One does the hokey cokey

Posted on November 29, 2016 by Patrick Miles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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‘The Long Shadow’, War Poetry, and Commemoration

Posted on November 22, 2016 by Patrick Miles

 

The Long Shadow, David Reynolds

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*               *               *

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

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

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

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

Posted on November 18, 2016 by Patrick Miles

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

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

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

Hampstead, May 10.                                     WILLIAM CAINE

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

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

William Caine and his wife, 1918

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

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Armistice Day, 1937

Posted on November 16, 2016 by Patrick Miles

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

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

Quietly alone out of doors for silence.

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

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

Posted on November 4, 2016 by Patrick Miles

    WILFRED OWEN AT ORS

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

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

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

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

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

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

               *               *               *

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

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

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

Wilfred Owen Memorial

The Forester’s House memorial at Ors

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

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

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

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

© Damian Grant, 2016

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‘…you may touch them not.’

Posted on November 3, 2016 by Patrick Miles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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And the asp jumped over the chimney sweeper!

Posted on November 1, 2016 by Patrick Miles
Chimney Sweeper Moth

A Chimney Sweeper (Odezia atrata)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Guest post: Harvey Pitcher, ‘Calderon on Chekhov’

Posted on October 21, 2016 by Patrick Miles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The limits of biography

Posted on October 20, 2016 by Patrick Miles

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

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

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

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

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

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

*               *               *

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

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

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

*               *               *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*               *               *

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

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

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

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Rachel Cusk and George Orwell: Transitions to…where?

Posted on October 19, 2016 by Patrick Miles

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Percy Lubbock: ‘Esoteric and intimate portraiture’

Posted on October 18, 2016 by Patrick Miles

 

George Calderon A Sketch from Memory by Percy Lubbock

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Posted on October 15, 2016 by Patrick Miles

 

John Aubrey My Own Life by Ruth Scurr

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

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

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

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

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

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

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Ruth Scurr: ‘Fatal Purity’ and dangerous identity

Posted on October 13, 2016 by Patrick Miles

 

Fatal Purity by Ruth Scurr

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Claire Harman: An exemplary modern biography

Posted on October 11, 2016 by Patrick Miles

 

Charlotte Bronte A Life by Claire Harman

(Click the cover to find this book on Amazon)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Biography brainstorm

Posted on October 10, 2016 by Patrick Miles

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

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

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

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

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‘A paradox, a paradox…’

Posted on October 8, 2016 by Patrick Miles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Heartbreak House, Act 1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Postscript

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

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

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