him’. Preparation of the ragout takes up much more stage business, during which the donkey ‘wanders on’. The women are directed to act ‘Abu-Nâsi! Abu-Nâsi! Abu-Nâsi! Honour and glory to Abu-Nâsi! His bells jingle. They surround him and talk to him’ and there is even more business with him. When the Sheikh has left, feeling queasy, the women take the blue cloth from the balustrade and wave it out of the window. When Shemseddîn appears, Zillah kisses the blue cloth, spreads it on the table, and the women have a party. The Sheikh returns. After much ado and a lullaby, he falls asleep and the women go off to market. The servant shakes the blue cloth out of the window. Shemseddîn reappears.There is much more business for him this time as he plays up to ‘Zillah’ on the divan, who is actually the Sheikh. It ends the same way: the Sheikh imprisons Shemseddîn in the coffer, goes to fetch the Pasha, the women release Shemseddîn and replace him with Abu-Nâsi. They rush off with their ‘marketings’ before the Sheikh appears with the Pasha. On their reappearance ‘from market’, there is more business before the coffer is opened, the blue cloth is spread on the table for a feast of fruit, and all ends in ‘General Dance’.

One must admire Arthur Somervell for finishing the music despite never seeing George again after 4 August 1914. Mind you, he wrote in his memoirs that the action was ‘quick and very amusing’, so he must have enjoyed it (according to George’s timeline, the ballet should have lasted about 30 minutes). Somervell completed it by the middle of October 1914. At that time George was on his way to a hospital at Dunkirk to be treated for a benign enlarged prostate. He was wounded at Ypres on 29 October 1914 and returned to London on 1 November. It’s surprising that, so far as we know, he never contacted Somervell again, but we know that George’s commitment to the Front overrode so much else.

When war was declared, Martin Shaw had finished the music for George’s and William Caine’s pantomime The Brave Little Tailor but the project had to be dropped because something based on a German fairytale was no longer performable in Britain. Somervell’s commitment to George and the future of The Blue Cloth is moving: if he hadn’t kept George’s libretto and completed his own music after the outbreak of war, we would never have known The Blue Cloth existed. Let us hope that the music will be given its first performance soon, and one day the ballet.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Arthur Somervell, ballet, ballet libretti, Ballets Russes, Garry Humphreys, George Calderon, Heathland Lodge, Kittie Calderon, manuscripts, Martin Shaw, Michel Fokine, Moscow Art Theatre, Moscow Arts, musical score, Royal College of Music, stagecraft, The Blue Cloth, The Brave Little Tailor, The Great War, The Red Cloth, Well Walk, William Caine, World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

Very Old Cambridge Tales 5: ‘Stone’s Story’

Posted on February 19, 2024 by Patrick Miles

‘Will you be going to Russia again?’ I asked Stone as we arrived back at his rooms from the college dinner he had stood me.

‘Not if I can help it!’ he retorted, unlocking the door and walking straight across his sitting-room to a corner cupboard from which he produced a bottle and glasses. ‘I’m fed up with ’em. I’m fed up with Dos-toy-evsky, I’m fed up with Stalin and…and Mandelshtam and Nabokov and Solzhenitsyn! Actually,’ he called from the gyp-room, ‘it’s one of the reasons I’m glad I’ve been made Director of Studies.’

He was thirty, had completed a Ph.D. on Dostoyevsky at twenty-five, was rumoured to know seven or eight modern languages, and had lived in most of the countries of Western and Eastern Europe.

‘Ice?’

‘Water, please.’

He handed me a golden tumbler and we subsided into his low armchairs.

‘Well, you know – it’ll help me to move out of things Russian. Things Rah-shen… I can stop being The Bloke Who Knows All About Russia and become just an English Modern Linguist.’ He smirked: ‘I fancy working on Pirandello, say, and going to Italy a lot.’

From a morbid curiosity, I asked him if it was true that the recent death of someone in my own faculty, P.H. Jones, had occurred in Russia.

‘Quite.’

‘You mean old Jones died there?’

‘I mean he did, I can just imagine it, and it would kill me if I had to go back there.’

‘But it’s the last place you would ever associate with Jones! I can’t imagine him ever going abroad, even. He was notorious in the Faculty for his bon mot “Travel narrows the mind”…’

‘Oh, absolutely.’

Stone finished his glass and swirled the ice around in it at arm’s length. He mused.

‘Actually, Philemon Jones, the Grover Reader in Aesthetics, was agreeably surprised by Moscow – ’

I laughed. It was the tone of one of Stone’s ‘anecdotages’ as he called them, fantastic improvisations that he occasionally perpetrated in company and also attributed to his sojourns in Eastern Europe.

He got up and poured himself another large whisky. His face positively bubbled.

‘No, seriously – you know he was a Fellow of this college, don’t you?’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, he was agreeably surprised by Moscow when he arrived there, because…because the same afternoon, even, he had been sitting by the Philadelphus bush outside his rooms here, reading, occasionally lifting his Pimms from the little flap fitted to his deckchair, and recalling the stories he had been told about Russia at high table. He looked up, oblivious of the tourists ambling by, stared long into the sky above the court, where the black swifts were wheeling, and reflected tensely on the Aeroflot ’planes with rattling wings, the brutal confiscations at Customs, the soap-less hotels… Then, er, there was the political aspect so distasteful to him: the mythopoeia of the Left, the bogus cult of The People…’

I snorted at the unashamed hyperbole of Stone’s technique.

‘ – yet here he was, he reminded himself, and even the journey had been less barbaric than he feared. At two o’clock Eden, the Head Porter, had rung through to say that the taxi was waiting and they had put his bags in the boot. His hand hovered for a moment before drawing a stick from the stand, then, with the Burlington Magazine under his arm, he slipped out of his rooms, across the lawn, and two hours later was at Heathrow. How puzzled some of the Fellows would be to hear him praising the socialist airline, explaining that he was offered chilled lager and there were even seat-belts! His reception at Customs was unexpected, too. As he half-sauntered into the brightly lit hall, he noticed a blonde in grey uniform and white high-heeled shoes chatting to one of the customs men. At that precise moment, she looked up, stopped talking, and came over.

‘“Meester Jonns from the British Academy?”

‘He gave one of his boyish, rather endearing sniggers.

‘“Yes, I – ”

‘“You will come this way pliss.”

‘He sniggered again, but actually something in his mind gave way… Fortunately, though, the girl had been sent as his interpreter and introduced herself as Natasha. He was delighted. The customs inspection was perfunctory, a car was waiting, and he filled with fresh buoyancy at the prospect of his stay. He remembered that he had sensuous, Italian lips – ’

‘Jones?!’ I queried. ‘He was the son of a Welsh miner. Cut himself off from his parents the day he arrived in Cambridge with an Open Schol., and all that. At least, that’s what I’ve always been told. Isn’t your narration becoming un peu exagéré?’

‘No no!’ laughed Stone. ‘I swear that’s what the undergraduates in his dining society said of him! They had got this idea from his features that he had Italian, possibly Florentine blood in him.’

‘All right, all right, perhaps I never looked closely enough. The bit about his snigger was quite good, though. Go on.’

‘He remembered, then, that he had sensuous, Italianate lips and would be all on his own in this foreign country where nobody could possibly know him. However, as he held the front door of the car open for the girl, he was shocked to see long black hairs on the backs of her legs.

‘There followed the most exhilarating experience of his visit so far. The journey from Cambridge had been tedious and fatiguing. Essentially, though, when he stepped from the ’plane he felt as though he had hardly gone anywhere at all. He felt he could blink his eyes and there would be the honey-brown stone of the college court still, the fragrant Philadelphus, and his rooms. But once they were clear of the airport he was plunged into the sensation of real travel. The driver handled the car like a post-chaise, a coach-and-four! A long wall of slender, enamelled tree-trunks zoomed by, then low forms that, as he bounced about on the back seat, he took to be wooden houses; whole dimly lit villages; a jungle of tower-blocks; a single, deserted, gleaming wet street with winking neons; and suddenly they shot out into a vast square with a tractor chugging slowly across it – the centre of Moscow itself…

‘This was too much. He looked out of the back window with a humorous smile, as if to see where they had left the airport, and forgot about England altogether.

‘Of course, it was peeving and ridiculous to have to wait about to be “registered”, disturbing even to have one’s passport taken away, but what were these compared with the view from his hotel room? He gazed through a vast black window at fantastical spires, whorls and cupolas of silver, green and gold, a red flag spotlit high in the night… It was delightful. Magical!’

Stone frowned, and got up from his chair. He fetched a box of long Dutch cigars, offered me one, lit up, and walked up and down for a while, thinking.

‘Next morning P.H. rose rather late. He had a two-hour breakfast in the restaurant. At the end of it, Natasha appeared, and he stood about whilst she made ’phone calls. It seemed that the Tsar Alexander III bookplates he had come to look at did not exist. Then they existed, but could not be found. Curiously, though, he could not…mm…find it in himself to be annoyed at this uncertainty and inefficiency. He sat in the stuffy hotel lounge, wandered through the endless tourist bureaux and shops, and stood for a long time in front of a poster of a church, mysteriously captioned THE PEARL ON THE NERL. He vacantly acquiesced in the pleasantest feeling of suspension, almost as though he were slowly levitating. Then the books with the correct ex libris were found. They would be on a special desk for him, Table 44, around three o’clock. He returned to the restaurant, and by half-past two was ready to set off with Natasha to the Rumyantsev Museum.

‘Of all the unexpected things, it was terribly hot outside. Even under the brims of the Panama hat he had brought with him it was ridiculously hot, and not just hot but torrid, dry; it was a sucking kind of heat. A light haze hankered wherever you looked, and this lent things an oddly different appearance from the night before. An old woman crossing the other end of the immense square loaded down with bags, seemed to crawl along the edge of the world and disappear like a steamer or mirage over the horizon. Were the numbers on that clock-face gold? He could have sworn that last night they were electric blue. As for the red tomb of the Great Cham himself, it hardly bore looking at, it jumped so painfully into and out of the tomato-juice wall behind.

‘This “defocussing” trick, he decided, kept catching you out. That faery castle, now that he saw it in daylight, wasn’t it in fact the bastion of the new imperialism? And the strident vulgarity of the political advertisements everywhere!

‘They were walking through a dark tunnel. Forms passed, staring at his white suit and Panama from the gloom.

‘And yet, he reflected, as they came up the steps towards another huge placard, perhaps the Kulturgeist of the place could be comprehended in terms of a…a poetic of austerity, so to speak, a synthesis of Sparta and the imperial vision, a “reverse-aesthetic” in the neo-Kantian sense… The thought pleased him. After all, there was something aesthetic, in a deeper sense, about the well-pressed khaki tunic of the Communist. In a way, he ventured, his own moral sensibility was essentially Spartan, too; he would almost feel at home here wearing one…

‘However, it was now so sweltering hot that the elastic of his bow-tie was irking him. To make matters worse, strands of thick white fluffy stuff were floating on the air of the street, tickling his nose and somehow conspiring to clog his throat. They entered a dusty, bare-earth courtyard.

‘“Your objective, sair,” announced Natasha, and pointed to a low whitewashed building with a bright green roof. They negotiated a rickety revolving door. He handed over his hat and stick. The girl explained his papers to a policeman and a wizened little creature in a glass case at the barrier, pointed out the direction of the Rare Books Room and cafeteria, ushered him gently through, smiled, and was gone.

‘Philemon Jones, the Grover Reader in Aesthetics, took three steps into the Museum – and turned back. When was she going to meet him again? Where? He made towards the barrier, but the policeman moved in front, smiled, and wagged his finger. Through the revolving door our friend could just see the girl disappearing out of the gates with a young man in a white shirt.

‘A trickle of sweat seeped under his collar. He dabbed his brow, swallowed, and walked in the direction of the cafeteria.

‘There, at the end of a narrow corridor, was a bilious-coloured crypt with tables, chairs, and a muddy, pitted floor where tiles had come out. It was oddly subdued. People carrying buckled aluminium trays stopped and looked at him as though in disbelief. A few more, fainting footsteps towards the opposite doors, through them, and…he halted.

‘Inside a much smaller room than the first, a crowd – it could hardly be called a queue – of about thirty bodies was pressed up against a tiny counter, where figures like washerwomen moved in and out of swathes of steam issuing from a fissured espresso. These…bodies were unimaginably seedy-looking, abominably dressed, and coarsely-featured. They all looked like peasants, or miners. From the way that they stood and the pasty immobility of their faces, it seemed that they were quite used to their outrageous predicament. It was stifling. The deep double-glazed windows were tightly sealed against the winter, condensation streamed down the walls past a bewildered cockroach onto the concrete floor, and each emission from the hissing machine seemed to squeeze a fresh tincture of cabbage from the remaining air. A tree festooned with fluff gazed in the window from the grey courtyard.

‘“Chivovysmotrite?!” bellowed one of the washerwomen at him suddenly.

‘It was not the heat, or the fizzling racket, or the suffocating miasma that overwhelmed him. It was everything at once: the foetid smell of bodies, the steamed cabbage, images of a time long, long ago.

‘His knees were giving beneath him, but he must make it to that chair for dignity’s sake.

‘“Arglwydd arwain,” he heard flooding through his brain, “…stranets…of our own bowels, Phil boy… In Sparta once…”

‘His neck was being bound in fluff, by a snake of cotton wool, tighter and tighter. He desperately tried to unbutton his collar, but something gave a little “pop!” in his chest like a plastic cap coming off, and the last thing he saw as he swooned was a flock of swifts, wheeling slowly and so gracefully far above him.

‘Six weeks later, the body of the Grover Reader arrived back in England. When they took the lid off the zinc container, it was discovered that the corpse’s trousers had been stolen. His legs lay there stiff and white like two new broom-handles. And for years the story was told with great relish at high table, whenever the subject of Russia arose.’

I guffawed.

‘Very good, Mervyn, very good. How well, in fact, did you know Jones?’

‘Not that well at all, really.’ Stone pursed his lips and poured us some more whisky. ‘He said to me during the last election that he thought the National Front were the only genuine non-bourgeois party…’

Note: Chivovysmotrite?! means Wodderyerstaringat?!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged aesthetics, Alexander III, bookplates, British Academy, Cambridge, death, Intourist, Lenin's Tomb, Moscow, Nerl, Red Square, Rumyantsev Museum, Russia, Sparta, Very Old Cambridge Tales, Wales | Leave a comment

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 27

Posted on February 5, 2024 by Patrick Miles

16 January 2024

Friedrich Hölderlin, c. 1792, by Franz Carl Hiemer

I translated a few poems as a teenager and student (Rilke, Brecht, Hölderlin, Pushkin, Tiutchev, Mayakovsky, Yevtushenko, Brodsky), but bothered to see only a couple published. The fact was, I didn’t take verse translation very seriously. I had no desire to translate a series, or all, of a poet’s works. It was a purely experimental activity: I was seized by certain poems and felt an unstoppable urge to ‘write them in my own language’, learning a lot about metre, rhyme, register etc in the process. The original poem was the thing, not the occupation of translating poetry. Gradually the whole activity lapsed. I even came to believe no poem could be adequately created in another language, and that Henry Vaughan was right when he wrote: ‘Those that lack the genius of verse, fall to translating.’

O fallacem hominum spem! From time to time in the last eight years or so, the opening lines of a poem written by Hölderlin in his ‘Madness’ (1807-43) have spoken themselves over in my mind and I’ve gone to the whole poem and read it. There’s nothing particularly strange about this, as I take lots of poets down off my shelves and dip into them, nearly every day. This poem, however, is written by Hölderlin as though it is his lover ‘Diotima’ (Susette Gontard) speaking. It is ‘voiced’, as they say these days, for Susette, who had died at least five years earlier. She is speaking from a kind of Platonic paradise and breaks off in line 3 of verse 13. Very weirdly, I was reading the poem a few months ago when I suddenly ‘heard’ what Susette was going on to say to Hölderlin, and completed the poem (in German, and it fitted the Alcaic metre). This has never happened to me before.

So now the poem, and Susette’s voice, have taken me over and I am ‘translating’ it; writing it in English. The Alcaic (i.e. classical Greek) metre, which Hölderlin was very fond of, isn’t easy and produces weird vocal bendings in English, but that goes very well with the ethereal beauty of the poem, its leaps of syntax, sense and (some might say) sanity. The first two verses came more or less straight out in English, the rest are proceeding at about one every four days… I’m sorry I can’t give a sample, but WordPress finds it too difficult to produce the layout that is necessary to present Hölderlin’s Alcaic stanzas correctly.

I never remotely expected to be translating this poem — or any others for that matter. After working on it a few days, I begin to feel that what draws me to the challenge is that the whole poem is a tender monologue addressed to Hölderlin by someone dead, it is a supremely convincing female voice (presumably echoing how he knew Susette spoke), but the whole thing seems a dialogue between them, and yet was written by one person, Hölderlin himself — in other words there are, as it were, two utterances occupying the same space. That, I see now, is what Susette’s final words, that just came to me in German, are trying to tell him: that she may be ‘dead’ but they live together in the logosphere (Äther der Worte). I will post an image of my translation at some point…if I complete it!

20 January
Lieutenant-General Jürgen-Joachim von Sandrart, the German commander of NATO’s Multinational Corps Northeast, i.e. guarding Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, has given a long interview about the risk of Russia swiftly occupying these countries ‘a few years after a break in the fighting for Ukraine’ (today’s Times, p. 38). In my view, this could happen either after a ‘successful’ (for Putin) conclusion in Ukraine or an ‘unsuccessful’ one, as in the latter case a Blitzkrieg annexation of the Baltic states could be the price for Putin staying in power. Two years ago, I suggested NATO should always have been ready to deter an invasion of Ukraine by positioning a seriously threatening force in the Suwalki Gap (leading to the Baltic states between Russian Kaliningrad and Belarus) and another in Poland opposite Brest in Belarus. Horrifyingly, General von Sandrart confirms that NATO still is not coordinated enough to do this at the critical Suwalki Gap.

One of the most interesting parts of his interview, though, was when he said:

There is a growing realisation that deterring an attack on NATO soil is not just a job for soldiers, but a task for the whole of society. It’s not a thing we can outsource to the armed forces or the military so that the rest of society can sit back and say ‘they’re already on the case’. Quite the contrary. How resilient are our societies? Are we prepared to fight? I think we need to accept in our societies that we are fighting for our right to argue with each other.

He is absolutely right. Most people in Britain are mentally not remotely prepared for such a war. It reminds me of Churchill after the Munich Agreement coming out on the night streets of London seething with people enjoying themselves, and saying: ‘Those poor people! They little know what they will have to face.’

23 January
We have been on two long train journeys. I had forgotten how maddening the constantly repeated security message is: If you see something that doesn’t look right, speak to staff or text British Transport Police on 61016. We’ll sort it. See it, say it, sorted. The last eight words fall again and again like ball-peen hammer blows on your head. Slowly it dawns that it is effective because it is so maddening and the voice so in yer ear. The only problem is, the speaker does not dentalise the d in the last word, he glottalises it, and he thins the preceding e sound to a dull i, so that the word sounds like an imperative: See it, say it, sorti[t]. In other words, the message seems to be concluding with ‘sort it yourself’ — which is not what we want to hear, and the very opposite of the message’s intended meaning, I would have thought.

In 2019 and 2021 Hexham in Northumberland was voted on Rightmove the happiest place to live in Britain. Having just visited it, I can actually believe this. Everyone whom we had anything to do with was nice, polite, welcoming, their own person, unstressed and unintrusively conversive. Such a contrast, I felt, to the earnest ideological self-consciousness of Cambridge’s chattering classes. Perhaps it has something to do with Hexham’s smallness (about 13,000 people), the presence of deep history, its proximity to the rural way of life. The people somehow felt all at ease with it, and that was catching.

This calm sense was palpable in the Abbey, founded by St Wilfrid in 674; as present wandering around it and being helped by volunteers as at an evening Eucharist with about twenty in the congregation. The Abbey contains artefacts from the whole range of its history — and earlier. This is an image of the Flavinus Stone, nearly two thousand years old, which you see as you go in, before (I seem to recall) any Christian imagery:

Click the image to enlarge.

It’s a memorial nearly nine feet high to a Roman Standard bearer, with the inscription To the Venerated Departed: Here Lies Flavinus A Horse Rider of the Cavalry Regiment of Petriana Standard Bearer of the Troop of Candidus Aged 25, of 7 Years’ Service. Probably it had been used by St Wilfrid’s builders as part of the foundations. I won’t present the arithmetic, but Flavinus could have been born within a decade of Christ’s crucifixion. It was somehow very moving to see this young man commemorated — as it were included — in a great church of the Christian era.

30 January
With bitterness and frustration, Sam 1 (Russia) and I have decided we cannot, after all, have a Sam&Sam stall at this year’s British Association of Slavists and East European Specialists (BASEES) conference in Cambridge. We were booked for the 2020 one but that was cancelled by Covid, and for the 2022 one but that was cancelled by the invasion. This year the conference itself has not been cancelled, but we have had to pull out for a tangle of reasons. Our Russian books would (we have this on good authority) be boycotted by a hard core of Ukrainophile and Russophobe delegates. This could mushroom into an ‘incident’ which, if it got into the media, could cause Sam1 problems in Russia. In any case, he and I accept that quite apart from the active boycotters the stall would probably be regarded as in bad taste by far more delegates, and avoided, so we would hardly sell any books. We agreed in three brief emails that ‘people now look upon anything Russian with disgust. It’s a catastrophe for genuine Russian culture’. The Sam&Sam stall has been ready to go since 2020. We must simply pack it all up again and wait for peace. Some BASEES officers are more optimistic about this than I am. In the meantime, we can only hope that an advertisement in the conference literature might lead to us selling us some books online.

3 February
People ask me what my ‘frightening realism’ about Russia is based on. Well, I did live there for two and a half years under Communism; I have been reading Russian literature in the original since the age of nineteen; as a professional requirement I have had to study the whole of Russia’s history. But, essentially, I have tried to confront the full zhut’ that I objectively know the country is capable of. Just as there is hardly a concept in English to express vran’e (pathological self-deceiving mendacity), so zhut’ cannot be adequately expressed in English: it’s a combination of extreme, casual, mindless violence and treating human beings as literally things, not flinching at robbing, raping, torturing, destroying them. Understanding Russian claustrophobia and paranoia also helps.

Today I decided to post on Calderonia next time my very old (1977) Cambridge tale ‘Stone’s Story’. I was never going to, as it attracted criticism from friends at the time and I recognise it’s not a strong story, but it was specifically written to try to convey to Brits how irrational and simply deadly Russian life can be (the fact that it is set in Brezhnev’s Russia is irrelevant). There are, I promise, no more Very Old Cambridge Tales after this…

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged afterlife, Alcaic metre, Alexander Pushkin, Anton Chekhov, appeasement, BASEES Conference, Belarus, Belorussia, Bertolt Brecht, Brest, British Rail, Christian era, death, Diotima, Estonia, Fedor Tiutchev, Flavinus Stone, Friedrich Hölderlin, Henry Vaughan, Hexham, Hexham Abbey, Joseph Brodsky, Jürgen-Joachim von Sandrart, Kaliningrad, Latvia, Leonid Brezhnev, Lithuania, memorials, Munich Agreement, NATO, Old Cambridge Tales, poetry, pronunciation, Rainer Maria Rilke, Rightmove, Russia, Sam&Sam, security messages, St Wilfrid, Susette Gontard, Suwalki Gap, train travel, translation, Ukraine, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Vladimir Putin, Winston Churchill, Yevgeny Yevtushenko | Leave a comment

A stunning discovery

Posted on January 15, 2024 by Patrick Miles

Mr Garry Humphreys is writing a major book about the English composer Arthur Somervell (1863-1937), as well as compiling a catalogue raisonné of Somervell’s compositions. On 6 September last year he emailed me to ask whether I thought a typescript entitled The Blue Cloth — Abu Nâsi: A Wordless Comedy, accompanying a full score of Somervell’s incidental music to the work, was the same as George Calderon’s ballet libretto The Red Cloth: A Comedy without Words.

From the very words Abu Nâsi (which refer to a tame donkey in the script and appear to mean in Arabic ‘Father of Clarification’), I was able to say that the text Humphreys has seen at the Royal College of Music is a version of the ballet libretto The Red Cloth, which I discuss on pages 338-39 of my biography George Calderon: Edwardian Genius. The question is, of course, whether The Blue Cloth is an earlier or later version of The Red Cloth. On Garry Humphreys’s advice, I ordered a copy of the text from RCM’s archive at the end of October. Not having received it by the end of November, I reordered it and for good measure inquired about a copy of Somervell’s music as well. I am still waiting…

On the typescript that Humphreys has seen, George’s address is given as 42 Well Walk, Hampstead, whereas on the typescript that belonged to Kittie, and of which I have a copy by courtesy of Mr John Pym, the address is Heathland Lodge, Hampstead Heath. Since George and Kittie did not move from Heathland Lodge to 42 Well Walk until the end of 1912, one might conclude that The Blue Cloth is the later, even ‘definitive’ version. But Kittie’s copy, The Red Cloth, which she described as ‘very valuable’, contains changes in George’s hand as well as his manuscript cartoons accompanying the typed text, which suggests to me that it postdates The Blue Cloth and is the ‘master copy’.

George’s cartoon of the Sheikh, who thinks he has caught his wife’s lover in the coffer he is sitting on.

My theory about why the ballet was renamed The Red Cloth is that on Kittie’s copy she had written ‘This was going to be produced by the Moscow Art Theatre in 1914 when the War came’ and red would be far more attractive in a Russian title, as krasnyi (scarlet) has always been Russia’s favourite colour and used to mean ‘beautiful’. Originally, the libretto was created by George for Michel Fokine and West European performance. Because Kittie’s copy had the Heathland Lodge address on it, I concluded George had written it in 1911 or early 1912. In June 1912, however, Fokine resigned from Ballets Russes and did not come to London with the company, hence George’s offer to the Moscow Arts, which was perhaps facilitated by George’s admirer and correspondent Vsevolod Meyerhold.

The gratifying thing for me is that my hypothesis of the date of composition of The Red Cloth, as presented in the biography, and Kittie’s account of a planned 1914 Moscow Arts production (which when I first read it in the 1980s seemed implausible), are validated by this paragraph from Arthur Somervell’s as yet unpublished memoirs, written in 1935, which Garry Humphreys has most kindly shown me in his transcription:

In 1912 George Calderon called on me with a wordless play to which he wished me to write music. The scene was set in a Harem, and the action was quick and very amusing, the end being a climax of absurdity, which was very much heightened since the audience knew what the end would be before the discomfited husband, and they watched his disillusionment with ever increasing delight. Calderon said there was no hurry, as he hadn’t got the promise of a performance, but early in 1914 he told me that he had got a promise from the Moscow Arts Theatre, and that the production would take place in October of that year. I had already made a start and played him some of the beginning. Then he went to the War, and though we hardly expected it could be played in October, I went ahead with it and it was finished and scored by the middle of the month. Alas, Calderon never returned! He was reported ‘missing’ in the autumn and was never heard of again; so The Blue Cloth went on to the shelf. We were very much shocked about Calderon’s death, he was one of those men for whom I felt a real affection, although I knew him so slightly.

There is, of course, a factual error here, as George was not ‘missing’ after his wound ‘in the autumn’ at Ypres; he recovered, was reported missing after the Third Battle of Krithia, and is now known to have died at Gallipoli on 4 June 1915. But Somervell’s memoir of George, as ‘one of those men for whom I felt a real affection’, is invaluable.

Obviously, now that we have the complete music to George’s ballet The Blue/Red Cloth for Michel Fokine, and George’s complete illustrated libretto, it could be performed for the first time! (No music is known to have been commissioned for the other four ballets or ‘mimodramas’ that George wrote originally for Ballets Russes.) The Blue/Red Cloth is indeed set in ‘the Harem of the SHEIKH’s house in Cairo; early 19th Century’, its plot probably derives from one of the Tales of the Arabian Nights (although I’ve not been able to discover which), and it is a comic version of Fokine’s sensational and trail blazing ballet Scheherazade, which George must have seen in London during the 1911 and 1912 Ballets Russes seasons. I hope to return to the subject of a future premiere of the Calderon/Somervell collaboration — giving a full account of the plot of The Blue/Red Cloth — when I have received copies of the libretto and music from the Royal College of Music.

I cannot thank Garry Humphreys enough for contacting me, and wish him every success with his work on Arthur Somervell, which I am sure will be definitive and shine needed light into further corners of British music in the Edwardian period. I would hope to write about it one day on this blog. I am also deeply beholden to the trustees of Arthur Somervell’s estate for giving me permission to quote the above passage from his memoirs.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Scheherazade', Abu Nâsi, Arthur Somervell, ballet, Ballets Russes, biographies, biography, cartoons, comments, Dardanelles, Gallipoli, Garry Humphreys, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Heathland Lodge, Islam, John Pym, Kittie Calderon, Konstantin Stanislavsky, Michel Fokine, Middle East, mimodramas, Moscow Arts Theatre, The Blue Cloth, The Great War, The Red Cloth, Third Battle of Krithia, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Well Walk, World War I, Ypres | Leave a comment

NEW YEAR

Posted on January 1, 2024 by Patrick Miles

Tough Christmas chrysanths

Whether you are stalwart subscribers to Calderonia since 30 July 2014, or casual callers from across the globe to posts on, say, limericks, John Hamilton, paradoxes, the Third Battle of Krithia, dogs or Lady Chatterley’s Lover, I wish you a very happy new year.

Like a lot of people, I suppose, I remember many sermons throughout my life. But I remember each of them for one thing, not their detail: Michael Ramsay booming a long passage of Euripedes down the nave of the University church in Greek, for instance, or the local priest telling how as a curate in a women’s prison he found himself standing next to one of Britain’s most heinous killers, whose name I can’t even bring myself to write. The only sermon I recall in some detail was delivered hastily from some very small sheets of paper, standing on the sanctuary step, by Rowan Williams when he was but a curate at another local church. Its subject was ‘Freshness’.

He was glossing God’s words in Revelation 21:5 ‘Behold, I make all things new’. Of course, Williams related them to Christ’s transformative message and resurrection, but he concentrated on the sheer power of ‘newness’ and ‘freshness’ as concepts. I think the meaning of these words is really so mysterious that perhaps it can only be defined by reference to their opposites. It would take a Socrates to identify the Ideas behind ‘new’ and ‘fresh’. They are extremely potent ideas, though, and we surely recognise that in the commencement of a new year. Thank goodness, a year is a cycle, a circle, so there is always the opportunity of a new one — a new start, new events, fresh hope.

There will be at least two major new events in my life this year. First, my Anglo-Russian publisher Sam&Sam will at last have a stall at the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies international conference at Robinson College, Cambridge (5-7 April 2024). Our 2020 appearance with my Russian co-publisher, who had already bought his air tickets and visa, was cancelled along with the conference because of Covid; the 2022 conference was cancelled because of the invasion; last year’s was held in Glasgow. Our appearance this year is not without risks, because there are plenty of extreme Russophobes about and my co-publisher’s position in Russia itself is delicate. Obviously, he cannot himself attend, and I don’t want to field questions about him. But I simply have to go forward and confront these risks, as we need to sell books. I would like to sell at least thirty copies of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius at a discounted Conference price of £20 each and, say, fifty of our books in Russian: http://www.samandsam.co.uk.

Secondly — deep breath — I shall be blogging less frequently this year and closing Calderonia on 30 July 2024. To be precise, I shall cease blogging personally on that day, but the site will continue to be viewable and if there are any significant new discoveries about George’s life beyond that date I will post about them. In effect, Calderonia will turn into a text of over half a million words, a research tool, a kind of website, for interested future readers and biographers. I do hope this will not be a massive disappointment to any of you, who have been magnificently loyal followers for so long. There are many reasons for stopping now, but essentially (I hope you will agree) ten years is a pretty good run.

As King Lear (Act V, sc. 2, l. 11) puts it: ‘ripeness is all’. Or perhaps I should say ‘freshness is all’. Or as Mandel’shtam put it: ‘Flowers are immortal’. Newness is never old.

Fresh Freesias

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged archbishops of Canterbury, BASEES Conference, biographies, biography, blog announcement, Book of Revelation, Calderonia, chrysanthemums, comments, freesias, freshness, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, King Lear, Kittie Calderon, Michael Ramsay, New Year, newness, oldness, Osip Mandel'shtam, publishers, Rowan Williams, Russia, Sam&Sam, sermons, Ukraine, William Shakespeare | Leave a comment

Short story: ‘Crox’

Posted on December 18, 2023 by Patrick Miles

In memoriam John Baddeley

A dripping mass of leaves and twigs slapped across the window. The bus began very slowly to take the hill.

Near the top, in an oval of meeting branches, a horse and rider were visible, reduced to immobility by the distance, the drizzle, and the drops on the glass, as if fixed with a few blobs on a miniature.

The bus growled closer. He could see that the rider must be a girl. The animal’s bright hooves flopped through the puddles and steam fumed from its sides. But she sat completely straight, her head slightly raised, her thighs gripping firmly. As they passed, the boy glimpsed a pale, finely chiselled nose, blue eyes, and short fair hair beneath the helmet.

Lone rider!.. Dare he turn?

‘Smoking a bit heavy aren’t you, son?’ said the gaffer in the seat in front, and moved further off.

Half-term seemed really long, even if they were going back the day after tomorrow. Just a few days off, and you began to relax, to live ‘properly’, to take some pretty unusual things for granted. That blonde bombshell, for instance.

But there was the cathedral above the shingle roofs, here he was clambering down from the upper deck, now he was about to set off into the city centre to do his ‘shopping’, and –

He frowned. Opposite the bus station was the side entrance to a department store. He knew that it had an amazing modern bookshop. He looked round casually, crossed the road, and half an hour later emerged with a copy of Brave New World.

He set off in the direction of the old, unbombed part of the city, where his mother had told him to buy a new pair of black shoes at a half-timbered shop called Hartley & Brown. But then he stopped. What was wrong with buying them from Wisemans, which he had just come out of? They had a whole floor of shoe shops, strip-lit, glassy, and open plan. It would mean he need not go near the cathedral, whose presence he found oppressive. He was already a bit behind, so going back into Wisemans would buy him time.

He walked out of the lift, turned right into the footwear department, and the first thing that caught his eye was the words ‘For the Teenager’ on the wall in a far corner. He made for it over new, seemingly perfumed carpeting.

A girl, or, well, a young woman, was sitting to the right of the till with her legs stretched in front of her, her hands together in her lap, her eyes open, but apparently dreaming. He approached. With a little jerk of the head, she stood up, smiled, and came towards him. She had short, wavy black hair, a thin line of lipstick, and wore black trousers, a light-grey top, and black open cardigan, beneath which he registered small, young, but perfectly formed breasts.

‘Can I help you..?’

She smiled even more, with her bright dark eyes, and looked at him comfortably but very directly. In a flash he realised that she was only a year or two older than himself.

‘Yes. Thank you very much. I’m looking for a pair of black shoes – ’

Suddenly a large, florid man erupted through the curtain to the left of the till.

‘Can I help you, sir?’ he effused, adding: ‘That’s all right, Anita, just watch.’

‘Yes, Mr Brimley.’

‘I’m looking for a pair of black shoes for less formal occasions…’

‘Certainly, sir. And what size would that be?’

‘Nine and a half.’

The man actually closed his eyes, wrung his hands, and cocked his head in ecstasy at the ceiling.

‘We have just the shoe for you, sir. Anita, fetch the gentleman a pair of Crox size nine and half, and make them snappy, hahaha!’

The girl darted through the curtain, darted back, and handed her boss the box. He removed the lid with a flourish, rustled apart the tissue paper, and presented the creation on his open palm.

‘There we are, sir, the very latest in teenage fashion. Crox from Liverpool!’

The boy eyed them critically. They weren’t actually black, but a very dark, night blue. It was matt with sort of contour lines visible in the leather; you couldn’t polish it. And they were gussetted; no laces. They looked rather tapered, and their black rubber soles were fiercely serrated, hence, presumably, their name.

‘Can I try them on?’

‘Of course, sir, of course!’ The manager beckoned him to a foot-rest and gently, professionally fitted one for him with a horn. He pressed the toe.

‘There you are, sir, plenty of growing room, they will fit perfectly. Put the other one on, would you, and try walking about… How do you find them?’

‘Very comfortable. Very comfortable.’

‘I thought so. They suit you, sir, in fact if you don’t mind me saying so they are you!’

The boy ruminated. They were not, perhaps, what his mother had in mind, but you were allowed to wear gussets in the sixth form, and he was sure they would cost less than the money she had given him. And he would be able to wear them outside school. The bloke was right: they were ‘him’, they were slightly sneakerish and mod, his friends would ask him where he had bought them.

‘Thank you. Yes, they’re excellent. I’ll take them. How much do they cost?’

‘Anita, that will be three pounds nineteen and sixpence from the gentleman, please.’

The girl bobbed, smiled with both mouth and eyes, and went round to the till. This was more money than the boy was expecting, but even so he would be bringing his mother plenty of change. He paid. The bloke reassembled the box, slid it into a paper bag, and thrust it out.

‘There we are, sir. It’s been a pleasure to serve you!’

He had hardly walked eight paces when he heard Brimley say something to the girl about ‘butter up’. He half-glanced behind him. Brimley was disappearing through the curtain, but the girl gave the boy her nice smile.

With his two paper bags, he ambled to W.H. Smith’s and bought a German newspaper. He read it ostentatiously over lunch in an unpretentious café he knew, then smoked a miniature cigar with his coffee.

The bus home filled up rapidly. At the first village a bulky middle-aged couple got on. There were only two empty seats downstairs. The woman made it to the back seat, the man gripped the rail and swayed there with a stick.

‘Why don’t you sit down?’ she said to him.

‘I will do, when this cowboy has moved!’

The boy started. He was blocking the window seat. Presumably the bloke was referring to his artificial leather jacket. The boy got up and stood in the gangway. With a dramatic sigh, the bloke struggled to the window seat.

The boy resumed reading Brave New World, which was to be a set book. Suddenly, he remembered the shoes. He put the book back in its bag, manoeuvred the lid off the box on his lap, and parted the tissue paper. The natural light accentuated the contour lines on them and brought out the blue. They were distinctly pointed…and he wasn’t sure he liked the jagged soles after all. Crikey, now he looked at them more closely, had he made a terrible mistake? But no: they were allowed more relaxed shoes in the sixth form, and these shoes would definitely go with what he wore among his friends. No, they were what he wanted. But what would his mother say?

She caught him as he was passing through the kitchen, and exploded.

‘Those are aw-ful! What on earth were you thinking of? Or were you thinking at all in that head of yours? I can’t believe it! I gave you six pounds ten to buy a good pair of black leather lace-ups from Hartley and Brown, and you come home with winkle-pickers! Where did you get them?’

‘At Wisemans…’

‘A cheap and nasty department store! Why? Why? You can’t possibly wear those to school – ’

‘But we are allowed to wear gussets and less formal things now.’

‘Well you’re not going to! You flatly ignored what I told you, and have made me buy you a pair of vulgar winkle-pickers. They’re not even black! Why do you do these things to me?! You won’t be able to wear them at weddings, funerals, or anything else – everyone will think you’re a teddy boy!’

‘They won’t think I’m that…’

‘Well. You can take them straight back. Tomorrow. I don’t know who managed to sell you this rubbish, but you can go straight over there, demand my money back, and then go and do what I told you to.’

Drained and almost trembling, he went up to his room. Dammit…perhaps he hadn’t thought carefully enough before he bought Crox. He definitely wanted to keep them, though. He got out his National Savings book and counted the money in his wallet. He couldn’t afford them, given his other expenses. But he was in despair at the idea of persuading that fat arse Brimley to give him his money back – and he was sure Brimley had nothing ‘For the Teenager’ that he could exchange for them, so what was he going to do? It was an impossible situation. Tomorrow would be like going to the scaffold. Maybe if his mother took the shoes back, she’d be able to persuade Brimley… But she would never do that.

When the boy entered the shop in the middle of the afternoon next day, Brimley was attending to a mother and son and did not acknowledge his arrival. Anita, however, noticed him and smiled.

After an agonizing wait, Brimley saw his satisfied customers off and his eyes lighted on the boy. He beamed.

‘Well well, sir, have you come back for more? What can we do for you?’

The boy went over to the two of them and tendered the shoebox to Brimley on both hands.

‘Er, I’m afraid there is a bit of a problem, Mr Brimley… I haven’t worn the shoes, because my mother doesn’t like them.’

‘Your mother doesn’t like them?’ He was genuinely taken aback.

‘No. You see, she sent me out to buy some shoes and I bought the wrong ones. Now she would like you to take them back and…refund her money.’

‘Oh no, son, I’m very sorry, we can’t do that. I thought you were buying the shoes, not your mother! Don’t you like them?’

‘Yes, yes. I do. But you see, she gave me the money to buy a pair of black leather lace-ups…for school. And I rather forgot… My mother is… She doesn’t understand shoes like Crox.’

‘I see – I think. Where is the receipt?’

‘I…I can’t find it anywhere, Mr Brimley. I think I lost it…’

‘Well, I can’t give you any money back, and we don’t sell school wear, but I might just be able to help you. How much is your mother prepared to spend?’

‘Yesterday she gave me six pound ten and I’ve brought the change with me.’

‘Right, son. Wait here. Put the shoes over there and I’ll see if I can fix something up with one of my colleagues. I can’t promise anything. I’ll be back in ten minutes. Anita, watch the shop.’

He adjusted his tie, put on an important-morbid expression, and sailed away.

When he had gone, Anita sat down beside the till and looked across at the boy. She stretched her legs out and placed her hands in her lap as she had yesterday. In her concentration on him, however, she slid her hands down the sides of her groin. She bent forward slightly and even moved her hands up and down in the creases.

‘Good grief, what’s she doing, that’s her pubic hair, her mons Veneris,’ thought the boy in shock, but instantly knew he could never think of such a girl in that way.

She leant further forward, smiling at him with her beautiful, sensitive mouth and her dark eyes, which were as wide as wide, as still as still on him. He felt she saw directly, unwaveringly, lovingly right into him.

‘What happened?’ she asked him softly.

Happy Christmas to all our readers!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged adolescence, Crocs, Crox, fashion, half-term, love, mothers, rules, schooldays, sex, shoe shops, shop girls, short stories, smoking, taste, teenagers | 2 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 26

Posted on December 5, 2023 by Patrick Miles

7 November 2023
Ukraine must win. There is no alternative, because Putin will never offer a true peace, only a breather before making another attempt to destroy Ukraine as a sovereign state then torture, murder, deport and imprison its people. Many people still have not understood that this is what the madman wants to do. ‘Stalemate’, a ‘frozen conflict’, would be a variant of the same: a not-peace. Despite the palpable wavering in American opinion, I agree with Garry Kasparov and other voices that the defence of Ukraine is the defence of the democratic West and its values, so the West must throw everything into it. Did we learn nothing from Hitler’s predations? It is the defence of ourselves, against both Russia and China, as the latter is undoubtedly awaiting the outcome of Putin’s ‘special military operation’ before unleashing its own on Taiwan. We know that at their recent summit Putin and Xi agreed that they were going to ‘change’ the post-1945 world order ‘utterly’, which means terrorize and totalitarianise it. Russia’s war has been disastrous for Russia so far, but reports from Ukrainian generals indicate that Ukraine is running out of troops below the age at which Calderon tried to sign up in 1914 and was considered too old (45). Yet only outright Russian defeat could remove Putin and give us true peace.

I realised today that my views on what we have to do to help Ukraine win would probably shock a lot of my friends, so I had better be careful how I express some of them publicly. First, if (God forbid) Trump wins the presidential election, Europe will have to go it alone in ensuring a Ukrainian victory; again there will be no alternative, and we shall all have to hike our defence spending far above the NATO minimum of 2% GDP. It would be war by any other name, but Europe could not look itself in the face again if it let Ukraine down. Second, I agree with the White House’s former Russia director, Matt Dimmick, that it is no good ‘drip-feeding weapons into Ukraine, allowing President Zelensky’s forces to defend territory but not giving them an advanced enough armoury to defeat Russia’: we must give them the most sophisticated weapons we have, and which Russia has not, in order to save Ukraine’s young blood and win the war as fast as possible. (Dimmick rightly said as well that ‘Ukraine would be in a much stronger position if all the weapons systems the US was providing now had been dispatched at the beginning of the war’.) Third, we must call Putin’s nuclear bluff (there would probably be a revolution in Russia if he used nuclear weapons, and he knows it). We have been far too frightened of him. You may remember me saying at the beginning of the war that we should have threatened him by bringing a serious NATO force up to the Kaliningrad Gap, and positioned another opposite Brest threatening the thug Lukashenka. We should do something similar now, without setting a boot on Russian territory (that is always a fatal mistake). We have not, militarily, been anywhere near resourceful, proactive and threatening enough. I won’t elaborate.

Meanwhile, communications with Russia have become more dangerous than ever. The other day a friend of over fifty years standing simply emailed me a beautiful recent photograph of Chekhov’s and Olga Leonardovna’s graves at Moscow’s Novodevichii Monastery, with no message, no caption, sans mots, but I knew what he meant. I emailed back this image that we took last month on the seafront at Ventnor (as usual, click on the image to magnify):

The juxtaposition of Scott’s Waverley and Turgenev’s Fathers and Children on the house front is felicitous. On the other hand, as Stephan Roman puts it in his book about the Isle of Wight and Russia (p. 126): ‘Turgenev feared the power and destructive nature of Bazarov [the novel’s Nihilist hero] from the moment that he had summoned him into existence.’ Turgenev was right: Bazarov is a quintessential force of Russian chaos.

12 November
Remembrance Sunday. Always the saddest day of the year. As Owen wrote: ‘Weep, you may weep, for you may touch them not.’ Nothing approaches the sacrifice that they made for us. For our freedom. For our future. Men and women. Ukraine knows it well.

Recent subscribers may not know that between 2014 and 2018 we lived the First World War practically day to day with George Calderon and his set, and we often discussed the experience on this blog. The commemoration of the centenary was eviscerating, and I wonder whether those even closer to it than I was, for example Andrew Tatham and Clare Hopkins, feel that it has moulded their attitude to Remembrance today. For myself, I can’t say that 2014-18 was a catharsis, but I somehow feel more at peace with the tragedy now. I simply feel that George and his fallen comrades will be ‘aways with me’.

At the same time, the terrifying, incomprehensible self-destructiveness of the human race, and the unrecoverable loss that wars inflict on us, slay me now worse than ever. During glasnost’ and perestroika many Russian intellectuals, scholars and commentators felt free at last to talk publicly of the ‘possibly irrreparable damage to the gene pool’ inflicted by the Civil War and Stalin’s genocide — literally, the loss in mental intelligence to subsequent generations of the Russian people. We can, perhaps, see some truth in that…

20 November
Another sign of age: picking up pristine GPO rubber bands from the pavement for one’s own use. When I was a boy, I used to think the old men I saw doing that sort of thing must be hopelessly demented. But I haven’t taken to wearing a flat cap yet.

26 November
The mention of Walter Scott above was not just felicitous, but fortuitous: we have been in Edinburgh this week and Scott was everywhere. In Princes Street Gardens a massive Christmas Market was in rude action right up to the plinth of the Scott Monument, but the remarkably good statue of Scott by John Steell in the base of the Monument was the still eye of the storm. ‘What would he think of it all?’ someone asked.

I decided to read my first unabridged Scott novel, Rob Roy. It has been an extremely slow read (380 pages), although in places the plot moves like lightning. The source of the slowness, it seems to me, is the very art of Scott’s long, syntactically sealed and rather heavily punctuated sentences, which I imagine are simply beyond the patience of readers to parse today, hence the decline in his popularity. But strain as you might, you couldn’t ever accuse these sentences of redundancy. Every word he uses seems the only right word. The impression is of a great rationalist — a Scottish Rationalist, presumably. His English is perhaps far too rational for us today. Yet that sense in his style of ‘what you see is all there can be, and that’s the highest function of language’, is offset by the sheer Gothic energy of his dialogue in Scots. The alternation of the Rational and the Gothic is irresistible, and often very funny. Scott’s writing seems to me the perfect foil to Jane Austen’s.

The ‘get-in’ at Nicolson Square Theatre, 1974, and the same site today

We also visited 21 Hill Place, which we occupied as Nicolson Square Theatre during the Edinburgh Fringe of 1974-76 with productions such as Ivanov and The Cherry Orchard. The improvement in the property as shown by the images above cannot be put down purely to colour photography. Unbeknown to us at the time, it was an old and distinguished building: https://www.edinburgharchitecture.co.uk/21-hill-place-royal-college-of-surgeons-edinburgh. The young company was wonderful, but standing outside the locked doors of the building today I found the memories of mounting eight productions in two years provoked not so much nostalgia as neuralgia!

4 December
As I announced in May, I wanted to give Calderonia followers a foretaste of my 2024 book of short stories, now called The White Bow/Ghoune, by posting some this year. The last story will be ‘Crox’, to go up on 18 December. To me, at least, it seems appropriately upbeat for Christmas. A couple of words of background may help. Like nearly everything in these stories, it is based on my own experience and observation. A boy in the Lower Sixth at the grammar school I attended fell in love with a ‘shop girl’, as she was then referred to, they married, she accompanied him to university, and they lived happily ever after. I did not know them personally, but it was the talk of the school and town.

A slightly worrying aspect of this story, however, is that, as the sheet from my 1978 notebook shows, and indeed the unfinished start of the story from 1979, I invented the brand of ‘Crox’ 45 years ago, but everyone now knows the shoes that are called Crocs, whose company, I gather from the Web, was founded in 2002 and is litigiously protective of its name. As far as I can see, my Crox have nothing whatsoever in common with their Crocs. But it will be interesting to see if at some point they snap at me. Everyone, of course, will assume I stole the name from the very successful American shoe company, but I have no intention of changing the story’s title, because (a) I can prove it predates Crocs by 24 years, and (b) I want Crox in my story on account of its similarity to crux.

The dedicatee of this story is a school friend who died four years ago. As fifteen/sixteen-year-olds we played Jonathan Routh-style pranks on a number of shoe shops in Canterbury and Margate by inquiring whether they sold ‘Berkers’ — an imaginary brand of heavy black shoe that made the wearer look a berk. This certainly taxed our powers of improvisation, but it also led to hilarity and meeting a number of nice ‘shop girls’.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged Alexander Lukashenka, Anton Chekhov, Berkers, Brest, Cambridge Young Chekhov Company, comments, Crocs, Crox, dedicatees, Donald Trump, Edinburgh, Fathers and Children, Garry Kasparov, gene pools, George Calderon, glasnost', Gothic, Ivan Turgenev, Jane Austen, Jonathan Routh, Kaliningrad, Matt Dimmick, NATO, Nicolson Square, old age, Olga Knipper-Chekhova, pavements, perestroika, Remembrance Sunday, Rob Roy, rubber bands, Russia, Scotland, Scott Monument, Scottish Rationalism, shop girls, short stories, Stephan Roman, Taiwan, The Great War, Ukraine, USA, Ventnor, Vladimir Putin, Volodymr Zelensky, Walter Scott, Wilfred Owen, World War I, Xi Jinping | Leave a comment

Cambridge Tales 8: ‘Black Tie’

Posted on November 13, 2023 by Patrick Miles

For Julian Bates

Some Ph.D. theses start from a highly specific topic and finish (are completed) with it, others start from a rather broad theme which narrows with time until it is specific. Jonathan Palmer’s thesis was of the latter type; which tend to be longer in the completion. He had begun research three years ago with the theme ‘Culture and Communication in Dante’s Commedia’. By the end of his second year, this had settled to ‘The Significance of Forms of Address in Dante’s Purgatorio’. However, the narrowing of his thesis topic had necessitated acquainting himself with swathes of linguistics, semiotics, structuralism, and even anthropology. Whereas he should have been writing up his thesis in the third and final year of his grant, he was doing that only now, in his fourth year, when the money was running out…

His income came from occasional translations and regular teaching for all the colleges. His own college had helped him by giving him free accommodation in one of its houses in return for being the ‘M.A. in Residence’ there. This brought no formal duties, it simply meant keeping an eye on the six undergraduates who lived there, in particular watching out for drug-taking and any mental problems. On the other hand, living with undergraduates had its strains. If a party raged in one of the rooms beyond midnight, it was tricky bringing it to an end single-handed. Three young women also came and went from the house. On one occasion Palmer had walked into the bathroom to have a shave, looked in the mirror as he lathered up, and beheld a pair of naked lovers in the bath behind him.

This morning, which was a dull damp one in February, he went to the kitchen to make his breakfast only to discover that the enormous communal table had been stolen. An amused undergraduate told him that it was on the roof of a nearby college hostel. He then had to deal with the bedder, who regarded him as her ally and insisted on keeping him au courant with her family matters. Today her son was ‘in the thrones’ of moving. After that, and after the five medics had left for lectures, he was able to get on with writing at his huge College desk in an alcove looking onto the garden. Then there was a quiet knock on his door.

He set down his pen, strode over to the door, threw it open, and stood rooted.

It was Peter Cathercole, the only arts student in the house. He was short, whiskery, with a thinning crown and large vivid nose. He looked at Palmer but did not speak. Palmer knew Cathercole smoked pot, and put his unusually blotchy complexion and watery blue eyes, which shifted quasi-humorously, down to that. But Cathercole said:

‘Hi. I’m sorry to bother you. Really. Last night I heard that my brother died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage. He worked at the station. They knew I’m at the College, so they contacted my tutor, and he told me after Hall – ’

For a second, Palmer was lost for words. He just managed to say:

‘That’s terrible… I’m sorry – ’

‘Yes, there was no warning…no-one suspected. The people he worked with say that one minute he had a headache, the next he collapsed unconscious and died… My tutor rang my parents, then I talked to them, and I got back late…’

‘I see…how awful…I’m glad you were with your tutor. I’m shocked…’

‘The thing is,’ continued Cathercole, and again his eyes watered and shifted almost humorously, ‘my parents are arriving today and I wondered if they could stay the night here, in the front room.’

‘Of course, of course… It’s empty, but I think it’s pretty clean.’

‘They say they will bring sleeping bags.’

‘Are you sure? We could get mattresses, and sheets…’

‘No no, it’ll be fine. My mother will organise it all. They might need to stay tomorrow night as well?’

‘No problem – as long as they’re happy sleeping there…’

‘Thanks. Thanks. I really appreciate it.’

‘I’m shocked, and really sorry…’

‘I still can’t believe it’s happened of course. It makes no sense…’

Palmer returned to his desk and looked out at the wintery garden. Cathercole’s parents must live a long way away. How come his brother was in Cambridge too? How come he worked on the railway? Had anyone known that before? Perhaps Peter and his brother were very close…

Just before one, Palmer heard Cathercole go out. Then a car arrived late afternoon with him and his parents. Before formal Hall, Palmer emerged holding his gown and met them. The father was erect, wore a pale grey suit, tie and glasses, and seemed constantly on the verge of saying something, but did not. Mrs Cathercole was short, bustling, and red-faced. Palmer expressed his condolences to them and apologised for the lack of a table to eat at.

The kitchen table materialised during the night. At breakfast, all the medical students were subdued, moved quietly about the kitchen, and promptly left for lectures. The Cathercoles breakfasted in their room.

They must have had a lot to do. They appeared in the kitchen around tea-time, when some of the medics had got in from rowing and were ravenously consuming toast and jam. It was awkward. Mrs Cathercole smiled amiably at them – to her, perhaps, they were just ‘boys’ – and Mr Cathercole hung back silently in his suit. They were in their own world. They took their son out for supper, but Palmer could hear them still coming and going from the front room when he turned his light off.

At lunchtime the following day Peter Cathercole called to say that his parents had left, having arranged the funeral, and were very grateful to him for allowing them to stay in the college house. The funeral was in three days time. Palmer decided he should go.

Although nearly twenty-eight, Jonathan Palmer had never been to a funeral before and did not possess a black tie. It was only the day before the funeral that he realised he should wear one. He did not want to shell out for one, as he could not envisage wearing it again for years. He hit on the idea of going to see Joe, the Kitchen Manager, and asking him if he could borrow one of the black ties that the white-jacketed College waiters wore. To his surprise, the request was met with gravity by Joe and the senior waiters whom he happened to be briefing for a private dinner. It was an expensive-looking woollen tie, and had to be returned immediately.

The funeral was at three o’clock. Palmer, Peter Cathercole and three of the medics gathered in the hall just after two. The three students wore ordinary ties. There was a very good sense of supporting Peter. At 2.15 a hearse glided past the end of the hedge-lined drive and a limousine stopped in the gap. Mr Cathercole appeared. Peter sighed, and with a droll twinkle said:

‘Well, this is it… I suppose I’d better go.’

Ten minutes later, a taxi came to the front door for the others.

They arrived at the Victorian chapel of the City cemetery just as the coffin was being taken from the back of the hearse. ‘Hold onto the pram!’ one of the undertakers barked at a gangly chinless youth, presumably their apprentice. They then rolled it with a rumble onto the concertina contraption whose handle the youth was gripping.

There were about twenty-five mourners, of whom eight were the dead man’s workmates from British Rail, wearing uniform. The family included two sisters. There was no sign of Peter’s tutor, so it occurred to Palmer that he was representing the College. The three students were very quiet.

The service was the most basic Prayer Book one possible, with no tributes and only a concluding hymn. It occurred to Palmer that the reason was that the Cathercole family couldn’t ‘take’ more. Within fifteen minutes they were all following the coffin out for the committal.

And this is when it hit him. They trundled the ‘pram’ between rows of tombstones over grass that had patches of wet earth between. They had fifty yards to go, the ramshackle thing bumped and pitched, the chinless youth brought up the rear, and he was hanging his head right down on his chest whilst trying to control compulsive laughter about something. Palmer noticed that the idiot’s white shirt collar was frayed and his suit greasy. Peter’s mother was beside herself with weeping and his father was holding her up. When they reached the open grave, it was surrounded by slithery peelings of brown mud. The word ‘excremental’ sprang to Palmer’s mind. The hole was like a drop. Suddenly he thought that the students, being medics, must have seen plenty of dead bodies; but their faces were pale and sombre. Then the priest started to intone and it was blatantly obvious that he said it with no feeling, that it was all cold and mechanical on account of this being the sixth time he’d taken the service that day, for someone he had never known, could feel nothing for, did not personally care anything about…and wonderfully, weirdly, outrageously, at that very moment a plane started droning overhead, climbing above the airport, and its droning merged perfectly with the priest’s droning.

Palmer was appalled. The disrespect of the chinless youth made him want to clout him. The resemblance of the mud to faeces turned his stomach. He could not bear Mrs Cathercole’s loud sobbing. The unfeelingness of the priest enraged him. He had never met Richard Cathercole, he did not know what he looked like, he wouldn’t have known who he was if he had clipped his ticket at the station, but wasn’t he worth more than this? As so often, Palmer involuntarily thought of Dante; in this case his piety, the sublimity of his religion, his art… These white shirts and black ties, the chief undertaker’s top hat and tails, the fat brass handles on the coffin and the priest’s unironed surplice were so tawdry, cheap, phoney, Victorian… It was as horrible and absurd as Richard Cathercole’s death itself.

Fuming, Palmer collected himself and walked back with the others to the chapel forecourt, where the return taxi was to meet them. Peter Cathercole came over and told them that there was going to be a ‘wake’ at the University Arms Hotel, to which they were all invited. They thanked him. The taxi arrived. The Cathercoles were shaking the hands of their son’s workmates in turn, and there were evidently some relations or friends of theirs who hadn’t seen each other for a long time. Palmer did not want to keep the taxi driver waiting, nor did he want to be the first to arrive at the wake, so after a decent pause he and the others piled into the taxi and he told the driver to drop them at the marketplace, from where each could make his way to the University Arms when he liked.

As the taxi bowled along, he furiously debated his position. There was no denying, it would be polite to go to the wake. But he wouldn’t actually ‘know’ anyone there, and no-one would know who he ‘was’. Might it not look as though he and the others were there just for the food? He recalled a wedding reception in a court of the College, where the students invited had disgraced themselves by falling on the food before ‘family’. He winced. God no… But to attend the wake was an accepted mark of respect. Might his presence, representing the College, even bring a crumb of comfort to Mrs Cathercole? He would be pleased to talk to her. But would she regard him as incidental, even superfluous, and not want to talk to him? And he just hadn’t known her son, he hadn’t known him; so would his respect seem empty, forced, completely bogus? Just how many of these funeral formalities was one obliged to observe? The funeral itself was ghastly – wasn’t that enough? Yet he knew only too well that all cultures require a wake, some ‘epulary act’ to round off the funeral rites, to bring closure… Hadn’t Bakhtin written that the banquet following Hector’s cremation was ‘the true completion’ of The Iliad, because eating was ‘the triumph of life over death’? Ah, but this wasn’t going to be some Rabelaisian feast, for goodness’ sake, it would probably be egg sandwiches and cups of tea… With waiters. Yes, there would be hotel waiters in white jackets and black ties… He remembered the source of his own black tie and shuddered. The tie was culinary, not funerary. It was a badge of servility. If he wasn’t actually mistaken for a waiter, wearing this tie at Richard Cathercole’s wake would make him feel like one.

The taxi drew up in the market rank. Palmer paid and tipped the driver, as he had before, they all got out, and the medics dispersed. He took off the tie, folded it, and returned it to the College kitchens. He did not go to the University Arms.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged black ties, brain haemorrhages, Cambridge, Cambridge Tales, college life, Dante, funerals, Jonathan Palmer, Mikhail Bakhtin, mourning, Peter Cathercole, postgraduates, student pranks, The Divine Comedy, The Iliad, The University Arms, undergraduates, undertakers, wakes | 2 Comments

Very Old Cambridge Tales 4: ‘First Love’

Posted on October 30, 2023 by Patrick Miles

Morning placed his misty paws on the window sill and peered in through the latticed casement.

Stephen May (2 yr Maths) was asleep with his mouth slightly open like a baby. He groaned, awoke, and looked at the ceiling. Then, with a heavy sigh, he turned over – and touched something.

Instantly a smile of utter contentment caressed his face, a golden glow dawned behind his eyes, warmth and intimacy rippled through his whole body… The soft little thing beside him stirred. He slipped his arm awkwardly beneath her head and was about to draw her towards him, when (O wonders!) she nestled closer in her sleep, and her lips pouted into a kiss… He closed his eyes blissfully. Could anyone be happier?

In these Elysian Fields, however, he was visited by spectres.

The tubercular pink cover of The Freshman’s Manual of Reproduction, Contraception and Family Planning floated up before him. It was sent free to everyone in their first week. He opened it, and the pen drawing that leapt from the front page put him off all thought of girls for the rest of the term…

Now titles in fat red letters crawled across his brain: NAUGHTY COALMEN – SWEDISH MONIKA 7 – DO YOU WANT TO REMAIN A VIRGIN FOREVER?..

He hadn’t been able to get out of going to one of them with Big Ernie, Pete and the Maths crowd.

He sat in the tense darkness and watched blankly, as though they were the writhings of strange machines… It was more than an eye-opener – it was a thunderbolt. Was that what people actually did?! Was this what was expected??? Overcome by heat and smoke, he stumbled out into the foyer and was sick in a Fire bucket.

Poor spotty Philip Potter. Now his chinless form appeared before him, in graph-paper shirt, greasy tie and jacket, his hands round a cup of coffee. When Stephen stopped going with the Maths lot, Philip was the only one who came to see him in his room – evening after evening…

Not, of course, that there was anything wrong with men’s company. It wasn’t as though he wanted to ‘get off with’ somebody as everyone put it – on the contrary, he gulped at the very thought of what that might mean. But…couldn’t you just meet girls? Couldn’t you just talk to them? One day he had a strange experience: plodding up Petty Cury, he suddenly stopped in his tracks, as it came home to him how sweet a girl’s voice sounded, literally – sweet…

But now the bed seemed to fill with icy water as he slept. He saw all those Sunday afternoons alone in his ‘attic’, with the bells ringing out over an empty city, and one Sunday in particular when he took a desperate step: he wrote a ‘Hello-how-are-you-getting-on’ letter to Fiona Flytes, whom he’d gone out with once at school. Mercifully, mercifully, she didn’t answer; and when he was home at Easter he heard she’d got engaged to an accountant.

So a whole bright Cambridge Spring came and went.

What had happened between then and June, what??? Watching it unroll again in his dream was like flying over endless tundra…

Potter called every evening, to talk with emaciated mien of one thing: exams, exams… And he saw more clearly than ever now that the way he had ‘existed’ the term before had gradually settled into a pattern, then a habit, and then a norm; and he’d come to accept this daily round so completely that he couldn’t conceive of life being any different after the exams, or indeed ever for the next two years…

But he was wrong. After the exam, Withers (their Director of Studies) gave a sherry party.

He jumped in his sleep as the well-packed seat of a pair of jeans thrust into his face – and another… Then the gentlest tickling rose through his throat and nose as he saw Her sitting beside him, in her fawn jumper and flowered shirt-collar, holding her glass in her lap. And he re-heard his first, hesitant words:

‘Hel-lo…erm… Horrible about Potter wasn’t it?’

Yes, there she was as he saw her for the first time! Short, a tiny bit plump, but with the darkest dark blue eyes, such as babies have. He had turned round – and there she was! And somehow they had hardly got onto Paper 24B and how long it took her to bike to lectures, when everyone was queuing up to thank Mr and Mrs Withers, she was whisked away by a friend, and it wasn’t until he was brushing his teeth that evening that he suddenly, vividly recalled her voice, and her small, soft-looking mouth, and understood that, without knowing it, he had been doing exactly what some months before (when was it exactly?) he had longed for so much!

It was simply destiny, then, when a week later Chubb threw a wine and cheese party and there she was again. Goodness knows what gave him the courage – maybe it was Chubb’s claret – but all of a sudden he invited her to a play…

When they returned that evening, there was a May Ball on in the college.

It was quite weird, dodging the staggering couples everywhere – and the men in their black and white all seemed so tall – but how marvellous it was sitting in the ‘attic’ with the music wafting in from below, and agreeing how strange Cambridge was really!

And now the events of the last few weeks rolled themselves into one brilliant, dazzling ball: tea in her room on the first Saturday of term – then the river, bleak and deserted, with large leaves floating down delicately into it – then their first kiss – feeling her warmth against him – Big Ernie shouting out in the college bar ‘How’s your sex life, then, May?!’ and Pete crooking his arm and leering ‘Whoooor!’ – and, finally, discovering last night that for some reason the porters had clanged shut the gates at one – deciding that she would have to stay – and writing out as if in a dream: Dear Mrs King, Please do not disturb. Thank you. Stephen. – and…

Suddenly (you don’t meet this word very often in modern stories, but life does still have its surprises!), suddenly…there was an unmistakable knock at the door.

They woke up staring at each other.

‘Mr May! Are you in there?’ called a gruff voice.

‘Y-yes…’ Stephen replied faintly. ‘The wardrobe,’ he whispered to her, ‘the wardrobe!’

She jumped out of bed just as she was, crouched inside, and Stephen closed the door. Trembling all over, he found his glasses, put on his dressing gown, and opened up. Two college workmen were standing there.

‘Sorry to bother you, sir,’ began the first, touching his cap. ‘It’s the new furniture… We’ve come for the wardrobe.’

Morning smiled to himself, turned from the curtains, and swirled off to where another thousand lovers were awaking – or, at least, a couple of hundred…

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.