Time and the biographer

Posted on March 27, 2015 by Patrick Miles

I have received a long and very interesting letter from John Dewey, author of the superb Mirror of the Soul: A Life of the Poet Fyodor Tyutchev (2010), commenting on my various posts over the last three months that touch on biographical matters. For information on this biography and John Dewey’s translations of Tyutchev, go to www.tyutchev.org.uk .

There is a resemblance between Dewey’s predicament as a biographer and mine in that ‘nobody knows who Fyodor Tyutchev is’, just as ‘nobody knows who George Calderon is’. There the resemblance ends, however, since Fyodor Tyutchev is actually Russia’s greatest poet after Pushkin! It is only in the West that comparatively few people have heard of him. Amazingly enough, now I think of it, in 1971 I was going to do a Ph.D. comparing Tyutchev with Samuel Coleridge, before Chekhov’s plays grabbed me.

On the question of how long one should take writing a full-length biography, Dewey writes: ‘Like you, when I started on the Tyutchev biography in earnest in 1999 I was aiming to complete in time for a significant anniversary (the 2003 bicentenary of his birth). This proved to be hopelessly optimistic, and in the event the project took the decade which, as you point out, Park Honan customarily found necessary’ (see my post of 21 December 2014). Most interesting!  But Mirror of the Soul is magisterial, exhaustive, and looks pretty definitive to me, which I can’t possibly claim for my biography of George. Dewey explains the stretching of his biographer’s clock thus: ‘It was not only because the material seemed to grow and grow, but because there were several frustrating unknowns regarding Tyutchev’s life and certain individual poems which I became obsessively determined to solve if at all possible. And I’m sure you’d agree that detective work of this kind is actually one of the secret pleasures of writing a biography.’

Certainly. However, I simply have to say that my biographer’s clock, or fuse, is shorter. I couldn’t contemplate spending ten years writing a biography, mainly for the reason I gave in my post about Honan: I need my own self back. I have written academic books, which generally took three years from start to publication, but I couldn’t face ten years and that is why George Calderon: Edwardian Genius is not footnoted, and not told as a scholarly linear narrative. I suppose what always made me want to write about George was his extraordinary life and personality, his ‘otherness’, and that’s really what drives me on to tell his and Kittie’s story. In a way, my book is not so much a chronology as a psychology. I will write more about this on another day, in connection with Ruth Scurr’s self-avowed ‘deep fascination with how and why we tell the stories of earlier lives’.

John Dewey also writes: ‘I was particularly struck by your discussion of a biographer’s feelings on reaching the death of his/her subject. Like you I experienced a mixture of relief and sadness at that point, and have often wondered since if this is typical. […] Your identification of the different “times” involved hadn’t occurred to me and is most illuminating’ (see my post of 9 February). If only! I still can’t rationalise this experience, but was extremely interested to read of Dewey’s own. I keep wondering if the most obvious explanation isn’t the most plausible: that we have grown very close to this person we have been writing about, and when he/she dies in the text one part of our brain triggers the ‘grief response’ but another part of the brain knows the person hasn’t ‘really’ died… I shall say more about the problem next week.

Finally, Dewey has just read A.N. Wilson’s ‘magnificent biography of Tolstoy, having thought beforehand that as a novelist he might take a novelistic approach [see my post of 6 March on Ruth Scurr’s essay “Lives, some briefer than others”]. In fact he does not, but rather deals with Tolstoy as one novelist discussing the life and work (incomparably greater, as he would be the first to admit) of another. It’s full of brilliant insights and delightfully ironic comments — highly recommended’. Wilson has to deal with what Stuart Kelly in his TLS piece about Ruth Scurr’s Aubrey ‘biography’ called the ‘Damascus Quandary’, i.e. why a person (in this case Tolstoy) suddenly rejects their past and radically reorients themselves. ‘Wilson gives some very convincing answers’, writes Dewey. ‘I had to confront a similar problem with Tyutchev, who seems eventually to have prized his Panslavist political writings above his lyrical verse, but I can’t say I managed to come up with a coherent explanation.’

There are ‘nervous prostrations’ in George Calderon’s life but not, I think, a single ‘Damascene Moment’, and hence no ‘Quandary’ for me as his biographer. Rather, most people seem to feel that the quandary is: why does Calderon appear to have radically reoriented himself so many times — from barrister to Russianist to short-story writer to novelist to anthropologist to dramatist to political activist to balletomane to soldier to… death? What, to rephrase Virginia Woolf in The Waves, is ‘the thing that lies beneath the difference of the thing’? That is the mystery in George’s case.

I am extremely grateful to John Dewey for such a stimulating letter.

Next entry: Weekend work: ‘The Lamp’

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Gallipoli: the beginning of the end

Posted on March 25, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today, 25 March 1915, Field Marshal Otto Liman von Sanders left Constantinople for Gallipoli to take command of the Turkish forces at the Dardanelles. He was not a brilliant Prussian general, but many consider him first-rate. Upon arriving, he said to one of his colonels: ‘If the English will only leave me alone for eight days…’ In fact the naval attack of 18 March was never repeated and the Allied landings did not happen for another month.

At the end of February 1915 it seems the Turks had only 15,000 troops on the Peninsula. By mid-March there were about 70,000 at the Dardanelles in toto. This was almost equal to the maximum force Kitchener could allow Hamilton for the Gallipoli campaign. More kept arriving and ‘the scheme of defence improved out of all recognition’ (Official History). Liman von Sanders now put his men into intensive training.

Frankly, the Gallipoli campaign was already lost. But the Edwardians were never people to shirk a task, especially a hopeless one.

Next entry: Time and the biographer

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A terrific find

Posted on March 23, 2015 by Patrick Miles

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:

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Obverse of letter from Katharine Calderon to Gladys Raikes, 31 March 1923

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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:

My very dear lady, […] my lectures are nothing more than desultory improvisations. But you will know this talk, however inadequate, will be de coeur. My love for and devotion to George has grown with the years. Just as my friendship was strongest during the last year, it would have remained one of the strong towers in my life. If it is a memory, it is a living and powerful thing. As I grew older, and, I hope, a little wiser and steadier, I learnt to appreciate George’s character more and more. So long as I live you may be sure of my devotion to him and to yourself. There are no two people I love more. So you may imagine it is no common task I am undertaking, but a secret act of homage to two very dear spirits.

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

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22 March 1915

Posted on March 22, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today, a Monday, Admiral de Robeck, Commander-in-Chief of the British-French fleet at the Dardanelles, and his second-in-command Admiral Wemyss, arrived at Lemnos on their flagship the Queen Elizabeth for a conference with Sir Ian Hamilton, Commander-in-Chief of the Mediterranean Expeditionary Force. De Robeck’s Chief of Staff, Roger Keyes, did not attend as he was busy organising a new fleet of minesweepers for a fresh attack on the Narrows — which despite the bad weather was intended to be imminent and decisive. (See my posts of 10 and 18 March.)

Events in the Gallipoli Campaign sometimes seem a perfect illustration of chaos theory. According to Hamilton, the first thing de Robeck did on sitting down at the conference table was to announce that he was now convinced the Fleet could not force the Narrows without the Army. How could de Robeck possibly say this? For the past three days he had been preparing for a fresh naval attack, five more British battleships and one French were on their way, a new squadron of spotter-planes was arriving, and everywhere Keyes had found captains’ and crews’ morale high.

In his memoirs, Hamilton claimed that he had always accepted de Robeck’s view as the ‘man who should know’ about the Navy forcing the Narrows alone, and would never have dreamt of expressing an opinion. But this is disingenuous, as we know that he wired Kitchener on 19 March telling him that in his view the Straits could not be forced by navy action alone; the Army must undertake a ‘deliberate and prepared military operation, carried out at full strength, so as to open a passage for the Navy’. Obviously, Hamilton had no naval expertise… But he knew that his words would carry great weight with his benefactor and chief, the Secretary of State for War.

The result of today’s conference is a chaological mystery. Whoever convinced whom, and whatever the chance factors that influenced de Robeck, everyone, including Wemyss, now agreed that a combined operation was the only way forward! When he heard it, Keyes was incredulous, and never ceased subsequently arguing for a naval attack. But Hamilton announced that he could assemble his invasion force in three weeks, and on 24 March he left Mudros with his Staff for Alexandria to do so.

Next entry: A terrific find

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Tahiti: The book’s reception (1921)

Posted on March 21, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Katy George’s discovery of Kittie’s letter to Gladys Raikes of 31 March 1923 (see Comments and my post this coming Monday), in which Kittie talks about Percy Lubbock’s ‘Life’ of George, has reminded me that Percy also played a vital part in creating Tahiti from the synopsis that we presume George was perfecting now in 1915 whilst home on weekend leave. In her Preface to Tahiti, Kittie directed ‘words of greatest gratitude’ to Percy for his ‘untiring help’ in ‘dealing’ with all the manuscripts from which the book was assembled. This could not have been easy for him, as he was working on George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory and other projects at the same time. Grant Richards had decided to bring out the ‘Life’ on 10 May 1921 in order to prepare the public for the publication of George’s selected works, which began in July with Tahiti.

Both books were very well received. Kittie’s Cutting Agency sent her over thirty national and international reviews in three months. On 12 August 1921 the Evening Standard put Tahiti at the top of the best-seller list for Central London, and by October it was being reprinted.

But perhaps for Kittie the most gratifying reception was from George’s and her friends. Laurence Binyon, for instance, wrote to her on 13 August 1921:

It is a book I shall never forget. It makes so vivid a picture of the Island in one’s mind — and a not less vivid picture of George. I feel as if I had been there with him. I like best the chapters about the charming Amaru and his hospitality. George brings me so much nearer the natives than the other writers who have written about the South Seas. One sees how disinterested was his feeling for them — not the mere getting of an exotic pleasure and experience. But his insight and knowledge make the story a sad one. What a shame it seems on all us Europeans to have ruined these innocent creatures and (George makes one see) their real civilization! […] I am not fearfully interested in folklore myself, so the parts which give solid information on this score — though I expect of great value — do not delight me so much as the parts of purely human interest, as the descriptions, which have scent and atmosphere as well as vivid pictures.

The educationist and reformer Isabel Fry wrote to Kittie:

The book is simply charming — and vivid and brilliant too. And learned and cultured. But what I enjoy most is the direct sense of personality and the revealing of such a perfectly delightful one, delicate and stalwart, sympathetic but no sentimentalist; and such simplicity combined with a real profundity.

One should remember that for the Edwardians ‘charming’ was as powerfully positive as ‘stalwart’. Kittie’s lifelong friend Constance Sutton, who was extremely well read, wrote: ‘With this and Percy Lubbock’s tribute, you can feel that George’s personality and genius are safe to be recognised for all time.’

But the success came precisely when Kittie was overwhelmed by the biggest loss since George’s death in 1915: on 5 August 1921 her other lifelong female friend, Nina Corbet, died suddenly in Lugano at the age of fifty-four. Kittie left London immediately to comfort Nina’s mother in Torquay, and stayed there some time.

Next entry: 22 March 1915

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Life with the 9th Ox and Bucks

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Patrick Miles

It is not quite clear from the wording of Kittie’s memoirs whether George had been coming home every weekend from Friday to Monday before starting a ‘machine gunnery course on Hayling Island’, or whether he was able to take such long weekends once he started this course. Either way, I believe that by now he would have begun it, because it must have lasted several weeks. On Gallipoli, we see him merely supervising the care of a machine gun, but presumably he would have learnt how to use it efficiently himself, and had plenty of practice firing it on a range, so that he could take over if machine gunners in his platoon or company became casualties.

Understandably, Kittie concentrates on his personal relations at Fort Brockhurst:

Capt. [Arthur] Maxwell Labouchere the adjutant (alas, killed later [1918]) became a real friend and made a great difference — and the Peels (a young brother officer and his wife) were often a refuge; as George expressed it, their ‘little young household was such a rest from barrack life’.

It was a comfort to know that there were such bright spots — and there were many points that helped. He liked the Colonel [Hawkins], and Major Benson D.S.O. was such a splendid soldier to work with. George’s sense of camaraderie, as it was certain to, made him throw himself into the spirit of it all — be the spirit of it all. […] I also heard later how his music had counted.

Kittie’s reference to ‘bright spots’ could imply that George was not over-happy at Brockhurst — possibly even depressed, as at Ypres. Followers may remember from my post of 22 January that we know he wasn’t comfortable with the ‘hard and arid gaiety’ of the officers’ mess sitting-room, and sought refuge from it outside Fort Brockhurst when he could. He was entitled as a married officer to live in digs, and Kittie would have set up a home for him there, but he felt that if they did this he wouldn’t learn ‘one quarter as much of soldiering as by living in Barracks’, and Kittie agreed (see my post of 16 January).

Incidentally, I have made little progress in deciphering the five ‘appled out’ lines in George’s letter of 10 May 1915 that may describe the less positive side of his stay at Brockhurst (see post of 22 January). I have consulted a university library manuscripts section, the forensic department of one university, the criminology department of another, and a retired chief constable, but they have not come up with a solution. Examination both magnified and under ultraviolet light has revealed only six words. The way forward appears to be to make a word-by-word ‘grid’ of these lines, put in what we have, and turn it over to a team of cryptologists.

What we can presume is that George received a lot of letters from a wide range of friends such as William Rothenstein, Henry Newbolt and Manolo Ordoño de Rosales, and we know for a fact that he had with him at Fort Brockhurst a ‘large number’ of books from the ‘London Library’. Both letters and books were lost when the battalion moved out.

Within the battalion, Labouchere wrote later, George took ‘everyone’s heart by storm’. He was particularly valued for what Kittie called ‘his unending invention and energy in getting up sham fights’, i.e. field exercises. Not surprising, perhaps, for a dramatist and expert pantomime-stager, and perhaps that is what he enjoyed as a lieutenant most!

Next entry: Tahiti: The book’s reception (1921)

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18 March 1915

Posted on March 18, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Just after dawn today, the first ten battleships of de Robeck’s Anglo-French fleet moved off from Tenedos for what it was hoped would be the decisive attack on the Dardanelles, leading to forcing the Narrows on the 19th.

De Robeck had been forbidden by the Admiralty to attempt to ‘rush’ the Narrows (this would have been suicidal). The plan today was simultaneously to silence the shore guns protecting the first, Kephez minefield, and batter the forts at the Narrows from a fairly safe distance, enabling the minesweepers to clear a channel forwards. Next day the forts would be destroyed at close range and the minefield at the Narrows cleared.

At 10.30 this morning, in beautifully clear weather, lines A and B, comprising six British ships followed by four French, entered the straits and came under fire from Turkish mobile guns on either side. They steamed on to about eight miles downstream of the Narrows and at 11.25 the British ships in line A started pounding the fortresses at Chanak and Kilid Bahr on either side. These did not bother to reply, although the ships met a continuous barrage of howitzer and field gun fire from the nearer shores.

At noon, the French squadron B moved forward to close the range, whilst enabling line A to carry on firing astern of it. The forts at the Narrows now started firing at the French, who took some bad hits, but the attack continued and seemed to be succeeding: by 2.00 p.m. the forts had fallen silent. A Turkish General Staff report described the situation at this point as ‘very critical’.

Then things unravelled. As the French squadron began to retire on the Asian side to allow the six British battleships of line C to come forward, the Bouvet hit a mine in the counter-intuitive string laid by Geehl (see my post of 8 March). It sank in two minutes with the loss of 640 men. Line C closed range again, the guns at the Narrows sprang back to life, but by 4.00 p.m. were once more dimmed. The minesweepers were now called in, got to work, but suddenly panicked and withdrew. Then the Inflexible hit another of Geehl’s mines and limped from the field. Within five minutes, the Irresistible hit another, six hundred crew and casualties were taken off, and it drifted towards the Asian shore under heavy fire. Naturally, no-one in the Fleet knew what was ‘attacking’ them. The only possibility seemed to be mines being released into the current, or torpedoes from undetected shore tubes. ‘Deeming it impossible to keep his fleet in the Straits in face of this new and unknown danger,’ de Robeck ‘decided to interrupt the operations’ (Official History).

Just after 5.00 p.m. the Fleet withdrew, leaving Commodore Roger Keyes to attempt to salvage the Irresistible with a squadron of his own. In the course of this, the Ocean hit yet another of Geehl’s mines. All the crew were rescued, but later that evening she sank along with the Irresistible.

Altogether, then, today three battleships were lost and three others put out of action. In effect, it meant that the Fleet’s strength had been reduced by a third. De Robeck, however, was all for resuming the attack after reconsidering his plan, and Keyes thought that neither the forts nor the mobile field guns were now a menace, all that had to be addressed was the mines. The War Council informed de Robeck on 19 March that five more battleships were on their way to replace those lost, and the Admiralty confirmed that he could continue the assault on the Narrows if he saw fit.

Sir Ian Hamilton, however, who had observed the second half of today’s attack from inside the Dardanelles, wired his patron Lord Kitchener that he no longer believed the Straits could be forced by naval action alone.

Next entry: Life with the 9th Ox and Bucks

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15 March 1915: The strain tells

Posted on March 15, 2015 by Patrick Miles

After the naval bombardment at the Dardanelles was suspended on 8 March, the weather worsened but the highly energetic Commodore Roger Keyes was able to make some progress with the minesweeping by replacing trawlermen with Navy volunteers.

On 11 March Winston Churchill (First Lord of the Admiralty) replied to Vice-Admiral Sackville Carden’s wire of 11 March with a carefully crafted one that included the words: ‘We do not wish to hurry you or urge you beyond your judgment, but we recognize clearly that at a certain point in your operations you will have to press hard for a decision, and we desire to know whether you consider that point has now been reached.’

Carden did not reply.

In what was to become a fateful pattern during the Gallipoli campaign, Carden had practically been brought out of retirement to command the East Mediterranean Fleet, and in Alan Moorehead’s words ‘he had already had a long winter at sea off the straits before this action had begun’. He had lost his appetite and was getting very little sleep. He was worried sick about every aspect of the operation.

On 14 March Churchill telegraphed again. It was a long wire containing top secret intelligence about the depletion of the Turks’ ammunition on the Gallipoli Peninsula, but it ended with almost an order: ‘The unavoidable losses must be accepted. The enemy is harassed and anxious now. The time is precious as the interference of submarines is a very serious consideration.’ Carden replied that he would probably attack on 17 March.

Tonight, Monday 15 March 1915, Carden had a nervous breakdown. He had to relinquish his command and sail home immediately.

On 17 March Churchill appointed Carden’s second, Vice-Admiral John de Robeck, to command what Churchill called ‘the Mediterranean Detached Fleet’ (it included a French squadron) and de Robeck promptly told him that, weather permitting, he was going to attack the forts at the Narrows next day.

Next entry: 18 March 1915

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Tahiti: an imagined world?

Posted on March 14, 2015 by Patrick Miles
Figure from Gauguin's 1899 painting 'Tahitian Women with Mango Blossoms' (left); George Calderon's pencil sketch 'Manu' (right)

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 with Mango Blossoms'

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

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‘Calderonia’: an update

Posted on March 13, 2015 by Patrick Miles

New followers of the blog deserve an explanation, I feel, of why the last four posts have been purely military and what stage ‘Calderonia’ is at.

The main object of the blog is to follow the last year of writer George Calderon’s life in a kind of ‘real time’, i.e. by posting events and documents exactly a hundred years after they happened. We need to contextualise these by keeping track of other, simultaneous developments — military, social, political — that impacted, however obliquely, on Calderon’s life. Concurrently, when there is time I discuss any theme that arises, e.g. Edwardian semantics, George’s Chekhov translations, or the writing of my 160,000-word biography, which is now almost finished. (Another theme is, please consider Leaving a Comment on the blog rather than e-mailing me or writing, so that your views can be shared directly with other followers.)

On 9 January 1915, at the age of forty-six, George was given a commission as lieutenant with the 9th Ox and Bucks. Shortly after he moved with them into Fort Brockhurst at Gosport, the whole battalion went down with flu and tonsilitis, and he was very ill. About the middle of February 1915 he was well enough to come home to Hampstead on sick leave. My guess is that he returned to Fort Brockhurst and his military training in the first week of March 1915 (see post of 3 March 2015).

Unfortunately, we have no personal documents relating to Calderon’s life between the beginning of February and the middle of April 1915. This could be because, as his wife Kittie’s memoirs tell us, he was home Friday-Monday every weekend. However, George was a pretty prolific letter-writer and one of the purposes of his letters home from military service was to provide a record of his experiences for a later book. It seems quite possible, therefore, that he wrote home in this period but that some of his letters were concerned with Kittie’s attempts to persuade him to give up active service and work on the home front. He was unresponsive to her arguments, and those of many of his friends. So she may well have destroyed this part of their correspondence.

Rest assured, from the middle of April we can resume the story of George’s life in much more continuous ‘real time’, with some wonderful personal documents. Meanwhile, my supposition is that on weekend leave, amongst other things, George worked on a synopsis of his travel book Tahiti which would enable Kittie to assemble it if he did not return from the War, and on his last play The Lamp, which she was similarly able to complete for publication. Tomorrow, then, I will look at aspects of Tahiti (see also my blogs of 27 February and 1 March), and subsequently I shall discuss The Lamp.

On the military front, my priority will be to keep in step with developments at the Dardenelles. For a superb recent interview on the subject, go to:

http://www.historyanswers.co.uk/history-of-war/the-blunder-of-gallipoli-a-failed-campaign-dissected/

Next entry: Tahiti: an imagined world?

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The Battle of Neuve Chapelle

Posted on March 12, 2015 by Patrick Miles

All this week, 10-13 March 1915, a new battle was raging in France’s Artois region. The western front had been static since Christmas (see my post of 27 January). This was the first deliberate British offensive, and it was very carefully planned. The Royal Flying Corps had carried out detailed reconnaissance to almost a mile behind the German lines, where they were active in bombing railways and reserve troops. On 10 March the artillery of the Indian Corps and IV Corps destroyed the German wire and front-line trenches within thirty-five minutes. Following this, front-line and support trenches were quickly taken by the infantry and Neuve Chapelle itself captured after less than two hours fighting.

‘However, what then? German reserves arrived by train to another line, and British reserves came up on foot, each carrying sixty pounds of equipment — the equivalent of a heavy suitcase. The cavalry moved forward in expectation, and clogged the roads. But the guns had not registered the new German line, and the infantry were tired. Subsequent attacks therefore failed.’ Norman Stone, World War I: A Short History (2007).

Next entry: ‘Calderonia’: an update

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10 March 1915

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today, Wednesday 10 March, a War Council meeting was held at which Kitchener announced that he would now send his last Regular Army division, the 29th, comprising about 15,000 men, to the Mediterranean to join the forces being despatched from Egypt (see my posts of 16 and 19 February). The idea seems still to have been that, with its Russian allies, this force would take Constantinople, not fight its way up the Gallipoli Peninsula. Churchill told the War Council that he still believed the East Mediterranean Fleet could get through the Straits (‘take’ the peninsula?) without the army’s help.

Kitchener now decided to appoint General Sir Ian Hamilton as Commander-in-Chief of the Anglo-French military force in the East Mediterranean. Hamilton, who may well have been distantly related to Kittie Calderon, was a hero of the Boer War, a forward-thinking general, and a popular choice. But he was now sixty-two. A Liberal, classicist, fluent writer of prose and poetry, he was considered by the prime minister, Asquith, to have ‘too much feather in his brain’.

Next entry: The Battle of Neuve Chapelle

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9 March 1915

Posted on March 9, 2015 by Patrick Miles

Today, the Commander of the East Mediterranean Fleet, Admiral Sackville Carden, suddenly telegraphed the Admiralty that he could do no more to knock out the Intermediate Defences of the Dardanelles until he had received more planes for aerial reconnaissance inland. Meanwhile, he would concentrate on clearing the lines of mines across the Straits, because without doing that he could not get within decisive range of the ‘Inner Defences’. But his minesweepers had hardly been very successful so far. They were trawlers manned by fishermen who did not regard it as part of their contract to sweep mines under heavy fire…

Next entry: 10 March 1915

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8 March 1915

Posted on March 8, 2015 by Patrick Miles

On this day the East Mediterranean Fleet’s bombardment of the shore batteries at the Dardenelles that had begun on 25 February was suspended. It had not gone well.

The shelling of the outer forts, from a very safe distance, appeared to have been successful, but the Turks had simply evacuated them because they realised the old-pattern guns there could do nothing useful. When the ships moved further up the Straits to destroy the so-called Intermediate Defences, they found themselves under attack from mobile guns such as howitzers, which were impossible to pinpoint and take out.

Meanwhile, at first landing parties had been unopposed at Kum Kale and Sedd el Bahr, but when the weather allowed them on 4 March to return to finish destroying guns there, they were fiercely opposed and twenty-three marines killed. The Turks were no longer intimidated by naval fire and kept regrouping.

For the next three days the shelling continued, but in the words of the Official History the operations were ‘barren of important results’.

Tonight a certain Turkish mine expert, Lieutenant-Colonel Geehl, took his ship the Nusrat down into a bay on the Asian side of the Dardanelles and laid a line of twenty mines parallel to the coast, because he had seen British ships manoeuvring there the day before. Nobody noticed him.

Next entry: 9 March 1915

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Who was George Calderon (again)?

Posted on March 7, 2015 by Patrick Miles

I first posted on this subject last year, 13 September. The reason I am touching on it again now is that a follower has very kindly sent me a cutting from the International New York Times of 23 January which is about biographies of people who (like George Calderon) have never had biographies written of them before.

In this article, Thomas Mallon calls for the first biography of American writer Tom Wolfe (still alive at 84), and Ayana Mathis calls for the first biography of American ‘novelist, cultural critic, and jazz and blues scholar’ Albert Murray, who died in 2013. They both make out excellent cases, but I don’t think publishers are going to rush to take them up.

Since Wolfe is still alive, what publishers will really want is a sensational autobiography, whether ghosted or not, and pace Ruth Scurr (see my post yesterday) autobiography is not a department of biography. With Albert Murray, I fear, few publishers will get further than a bemused ‘Who was Albert Murray?’.

These are two reasons why our own bookshops are not awash with new biographies in the sense of biographies of people who have not had biographies written of them before. Books about people’s lives may have outsold history in Britain last year, but those books consist almost entirely of celebrity stories of the living, memoirs (fictionalized or not), and ‘new’ biographies of people who have had biographies written of them before.

I know this myself from regular forays into Waterstones and Blackwells over the past year. I would say that 95% of the ‘new’ biographies are of very well known people who have had biographies of one sort or another written of them before. For instance, in the context of WW1, Sassoon, Owen, Brooke, Thomas, but (I think) no-one who is not ‘iconic’ already. And this is hardly surprising. As publishers have written to me, George Calderon’s life may be ‘vibrant…full of action…poetic…remarkable…very human’, and his self-sacrifice luminous, but if they can’t sell 6000 copies they are not going to publish it.

Naturally, as the author I believe they can sell more than 6000 copies of an innovative biography of an Edwardian genius, but as a one-time businessman myself I perfectly well understand why they may not take the risk.

It seems to me dreary and unintelligent to keep bunging out ‘new’ biographies of, say, Shakespeare, Dickens, Austen or Vita Sackville-West, when these contain hardly any new facts that can’t be found in previous biographies. But, of course, we mercifully do not live in a command economy and well-written ‘new’ biographies of such ready-made celebrities are relatively low-risk!

I would be the first to agree that a biography that contains no new facts but presents a fresh interpretation of its subject, is valuable. But you hardly ever find that in full-length biographies of, say, the celebrities named in the previous paragraph. Thanks to John Aubrey, I was seduced into presenting my own take on Chekhov (Hesperus Press, Brief Lives, 2008), but that was because, after forty years of living with Chekhov, I was bursting to say certain things about his works and life that I think had not been said before. I would never have dreamt of writing a ‘new’ full-length biography of Chekhov, as I couldn’t have added many new documented facts to those in the full-length biographies by Simmons (1963), Hingley (1976), and Rayfield ( 1997). Incidentally, the fifty or sixty Russian and European-language biographies of Chekhov that already existed could not hold a candle to the last three, but Simmons, Hingley, Rayfield, and even Miles, were fortunate in that the demand for biographies of Chekhov already existed…

If there is no ‘demand’ for a new biography, in the sense of a subject of whom publishers ask ‘Who is he?’, then they are not going to take the risk of publishing it. I still have a long way to go with publishers and I’m certain that by hook or by crook George Calderon: Edwardian Genius will eventually be published — with, even, its full complement of illustrations. But the above, I submit, explains why commercial publishing of genuinely new biography is almost at a standstill in our country.

Next entry: 8 March 1915

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A biographer in-spires

Posted on March 6, 2015 by Patrick Miles

I have just read a long article by Ruth Scurr, ‘Lives, some briefer than others’, in last Saturday’s Guardian Review (28 February), which I thoroughly recommend to followers if they can get it, along with a piece by Stuart Kelly, ‘Enter John Aubrey’, which can be accessed through the TLS Blog link on the right (go to ‘More recent pieces from the TLS’). Both articles arise from the imminent publication of Ruth Scurr’s ‘biography’ of Aubrey, John Aubrey: My Own Life.

I may have missed something, but it seems to me that Scurr’s essay is the most wide-ranging and stimulating contribution to the subject of modern biography to have appeared in the British press since a piece by Michael Holroyd about ten years ago. As Scurr says, ‘biography is an art form open to constant experiment’; to stay alive, it has to keep reinventing itself. Holroyd’s view, as I remember it, was that biography had to move closer to the novel and that’s what readers wanted. At the time, I was actually contemplating a novel about George and Kittie Calderon entitled Golden Square. This was because although I had access to all their extant papers, there was still a huge amount I would have to imagine, wanted to imagine, and I thought their story more ‘human’ than ‘biographical’. As more and more documentary evidence emerged, however, the balance in my mind shifted. Even so, in the past seven months two followers of this blog, perhaps beguiled by the runs of days when I can tell the Calderons’ story in ‘real time’, have asked me whether I have ever thought of writing such a novel.

Scurr’s essay is positively inspiring, at least to this biographer, because it touches on one vibrant issue of biography after another; issues that whizz around in your head as a practising biographer but perhaps have ne’er been so well expressed. I can’t address many today, but here are a few.

‘Novelists can write what they want to happen,’ Scurr says, ‘but biographers must write what actually happened.’ This may seem trite, but it isn’t. ‘All biography is fiction,’ Donald Rayfield wrote of his monumental life of Chekhov. I found this a worrying thought as I read it, but literarily, formalistically, it’s indisputable (he added: ‘but fiction that has to fit the documented facts’). As I have said in this blog several times, I try to write George’s life ‘in real time’ as though it is happening, which for stretches perhaps brings it close to a novel, a work of fiction. I rejected footnotes for that very reason. But of course everything in it still has to be evidenced from the past. It is all too easy to forget that. For instance, it was an informed guess that George moved back to Brockhurst on 3 March 1915, it is speculation that whilst he was convalescing he worked on the synopsis of Tahiti that would enable Kittie to publish the book if he didn’t return from the war, and it is pure speculation that he did nothing after 4 August 1914 about finding a producer for The Brave Little Tailor. Those are examples from just the last week’s posts! How right Scurr is to remind us of Defoe’s warning against ‘a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart at which, by degrees, the habit of lying enters in’ — in other words, against appropriating your subject’s life so much that it becomes fiction. The chance discovery some months ago of a pocket diary of George’s for 1907 completely blew away several assumptions about events in his life that I had already written into my biography of him.

It is because readers do want ‘the true facts’ of a person’s life, whether out of sheer curiosity or for extraneous purposes, that there will always be a demand for the ‘traditional’, ‘linear’, ‘boring’ biography. And what is wrong with that? It still has to be written well enough for the reader to want to turn the pages. But I have to say that for me these words of Scurr’s come closer to home: ‘The fundamental problem is always the same: how to find a narrative form that fits the life (or lives) in question.’ Personally, I found the narrative form of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius through what I call, quoting a poem of Graves, the ‘tourbillions of Time’ in Calderon’s relatively short life. If ‘editors’ aren’t going to like the fact that there are two more chapters after George’s disappearance at Gallipoli, they are going to like even less that he hardly features in the first chapter, that his story starts in 1898, flashes back to Russia 1895-7, then 1868-95, then returns to 1897-1906, then there is a set of chapters that are really thematic (synchronic), then the last three are purely linear (diachronic)…

Here are some more warning words of Scurr’s that I agree with: ‘Like scholars who have “mastered” a particular topic or archive, the biographer can come to feel he or she owns their subject.’ As I said in my post about the American biographer Park Honan (21 December 2014), I believe biography is an act of intense empathy, but you have to come out of the other’s self again to write the biography. Further, ‘if there is no such thing as a definitive biography,’ writes Scurr, ‘there might at least be a groundbreaking one, offering something that has never been seen or heard before. It is in the hope of thwarting such life-hunters that people resort to burning letters and journals.’ Oh dear, there is certainly a suspicion in my mind that that is why Kittie willed so many of her letters and George’s papers to be burned. Perhaps she intended Percy Lubbock’s 1921 George Calderon: A Sketch from Memory to be ‘definitive’, literally the last word?

Inevitably, one will not agree with everything Scurr says. She begins by talking of Aubrey’s ‘child’ being ‘the publishing phenomenon of our time’ and suggests it is outselling history in the bookshops. But this is true only sensu lato. To claim it, she elasticates ‘biography’ to include autobiography, memoir, celebrity stories and ‘innovative books such as Helen Macdonald’s H Is for Hawk‘. Nothing in this world or the next, I believe Eliot said, is a substitute for anything else. ‘Biography’ is a genre — ‘traditional’, ‘starting at the beginning’, ‘linear’, ‘boring’ — and autobiography, memoir, celebrity stories, faction, are other genres of their own. The challenge is to develop and deepen the genre ‘biography’, possibly by hybridization, but not to pretend it includes other, discrete genres. In my next post I will touch on why biography sensu stricto is actually not all over the bookshops and in publishing terms, I believe, is almost at a standstill.

Scurr says that her John Aubrey: My Own Life, which is published by Chatto on 12 March, is ‘written as a diary’. This suggests it is a work of fiction. But perhaps it is ‘fiction that has to fit the facts’, as Rayfield put it. Judging by Kelly, who has evidently read it, Scurr’s ‘centoic, diaristic method’ actually employs only Aubrey’s own words, taken from the vast corpus of his writings. But how do we know?! Presumably Scurr explains that in a preface. Similarly, can a biography sensu stricto be written not in the third person? If it is written in the first person, is it not by definition subjective? Where is the sense of objective factual detail, contextualisation, evaluation; of the outside ‘other’ who is the biographer? Doubtless all these questions will be resolved when we have read Scurr’s ‘biography’ of Aubrey, which clearly we must rush out to buy.

Next entry: Who was George Calderon (again)?

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