Archive

Posted on July 30, 2016 by Patrick Miles

In my last post I should have explained that some of my fury at having to check again every quotation and fact in the typescript came from the necessity it entailed of taking scores of manuscripts out of George and Kittie’s archive for the umpteenth time, using them, and putting them back. This is not good for them.

They have given me
their dust: my fingers leave them
this flash patina.

I am still in awe of the privilege of being the first person to work with these papers since they were deposited in a Scottish attic soon after Kittie’s death in 1950. The last person to read them all before me was Kittie herself at ‘White Raven’ in the 1940s.

To begin with I found them dusty, musty; I always had to scrub my hands after working with them. And they had strange, powerful smells. Gradually, these resolved themselves into George’s smoking, a subtle camphor that Kittie favoured, and the chemical used to disinfect Archie Ripley’s papers after his death from tuberculosis.

These smells have  accompanied me — I could even say have inspired me — throughout the writing of the book about these people. I also believed in keeping the papers as Kittie left them, down to the last rusty paperclip .

But after the lids have been taken off the archive boxes so often, the folders opened so often, the letters and documents spread out so often to read, I have to inhale very deeply to catch those smells still; but I do.

His cigarette smoke
fades and the pressed rose crumbles.
They go from me now.

(The rose was sent to Kittie from Lucknow by a British soldier in 1917.)

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‘O, fallacem hominum spem!’

Posted on July 27, 2016 by Patrick Miles

This tag from Cicero, meaning ‘Oh how deceptive is men’s hope!’, may be heard on the lips of Chekhov buffs when disappointed about something, followed sotto voce by Kulygin’s line: ‘Accusative with exclamation…’ (Act 2, Three Sisters).

It is certainly appropriate for me to exclaim it now. In my post of 23 June, entitled ‘Progress’, I announced that I was going into printing out the typescript of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius and ‘giving it its final hoover’. I said I did not know how many weeks this would take, and alas it has taken five. But that isn’t the worst of it. I began to check quotations at random — because they had all been checked once before when I was revising the manuscript — and I found to my incredulity that nearly every other quotation had an error in it. There was no alternative, of course, but to go back to the beginning of the typescript and check every quotation, date, figure, fact, very carefully. Even this cannot be the ‘final’ operation. Having completed this five-week deep-pile hoover, I have decided I must immediately go back to the beginning and read the text fluently as originally planned, checking just a few quotes and figures at random.

I must be frank, it is more than disappointing, it’s almost depressing (but these are the ‘Dog Days’). For the first time, I think, in the whole of this project, I have wobbled over whether I am really up to the challenge of it.

There are well over a thousand changes I now have to introduce to the computer version of the whole book. Admittedly, half of them are changes involving tightening up punctuation or syntax, improving expression, or having second thoughts about things (e.g. how far George got towards the Turkish trenches before he was killed), but that leaves far, far, far more mistakes of quotation or digital fact than I remotely expected. What is the explanation? I have spent many an idle minute in the last three weeks staring into space and speculating on that, in a state of some shock.

I have two and a half theories. First, that creating the book in tiny but legible handwriting, in pencil, which then is checked and revised in manuscript before being typed up, is a disaster. When I come to revise the first typescript (in hard copy) I can spot typos, of course, and obvious errors of transcription, and in any case I made changes on screen as I transcribed the manuscript, but the only way to eliminate every error of transcription would be for me to read the manuscript back word for word to someone following the typescript on screen and for them to spot the errors. This would be asking a bit much of them, but it could not be done the other way round, with one of us reading from the screen, as they would not be able to read my writing efficiently enough and even I would find it more difficult than reading the manuscript aloud. When I translate plays (first in pencil), I always ask someone to read the translation back to me from the screen whilst I follow in the original language, but somehow I did not think a similar process would be necessary in the case of one’s own writing. Oh how deceptive is men’s self-confidence! In fact, of course, it is probably more necessary to go through this read-back process when you are both the author and the typist.

Long-term followers may feel that my second explanation is a case of ‘blame the brain again’, but now that I have been made painfully aware of the errors of transcription I committed when writing the manuscript and the errors of transcription I committed when typing it up, I do see a common trend. In about 80% of cases, what I have done is drop words that I would not have considered necessary myself, and I have not been conscious of doing this. It is eery how consistent the pattern is; and the words elided really aren’t missed, there is no appreciable loss to the sentence. I conclude, therefore, that fifty years of striving to use the least number of words in translations and my own writing have programmed my brain to make this reduction automatically, without my conscious mind being aware of it. But, whether these words are redundant or not, they have, of course, to go back in for the quotation of someone else’s writing to be accurate.

The most egregious example of my rewriting quotations is so extraordinary that I still can hardly believe it. Possibly the most famous quote from George’s 1912 Introduction to Two Plays by Anton Tchekhof is: ‘His plays are tragedies with the texture of comedy.’ I have known this aphorism since at least 1968. In manuscript, I managed to render it as ‘His plays are comedies with the texture of tragedies’. I managed to type it up without noticing anything; it was only the word-by-word checking of the redesigned hoover that brought it to light. But as I see it, this is an extreme example of the brain seeing what it wants to see rather than actually reading. The error I made is, I suppose, ‘Freudian’: without being aware of it, I wrote down what I subconsciously believe (‘comedies with the texture of tragedies’) rather than what George wrote. And this has had an interesting and not unproductive repercussion: I am no longer sure of what George meant, or whether this whole ‘texture’ business means anything at all!

Obviously, it is also tempting to conclude that such fallibility is the result of anno domini (or as people charmingly put it these days, ‘dementia’). That is my ‘half theory’. The basic problem, I feel, lies in the cunningly trained reflex of the brain to project its own preferences on things irrespective of the reality fed it by the senses. I think we all suffer from this, but I am prepared to admit it has been exacerbated (honed) by age.

To cap it all, I said in my ‘Progress’ post that the sixth draft of my Introduction had gone off to a very experienced writer-biographer friend to have the surplus moisture mangled out of it and then I hoped to ‘iron it to a state of crispness’, but O, fallacem… It has come back not mangled, but cut into pieces. I’m reminded of a friend who, when he asked Matron at his boarding school what had happened to one of his vests, was told: ‘I cut up your vest to mend your pants!’ It is not at all clear to me how, after this treatment, the pieces of my Introduction could be sewn together again to make a credible garment.

Of course, after the initial shock one should be wary of taking such things too seriously. There must always be the suspicion that your critic hasn’t really understood where you were going with what you have written; why you have composed it the way you have. However, in this case my reader is definitely 28.53% right. I won’t go into the details; they concern the opening sentence, paragraphs, page and ‘selling the book’ to publishers’ readers. But then we are not all as lucky as Ruth Scurr and can start with a sentence that contains the name of a famous writer plus two of the most powerful words in the English language: ‘John Aubrey loved England’!

All I can say is, ‘watch this space’…

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‘Old P.H.’

Posted on July 23, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Although I was sceptical about this blog when first persuaded to start it nearly two years ago, I cannot chirp loudly enough about the benefits it has brought the project. There is our amazing follower Katy George, who came upon an important letter of Kittie’s inside a book bought at a charity shop and contacted me through the blog, then discovered ANOTHER one online, in Tasmania, concerning George and Tahiti. (Letters from Kittie are very rare and both were acquired for the Calderon archive.) There are the expanses of fresh contextual information followers have contributed, the new angles they have brought to events, and the enriching dialogues I have had through the Comments channel, particularly about George’s character and our national commemoration of World War 1. Not to mention the unexpected but satisfying challenges of writing a ‘blography’ of George and Kittie almost every day for a year, followed by the current blog in a different genre.

Most recently, I received an email from our subscriber Distinguished Professor of Linguistics Greville Corbett, at the University of Surrey, with a photograph he had taken that morning at the Watts Gallery at Compton, near Guildford, of the top half of this painting, which he said ‘jumped off the wall’ at him:

Caption Text

P.H. Calderon by G.F. Watts (by kind permission of Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village)

Well, it sprang off the screen at me, too. I gasped! Because it solved in one blow a question that had intrigued me and others for about thirty years (almost a ‘phantom fly in amber’). Facing page 30 of Percy Lubbock’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921) is what we had always taken to be the photo of an engraving captioned ‘Philip Hermogenes Calderon, R.A., father of George Calderon’. Three-quarters of it, I would say, is almost black. Beneath it, in extremely small print, are the words ‘G.F. Watts, R.A., O.M., pinxit’. The word ‘pinxit’ (‘painted’) was taken to be figurative for ‘engraved’ and it was thought Watts might have produced it from a photograph now lost. Above all, though, because the figure looks like an old man, and far more Spanish than P.H. Calderon’s own photographs, it was seriously doubted that the ‘engraving’ was of P.H. at all — perhaps Kittie had miscaptioned it and really it was of P.H.’s father, Revd Juan Calderón, who had emigrated to Britain in 1845 and become Professor of Spanish at King’s College, London?

I cannot do better than quote Watts Gallery’s own description of the painting in their care, which they have kindly emailed me:

G. F. Watts, P. H. Calderon, 1871, Oil on canvas, 63.5 cm x 51 cm, Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village. Full-length male portrait in three-quarter profile; portrait most likely intended for Watts’s series of portraits of eminent Victorians presently known as the ‘Hall of Fame’. Philip H. Calderon (1833-1898) was born in France but became a naturalised British subject in 1873. He first studied to become a civil engineer but in 1850 he enrolled at the James Matthews Leigh Art School in London, where he studied painting and drawing. As an artist, Calderon shared Watts’s circle of friends. The two painters often discussed artistic techniques. Watts was extremely pleased with the results of his portrait and commented on it to Calderon: ‘I am immensely pleased with it. It is so luminous and bright, so dead in surface, that I feel for the first time in my life I am on my way to a good thing. No more oily surface but a bright fresco-like appearance.’ It was around this time that Watts began building a new house and studio and was financially committed to accepting portrait commissions. The portrait of P.H. Calderon accompanied other portraits sent to represent his best work in Paris 1878.

This leaves no doubt, since Juan Calderón died in 1854, that the original of the portrait in Percy Lubbock’s book about George Calderon is of George’s father P.H., and that this original is a painting. The other tiny words beneath it, ‘Emery Walker ph. sc.’, therefore presumably mean ‘Emery Walker [Arts and Crafts engraver, photographer and printer] made this photograph’ of Watts’s original.

But if P.H. Calderon was 1871 minus 1833 equals thirty-eight years of age when Watts painted this portrait, why does he look at least sixty, why are his moustache and beard far more luxuriant than in photographs, and his nose and eyebrows greatly accentuated in size and shape? The answer, I speculate, is in the combination of P.H. Calderon’s character with Watts’s approach to painting. ‘Old P.H.’ loved dressing up as a Spanish grandee straight out of a picture by Velazquez (there is a photograph by David Wilkie Wynfield of him in this guise), and Watts declared that he painted ‘ideas, not things’. I feel, then, that Watts understood the ‘idea’ that P.H. wanted to project of himself, and created it in paint, rather than producing a naturalistic portrait of the lively, successful, thoroughly anglicised Hispano-Frenchman sitting before him.

P.H. Calderon was the acknowledged leader of a group of painters known as the ‘St John’s Wood Clique’ (they included G.A. Storey, whose sister Calderon married, W.F. Yeames, G.D. Leslie, H.S. Marks, Wynfield and others). In my ignorance, I had assumed Watts was also a member of the group, but he wasn’t; he was much older than them and ploughed his own furrow. Nevertheless, paintings by the St John’s Wood Clique share Watts’s slide into allegory and symbolism. This painting by P.H. Calderon is a fair example:

caption

‘Captain of the Eleven’ by P.H. Calderon, 1882

When in 2012 this painting came on the market for the first time since 1925, Bonhams Director of 19th Century Paintings, Peter Rees, described it as ‘the perfect image to represent the Victorian view of children as models of truth and honesty’. I would say that it is also an iconic image of the ‘straight bat’ (it now hangs in the Long Room at Lord’s). It became familiar to everybody after Pears Soaps published it in their Christmas Annual for 1898 and mass-reproduced it on posters, prints and presentation cricket bats throughout the twentieth century. The boy is completely unlike George, but there is a certain facial resemblance to his brother Fred, born in 1873. Even so, what Rees called the ‘clear complexion and cherubic face’ make it less of a real boy than a romantic trope. ‘Captain of the Eleven’ sold in 2012 for £289,250, a new world record for a Calderon painting.

There can be no possible doubt that P.H. Calderon was an accomplished painter. He has a unique Victorian palette. However, when George wrote to Kittie on 10 February 1899 ‘I am undermined in all my actions by the desire to please an audience; it is the worst of vices, of the gentler sort’, he may well have had his father in mind too. In order to support a family of ten, P.H. needed to earn good money. He therefore developed subtle ways of pleasing his Victorian, especially male audience. To quote the Art Renewal Center Museum website: ‘Calderon was a skilled painter of attractive young women, and had the ability to show their emotions in a way which appealed to Victorian sentiment and was regarded as chivalrous.’ His obituary in The Times of 2 May 1898 described it as ‘a happy art in painting the charms in womanhood’.

In 1891 P.H.Calderon almost went too far with the following painting depicting a saint:

http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/calderon-st-elizabeth-of-hungarys-great-act-of-renunciation-n01573

It offended Catholics, opponents of ‘Parisian’ nudity in Victorian art, and public opinion that objected to the Royal Academy buying up paintings for the nation from its own summer exhibition through the Chantrey Trust which the Academy administered (P.H. was paid £1260 for it). Controversy about the painting raged for weeks in the press and even Parliament, but P.H. Calderon seems to have kept his counsel. To the modern spectator the painting may seem voyeuristic and tacky, but root as I might I have never found the least suggestion that P.H. was ‘Bohemian’ or led a double life. He was simply what Watts portrayed: an eminent Victorian. He counted Dickens and Trollope among his friends, had a reputation for humour, histrionic singing and practical jokes, and was beloved by the students he taught as Keeper of the Royal Academy from 1887.

I am extremely grateful to Dr Beatrice Bertram, Curatorial Fellow of Watts Gallery – Artists’ Village, for providing the full-length image of P.H. Calderon’s portrait and informing me about it. I have immensely enjoyed browsing through Watts Gallery’s excellent website. Watts proves there to be a fascinating, even controversial Victorian/Edwardian. As a theatre person, I was particularly interested in his brief 1864 marriage to the seventeen-year-old Ellen Terry, who in 1911 George Calderon was hoping would play the lead in a London production of his translation of The Cherry Orchard. Watts Gallery was established by G.F. Watts and his second wife in 1904 and I believe it was the first gallery in Britain to be dedicated to a single artist. I can’t wait to visit it in the flesh.

Heartfelt thanks to Professor Corbett for inspiring this post!

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The Somme: over to you

Posted on July 21, 2016 by Patrick Miles

It won’t, I think, surprise followers to hear that I know next to nothing about the Battle of the Somme compared with Ypres 1 and Gallipoli, which George Calderon fought at and which we covered from day to day in autumn 2014 and summer 2015.

I am grateful, therefore, to Harvey Pitcher for pointing out in his Comment that at the Somme the orders were to walk towards the enemy. I did not know that. It has been referred to several times in the media since. I gather that the rationale was that each man was carrying 70 lbs of equipment (why so much?) and would have been exhausted if he had had to run the whole distance. But, of course, it gave the enemy plenty of time to surface from their dugouts, man their machine-guns, and mow the British soldiers down ‘like corn’, as eye witnesses put it. I don’t know, however, whether the sound of the whistles would have carried three hundred yards and was therefore as stupid as it appears. I asked a military man about this with regard to the Third Battle of Krithia, where the lines were about 200 yards apart, and he confessed it had never occurred to him. I agree, though, that it is tempting to regard the use of whistles as typical Edwardian military gung-hoism or ‘casual arrogance’ as Peter Hart called it (see my post of 1 July).

Where the walking pace is concerned, it could be objected that the commander of the Fourth Army, General Sir Henry Rawlinson, did not know that the German front line had not been destroyed, and in particular that its twenty-foot-deep dugouts were intact; that for us to criticise him and Haig, therefore, is simply wisdom of hindsight.

But that was my point in my post on 1 July: Rawlinson assumed the German barbed wire and trenches had been destroyed, he did not know, and he went ahead with the Battle. What kind of risk assessment is that? In fact, as I understand it, Rawlinson ignored the doubts expressed to him by infantry officers about the damage caused by the barrage (Martin Middlebrook, The First Day on the Somme, 1971), and the opinion of his intelligence officers, formed from interrogating deserters, that the German machine-gun placements were still in one piece (Hugh Sebag Montefiore, Somme: Into the Breach, 2016). It is the fact that he went ahead and there was no plan B when it became clear he was disastrously wrong, that I regard as so Edwardian.

I am not, however, by any stretch of the imagination a military historian. I have asked experts at the Imperial War Museum to comment, but (understandably) they are too busy. (See http://www.iwm.org.uk/history/what-happened-during-the-battle-of-the-somme .) If there are any military historians out there who can throw their expert light on our perceptions of the Battle of the Somme, please do Comment, or you would be very welcome to present a guest post.

The most difficult, and awful, thing to get one’s head round, I find, is that although the Battle of the Somme was perceived at the time as a defeat, or at least deadlock, as attrition it does seem to have marked the beginning of the end for the German war effort.

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Mrs Stewart of Torquay recalibrated

Posted on July 19, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I refer new followers to my post of 1 June 2016. The reason it was important to find out more about the life of Mrs Eliza Stewart, even so late in the project, is that after the sudden death in 1921 of her daughter, Kittie Calderon’s lifelong friend Nina, Kittie became a ‘second daughter’ to Mrs Stewart and often visited her in Torquay. Kittie was a trained nurse and attended Mrs Stewart in her long last illness. She was almost certainly present when Eliza Stewart died at home on 24 November 1925. Since my biography of George Calderon is ‘also’ a biography of Kittie, right up to her death in 1950 thirty-five years after George, it was important to clarify aspects of Mrs Stewart’s life, particularly as that could throw light on the vexed question of when Nina and Kittie became firm friends.

Extremely diligent researchers under the direction of Local & Family History Librarian John Tucker at Torquay Library, teamed with my indefatigable genealogist and Web-searcher Mike Welch, and myself, have been beavering away at the subject since the beginning of June and come up with what we think are well-substantiated answers to a ganglion of questions about Mrs Stewart. Unfortunately, these answers differ somewhat from many of the versions presented in my post of 1 June!

First, when and where did Mrs Stewart live in Torquay? She was known in the Stewart family of Fife as ‘Mrs Stewart of Torquay’ because, family lore had it, she was relegated to Torquay after returning to Britain with her infant daughter following the sudden death of her husband, James Affleck Stewart, in Canada in 1867. Their return to Britain was placed in 1870. But neither she nor Nina appears in the U.K. census for 1871. The first hard fact we could find about her residence in this country at all was in the 1878 edition of White’s Directory for Devonshire, which has her living at a house called ‘The Nest’, Kent’s Road, Torquay. She was presumably out of the country for the 1881 census, but the 1891, 1901 and 1911 censuses show her in London and elsewhere with her Stewart/Corbet family. She must have left Torquay long before.

According to John Tucker’s team, and Mike Welch’s researches in Kelly’s Directory, Mrs Stewart moved back to Torquay in 1912, when she bought a house called Congham Lodge, which she renamed The Croft and lived at until her death. Although the history of this property is complicated, I can now confirm, from period maps supplied by John Tucker and from satellite images, that it is the one illustrated in my post of 1 June. Mrs Stewart lived there for the rest of her life, and here is a grand photograph of her taken there:

caption goes here

Kittie Calderon’s caption: ‘Mrs Stewart in her Drawing-room at The Croft Torquay’ (c. 1914)

There is some doubt still about when Mrs Stewart was born. According to family tradition she was ‘Canadian’, but the extant censuses give London as her birthplace and one says ‘London, Westminster’; public records would therefore suggest she is the Eliza Sarah Vale born there in 1844, but her census returns and death registration imply anything from 1840 to 1844. An 1888 newspaper report discovered by Mike Welch does, however, appear to explode the version that she had never met her in-laws before she came over from Canada with Nina following her husband’s death: she visited the Stewart estate in Fife in 1862 ‘with her late husband and they were a very handsome couple’. So was she married at the age of eighteen?

Another obscure newspaper report nailed by Mike Welch narrows down the time when Nina and Kittie became close (they had possibly first met when they were young children visiting their respective grandparents in Fife).

In the 1881 U.K. census Kittie was living in St Andrews with her parents and brother, and Nina in Kent with her nurse/governess. The following year, however, ‘Miss Katharine Hamilton and Miss Nina Stewart’, both aged fifteen, were teamed together in the ‘autumn competition of the St Andrews Ladies’ Golf Club’. It seems possible, then, that by 1882 Nina had moved to Fife since inheriting the estate following her grandmother’s death in 1880, and both she and Kittie were receiving their education in St Andrews.

Given popular beliefs about the Victorian era, it may seem amazing that in 1882 St Andrews had a ladies’ golf club at all, but by the beginning of the Edwardian era there were even! women’s London clubs (Kittie and George’s sister Marge belonged to one).

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The Somme: a memory

Posted on July 12, 2016 by Patrick Miles

In July 1970, whilst waiting to hear whether I had been awarded a grant to do a Ph.D. on Chekhov, I worked for six weeks in the male wing of a ‘mental hospital’ near my home. I place the words in inverted commas, because I am sure that is not what it would be called today. The large, Napoleonic buildings had been the local workhouse until after the Second World War. In 1970 the patients included teenagers and adults with Down Syndrome, ‘stable’ schizophrenics, many severe epileptics, and others still described then as ‘mentally subnormal’. It was a remarkably well-run, caring and happy place.

On my early shifts I had to shave some of the patients. Amongst them, incredible to relate, were a few men who had joined the institution when it was a workhouse, had nothing medically wrong with them, and had simply stayed on when it became a ‘mental hospital’. One of these was Ben Hattersley, who was about eighty, lean and fairly limber, with white hair and blue eyes, but going blind. He was, I think, the oldest patient, and I was told early on by one of the nurses that Ben had had been ‘at the Somme’. The nurse said to me, ‘Ask him about the Somme, he’ll tell you about it.’

So one morning when I was giving Ben a shave, I did ask him if he had been at the Somme, and he had no hesitation in telling me his experiences, from the mud, the terror, the comrades killed around him, to the deafening artillery barrages, the exhaustion, the reality of bayonet combat, and his own amazement at surviving. He wanted to tell people of the most terrible experience of his life; he wanted us to know. As I finished shaving him, however, I very clearly remember him saying, in a state of agitation: ‘But the worst thing was the screaming of the horses…I couldn’t stand that.’

I have often thought about it since. I am inclined to think that it wasn’t primarily the thought of the pain the horses were in that Ben found unbearable (after all, there were men out there screaming, groaning, calling), it was that the horses’ screaming was the nec plus ultra; something of a different order; something Apocalyptic.

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Three women follow the Somme

Posted on July 8, 2016 by Patrick Miles

After Kittie Calderon had done all she could to establish George’s fate at Gallipoli on 4 June 1915, and accepted that she would live by the faith that he was in a Turkish prisoner of war camp, she suffered a long breakdown. She wept incessantly and succumbed to one illness after another. There is exceptionally little evidence of what she did between October 1915 and July 1916. After leaving Foxwold on 10 June 1915, the day before she received her first telegram about George from the War Office, she could not be persuaded back, however much Violet and Evey Pym tried, until July 1917.

One may be sure, however, that she closely followed developments in the War and, at this time in 1916, the course of the Battle of the Somme. She had many friends and relations in the army, and above all her closest friend Nina Corbet fed her news that her sister-in-law Constance received from her son Dick Sutton, who as ADC to General Sir Henry Rawlinson was on the spot. Nina was Dick Sutton’s favourite aunt, he was in her own words ‘like a very dear son to me’ after her own son Jim Corbet was killed at Givenchy in 1915, and all three women had been extremely close since the 188os.

Three weeks after Sir Henry Rawlinson launched the Battle of the Somme (see my post of 1 July), Dick Sutton wrote to his mother:

Here the battle drags on, progress much slower than we would like, but I suppose as fast as one can expect. The Bosches seem to fight as well out of the trenches as they do in them, and their machine-guns, hidden in woods and standing corn, are very deadly, especially as our gunners can’t see where they are. The decision of the battle has still to come.

The peoples of the Allied countries were hoping for the definitive collapse of the German line as a result of this battle, especially as the Germans had just lost at Verdun. However, although after 1918 German generals said that the Battle of the Somme was the real turning-point of the War, because they lost so many men that they could never again raise a fully trained fighting force, as the months wore on Allied hopes were dashed. On 7 November 1916 Dick Sutton wrote in his diary:

Sir Henry has written a strong letter to GHQ, deprecating the continuation of the offensive here under present conditions, which are not likely to improve before it freezes. The efficiency of the Army next spring will be endangered if the present losses in officers and NCOs continue. I am certain from this that the great battle of the Somme is over. We have, I am afraid, gained only a local success, which cannot be called a victory.

Dick Sutton survived the War, to his mother’s great rejoicing, but died of influenza at a military hospital in Wimereux on 29 November 1918. All three women were devastated. Both the Corbet and Sutton families, who had come to Britain with the Norman Conquest, were left without male heirs.

For the archive of posts since 31 July 2015, please click here

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Zamyatin: Ross: Calderon

Posted on July 5, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Everyone should read Zamyatin’s anti-Utopian novel We, which had such an impact on George Orwell and is so different from his own 1984. But I don’t believe newcomers to Zamyatin should start with the masterpiece…

Yevgeny Zamyatin. Portrait by Boris Kustodiev, 1923.

Yevgeniy Zamyatin by Boris Kustodiev, 1923.

The best way into the delightful, geometrical, farcical, Carrollian, delicate, synaesthetic, quasi-Aspergerian, intense and disturbing world of Zamyatin is through his short stories. A browse on Amazon will offer you two collections published over thirty years ago, but I warmly recommend the selection recently translated by John Dewey — see http://www.brimstonepress.co.uk/books/detail/YZ-TheSignAndOtherStories.htm .

I was amazed to discover that of the ten stories in Dewey’s volume only one had been translated before: A Fisher of Men. But I can well understand that Dewey could not resist making his own translation of this hilarious story of sexual represssion in Edwardian London! In style and theme it is a sequel to The Islanders, Zamyatin’s much longer satire on life in Jesmond, an impeccably upper middle class area of Newcastle upon Tyne. If Orwell is supposed to have based the totalitarian state of 1984 on his schoolboy experience of Eton, We could be seen as the ultimate extrapolation of Zamyatin’s experience of living at 19 Sanderson Road, Jesmond.

As I discover from J.A.E. Curtis’s magnificently lucid The Englishman from Lebedian — A Life of Evgeny Zamiatin (1884-1937) (Boston, 2013), Zamyatin was sent to Newcastle by the Tsarist government in 1916 as a civilian marine engineer to supervise the construction of Russian icebreakers. He lived there for eighteen months and, at least in the six months before his wife arrived from Russia, was very unhappy. He found Newcastle ‘utterly dull’, its theatres ‘completely stupid’, the English ‘terribly virtuous’, Jesmond inspissately bourgeois, and the Russian community ‘not my sort of people’.

Whether he knew it or not, about a mile away, at ‘Sherwood’, Graham Park Road, Gosforth, was living a thirty-nine-year old Russian woman who would have agreed with him. She objected to Newcastle’s architectural gloom, its perpetual rain, the dedicated conformism of English life, its lack of vitality and culture. It was ‘absolutely wrong for her’, her second son told me in a phone conversation on 19 March 1986. Whenever she could she would get away, either with or without her husband.

She was Mariia (‘Manya’) Iakovlevna Guseva, married to Archibald Campbell Ross, a naval engineer who worked for R. & W. Hawthorn of Newcastle and had fallen deeply in love with her when he was working on Tsarist battleship projects in St Petersburg. This was in 1895, when Manya was only eighteen, and he married her the year after. Both Archie and Manya Ross were close friends of George Calderon’s from his years in Russia, 1895-97. In 1900 Manya gave birth to George Campbell Ross, George Calderon attended his christening as a godfather, and Rear Admiral G.C. Ross was the son who rang me in 1986.

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From left to right: Archibald Campbell Ross, George Campbell Ross, George Calderon, c. 1902, at 4 Collingwood Terrace, Jesmond, Newcastle upon Tyne

So could Zamyatin have known the Rosses whilst he was living in Newcastle? The icebreaker that Zamyatin was working on there was being built by Armstrong Whitworth and, of course, there were an awful lot of other marine engineers in Newcastle. On the other hand, Archie Ross spoke fluent Russian, wrote the language well, and knew Russian naval ways, so he might have been brought in as a consultant. More likely, the Rosses met Zamyatin at a Russian social or cultural event, as Manya gravitated to the Russian community and Zamyatin was friends with the Russian consul. Manya Ross would certainly have been interested in him as a writer, but otherwise she was not one of his ‘sort of people’: she was a Tsarist patriot and he was a Bolshevik!

When Manya Ross made her cultural forays to London, she may well have occasionally stayed with the Calderons at Heathland Lodge in the Vale of Health. The only specific information we have about a visit is from George’s 1907 pocket diary. At 10.00 p.m. on Saturday 4 May 1907 George took Kittie’s niece May Hamilton ‘to Easter service at the Russian Church with Manya’. An entry for 8 May reads: ‘8.15 Red Lamp [the comedy by Hilliard Booth?] with Manya and supper at the Criterion’. On 10 May George and Manya went to ‘Balkan Exhibition’, three days later Manya came for ‘lunch and tea‘ (underlined in the original), then presumably returned to Newcastle. In  November 1909 Manya travelled to Glasgow to be with George and Kittie at the premiere of George’s translation and epoch-making production of The Seagull.

With her unassailable sense of realism, Kittie took a nuanced view of Manya’s visits to London. On 25 September 1941 she wrote from White Raven to her niece Nancy Knox in Australia:

Melbourne [is] within such easy reach for the Little Knoxes to go for a night or two at intervals to see ‘the Life’ [i.e. zhizn’], as a Russian friend of  ours used to say when she used suddenly to appear on our doorstep from Newcastle where fate had planted her and her delightful engineer husband. Manya never could see any of ‘the Life’ in Newcastle — though it was there sure enough but not easy for Russian eyes to discern.

In 1926 or 1927 the Rosses moved nine miles out of Newcastle to Heddon-on-the-Wall, where Manya must have been even lonelier. After Sir Archibald’s death in 1931, she appears to have moved permanently to London.

In St Petersburg 1895-97 Manya and her family gave George Calderon an enormous amount in terms of Russian language practice, sight-seeing, initiation into Russian culture, manners and understanding of Russian women, which he used in his articles published in the Pall Mall Gazette. When George and Kittie announced in October 1900 that they were getting married, Manya wrote George the only letter of congratulation that has survived in his archive. It is in Russian and I translate:

Don’t tell me you are getting married, too?! How unlike you that is, — that you are in love, I can believe, — but that you are getting married and so soon — it’s simply incredible. I approve of your choice, but am sorry to lose you as a dear, good friend and interesting person to talk to. I know that both of you will be happy, because you are both suited to each other, I felt that immediately I saw your darling Kittie. She really is wonderful, and her old mother too. I send you my parental blessing. I am sorry that we shan’t  be at your wedding, much as we would like to be, it’s your own fault, you should have told us earlier. Your devoted and ever-loving MANYA.

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The Somme: Ends and Beginnings

Posted on July 1, 2016 by Patrick Miles

When did the Edwardian Age begin and end?

Obviously, in the literal sense it spanned Edward VII’s reign, 1901-10. Cultural historians, however, have long extended it beyond those dates, because the nexus of attitudes and values that we call ‘Edwardianism’ began to form before 1901 and died years after 1910. Thus Samuel Hynes, author of one of the most influential books about the period, The Edwardian Turn of Mind (1968), placed the beginning at ‘roughly the turn of the century’; some would even date it to the ‘naughty nineties’; Roy Hattersley (The Edwardians, 2004) dated it from Queen Victoria’s death; I perceive it setting in after the Queen’s jubilee of 1897. Hynes wrote that ‘the end of the Edwardian age is as certain as it was sudden — 4 August 1914’ and Hattersely agrees.

But 4 August 1914 is merely symbolical. We all know that Britain went into World War 1 with its Edwardian attitudes intact; that was part of the problem. Last year I followed the Gallipoli campaign on Calderonia from day to day and we could see that it was compounded of ponderousness and mental rigidity, wasteful false heroism, woefully arrogant misplaced self-confidence, dedicated amateurism, and lack of realism, to name but a few attitudes. The failings of the Edwardian officer-class were all too obvious to the ANZAC troops. A tougher new breed of soldier like General Charles Munro, who replaced Ian Hamilton and recommended evacuation, could also see them. I felt then that the Gallipoli disaster not only epitomised the worst of Edwardianism, it marked a turning point in it; the beginning of its end. My own working time-frame for the Edwardian Age became 1897-1915 (one has to spell these things out in one’s Introduction).

However, I don’t now believe that Gallipoli fundamentally changed attitudes. Its failures led to the fall of the Liberal government in May 1915, of Fisher and Churchill, and criticism of the campaign from the Australian journalist Keith Murdoch shook some people’s confidence, but the actual evacuation of January 1916 was seen as a triumph, the nation was still focussed on ‘gallantry’, defeat was not accepted as defeat. It was, I believe, the Battle of the Somme, which was launched at 7.30 a.m. today one hundred years ago, that triggered the break up of the Edwardian mindset.

The Battle of the Somme shared several features with Gallipoli, for example meticulous planning and preparation combined with complete inflexibility, a lack of intelligence analysis combined with a lack of risk analysis, and a belief in ‘heroism’ that made men totally expendable. Meticulous planning and preparation — complete military professionalism — were a good thing, of course. But if there was no plan B, no way of changing from plan A if it went awry, no use of intelligence and risk assessment, then as at Gallipoli meticulous orders could simply make self-destruction more efficient.

George and Kittie Calderon’s twenty-five-year-old friend Dick Sutton, who had been wounded twice by June 1916 and was now ADC to General Sir Henry Rawlinson, commander of the Fourth Army at the Somme, wrote in his diary on 30 June 1916:

In my opinion everything depends on the infantry following upon the heels of the artillery barrage, which will go up in front of them in each task. The weather appears to be favourable, which is an enormously important factor in modern battles. There are, however, two things which may defeat us; or rather, I should say, not two, but a combination of both. These are the magnificent fighting qualities of the enemy and his ever-present machine-guns. No matter how long or how heavy the bombardment it is impossible to knock out every machine-gun, or kill all the detachments. One machine-gun may hold up a whole Brigade if it is properly handled, and a quantity of machine-guns may hold up our whole attack, and slaughter us in thousands.

As we know, that is what happened. Rawlinson ignored intelligence about the depth and strength of the Germans’ dugouts, believed that the long preliminary artillery barrage had destroyed the German front line, and insisted on his own rigid plan. By the afternoon of today the scale of the disaster was clear, but neither Rawlinson nor Haig could change their plan…  By the end of today, the British Army had sustained more casualties than on any other day in its history — 57,470, of which 19,240 dead. When the Battle ended in November, the casualty figure was over a million from both sides.

Yet the effects of the Battle of the Somme were quite different from those of Gallipoli. The army did enter a learning curve. They had invented the ‘creeping barrage’, as Sutton’s diary indicates, but it and the artillery plainly needed improving. Tanks were first used at the Somme in September, but the army had to learn how to combine them with the creeping barrage and infantry assault. This would eventually be a war-winner. The Somme also demonstrated the almost complete irrelevance, if not counter-productivity, of the cavalry. I have the clear impression that defeat on the Somme at last shook military and popular attitudes to the core. As Peter Hart has written in his Gallipoli (2011), the ‘casual arrogance’ that lay behind the Dardanelles disaster was ‘finally exorcised by the Germans on the gently rolling ridges and valleys of the Somme in 1916’.

Edwardianism died at the Somme. This was a very positive development.

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…and a brain surgeon writes

Posted on June 29, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Much as I am enjoying writing this blog free of the constraints of 1914-15 Time, I think long-term followers may understand when I say that I still think of my 1914-15 ‘blography’ of George as Calderonia proper.

Those followers will remember that several posts between July 2014 and July 2015 touched on what I called chronotopia (e.g. 12 September 2014, 8 December 2014, 30 March 2015, 18 June 2015). This word was intended to define the difficulty I had, as a biographer, of two-timing with time, viz. of writing the day-to-day 1914-15 blog strictly in ‘real time’ whilst continuing to write George Calderon: Edwardian Genius in extended narrated time. I don’t know if it was Bakhtin who invented the word ‘chronotope’, but it was certainly needed, to identify the different time/space forms that different genres of writing employ (‘temporalities’ has also been used). When I was trying to write in two chronotopes simultaneously, I felt that circuits in my brain kept shorting. Above all, the ‘real time’ chronotope of the blog kept infecting my writing of the book, sapping its narrative propulsion, until faute de mieux I gave up writing the book for five months, concentrating on completing research for the last two chapters, which I started writing only when Calderonia  proper was over.

When I said that I felt it was my brain that couldn’t cope with writing in these two chronotopes simultaneously, I was aware that I was speaking metaphorically, since I have, of course, no idea of how my own brain physically works. I was also very ready to believe that younger writers’ brains would be more able to two-time than a sixty-eight-year-old’s. But in the course of working on something quite different, I have just read a short article by Dr Detlef B. Linke, Professor of Clinical Neurophysiology and Neurosurgical Rehabilitation at Bonn University, which — in so far as I can understand it — seems to suggest there is empirical evidence for my metaphorical hypothesis.

Dr Linke begins his article by stating that ‘there is no common pacemaker by which intervals of time could be defined in the brain. […] The data demonstrate that the brain is not a clock in the physiological sense’. The brain has developed ‘different time-scales’ for itself, partly through ‘imaginative capabilities’ according to German Idealist philosophers (which I daresay Bakhtin would agree with), but:

Too much rhythmic synchronization is deleterious for informational content, and generalized rhythmic synchronization of the brain is a well-known pathological condition. The question of informational coding therefore has to be seen as a complex system of time-scales in which a complete presence of all the information would destroy the complex hierarchical and heterarchical interactions.

Polychronotopia, then, can cause a complete brainstorm… To complicate matters further, ‘for the right hemisphere, the flow of time is experienced as slower than for the left hemisphere’. Could this mean that two-timing with the narrative-biography-chronotope (slower) and the real-time-chronotope (faster) is a question of repeatedly switching from one hemisphere to the other, which some brains might be better at than others? Linke even seems to suggest that ‘a part of biography […] belongs to the way from the right to the left hemisphere’. He concludes, encouragingly:

Reflection takes time and therefore makes a difference to the passing of time. […] I think this difference need not be painful but it can, instead, be taken as the possibility of the brain being a host to others. There are good reasons to keep up differences and time-scales when they could be the origins for better contact with alterity. But the question of unity therefore remains, especially the question of the ability of being a host while being preserved in unity.

This begs a few questions, and sounds to me as though it may have been translated from German by someone whose native language is not the target one, but it’s still interesting, I find, coming from someone who is described as a ‘brain scientist’ and clearly works with measurable data, unlike myself who can merely speculate.

The full reference for this article is: Detlef Linke, ‘The Lord of Time: Brain Theory and Eschatology’, in The End of the World and the Ends of God, ed. by John Polkinghorne and Michael Welker (Harrisburg, Pennsylvania: Trinity Press International, 2000), pp. 42-46.

Last year in Calderonia, John Dewey, the author of Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Fyodor Tyutchev (2010), and I discussed the tristesse that a biographer often experiences when the subject of their biography has died in the text, so to speak. Since s/he has always known the subject is dead, and the death in the text being written rarely coincides with any commemorative date, we speculated that the tristesse/mourning is also connected with something happening in the brain as that very personal ‘time-track’ comes to an end.

Since then Dewey has published a much-needed collection, in his own elegant English translation, of stories by Yevgeniy Zamyatin, the bracing ‘first dissident’ Soviet writer; see http://www.brimstonepress.co.uk/books/detail/YZ-TheSignAndOtherStories.htm . In my first post next week I shall look at the possibility that there is a link between Zamyatin and George; whilst endeavouring to avoid both apophenia and pareidolia.

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A posh word for it…

Posted on June 25, 2016 by Patrick Miles

The other day, I came across a word that was new to me: apophenia. It is not in Chambers Dictionary, and at first I wondered whether it was a misprint. But, of course, there is masses about it on the internet.

What seems a reliable article in Wikipedia attributes it to the psychologist Klaus Conrad, who defined it in 1958 as ‘the unmotivated seeing of connections’, and the article goes on to say that ‘apophenia has come to imply a universal tendency to seek patterns in random information’.

The penny dropped that this is what is behind some of my ‘phantom flies in amber’ (search on that term for previous posts). I have put together certain objective features on the photograph of the 1st KOSB going over the top on 4 June 1915 and made a pattern that I’ve called ‘George Calderon’ (see my post of 14 June 2016). I took the facts that my great-aunt and -uncle lived a couple of miles from Kittie in Ashford, Kent, demonstrably shared some acquaintances with Kittie, and told me after I returned from Russia in 1973 that ‘Mrs X’s husband also went to Russia’, where X was a foreign-sounding name that I promptly forgot, and I perceived a pattern in this information that spelt ‘my family knew Kittie Calderon’. But in neither case, I stress, did I believe that these perceived patterns had any basis in reality. In fact, I regard them both as nearly unverifiable ever in this world, and therefore intriguing but nothing more.

There seems, however, to be some confusion about ‘apophenia’. You would have thought that the ability to see patterns was a vital creative ability for both artists and scientists. But Conrad’s 1958 publication was entitled Incipient Schizophrenia: An Attempt at a Gestalt-Analysis of Delusion and he thought ‘apophenia’ was a symptom of the onset of delusional thinking in psychosis!

Apparently, apophenia is all right when the pattern leads to empirical testing that in turn leads to ‘insight into the nature of reality or its interconnectedness’, but when it is just ‘a process of […] experiencing abnormal meanings in the entire experiential field’ then those meanings are ‘entirely self-referential, solipsistic, and paranoid’. In fact, one learns, the proper word for the first (i.e. leading to insight into the nature of reality etc) is pareidolia, and apophenia is the abnormal one leading to conspiracy theories, OCD, paranoia and schizophrenia.

It took me forty-five years before I could see the Man in the Moon, yet this is a standard case of pareidolia, apparently. Another would be the ‘face of Satan’ in the smoke trailing down one of the twin towers on 11 September 2001, which I spotted immediately. It’s difficult to see, though, how either of these provides ‘insight into the nature of reality or its interconnectedness’; there’s nothing empirically revealing about them, they are just images. On the other hand, if I jumped to the conclusion that the moon really is a big man’s head, or that Satan personally was telling us he is still alive and kicking, that would be apophenia and the first step towards schizophrenia.

So presumably, wondering whether the famous photograph of the 1st KOSB going over the top shows George Calderon, and hypothesising that my great-aunt and -uncle knew Kittie, are examples of pareidolia (even though I don’t attach any empirical value to them) because at least I’m not mad enough to attach any mystical, conspiratorial significance to the patterns I have perceived here.

That’s all right, then. But it seems to me that apophenia and pareidolia still share the very same process of initial discovery or ‘revelation’. According to Wikipedia’s entry on pareidolia, the latter is a sub-category of apophenia. But surely, if apophenia is the abnormal one, it should be a sub-category of pareidolia, or they both should be sub-categories of that ‘universal tendency to seek patterns in random information’ which apparently does not have a name of its own?

All I can say is, it seems to me that (a) as a biographer one should always be alert to these perceivable patterns, in case there is something verifiable and empirically useful in them, and (b) like the ‘phantom flies in amber’ these patterns don’t half ‘bug’ you once you’ve joined up the dots and perceived them!

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Progress

Posted on June 23, 2016 by Patrick Miles

I’m relieved to say that I’ve completed the sixth draft of my Introduction to George Calderon: Edwardian Genius since June 2013 and cannot at the moment do more. It’s gone off to my biographer colleague for his attention. After he has put it through his mangle, I hope to iron it to a state of crispness and that will be that.

As I explained in my post of 19 May, I have recast the Introduction in terms of what six independent readers told me they thought should be addressed in it. One really has to pitch these things to the potential reader. However, a surprising amount of this latest version survives from rabbitings that first saw the light three years ago.

I am hopeful that this long process has successfully concealed the fact that I am wholly unqualified to write introductions to my own work. You don’t, thankfully, have to explain your own poems or plays… It’s an impossible demand. I worked three years with Ireland’s greatest living dramatist, Tom Murphy, on his play The Last Days of a Reluctant Tyrant, and when it was all over he asked me to write its first publicity shot. ‘Tell me what it’s about, Patrick, because I don’t know any longer,’ he said. Quite.

So I am now going into printing out the ‘revised typescript’ on recycled paper and giving it its final hoover (how unthreatening these domestic, feminine images are!). Goodness knows how many weeks it will take. Some people have told me that they regard this as the most satisfying stage of writing a book, but I don’t. I can’t possibly face 165,000 words in a mood of enjoyment and self-congratulation. If one doesn’t read hypercritically, it’s a waste of time. The real question is, how much will I want to tamper with?

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Thank you; and Bunty!

Posted on June 21, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Last Thursday here in Cambridge I went to see a new production of Patrick Marber’s version of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, set in Britain 1945. I would be surprised if there is a tougher, less sentimental play touring England at this moment (it now goes to Brighton, Richmond and Milton Keynes, and is well worth seeing). Tension and dread screwed down the audience…until a Jack Russell was carried in UL, brought downstage, borne off DR, and released a universal ‘Aaaaaah’. I am rather more of a cat person myself, but evidently dogs are a force to be reckoned with.

I was delighted to read two Comments on the blog about them in one day — Jenny Hands’s lovely piece mentioning her own Jack Russell and appreciating ‘Bunt’, as Kittie called her Cairn terrier in her diary, and John Pym’s incredibly powerful evocation of Foxwold through the dogs and smells of his childhood. Thank you both, and don’t hesitate to Comment again concerning dogs, as they were a major theme in the Calderons’ lives and those of their friends. Indeed, Kittie’s closest friends of her own generation, Nina Corbet and Constance Sutton, always kept dogs and discussed them at some length in their letters to her. I feel a post coming towards me from afar on this intriguing Edwardian topic… But must point out that Kittie and George had three cats as well.

For me it was also terrific that Jenny Hands foregrounded Kittie as ‘someone who in general can be liked and admired’. I have just described her in my draft Introduction as ‘every bit as impressive as George’, but I sometimes worry that I am hopelessly predisposed. Every independent observation about Kittie is therefore valuable to me.

Finally, my extreme thanks to Professor Ricketts for his extended Comment on mourning and the ‘Lead. Lead’ crux in Robert Nichols’s poem ‘The Assault’. He is only the second of about twelve professors, both in office and emeriti, who has actually posted a Comment that all can read, rather than sending me a private email whose content is certainly worthy of Comment status but is not intended for general consumption. I think Professor Ricketts’s collocation of the ‘Lead. Lead’ line with the earlier one in which ‘lead’ signifies the heavy metal, and has no diacritic, is pretty suggestive, but I shall refrain from further comment, because I feel Comments should be principally by followers!

Professor Ricketts is a specialist in the World War 1 poets and I very much hope I can tempt him to do a guest post at some future date. And I remain deeply grateful to Clare Hopkins, Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, for initiating the debate with her moving Comment of 5 June.

For the archive of posts since 31 July 2015, please click here. 

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‘A sort of mother to us all’

Posted on June 17, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Others’ observations about Kittie Calderon are rare (except for George’s in letters, of course). It was with great pleasure, therefore, that I heard recently from the film critic John Pym that he had come across several mentions of Kittie in his father Jack’s letters of 1929-30; and I am most grateful to him for allowing me to quote some now and reproduce the photographs of his parents below.

Long-term followers of this blog will remember John Pym’s exceedingly generous contribution of family images, information and text to Calderonia between 2014 and 2015. Those who have joined more recently might like to access these by searching on Foxwold, the Pym family home at Brasted Chart where Kittie and George were often the guests of their great friends Charles ‘Evey’ Pym and his wife Violet (née Lubbock). On 29 November 1914 the Calderons attended the christening at Brasted of Elizabeth Pym (1914-2002), to whom George was a godfather, and they spent their last Christmas together at Foxwold (see my post for 23-31 December 1914).

Jack Pym (1908-93) was Evey and Violet’s eldest child and featured on day one of this blog, 31 July 1914 (2014), as he was on holiday in the Isle of Wight with his brother Roland (1910-2006) when George joined the family there.

In 1927, Violet died at the age of forty-five, leaving four children. After the funeral, Kittie stayed at Foxwold for three weeks; in April she helped at Foxwold for five weeks; she had the Pyms’ son Jeremy (1919-81) and his nurse to stay with her at Petersfield; and she was always available to Evey for advice about the children’s health and well being. In fact, when I researched my final chapter, ‘White Raven’, about the last twenty-seven years of Kittie’s life, I concluded from Foxwold’s Visitors Book and Kittie’s letters to Percy Lubbock postponing at short notice her planned visits to him in Italy, that in the late 1920s Kittie found her ‘family’ with the now motherless Pyms in Kent.

This is graphically borne out by Jack Pym’s letters to his intended, Diana Gough, in 1929. The couple were still at university and both of their widowed parents were apprehensive about them marrying so young. Kittie seems to have played an important part in persuading Evey not to oppose the engagement. In particular, it was arranged that Kittie should already be at Foxwold when Diana and her mother Lady Gough visited in April and again in August 1930, and that she should stay on to give counsel afterwards. Jack Pym twice described Kittie in letters as ‘a sort of mother’ to the family, and the marriage of Jack and Diana eventually took place in London on 17 December 1930.

Jack and Diana Pym, 1930s

John (Jack) Pym, 1930, and Diana Pym, née Gough, 1930s

The first mention of Kittie in Jack Pym’s letters to Diana comes on 4 August 1929 and  is fascinating:

We argued all about Epstein [the sculptor] last night at dinner. I think I shall retire from this artistic controversy, it never gets anywhere and merely leads to most frightful wrangles. We have an Irish aunt staying here who is extremely charming and a sort of mother to us all, but she is a fair one for argufying […].

Kittie was not Irish by nationality, she was a daughter of the Anglo-Irish landlord John Hamilton, who has been described as doing ‘more for his tenants than any other landlord before, during and after the [Potato] Famine’ (Dermot James, John Hamilton of Donegal 1800-84: This Recklessly Generous Landlord, Dublin, The Woodfield Press, 2010, p. ix). She spent much of her childhood in Ireland, possibly spoke with a slight Irish accent, but otherwise with received pronunciation. She was used to and enjoyed ‘argufying’ about topics, because George loved igniting discussion and expected her to argue back!

On 14 December 1929 Jack Pym characterised Kittie again in a letter to Diana:

She is Irish with all the attractive qualities of that race and practically none of their disabilities. But she has a boring little dog.

This was the rather humanoid, and very long-lived, Cairn terrier Bunty, who can be seen in the photograph accompanying my post ‘Watch this Space’ of 20 April 2016. After the visit by Diana and her mother in August 1930, Kittie stayed on for two more days and on 14 August Jack wrote to Diana:

Aunt Kitty departed on Wed., her dog smelling to the last like a public lavatory, it had rolled in something and had to be washed with Jeyes [Fluid].

Bunty always seems to have made an impression on people.

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Is this George Calderon?

Posted on June 14, 2016 by Patrick Miles

Just as music gives people ‘ear-worms’, so biography brings us ‘phantom flies in amber’. As I explained in my posts of 5 January and 1 April 2015, over time the biographer becomes convinced s/he has seen things in print that s/he can no longer find, glimpsed documents s/he can no longer trace, heard things (‘facts’) that s/he cannot verify, however long s/he spends looking for them… These obsessions become flies, or even large black beetles, preserved in the amber of the biographer’s brain.

Is this George Calderon, 4 June 1915?

Published by kind permission of the Imperial War Museum.

For me, the figure in the foreground above, who features in the extreme left of the famous photograph of the K.O.S.B. going over the top on 4 June 1915 (see my post for that day last year), is one such beetle.

The very first time I saw the photograph, I was struck by the figure’s resemblance to George Calderon. The soldier is the right height, the nose is as prominent, perhaps the stoop comes from George’s age, weariness, or documented determination always to keep his head down at Gallipoli, perhaps the curious thing on his chest is one of the shell-caps that in his last letter to Kittie he described the ‘armourer sergeant’ fitting on his broken field glasses, perhaps this figure’s impedimenta are what George was referring to when he said he was ‘getting to look like the tramp cyclist at the music halls’? Perhaps the slightly disoriented, absent-minded stance of the figure is what caused him as an interpreter in the Blues to be called ‘The Professor’?

We know that by now George was wearing a pith helmet, and the officers had all, probably, removed their insignia to avoid being picked off by snipers. The fact that this figure is not yet going over the top himself is not unusual: on the Western Front, at least, not all officers surged forward at the head of their men, some remained to encourage and help the rest over, before joining them. In the 1st K.O.S.B. on 4 June there was almost an excess of lieutenants and captains, as so many had been attached from other regiments.

But…but…this is not at all how one had imagined George in the battle, nor does it conform with what we are told by the sources about B Company going over the top. These sources describe B ‘jumping’ as A Company had before them, i.e. attacking in a single surge, not in platoon rushes. Moreover, you would have thought that the photographer would be unable to keep any traces of the dead and wounded from A Company out of the picture and there seems to be no sense of urgency amongst those going over the top here. This is why I concluded last year that the photograph was most likely of C or D Company, who went forward in platoon rushes twenty minutes or more after the time fixed in orders and encountered little resistance.

The photo as a whole calls for interpretation and comment from military historians who have specialised in Gallipoli, and I shall invite one to make a guest appearance on ‘Calderonia’ to explain what he thinks is going on here.

The vital thing about ‘phantom flies in amber’ is never to get so used to them that you end up thinking of them as facts…

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More Chekhovian than Anton

Posted on June 10, 2016 by Patrick Miles

For an extreme example of what George Calderon called Chekhov’s ‘disjunctive manner’, I recommend:

Florence Foster Jenkins Poster

George touched on aspects of the ‘disjunctive manner’ in the Introduction (1912) to his translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard, but he had expressed it most succinctly the year before in his article on the exhibition of Post-Impressionist painters at the Grafton Gallery that Virginia Woolf famously said ‘changed human character’:

With regard to grotesqueness in the first place, it has its uses. When a man of Gauguin’s intelligence and accomplishment paints Christ in the Garden looking ridiculous with his great patch of red hair, one must consider whether it was not perhaps done with a good intention (which fails, however, a little with myself). Pathetic things in real life have a way of mixing themselves up with grotesque things. Realists have seized on this confusion to convey the pathos of life with its natural rough flavour about it. Characters in Tchekhov’s plays will suddenly pull out a cucumber and begin to eat it, or exclaim apropos of nothing ‘My little dog eats nuts’, or the like, and the reality of their inconsequences raises the value of the adjacent pathos. That may have been Gauguin’s intention with the Christ.

However, I did say extreme example. That is because the ‘disjunction’ in this film is between pure harmony and pure disharmony. The very rich Florence Foster Jenkins loves the harmony of the great singing voice, and she can hear it in her head when she herself sings, but her own singing (e.g. in the Carnegie Hall!) is excruciatingly disharmonious. There is a grotesque disjunction between the harmony in her brain and the discord her voice produces — and nobody for most of the film has the heart to tell her so. The effect is hilarious and unbearable by turns and often simultaneously (cf. Chekhov). But there is also plenty of, in George’s words, ‘adjacent pathos’, because the disjunction in Florence’s brain may really have been caused by the syphilis her first husband infected her with, from which she made a remarkable recovery, and in any case she displays an eye-watering faith in herself. Despite its huge dissonantal ‘inconsequences’, the film is as much about the human spirit as, say, the women’s arias at the end of Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters.

Meryl Streep  flutters, bustles, twitters and beguiles as Florence Foster Jenkins, and the role of her much younger husband elicits the best acting of Hugh Grant’s career; but for me it is Simon Helberg as the pianist who achieves true Chekhovian range and depth.

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