Figure from Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ (left); George Calderon’s pencil sketch ‘Manu’ (right)
It must have taken great self-control for George to concentrate on making a full synopsis of his book Tahiti when he was home on weekend leave, rather than simply keep writing it. But it was certainly the most rational approach. It must also have taken him a long time, as it had to be detailed. ‘Some parts of the book were practically finished,’ Kittie wrote in her Preface (1921), ‘others existed in many forms [my italics].’ Then there were diaries and ‘papers’ from which she had to make ‘direct selections’, and ‘very often the same matter was found in different versions’. In the synopsis, he had to make the source of the various elements of the composition that were to be fletched onto the timeline as clear as possible. What Kittie made from his synopsis is a masterpiece.
Although I have a whole chapter in my biography devoted to what he did on Tahiti in 1906, reconstructed from both his own account and information kindly supplied to me by the Tahitian authorities today, I shall not be looking at Tahiti as a work of art until I get to the year 1921 in the chapter I am about to write — about Kittie’s life 1915-22. I will be very short of space, but I have been re-reading and thinking about the book for years, so it will be a huge pleasure to commit my conclusions to paper.
Tahiti has a clear set of strands: the ‘road’, Tahitian people, music, pre-Christian religion and customs, the French administration, ‘getting back to nature’, rampant sectarianism, the baleful touch of ‘Civilisation’… But from the literary point of view, the most interesting question is: how fictive is this ‘travelogue’? When I researched the biographical Tahiti chapter, it soon became clear that George had changed certain names, e.g. of the ship he arrived on and French officials. But his own note, reproduced by Kittie in her Preface, suggests something rather different:
Everything set down in this book is true. I have thought it important, for a right understanding of individual lives, and thereby a conglomeration of detail, to give a picture of the whole, to put down personal details which I have been told or found out about people. The only untruth is that I have sufficiently disguised the personality of those of whom they are told, so that no one should recognise them.
Unless ‘personality’ meant for Edwardians something closer to ‘identity’ (which is not confirmed by dictionaries), George is saying that not only did he change people’s names, he changed their characters. Does this mean that, for instance, the unique, idiosyncratic, charming Tahiri-i-te-rai and Tupuna were not in fact like that? The suspicion reminds me of our discussion a few days ago about when is a biography actually fiction!
Just possibly, one can see this at work in some of the pencil sketches and watercolours that he produced. Perhaps the reason he did not intend the watercolour I showed in my blog of 27 February to be published, and did not put the woman’s name on it, is that it was imaginary — his private idea of what Rarahu, the heroine of Loti’s Le Mariage de Loti, looked like? Compositionally it has several resemblances to Loti’s own drawing. Then I have long been intrigued by the sketch entitled ‘(Manu)’ that Kittie included in Tahiti. This is the sketch I have reproduced above right. In technique, intensity and wistfulness it always struck me as different from the rest. Then about three years ago I suddenly realised it reminded me of the figure in the left of Gauguin’s 1899 painting ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ — the figure reproduced on the left above.
We know that George was deeply interested in Gauguin’s art, because he visited the famous First Exhibition of Post-Impressionist Paintings in London in 1910, which included thirty-six of Gauguin’s paintings, and wrote about it in the New Age. ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ was not shown in that exhibition, and I have been unable to track its ownership from, say, 1906 to 1914. But could George have seen a reproduction after he got back from Tahiti and drawn ‘(Manu)’ then, because he was reminded of her by the Gauguin figure? As with the ‘Rarahu’ painting, there are some distinct resemblances. It is also interesting that he has put ‘Manu’ in brackets, as though it was not ‘really’ her, not actually done from life. Not all of the drawings/paintings reproduced in Tahiti have the names of their sitters on, but ‘Manu’ is the only one enclosed in brackets.
The other thing we have to remember is that the writing of Tahiti was an act of creative hysteresis, i.e. the creation came years after the cause. So, as Kittie stresses, it was a work of memory…and memory of course massages fact. Although it contains its barbed wire, syphilis, and brutes, is the Tahiti of George’s book an imagined world, a fictive one, and how close are those qualities to imaginariness and fictitiousness?
I have a predilection for this image of Tahiti myself, because in the winter of 1972/73 in Moscow, surrounded by informers, KGB microphones, queuing, freezing fog, lies and mass psychosis, I came across a Soviet reproduction of ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’ in a pack of postcards sold at a tobacco kiosk. Along with other ‘icons’, including sensu stricto Rublev’s ‘Trinity’, I stuck it on the snot-green wallpaper above my work table in the student hostel on Lenin Hills.
People will say that it is quite obvious what the ‘message’ of this painting is from the central position of the blossoms and the breasts, but in my experience your eye very quickly fixes on the girls’ faces, which are so different, yet filled with the same gentleness, nobility, and security. The painting, even in this oddly coloured reproduction, helped me survive a year in the Soviet Union as a postgraduate.
Soviet postcard reproduction, c.1970, of Gauguin’s ‘Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms’
Sometime in 1973 I wrote:
Those girls, they stand there simply, offering
perhaps the future, or the murdered past.
Oh love-red blossom, and on golden skin
ash blue and faded mauve and deepest Pasque.
She is still giving, strongest trust; yet looks
a little to the side, beyond us here.
The other whispered softly to her, coaxed,
but almost hides her own pale, thornless briar.
(First published in Iota, no. 37, 1997)
Next entry: 15 March 1915: The strain tells
A terrific find
Please read Katy George’s and my Comments for the background to this letter, which Katy discovered recently amongst some papers of Mrs Raikes in a charity shop in Deal, Kent. New letters of Kittie Calderon’s are as rare as new ones of George’s! As I shall explain below, this find is invaluable to me as their biographer.
The letter is a very clear example of Kittie’s flying Quangle-Wangle handwriting, so I don’t think it is necessary for me to transcribe it:
Obverse of letter from Katharine Calderon to Gladys Raikes, 31 March 1923
Reverse
In those days, correspondents often just put the day of the week or the day of the month at the top of their letters, so it is brilliant that Kittie’s envelope has also survived, and this is clearly date-stamped 1923. It is addressed to Mrs Raikes at ‘Vinnicks’, Highclere, otherwise known as Downton Abbey, near Newbury… However, this was crossed out and the letter redirected to St Hilda’s Hall, Oxford.
The first matter of great interest is the mention of a ‘talk’ by Rothenstein and the fact that ‘he’ had written to Kittie telling her about it. This is George’s great friend, the painter William Rothenstein, about whom I wrote in my post of 3 January. It so happens that we have an undated letter from Rothenstein to Kittie in which he apologises for having ‘neither talent nor time’ for writing a memoir of George Calderon, but is planning a ‘talk’. Until Katy found this letter to Mrs Raikes, we had no idea that Rothenstein had actually given a ‘talk’. But it seems likely that his undated letter is the very one referred to in Kittie’s letter above, and that he gave the ‘talk’ where Mrs Raikes wrote her own letter from, i.e. at Highclere. Personally, I would have expected Rothenstein to have given the ‘talk’ in Oxford, where he had many literary contacts and where George was still a well-remembered figure who had been an undergraduate at Trinity College and raised a body of student volunteers during the Coal Strike of 1912. Perhaps Mrs Raikes had put her ‘permanent’ address on her own letter to Kittie but actually heard the ‘talk’ in Oxford and was still there, at St Hilda’s, when Kittie replied. No reason springs to my mind, at least, for why Rothenstein would give the talk at Highclere.
The reason Kittie put ‘talk’ in inverted commas, and I have perpetuated this, is that to people of Kittie’s and Rothenstein’s generation and social standing ‘talk’ was a new, rather infra dig word. Edwardians gave ‘lectures’. In his letter which we may now date as 1923, Rothenstein himself apologised to Kittie:
This rather suggests ‘Will’ spoke from very few notes and that is why there is no known text/record of his ‘talk’. But at least we now know he gave it.
The inference is that he also referred to Percy’s George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory (1921). Rothenstein’s own copy is in McGill University Library, Canada, and in 2010 Professor Alan Andrews, an expert on George’s fellow dramatist St John Hankin, emailed me to say that he noticed Rothenstein had written on the front end paper: ‘[Page] 90 account of dear George’s relation with me.’
The other subject of great interest to me in this letter is Kittie’s own feelings about Percy’s Sketch from Memory. She thinks it ‘beautiful’ and actually calls it a ‘Life’. The latter is one in my eye, as I have been saying for years that my book is the ‘first biography’ of George Calderon! On the other hand, Kittie had a great hand in this book, supplying a long memoir of George written specially for Percy, and all the biographical material that she thought fit. As a relative of Percy’s once put it to me, ‘he wrote the book for Kittie’. The latter is graphically borne out by the fact that it has a substantial, very moving section devoted to Kittie’s first husband, George’s friend and Percy’s uncle, Archie Ripley. It was very much George’s ‘authorized’ biography, then.
I will say no more about this subject here, except that (1) I have access to all the biographical material Kittie made available to Percy, but also to far more that she did not, (2) there were large areas of George’s life that Percy was not able to summon up a critical interest in, and (3) Calderon and Lubbock had fundamentally different personalities.
Nevertheless, Kittie was obviously pleased with the result, describing both the Sketch from Memory and Earlham as ‘masterpieces’. Although Percy’s prose is perhaps too Jamesian and orotund for our taste today, I would not disagree with that judgement. Earlham is the better-known book, a post-1918 recherche du temps perdu that has had great influence down the generations and never, it seems, been out of print. But the ‘Life’ is such a personal matter for Kittie that she implies with her three dots that she can’t talk about it… It is extremely interesting to see what she has to say about Earlham, for which she drew the frontispiece in the first edition, as she knew the place well from when she was married to Ripley. ‘Utterly and completely true yet perfect in its art — and of both books that is true’ is a very valuable statement to have from her.
I cannot add much about Mrs Raikes to what I have said in my response to Katy George’s Comment. However, thanks to the indefatigable labours of Mr Johnnie Pym, Evey and Violet Pym’s grandson, I can tell followers that the desire Kittie expresses in the last paragraph of this letter soon came true: Mrs Raikes’s late husband was a friend of Major C.E. Pym (‘Evey’), who invited her and her two sons to stay at Foxwold 1-6 September 1923, when Kittie herself was already there. They also coincided at Foxwold in 1931.
P.S. No mention of the distinguished Raikes family would be complete without a footnote referring to the fact that the dandy Tom Raikes (1777-1848) met Pushkin playing cards in St Petersburg high society in 1829 and is probably the ‘puteshestvennik zaletnyi,/ Perekrakhmalennyi nakhal’ (‘traveller just flown in,/An overstarched lout’) immortalised in Evgenii Onegin, Chapter 8, stanza XXVI, lines 9-14.
Next entry: Gallipoli: the beginning of the end