The Edwardian turn of language

Posted on February 12, 2015 by Patrick Miles

If George’s translations are ‘quirky’ and Constance’s ‘bland’, what is it they have in common that qualifies them both as ‘Edwardian’?

A certain kind of logorrhoea combined with loose sentence structure and genteelism.

Garnett, it has to be said, is far worse than Calderon in these respects. Take her lead-in to Lopkahin’s great speech in Act 3 after returning from the auction:

LYUBOV. Is the cherry orchard sold?

LOPAHIN. It is sold.

LYUBOV. Who has bought it?

LOPAHIN. I have bought it. [Long pause] I have bought it! Wait a bit, ladies and gentlemen, pray. My head’s a bit muddled, I can’t speak.

It is simply a fact of Russian syntax that the first three lines require only six words in the original. But there is no need to use twelve to ‘say’ the same thing in English. The fact that the Russian dialogue is so spare and plosive should impel one to achieve a similar effect. I am sure George has tried to do this, by opting for the past simple rather than Garnett’s full-form present perfect, and by going for the special use of ‘do’:

MADAME RANEVSKY. Was the cherry orchard sold?

LOPAKHIN: Yes.

MADAME RANEVSKY. Who bought it?

LOPAKHIN. I did. [Long pause] I bought it. Wait a bit; don’t hurry me; my head’s in a whirl; I can’t speak…

But Constance has also lengthened ‘gospoda‘ into ‘ladies and gentlemen’, and tacked ‘pray’, which must have been laughably genteel even in 1906, onto the end of the sentence, giving the latter a dying fall, making it lose all forward energy, and leaving it looking amorphous. In the original the two words she has rendered as ‘pray’ flash past in the middle of the sentence. George seems to have thought that anything for them in English would slow the sentence down at this dramatic moment, so he has dropped them and replaced them with ‘don’t hurry me’, which keeps the sentence penetrative. Constance has also made two sentences out of one in the original, whereas George’s use of semi-colons (very characteristic of him and too literary for a play-text today) successfully imitates the slightly staccato energy of Chekhov’s own, single sentence.

Yet it’s undeniable that George too cannot resist Edwardian paraphrase and genteelification. For instance, the last line of Act 2 of The Seagull is Nina’s single word ‘Son!‘ (‘Dream!’). This is very powerful. It is not English’s fault that we have to use an article here. The plain literal translation, then, would be: ‘A dream!’. Its brevity is a challenge that any British actress would relish. She could convey almost as much as the Russian through timing, delivery and body language. To say ‘It’s a dream!’ (Garnett) is to make the line a statement rather than an experience, but to say ‘It’s like a dream!’ (Calderon) is to distort the original altogether and remove its untramelled emotion to a speculative plane.

Another way of defining what is Edwardian about these translations would be, in my opinion, to say that they consistently dislocate, refract, avoid or water down the direct expression of feelings that is there in Chekhov’s original. Their general logorrhoea also works towards that effect.

The phenomenon can be seen in three of the most successful playwrights of the age, Pinero, Shaw and Galsworthy, who all love big blocks of stage prose. The only explanation I can come up with is that in the Edwardian period the dominant discourse became polemical, political and idea-based. Britain saw an explosion of such discourse, on the streets, in the media, in the parliamentary process (see my post of 21 November). It intimidated the drama into discussion rather than being, into statements about emotion rather than the realisation of emotion, into idea-speak rather than art-speech.

That having been said, reviewers agreed that in his own plays George displayed a natural gift for juicy, authentic and economical stage dialogue. Constance, by contrast, was not remotely a person of the theatre and could be said to have a tin ear for stage dialogue. Undoubtedly this is what made directors and actors prefer George’s translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard through the 1920s. Then a strange thing happened. By the 1930s Constance had translated all the plays, so inevitably more of her translations were being used. But because George’s translations were more recognisably his theatrical language, they became increasingly identified with the Edwardian past and fell away. Constance’s, however, could be said to be in no theatrical language at all, but to appear more as literals. Directors like Komisarjevsky and St-Denis could therefore use them as drafts to produce their own theatrical languages — which Kittie Calderon would never have allowed them to do with George’s work.

By the 1970s Constance Garnett’s translations were beginning to fall away in the British theatre even as literals (the translation would be credited as hers in the programme, but great changes were made). More and more theatre practitioners were commissioning their own literals or theatrical versions (e.g. Frayn’s). Now, I think, Garnett’s translations are hardly used in the British theatre at all.

George’s, however, could make an interesting comeback. If you are staging a period production of The Seagull or The Cherry Orchard, it makes sense to use an English version that is accurate but cast in an authentic theatrical language of the period — which George’s translations are. Today’s ‘dramaturgs’ increasingly recognise the advantages of such translations, and can subtly re-energise them. Proof of this was Stuart Paterson’s 2009 adaptation of George’s Seagull for the production by the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in Glasgow celebrating the centenary of the British premiere. This adaptation was subsequently broadcast on Radio 3 and lives on.

It amuses me now to think that we rejected George’s Seagull out of hand for the National Theatre in 1978 and sniffily dismissed his footnotes as ‘bookish’. Because he had lived in Russia at the very time in which the play is set, and consulted a wide range of people and published sources about aspects of the text, those copious notes are now invaluable (for instance, about the kind of billiards that Gaev plays in The Cherry Orchard). It sends a shiver down my spine to recall that we were thinking of inviting Harold Pinter to make a version of The Seagull. That, surely, would have transported us from Edwardian logorrhoea to the other extreme. It would have sucked Chekhov’s text dry!

Next entry: Profs Phelps and Senelick get it right

Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Mews, hues, and wonkers

Posted on February 11, 2015 by Patrick Miles

So (see ‘Two anniversaries’, 29 January), save perhaps for a few lost manuscript versions of Chekhov’s one-act plays made throughout the British Empire for amateur performance, Constance Garnett was the first person to translate a Chekhov play into English (The Cherry Orchard, 1906, disastrous production by the Stage Society 1911, published 1923).

If we include American English, which we should, the first published English translation of a Chekhov play was of The Cherry Orchard (New Haven, Conn., 1908). This means that, contrary to the impression I may have given elsewhere, George Calderon’s book Two Plays by Tchekhof (1912) was not the first English-language version to appear in print.

However, American English is not my native language, so I am not competent to judge American translations. The important thing about George’s translations (The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard) is that they remained the preferred versions in Britain until the 1930s and, unlike Garnett’s Cherry Orchard, his translation of The Seagull directed largely by himself was a significant success in a commercial theatre, the Glasgow Repertory (1909). His Cherry Orchard was the text used for the production that finally put Chekhov on the London commercial stage (1925) and initiated a Chekhov ‘boom’.

In this post, then, I am going to confine myself to British translations, specifically Constance Garnett’s and George’s. On 13 February I shall get a few things off my chest about George’s introduction to Two Plays by Tchekhof, which was probably even more influential than his translations.

How good are George Calderon’s versions of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard?

When I was asked to look at all available English-language translations of The Seagull in 1978, for a proposed production at our new National Theatre, of course George Calderon’s and Constance Garnett’s were at the top of the list (numbering about twenty-five, even then). But the Head of Scripts, Shakespearian critic and excellent theatre practitioner John Russell Brown, immediately — with a pained look that I remember well — rejected George’s as ‘too quirky’ and ‘too Edwardian’. I entirely agreed with him. The sheer number of footnotes suggested bookishness, and there were, it seemed, some very peculiar linguistic solutions (e.g. ‘non possumus‘ for the Russian indifferentizm). There was also a strange bloodlessness about his language, reminiscent perhaps of Galsworthy, that one felt, with a shudder, was quintessentially ‘Edwardian’. I shall have fought my way back to this subject by the end of tomorrow’s post. Suffice it to say, Constance Garnett’s translation, though also ‘Edwardian’, was rejected as being too bland and featureless!

Perhaps the first thing that should be said about Calderon’s and Garnett’s translations is that they, like most British versions, do not render Chekhov’s stage directions into the centuries-old convention of the British theatre. Published nineteenth/early twentieth century Russian plays present the set and action as seen from the auditorium (you can read a lot into this, but Russian theatre practice is another matter). Thus what is ‘right’ in Chekhov’s stage directions is ‘[stage] left’ in British practice. The fact that this transformation has not been made by George or Constance means that their English texts are scenically a mirror-image of the original. Well, one could say this is irrelevant, but it is rather Carrollian to contemplate…

Next, we should be clear that there are Russian words whose semantic, poetic and cultural resonance is impossible to trans-late, i.e. carry over, into English words. Unfortunately, the titles of these two plays are cases in point. Constance Garnett immediately realised that chaika ‘isn’t a Sea-Gull — but a Lake Gull’, as she wrote her son, but what could be done about it? The ozernaia chaika (lake gull) is Larus ridibundus, the Black-Headed Gull. This can be a very beautiful bird, with wings appearing more pointed than those of larger gulls and pure white leading edges. However, the associations of seagulls for us, a seafaring nation, are squawky and filthy. The closest I can get in English to the associations of chaika for land-locked Russians is a tanka by Wakayama Bokusui:

How forlorn/the white bird!/Sky and sea are both/blue: yet untinged/she hovers there.

One also gets a sense of what chaika can mean to Russians from the scene of Hamlet’s being set on the shore of Denmark in Kozintsev’s famous film: the camera follows a white seagull wheeling over sea and rocks, suggestive of the soul of Ophelia.

Not much can be done about this in English. ‘Mew’, ‘Gull’, ‘Sea-Swallow’ and others have been tried, but they are even less beautiful than ‘Seagull’. Nowhere does George explain what associations he felt chaika had in Russian, but he is the first person to have opted in print for The Seagull as the play’s English title. The best solution, it seems to me, is Laurence Senelick’s in his magnificent Complete Plays/Anton Chekhov (New York & London, 2006): ‘In English […] The Seagull has gained common currency as the play’s title, so I have retained it here, but refer simply to the “gull” in the text.’

Similarly, Chekhov made it crystal clear to Stanislavsky that of the two possible pronunciations of the Russian adjective vishnevyi, he intended the one (‘veeshnyo-vy’) that referred to the flower rather than the fruit, i.e. to the orchard’s beauty rather than its Lopakhinesque commercial value as a jam-producer. In conjunction with the pronunciation ‘veeshnyo-vy’, the word sad, usually translated ‘orchard’, acquires overtones more of ‘garden’. Hence when I was asked to produce a lexical/literal translation of the play, I gave titles ranging from Cherryflowergarden [sic] through Cherry Flower Estate to Cherrylands (since Vishnevyi sad is not just the actual garden/orchard, but the name of the estate). However, since Constance’s plonking The Cherry Orchard of 1906/11, repeated by George in 1910/12, that is what it will always remain.

Then, of course, there is the simple matter of mistakes of translation. I have not made a word-for-word comparison of the two translations, but I have the impression that there are more of these (say, a dozen altogether) in George’s version of The Seagull than in Constance’s. For instance, when at the end of Act 3 everyone has departed, leaving an empty stage, first a maid returns to grab a forgotten basket of plums, then Trigorin re-enters, saying ‘I’ve forgotten my stick. I think it’s on the verandah’, but George has ‘I think she’s out there on the verandah’, meaning Nina. There is no doubt that he has mistaken the nominative feminine pronoun representing an inanimate feminine noun (stick) for the feminine third-person singular (she) here. Knowing that Nina was coming onstage towards Trigorin from the verandah (which Trigorin had/had not planned), George has, I believe, let his scenic imagination run away with him.

There is a slight sense, perhaps, in George’s translation, that like a lot of Englishmen of his generation he had not immersed himself long enough in a Russian ‘language-bath’ for certain things to be second nature. The use of pronouns might be one. Originally, he had Polina stroking her own hair in the scene with Masha and Konstantin at the beginning of Act 4, when the Russian possessive pronoun clearly tells us it is Konstantin’s hair. However, he may have just overlooked the pronoun ‘his’ because of, again, his own cultural and scenic expectations. He corrected the mistake in proof.

Conversely, Constance Garnett translated Trigorin’s ‘vdovii tsvet‘ in Act 2 as ‘widow’s flower’, a bad mistake as tsvet here can only mean ‘colour’. But George had difficulty with it too: in Two Plays by Tchekhof he rendered it as ‘mourning shade’, but in the margin of his mother’s copy he wrote ‘widows’ colour’ (not incorporated, however, in subsequent editions as other revisions were).

Correction by George Calderon in margin of his published translation of The Seagull, 1912

Correction by George Calderon in margin of his published translation of The Seagull, 1912

Actually this crux demonstrates the difficulty of translating languages that have different structures and are at different stages of development. The Russian vdovii is a possessive adjective (‘belonging to a widow/widows’) of a kind that exists only tenuously in English: ‘fishy hope and fear [= the hope and fear of fish]’ (R. Brooke), ‘the bovine mind [= the mind of a cow]’, ‘mousy cheer within the larder [= food of mice]’ (S. Goathead), ‘oaten flavour [= taste possessed by oats]’. George and Constance had no alternative but to use an apostrophe. Some translators have done worse: Ronald Hingley has ‘Flower. Sombre hue’, Elizaveta Fen hedges her bets with ‘flower — the colour of a widow’s dress’. The point is that the deep, but vibrant, almost purple blue of the commonest garden heliotrope is a colour that certain widows might choose to wear at a certain stage of mourning. Today, the attributive use of the plural noun would be possible: ‘widows colour’, and a case might even be made for, on Trigorin’s lips, ‘vidual hue’.

The reason Garnett’s translations have the edge in accuracy is probably that she ran every word past her collaborator-consultant Natalie Duddington, who had native educated Russian but also a good knowledge of English. George had his native Russian consultants, but none was as professional as Duddington. It is perhaps surprising that Yavorskaya, Chekhov’s brief lover who played Nina at the age of forty in the 1912 London production of George’s translation, never pointed out George’s mistake with the stick, but then as the centre of attention (in her own eyes) it wasn’t in her interest to! A consultant like Duddington would also have spotted that George translates Treplev’s ‘novyye formy‘ as ‘new formulae’ in Act 1, moves to ‘new forms’ in Act 2, then returns to ‘new formulae’ in Act 4. Although Calderon had translated three plays by now (the Chekhov and Musset’s On ne badine pas avec l’amour), one cannot help thinking that an experienced translator would not have made this mistake. Constance, of course, was very experienced.

Like ‘non possumus‘, ‘formulae’ is an example of George’s ‘quirkiness’. Why did he go for ‘formulae’ when it would imply something mathematical, almost Aspergic? The very fact that he came back to the best and most emotive word, ‘forms’, surely implies that he was uncertain himself. On the other hand, the use of the ‘quirky’ word ‘Tatterdemalion!’ hurled by Arkadina at her son in Act 3, does seem appropriate for the funny word oborvysh and contributes to the ghastly campness of the scene. Here Constance has the fuzzy ‘You ragged beggar!’, Hingley the English cliché ‘Tramp!’, Fen the colourless ‘You beggar!’.

George’s ‘quirkiness’ has given some people the impression that as a translator he is too clever by half .This is borne out by his explanation in a footnote of why he has translated the phrase devichii bor, written down by Trigorin in his notebook after trying to break with Arkadina, as ‘the corn was “shuckled” by the wind’: ‘The translator has palmed off a handy substitute, instead of rendering Trigorin’s own trouvaille, which seems to mean “the maid’s spinney”.’ It does not seem to mean ‘maiden’s spinney’, or ‘virgin’s copse’, it does mean that and is vital to conveying what is actually on Trigorin’s mind at this point…

Yet Chekhov himself is famous for quirky, sometimes absurd words — one can think of examples in all of his last four plays. Possibly the most famous is Firs’s nedotepa in The Cherry Orchard. George renders it as ‘a job-lot’, i.e. ‘half a set’, something unfinished, a congeries, inferior. This, in my opinion, is very good, because it sounds odd (as the Russian word did originally, having come through Chekhov from Ukrainian) and makes a brilliant stab at the idea in the original of ‘half-baked’, ‘half-fashioned-by-chopper’. Constance originally had ‘a never-come-off’, which shows she understood the roots of the Russian word; but then she changed it to the flaccid ‘good for nothing’. However, at least she rejected Galsworthy’s suggestion to her: ‘have my “Ye’ve got no backbone”. Think — it’s the last word of the play, and backbone is a fine thing.’ A translation completely acculturated to Edwardian values, one might say!

Unfortunately, the meaning of ‘job-lot’ must now be known to relatively few. In any case, as with Garnett’s version, it ignores the fact that a nedotepa is a person who only half does things, botches them, and so the English cries out for an -er word. The closest English word in meaning is probably ‘wanker’. Obviously, even if it existed then in the metaphorical sense it has now, neither George nor Constance could have used it on the Edwardian stage! I think even today it is too ‘in your face’. In my surtitles for Dodin’s production in London in 1994 I rendered nedotepa as ‘nincompoop’, because surtitles shouldn’t be so colourful as to distract from the acting; in my expansive lexical/literal translation (2000) I preferred ‘bungle-arse’; for Timothy Hughes’s production in London in 2011 I was able to go for ‘wonker’, because the actor playing Firs (Donal Cox) had a fine Irish accent. It definitely worked. In fact, in my view ‘wonker’ is particularly appropriate, as the stressed syllable in nedotepa was to Russians intriguingly, almost embarrassingly, suggestive of ‘yop’ (‘fuck’), and this makes sense of Yasha’s criticism of Firs in Act 3 that he is always using ‘inappropriate words’.

This has been a rather discursive examination of some areas of George’s and Constance’s translations of the same two plays by Chekhov, but tomorrow I shall try to draw some more general conclusions, and at far less length. For viewers who are wondering why I am producing three posts out of the historical ‘real time’ of this blog, please read my post Lacunae: the ‘benefits’ of 25 January.

Next entry: The Edwardian turn of language

Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The dear departed

Posted on February 9, 2015 by Patrick Miles

After writing the last sentence of George’s life in its strict earthly sense (I have two short chapters about his and Kittie’s afterlife still to write), I left the manuscript chapter for a day before coming back to revise it, as usual, thoroughly.

When I returned to it that day I felt a peculiar lightheadedness, almost a sense of freedom; but underneath that an almost sadness.

What were these feelings? I have been striving to define and explain them ever since. I can’t quite put my finger on them.

*               *               *

It is well known that some biographers experience emptiness and tristesse when their work is over. They have ‘lived with’ their subject for however many years, and now the subject has ‘gone’. This doesn’t apply to me, as my work isn’t over and I feel I shall continue my dialogue with George outside the biography, probably for the rest of my life. The latter certainly happened with my biography of Chekhov: he died in 1904, but he hasn’t died in my life or my mind’s discourse. He still speaks to me, and I to him.

I wouldn’t deny that part of the lightheadedness was sheer relief at completing the chapter, the life of George Calderon in the strict sense, the ‘main story’ of the book…

The sadness could not be caused by the fact that George was now dead, because I’ve known that for over forty years! He didn’t die, for goodness sake, in my writing, he died on 4 June 1915 at Gallipoli and I’ve ‘always’ known that. (I described other, quite different, definable emotions I felt about the ending in my post of 7 February.)

But something has changed since I wrote the last sentence, something has gone… And it is so deep down that I still am not sure what it is.

*               *               *

My present theory is that the deep, deep brain holds various ‘times’ in play without your being aware of that (the brain just does it). When one of these ‘times’ actually ends — when that pathway in the deep, deep brain sputters out — you sense something has happened there, but your conscious mind can’t say what.

In this case, perhaps, the ‘time’ is the (fictive) present of George’s life as I’ve been writing it. Of course, I’ve been writing it in the past tense, but for me it’s always been the present. As I’ve said before in this blog, I believe a subject’s life has to be apprehended in forward-moving ‘real time’ by the biographer, otherwise he/she is merely writing history.

There’s no doubt this fictive present has broken off in my brain with George’s death. Kittie’s hasn’t, as I still have to describe how she searched for George when he was reported missing, how she edited his works, how she survived the next thirty-five years.

*               *               *

Neither, of course, is George Calderon ‘dead’ in the wider sense. His afterlife took off in 1921 and is still with us. He is still read and, perhaps, will be increasingly read.

But that is what Mikhail Bakhtin called ‘greater time’. The time that has broken off in my brain is George’s ‘lesser’, and purely fictive, time… Yes, in a sense his ‘life’; but not his life on this earth 1868-1915.

I have always had difficulty understanding Eliot’s lines ‘If all time is eternally present/All time is unredeemable’, but this experience with ‘finishing’ the life of George Calderon seems to give me a glimmer of their meaning. George’s fictive past and fictive future were always contained in that fictive present from which I myself was writing. Perhaps the fact that that fictive present is now ‘unredeemable’ explains the unease, the sadness.

I can certainly see that revising the whole book will be to experience a different kind of fictive time: I shan’t be ‘living it’ for the first time, and ‘reliving it’ won’t be the same! That first ‘living it’ is now unredeemable.

Next entry: Mews, hues, and wonkers

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Scott syndrome

Posted on February 7, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Two days ago, I happened to hear on Radio 3 Sarah Walker’s introduction to her ‘Choice’ on Essential Classics, which was Vaughan Williams’s Sinfonia Antartica (sic). As I recall it now, she said that the composer was commissioned to write the music for the film Scott of the Antarctic but that during the process he was increasingly struck by how Captain Scott was ‘doomed by his own poor judgement’, and this eventually led to the symphony and particularly its terrifying third movement.

The phrase ‘doomed by his own poor judgement’ sounded like a quotation from Vaughan Williams himself. It struck home deeply with me. Throughout the day, I found that it helped focus some of my own ‘experience’ (see yesterday’s post) of completing the story of George Calderon’s life, i.e. my describing his disappearance into the smoke and dust of the Third Battle of Krithia and my knowing he would never came back.

In a post on 13 August last year I said that I knew it was going to be a challenge to avoid lugubrious, ‘portentous’ prose once George set out for the Dardanelles (not that he or his fellow officers knew where they were going); the trouble being, of course, that you as his biographer know he is going to his death, but he doesn’t. I duly girded my loins to avoid this sombre temptation. I think I have avoided it, but in fact an entirely different seriousness intervened, or supervened, in the narrative.

Describing the last weekend they spent together in Hampstead, and then the journey to Devonport with George to say goodbye and watch him embark, Kittie wrote:

He was full of loving kindness.

Yet a strange feeling hung over everything; not of foreboding, but as though there were millions of miles of distance — distance that was bridged, but yet there.

But it was not bridged in ordinary ways — somehow the warm clasp of his hand as he sat by me in the train speeding down to Devonport didn’t seem to have anything to do with being near to him.

It is important, I felt when I got to this point, that she stresses this was not foreboding on her part. I believe her description is objective; I believe we can trust her memory here. She felt ‘millions of miles’ apart in spirit. For the umpteenth time in his life, George was becoming ‘someone else’, someone she did not yet know. This time, before her eyes, he was becoming Lieutenant Calderon going to a distant war. Being a soldier was far more of an appropriated persona for him than for Owen, say, or Thomas. He had assimilated the role so carefully and was acting it so well that most people did not realise it was acting. Personally, I believe he was impersonating a soldier so that he could write about the War from the inside afterwards (more evidence will come in May and June).

Understandable and even admirable though that may be, underlying George’s military career was the most awful misjudgement. In October 1914 he believed the war would be over by Christmas (at least, he told his mother that); in May 1915 he believed his Russian would come in handy when the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force joined up with the Tsarist Army in Constantinople; even at Gallipoli he was certain his regiment was always going to be in reserve (at least, he told Kittie that).

This last misjudgement was fatal. George was manipulated by Lieutenant-General Aylmer Hunter-Weston’s and Commander-in-Chief Ian Hamilton’s latest ‘invincible’ plan for the Gallipoli campaign and sent straight to his death. His experience was of open warfare only, as he had seen it at Ypres. That is, warfare in which you have a chance if you can run. His last letter to Kittie shows that even on the day before the Third Battle of Krithia he thought it was going to be relatively open, like the Battle of the Brickstacks (see my post of 27 January). In fact, as the official history puts it and all sources agree, the Third Battle of Krithia was ‘the first to be fought on the peninsula under conditions of definite trench warfare’. Within minutes of going over the top, George Calderon was dead.

Obviously, I don’t like straying from our ‘real time’ like this, but my point is that the last pages of my biography have been overhung not by foreboding and lugubriousness, but by a stunned realisation that George was ‘doomed by his own poor judgement’. He had a naive, uninformed and quintessentially idealistic view of the war. He was ‘conned’. I have found the realisation of this — as I studied the campaign in detail — depressing, but also infuriating. The waste, the waste, the waste! The destruction it wrought to Kittie’s life!

Or was he conned? I touched on the ‘Scott syndrome’ in my post Polymaths, or dilettantes? on 21 November 2104 and I won’t draw further parallels at this point, as the greatness or otherwise of Captain Scott is a vast, pullulating controversy. But if Calderon was ‘doomed by his own poor judgement’ and is in some ways as infuriating as Scott, one cannot deny his courage any more than one can Scott’s. Perhaps George was not conned for one moment, but his courage and love of what he was defending were greater than any disillusionment and despair.

I shall try to get my head round another aspect of the experience of ‘finishing someone’s life’, on Monday…

Next entry: The dear departed

Posted in Edwardian character, Heroism and Adventure, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A biographer sighs

Posted on February 6, 2015 by Patrick Miles

I have now written the last chapter of Calderon’s life (not the last chapter of the book), and revised it in manuscript. I have been living with the whole Gallipoli campaign for the past three months. Although this has not been as eviscerating as living with the First Battle of Ypres (see post of 31 October 2014), I will admit to being clapped-out.

When I began this blog, I said that I dreaded reaching the end of George’s life and I had lived for years with variants of the last sentence. Well, the experience hasn’t been what I was expecting, and the last sentence (flat though it may seem) is, I think, the only right one. I will say more about the ‘experience’ when I have got my head round it!

Meanwhile, I recommend Peter Hart’s Gallipoli (Profile Books, 2013). He has a firm grip on the big picture (the official history, 1929/32, is an impressive source for everyone where that is concerned), but his unique strength is the range of individual soldiers’ accounts that he copiously quotes. It is fascinating to compare Hart’s book with the classic by Alan Moorehead, Gallipoli (Hamish Hamilton, 1956).

Next entry: The Scott syndrome

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

They all fall down

Posted on February 5, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Suddenly, in early February 1915, the inmates of Fort Brockhurst were struck by influenza. Kittie says the ‘whole regiment’ went down, but presumably this is figurative. Certainly hundreds were affected, so perhaps the whole 9th (Service) Battalion was garrisoned in the Fort. Simultaneously, an epidemic of ‘bad tonsilitis’ broke out.

It is not surprising that diseases spread like wildfire in such an enclosed community. In effect, Fort Brockhurst was now quarantined. The inmates were allowed to go home on sick leave once they were no longer contagious and felt well enough to travel. Unfortunately, ‘not only were there absolutely no “comforts” in Fort Brockhurst’, as Kittie put it, ‘but no ordinary necessities of life and no proper medicines.’ George was extremely ill for about ten days.

On the battlefield, huge progress had been made in the medical services since George’s experience of them at Ypres in October. The 9th (Service) Battalion, however, was part of Kitchener’s New Army and nowhere near as well equipped as a regular unit. It seems doubtful, even, that the Army Medical Corps were involved in treating and containing the epidemics at Fort Brockhurst.

Not unexpectedly, George had something to say about all this when he finally got home.

Next entry: A biographer sighs

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

1 February 1915

Posted on February 1, 2015 by Patrick Miles
Nina Astley (Corbet), c.1917

Nina Astley (Corbet), c.1917

Tel.: Stockcross                                                       Benham Valence,                                                                                         Newbury.

Jan. 31 1915

My dear George

I wonder how you are liking yourself in your new surroundings. If ever you have a spare moment, do send me a line. This address of course will always find me, but tomorrow I go for a week to The Croft Torquay. Lesbia has been there for a fortnight with my Mother and is already much the better for her visit.

I saw Kittie on Friday [29 January] — she was I was glad to see a little better — not very stalwart yet! But even a slight improvement is a comfort. She makes one very anxious at times.

Jim writes always cheerfully, he keeps well — since he’s retired to Hospital with an attack of colic — a disease which he said he had always thought was confined to horses and the very youthful! He is near La Bassée. Reg is still watching for Zepps in London. Their Barricade business is fallen thro’ for the moment, as the W.O. won’t indemnify them should they shoot and kill a spy! They might be had up for murder. The W.O. say they can enlist as “Tommies” if they like, but they don’t like — for naturally if they had to enlist they would do it in something else, not a hybrid police force.

Show you forgive all this twaddle by sending me a line. I do hope your wounded leg is better.

Yours ever

Nina

Only 7 patients here now.

George Calderon received this letter today, a Monday, at Fort Brockhurst. The writer is Nina Astley, by her first marriage Corbet, who had been Kittie’s intimate friend since they were teenagers, and who had helped bring George and Kittie together after the death of Kittie’s first husband in 1898.

Nina was a prolific and extremely skilful letter-writer. She hardly ever had cause to write to George, and in fact there are only two other letters from her in his archive. Here she has wonderfully, apparently casually, woven together an inquiry after his health and snippets of family news. But the real point of the letter is its middle, where she tells George about Kittie’s condition. Kittie may be ‘a little better’, but the exclamation ‘not very stalwart yet!’ subtly suggests the cause of her condition in the first place. ‘She makes one very anxious at times’ is surely designed to play on his conscience.

The Croft, Torquay, was the residence of Nina’s mother, Eliza Stewart. ‘Lesbia’ is her daughter by Sir Walter Corbet, Kittie’s godchild, born in 1905. ‘Jim’ is her son Sir Roland James Corbet (see previous posts). ‘Reg’ is Nina’s husband Reginald Astley, who at 53 was a Special Constable raring for some action. Zeppelins had attacked Yarmouth and North Norfolk on 19 January 1915, killing two and injuring several others.

Nina was writing from Benham Valence, where she was staying with her sister-in-law Constance Astley, who was the mother of Dick Sutton by her first marriage (see previous posts about Sir Richard Sutton). The house had been a Red Cross hospital since late 1914.

We do not know what George replied, as all of Nina’s letters were burned by Reginald Astley after her death in 1921.

Next entry: They all fall down

Posted in Edwardian marriage | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Two anniversaries

Posted on January 29, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today is Anton Chekhov’s birthday. It is also the anniversary of the publication of George Calderon’s translations of The Seagull and The Cherry Orchard on 29 January 1912.

Was this a coincidence? Probably not. The publisher, Grant Richards, was making a risky investment in this Russian dramatist and wanted to get everything right. George’s approach to the publication was also fastidious. The text of Two Plays by Tchekhof had first been rejected by George’s usual publisher, Smith, Elder. Top Edwardian ‘art’ publisher Richards had probably been persuaded to take it on thanks to his acquaintance with Kittie going back nearly twenty years. George completely revised the translation for Richards, making it more ‘exact’, as he told him, than the acting versions he had evolved before. He also supplied many footnotes, which are often a delight in themselves, and an introduction. Richards was meticulous about the pre-publication advertising of his books and in the Times Literary Supplement of 25 January 1915 enthused: ‘Many readers will like the introduction as much as the plays. Mr Calderon is combative, lively — and he knows his Russia and his theatre. In fact he’s written the deuce of a preface!’

The loser from all this, for the next eleven years at least, was Constance Garnett. In the spring of 1906 she had started translating The Cherry Orchard ‘on spec’, as she wrote her husband, because she had heard that the Moscow Arts were coming to London that summer. The Russian company did not come, so she submitted the translation to the Stage Society, in which by then George was active. This probably gave him the idea of translating The Seagull, which he directed with success at Glasgow in 1909. Eventually the Stage Society put on Garnett’s translation of The Cherry Orchard on 28 and 29 May 1911. It was a famous disaster. Unfortunately, in a display of the tactlessness to which he was prone, George then told the Chairman of the Stage Society’s Council of Management that he thought the translation was ‘wretched’ and ‘now no-one would be willing to take up a Tchehov play anywhere as this poor translation would set the public against it’. These words are taken from a letter of 6 June 1911 written by Constance Garnett, to whom the conversation had been reported. Her laudable response was to try to publish her Cherry Orchard ‘at once’ and ‘not for a moment consider Calderon’s feelings’. But she was too late: George had already submitted his book to Smith, Elder.

All this is the background of events to pieces about George’s Chekhov translations and Introduction that I shall post during a ‘lacuna’ in the first fortnight of February.

Next entry: 1 February 1915

Posted in Edwardian literature | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The ‘second’ front

Posted on January 28, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today, Thursday 28 January 1915, the War Council met to make a final decision about the Dardanelles operation. Note that after the meeting on 13 January (see my post of that date) Carden had been appointed commander of the fleet that was to force the straits, he had been told that he would be given the super-dreadnought Queen Elizabeth, and Churchill had persuaded the French to join the operation. The prime minister, H.H. Asquith, informed the meeting today that ‘in view of the steps already taken the question could not well be left in abeyance’. He had travelled a long way since telling Venetia Stanley that he was ‘altogether opposed’ to the project (see my post of 5 December 2014). The fact is, everyone on the Council except the First Sea Lord, Fisher, was swept up by the desire to ‘do something’ about the deadly stalemate on the Western Front. Fisher tried to resign, but was persuaded back to the table by Kitchener. The Council then agreed that the Admiralty should be charged with carrying out the (purely naval) operation…a month later! To quote the official history: ‘The Germans had already had six months in which to improve the defences of the Straits, and the minefields were continually growing.’

Next entry: Two anniversaries

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The Western Front

Posted on January 27, 2015 by Patrick Miles

On 25 January 1915 the Germans unleashed a well planned attack on the British-French front at La Bassée, specifically between Givenchy in the north, Cuinchy on the canal, and further south. At Givenchy they captured British trenches, but were soon ejected, with the loss of 207 men. At Cuinchy the attack began with a number of mines being exploded in trenches occupied by the 1st Battalion Coldstream Guards. The Germans then rushed the British lines, took the front trenches, and fought on.

Much of the fighting at Cuinchy was in a flat area east of the village known as ‘the Brickstacks’. It contained about thirty blocks of bricks fifteen feet high, which had been there since before the war. Most were within German territory, the rest within the British lines. They presented a peculiarly difficult battlefield, especially as the area was knee-deep in mud. After a delay, the British infantry counter-attacked but could not dislodge the enemy from the front trenches. Over the next week a bloody farrago of trench warfare, shelling, machine-gunning and hand-to-hand fighting developed, before on 6 February the 4th (Guards) Brigade of the 2nd Division captured the Brickstacks and improved the junction between the British and French lines.

Jim Corbet (see my post of 8 September) was present.  After he had recovered in Britain from his wound at the Marne, he was promoted to Lieutenant on 9 December 1914 and sent out to La Bassée with a draft of two hundred men and three officers. He was now probably with the 3rd Battalion Coldstream Guards, who were part of the 4th (Guards) Brigade. In the words of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission Newsletter, the ‘attack and counter-attack’ action around Cuinchy at this time a hundred years ago is ‘probably typical of the front line situation at this stage in the war’.

George Calderon refers to the Battle of the Brickstacks, as it became known, and Jim Corbet’s part in it, in the opening line of the last letter he ever wrote (3 June 1915). Evidently the battle was synonymous for him with extreme danger.

Next entry: The ‘second’ front

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Lacunae: the ‘benefits’

Posted on January 25, 2015 by Patrick Miles

So (see my post of 21 January) we do not know a great deal about George Calderon’s training at Fort Brockhurst between now and the middle of April 1915, nor about his relationship with Kittie in that period, because of the lack of epistolary evidence.

Even so, I shall be able to describe some major, sometimes surprising developments for which there is documentary evidence, and I defy followers to predict these! I certainly would never have been able to predict them. One thing I will say even at this stage, is that Calderon was able to spend quite a few weeks at home during this period.

As I see it, there will be some benefits to having ‘lacunae’ in our Calderon storyline over these three-plus months, viz.:

1. I shall be able to keep followers up to date with the general military developments that directly impacted on George’s life down in Gosport. These are terribly important, of course, for any contextualisation of life in Britain in 1915. Over the last three months I have made a detailed study of the Gallipoli front and listened to the views of experts.

2. I will be able to offer my readings of various key themes in George’s literary life, especially the quality of his Chekhov translations and writing on Chekhov’s plays. This will be, so to speak, a purely synchronic dimension to an essentially diachronic blog, or to put it more simply: not time past, but time present. It will give me an opportunity to get various things off my chest that have been seething away there like TB ever since I worked for the Scripts Department of the National Theatre in the 1970s.

3. We will have time to look at the works that George probably strove over the next few months to leave in a state which would enable Kittie (his editor and agent) to publish them if he did not come back from the war.

4. I will have more space in which to elaborate/bore about the problems of the biographer…

5. As the centenary of George’s death approaches, I will keep you au courant with what is happening to mark it and to celebrate his life and achievement.

Er, now that I look at it all, it’s rather daunting, on top of finishing a 160,000-word book!

The blog will close on 30 July 2015, one year after I began it.

Next entry: The Western Front

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

They have wonderful editors

Posted on January 23, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Hilary Mantel is an excellent writer. But when it was announced in January 2013 that Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies were going to be adapted for the RSC and a media maelstrom broke out, I felt uneasy. It wasn’t as though Thomas Cromwell was unknown, or had never been put on the stage before, e.g. by Shakespeare. In 1973 (I think) I went to see A Man for All Seasons with a friend who is an English historian. We were moved, but as we walked home he said: ‘Hm…I think Thomas Cromwell is the more interesting character’ — and explained why. Later, I discovered that between 1907 and 1909 George Calderon had researched the sources as thoroughly as Hilary Mantel and produced his remarkable verse play Cromwell: Mall o’Monks (‘hammer of the monasteries’).

Before the RSC got going on its adaptation, which I felt would not be without difficulties, I wrote to a senior figure enclosing a copy of George’s play, in case it could be ‘grist to anyone’s mill’. He wrote back: ‘Fascinating stuff. Did you know that Victor Hugo also wrote a play about Cromwell?’.  Well, I did, but that was about Oliver…

When the media maelstrom broke out this week over BBC2’s dramatisation, I felt even more uncomfortable on George’s behalf, as it were. Rachel Sylvester’s long piece in The Times on Tuesday, 20 January 2015, ‘Cromwell rules in Westminster’s Wolf Hall’, related Cromwell’s ‘pragmatism’ and Thomas More’s ‘utopianism’ to British politics today, claiming that Mantel’s (Cromwell’s?) ‘many fans at Westminster’ include Cameron, Osborne and Clegg, and ‘modern politics is, like Cromwell’s, all about strategy, not philosophy’. This fired me to pen a brief letter to The Times after supper:

Sir,

Everyone is discovering Thomas Cromwell (Rachel Sylvester, ‘Cromwell rules in Westminster’s Wolf Hall’, 20 Jan). For the record, the first play about Thomas Cromwell was written by George Calderon in 1909. Calderon is the Russianist who introduced Chekhov to the British Stage, was a great reviewer for the TLS and Times, and died at Gallipoli a hundred years ago this June. Calderon used exactly the same sources as Hilary Mantel, but produced a pre-Shakespearian morality play in iambic pentameter. His message was as contemporary as Rachel Sylvester suggests Mantel’s is: George Calderon’s play was written as an allegory of the rise of Lloyd George!

(Patrick Miles etc. plus Calderonia blog address)

My personal belief about letters to the press is that one should write them when one’s fired up. The longer one spends on making them ‘lapidary’, the more dead, boring, and unlikely to be printed they become. Fire them off and forget about them.

I was therefore astonished to see the following printed in The Times yesterday:

Cromwell Pedigree

Sir, Everyone is discovering Thomas Cromwell (“Cromwell rules in Westminster’s ‘Wolf Hall'”, Jan 20). The first play about Cromwell was written by George Calderon in 1909. Calderon is the Russianist who introduced Chekhov to the British stage, was a Times reviewer, and died at Gallipoli 100 years ago. He used the same sources as Hilary Mantel, but produced a pre-Shakespearean morality play in iambic pentameter. His message was as contemporary as your writer Rachel Sylvester suggests Mantel’s is: Calderon’s play was an allegory of the rise of Lloyd George.

(Patrick Miles, Cambridge)

I am sorry that they removed the final exclamation mark and made it altogether drier (more lapidary), but I have to admire the way they have drawn the sting of my peevishness about Hilary Mantel’s, the RSC’s, and the BBC’s success compared with George’s ‘failure’ (I doubt whether his play has ever been performed, except possibly on radio in the late 1920s/early 1930s). They seem to have made as many as a dozen alterations, all very acceptable, which proves that the art of editing is alive and well.

Next entry: Lacunae: the ‘benefits’

Posted in Edwardian literature, Modern parallels, Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Apple apple apple apple apple

Posted on January 22, 2015 by Patrick Miles

In his first letter to Kittie after embarking on the R.M.S. ‘Orsova’ at Devonport on 10 May 1915 (she was probably still watching the ship with other wives whilst he was writing), Calderon seems to have summed up his time at Fort Brockhurst in a ten-line paragraph.

I say ‘seems’, because the first five lines have been ‘appled’ out by Kittie. ‘Appling’ is another Edwardian word to add to this blog’s vocabulary. If you did not want something to be read in a document, you wrote ‘apple’ through it tightly and continuously, as that combination of letters was pretty effective at scrambling what was underneath. George himself did this in some of his love letters to Kittie in 1899, when he wished he hadn’t written something but did not want to rewrite the whole letter.

In practice, ‘appling’ was usually a combination of writing ‘apple’ and stretches of Slinky-style scribbling — what we might today call ‘knitting’. If the latter is done in very round loops, it also looks like a series of apples.

After the five lines appled out by Kittie, George’s handwriting continues:

Peels offered their little young happy circle to me — and afforded every kind of refuge from the hard and arid gaiety of the Anteroom [the officers’ mess sitting-room]. I am deeply obliged to them. They gave me a colour that, in the ordinary course of things, I never could have got.

Peel was a young fellow-officer of George’s who lived in digs at Brockhurst with his wife and perhaps children. The ‘Anteroom’ was presumably one place where George would entertain with his piano-playing; yet ‘hard and arid gaiety’ sounds damning. Perhaps the ‘colour’ that the Peels ‘gave’ George even prevented him from sinking into the depression he had suffered as an interpreter at Ypres.

Kittie’s ‘appling’ raises a fundamental question for the biographer. Do you respect it, or try to unscramble it and read what is written underneath? In the case of George’s love letters, I could make out a few words and they did not suggest that I was missing much; that they would add much to what I knew already. Here, though, what Kittie has appled out (very effectively) could be significant. There are, I believe, forensic programmes for reading what is written beneath blotting out, so I am inclined to follow that up.

If you have lived with the subjects of your biography for as long as I have, you do feel a loyalty to them, a reluctance to breach their ‘trust’. But writing biography is a balance between empathy, sympathy, and omniscience!

Next entry: They have wonderful editors

Posted in Edwardian English, Edwardian marriage | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

The training of Lieut. Calderon

Posted on January 21, 2015 by Patrick Miles

We can assume that George’s training with the 9th Ox and Bucks now began in earnest. Unfortunately, apart from a machine-gun course on Hayling Island in March/April, it is difficult to ascertain what exactly the training consisted of.

We know that he came home most weekends, but he probably still wrote to Kittie at least once a week. Yet no letters from him or her have survived between now and his embarkation for Egypt in May 1915. After that, all his letters to her are extant.

There is definitely a mystery here. It is possible that Kittie destroyed George’s letters from Brockhurst because they reveal that he and she were bickering over why he was putting himself in the firing line rather than on the home front; why, in fact, he was destroying her health with worry. I shall present the evidence for that over the coming months. Another possibility, as I shall explain tomorrow under a different heading, is that he was not at all happy with aspects of life in Fort Brockhurst.

The regular officers who were completing his training were very pleased with him. The Adjutant, Captain Maxwell Labouchere (another cricketer, who features in Wisden on the Great War) wrote later that George ‘took everyone’s heart by storm’. His piano playing also made him popular.

Nevertheless…

Next entry: Apple apple apple apple apple

Posted in Edwardian marriage | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

An Appeal

Posted on January 19, 2015 by Patrick Miles

If you have not read Clare Hopkins’s ‘Recent Comment’ of 9 January, please do. Clare is Archivist of Trinity College, Oxford, and the author of what has been described to me by the Senior Tutor of a different Oxford foundation as ‘the best history of any Oxford college’: Trinity: 450 Years of an Oxford College Community (OUP, 2005).

Now the reason I haven’t responded to Clare’s comment myself, is that I happen to agree with her feisty opening words about hearing the views of other followers of Calderonia!

In my post of 28 November 2014, ‘Reactions’, I sincerely thanked everyone who had contacted me since the blog began in July, but I did rather coyly refer to the fact that followers were emailing me rather than leaving comments in the blogspace itself… Now I make a direct Appeal: there are many of you, you are often eminent in your fields, all of you know what you are talking about, so if you have a reaction to a post, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment by clicking the prompt at the end of the post!

One of the purposes of blogs, after all, is to create a conversation about a subject, and as a professor emailed me at the start of the exercise: ‘these days we all need a web-presence’. Perhaps if someone says something serious but outrageous, Calderonia will go viral and prospective publishers of my biography will sit up…

But, of course, I can’t resist saying something, here, about Clare’s comment. It’s superb. I can’t thank her enough for taking all the time and effort that she so manifestly has. Although I have read her history of Trinity College (at which both George Calderon and Kittie’s first husband, Archie Ripley, were undergraduates ), the name Reginald Tiddy had not registered. The story of his insistence on joining up when he could barely pass the medical, and the reasons for which he believed he must persist, are very moving.

And the ‘homology’ with George’s army career is startling, right down to Tiddy’s ‘godfather in war’, Arthur Farquharson, believing Tiddy should serve in the Intelligence Corps ‘where his faculties would be less wasted, and leave the infantry work to others’ — exactly Coote Hedley’s opinion about Calderon.

Finally, I think there’s a good chance Calderon knew Cecil Sharp, as Sharp was a very close friend of the composer Martin Shaw (1875-1958). As Shaw says in his memoirs (Up to Now, 1929), in the first decade of the twentieth century both George and Kittie had ‘carried me through one of the worst periods of my life’. George liked his music and in 1914 Shaw was composing for Calderon and Caine’s pantomime The Brave Little Tailor. George must have seen quite a bit of him that year, when I notice that Tiddy himself was in London. So if Sharp introduced Tiddy to Shaw, perhaps the latter even introduced him to George, knowing they had much in common?

Next entry: The training of Lieut. Calderon

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Fort Brockhurst

Posted on January 18, 2015 by Patrick Miles

If my dating of Calderon’s ‘Sunday’ letter to the Sturge Moore family is correct, then today, Monday 18 January 1915, George’s company (about 250 men) of the 9th Battalion Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire Light Infantry moved into Fort Brockhurst, which is two miles up the A32 out of Gosport. Possibly the whole battalion (600-800 men) was now garrisoned there.

Fort Brockhurst is one of five ‘Palmerston Forts’ built between 1858 and 1862 to protect Portsmouth against French invasion. It is now owned and managed by English Heritage.

With its moated keep and formidable firepower, the fortress was an impressive piece of military engineering. Neither its exterior nor its parade ground have changed much since 1915, but the interior now houses a ‘treasure trove of objects from English Heritage’s extensive reserve collections’. Probably it was much more densely settled than the one or two areas presented as ‘barrack rooms’ suggest today.

Obviously, the wag who described it to George as ‘just like a prison’ was right. All these men were living on top of each other, much of their life was regimented, and it must have been claustrophobic. On the other hand, it probably focussed their training as a crack infantry regiment very effectively.

Next entry: An Appeal

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , | Leave a comment