From the diary of a writer-publisher: 17

Posted on March 14, 2022 by Patrick Miles

24 January 2022
I have received several emails commiserating with me over my ‘anxiety’ and ‘nightmares’ about marking examination papers. The writers clearly assume I am Dr Robinson in my story Ghoune — that the story is strictly autobiographical and the flummery in it is what actually happens in Cambridge. An hilarious assumption! Actually I first typed out the flummery on a side of paper in 1976 for a colleague who was examining for the first time and certainly was anxious. My sketch was light-hearted and even he realised that the Impactor Librorum was a fantasy. He subsequently became an important archivist. During Black Crow I decided I should work the sketch up into one of my Cambridge Tales, so I asked him if he could send me a copy, but he could not find it.

29 January
Today we raise a glass to Anton Pavlovich on his 162nd birthday (actually today is his saint’s day, he was born on 16 (28) January 1860), and to the simultaneous publication of my shortish biography of him:

Click the cover to find the book on Amazon.

Sam2 and I are very pleased with Amazon’s printing of it, but for one thing: despite four Amazon proofs and all our efforts, they simply can’t get the page margins right or centre the title on the spine. That is to say, the bottom and top white spaces are consistent, but the side margins vary between 9 mm and 14.5 mm, therefore the ‘gutter’ in the middle of a two-page spread varies too. A variation of 5.5 mm in the side margins is far too much. How do they manage it? What on earth is the trouble?

To be fair, even the best printer in Britain, Clays of Bungay who printed George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, printed the book with far tighter left and right margins than we specified. As with Amazon, we were not consulted about this change and there was no way of correcting it. From a minute subcutaneous examination of Clays’ Terms and Conditions, I formed the suspicion that in reality there is 6 mm ‘tolerance’ in trimming the pages of a book. But why so much in the twenty-first century, when everything else is precisely programmed by the computer (e.g. the typesetting)? What is the problem? If anyone out there knows, please explain to us patiently in a Comment!

10 February
Andrew Tatham — himself the author of two highly innovative biographies — was quite right to suggest I should read A.J.A. Symons’s The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment in Biography (1934). It is clearly the progenitor of all those biographies today that have ‘In Search of …’ in their title or subtitle. I can see, therefore, why the book reminded Andrew of my ‘Quest for George’, as he puts it. And like Symons’s, my biography ends by trying to evaluate ‘Who’ its subject ‘Was’.

But there are two vital differences. First, as Andrew says, ‘Corvo [Frederick Rolfe] was a much spikier and more socially awkward character than Calderon’. That is something of an understatement. The culmination of Symons’s ‘Quest’ is to discover that Rolfe was a vicious homosexual paedophile, and to interpret his whole life in terms of his need both to disguise that in Edwardian society and to indulge it. George Calderon could be deliberately elusive, but I can say with certainty that his life was not a pretence.

Second, as everyone agrees, the forensic narrative of how Symons pieced together Rolfe’s life is at least as interesting as Rolfe’s life itself; in fact it is the central continuous plot of the book, and in A.S. Byatt’s words ‘more enthralling than most novels’. Some readers have told me that the story of how I ‘discovered’ George and Kittie’s archive and pieced together their lives was ‘exciting’ and should have been foregrounded in my biography. But I could never, ever have done this, as it was a book entirely about George and Kittie’s lives, not mine. It is a common saying that a biography ‘tells you as much about its author as about its subject’, and it may be implicitly true (I too am a translator and director of Chekhov’s plays, a man of dubious success in the British theatre, a bloke whose life was deeply affected by his experience of Russia, etc), but that is very different from consciously turning a segment of your own life (the ‘Quest’) into your biography’s main narrative.

A remarkable testimony to the vitality of Symons’s method is Carole Angier’s 2021 Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald. Sebald is famous for his blend of fiction and non-fiction. Angier set out to investigate just how much of what Sebald presented as fact in his life and art was fiction, by tracing and interviewing those who knew him. Some of these, notably Sebald’s widow, refused to talk to her, which sharpens the suspense. But Angier shows that Sebald did play fast and loose with objective truth. She concludes:

If you read him without questioning, and are moved — that is his main aim. I remind you of the truth. That is the job of the biographer. (p. x)

This is all well and good, but inherent in the ‘personal quest’ method is an element of subjectivity, which can be destabilising. As an aesthete, dandy and epicure himself, and someone whose ‘inclinations have always exceeded my income’, Symons was prone to ‘understanding’ Rolfe’s excesses to the point of compromising his, Symons’s, objectivity — and in my view this happens. Of herself and Sebald, Augier writes:

Though the Holocaust was far from the only tragedy he perceived, it was his tragedy, as a German, the son of a father who had fought in Hitler’s army without question. It was also my tragedy, as the daughter of Viennese Jews who had barely escaped with their lives. I think it is right to see the Holocaust as central to his work. But if I make it too central, that is why. (p. viii)

You rarely encounter a biographer who warns you from the outset that they may be too subjective.

22 February
The invasion of Ukraine has begun from its eastern borders. It was incredible to me to hear the BBC’s correspondent sign off yesterday with the words ‘in Taganrog’. Taganrog on the Azov Sea is where Chekhov was born and he wisely got out of it as fast as he could. It was proverbial for its provinciality, hence the epigram on Alexander I: ‘Vsiu zhizn’ on byl v doroge,/A umer v Taganroge’ (‘He spent all his life travelling [Europe etc], yet died in Taganrog’). In the Soviet period it was not a tourist destination and visas were not issued to it. When I got there in 1970, the director of the Chekhov Museum told me that I was the first westerner they had ever seen and their last foreign visitor was a Hungarian in 1958.

The destruction of Ukraine’s liberty, sovereignty and democracy by military attacks, subversion, blackmail and political murder will now proceed according to all the rules laid down by Machiavelli. NATO and Ukraine are no military threat to Russia whatsoever, but Ukraine’s democracy is a dire threat to Putin. He loathes it. What would happen to him if Russians suddenly remembered what real democracy is and wanted it back? The only reason Putin needs the ‘buffer states’ of Belorussia and post-invasion Ukraine is to protect his own homicidal dictatorship and set Russia back seventy years.

27 February
One thing leads to another…

In January ‘Winterwatch’ featured a report of a Speckled Wood butterfly in a Cornwall garden. It sounded very unlikely, as this triple-brooded butterfly is generally seen April-October. Chris Packham commented that it was ‘possible, because it does hibernate’. The context implied that he meant ‘hibernate as a butterfly’. If he did, then most unusually for Packham he was wrong. The Speckled Wood is unique amongst British butterflies in overwintering both as a caterpillar and a chrysalis, which brings survival advantages and has helped its phenomenal spread northwards through Britain since the 1960s (it has even evolved stronger wing muscles in the process).

The January sighting, which turned out to be genuine, sent my mind back to the very first Speckled Wood that I caught as a boy. I remember it well, as I was out on a nature ramble in some woods with Juin, the adopted Dayak (Bornean) son of a local naturalist, and Juin had helpfully pointed out some areas of undergrowth that we should not go into as they had evil spirits in them. It was a clear day but I recall it being cold — late March. The butterfly fluttered out of some dark pines, I thought it was a moth, and netted it for a look (I did not collect moths). So Speckled Woods could be around earlier than April…

But not in this case! I opened up my old butterfly cabinet, and there it was:

The somewhat florid data label, which normally lives folded up and impaled on the pin beneath the butterfly, means: [Captured by] P.J.S. Miles [in] Betteshanger [Park, East Kent, the woods where Rupert Brooke did his military training in October 1914]; [The] 1st recorded sp[ecimen]. 18 April 1961. Not March, then… But the best-informed local entomologist confirmed that it was the first record for this part of Kent; presumably, this capture was early evidence of its future spread.

I saw other Speckled Wood butterflies in those woods, in dappled sunlight on warm summer and autumn days, but did not catch them, let alone kill them, as I was already aware, aged thirteen, how precarious butterfly populations were. Moreover, I was very into breeding butterflies from the egg. It was deeply satisfying to raise more actual butterflies (‘imagos’) from a brood than would have survived in nature, and I soon could not bring myself to kill them for my collection, so they were released. The local entomologist I referred to had a great collection, but by the time I knew him (1958) he had changed: he was becoming a convinced conservationist. Under his influence, I gave up collecting butterflies when I was fifteen and have been a butterfly conservationist ever since.

So where is this leading..? To this:

Why, sixty years ago, was it still acceptable for boys to collect, i.e. catch and kill, butterflies? (I never heard of girls doing it.) This is what I have frequently asked myself whenever I have attended to the preservation of my small collection from that time, which is now of historical environmental interest.

My answers at the moment would run like this:

(a) It wasn’t wholly acceptable. People of my parents’ generation (of whom the local entomologist above was one) were already doubting it, for both conservation and humane reasons.

(b) The generation above them did find it perfectly acceptable, and they were Late Victorians/ Edwardians. My grandfather, for example, born 1888, encouraged my collecting, two of his friends were serious Edwardian lepidopterists, and they actually passed on to me setting boards, pins, and fine Late Victorian/Edwardian books on the subject. As a boy, I was much more influenced by my grandfather than my father.

(c) It was still thought necessary to the scientific study of lepidoptera. You had to have the set specimen with data label to ‘prove’, say, the occurrence of a species. Paradoxically, perhaps, you had to have the dead specimen of an aberration or ‘variety’, to prove that it existed (i.e. had existed). The study of vast collections of butterflies led to the identification of new species and seasonal/regional forms; to a deeper understanding of butterfly genetics and evolution in action. Nearly all of this has been superseded by highly sophisticated live photography.

So a statement by Chris Packham has led me back to the Edwardians. The explosion of collecting and amateur scientific study of insects in that period is an interesting side to Edwardianism that I had not considered before. Natural history became even more popular, with some fine writers on the subject (e.g. W.H. Hudson of Hampstead, whom George Calderon knew). Women originated the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, which received its charter from Edward VII.

I feel the urge to read my biography of Calderon from cover to cover again for the first time since 2018. There have been new books that are relevant and it would be interesting to discover to what extent I see things differently now. Watch this space, then, from about May onwards, for a return to some personal and guest posts about the Edwardians!

4 March
The invasion officially began on 24 February, but it was clear to some of us well before Christmas what the gameplan was, so there is no need for me to change a word of what I wrote in this diary on 22 February.

BUT: the utterly magnificent solidarity of the Ukrainian people has meant that every day by which they hold back the advance of Russian troops is a victory for Ukraine. According to intelligence reports, the delays have thrown Putin into Hitlerian rages.

Always trust the body language. The dictator’s ‘security council’ were plainly depressed, if not appalled, by the action he was asking them to ‘approve’, and his ‘economic advisers’ looked in total shock and despair. Neither group had known in advance what he was planning to do in Ukraine. Apparently, many govt officials wanted to resign, but were terrified he would accuse them of treason and put them in camps. I think there is a deep reluctance amongst the military, even. They have their own dignity. Implementing the historical fantasies of a murderer and war criminal may not be to their liking.

Where will it go from here? Unfortunately, the endgame will be pure Machiavelli as I said on 22 February. The occupation will be ruthless. People in the West will hardly be able to believe what the Russians perpetrate. We will weep tears of despair and frustration.

BUT: events have shown that the Ukrainian people love their liberty, sovereignty and democracy as their country — those, in addition to everything else, are what their country is for them — and they will never, ever resign themselves to losing them. Democracy is now a part of their identity, written in their blood and bones. At all costs, therefore, Zelensky and his brilliant team must escape and eventually form the government waiting in exile. If they don’t, I am sure Putin will kill them all. Obviously Putin wants to annex the whole country, but I have never believed he has the troops to do it and hold it. He may have to settle for the eastern half and grab the rest later — if he survives that long.

AND: Spot polls in Russia indicate that at most 3 out of 10 people support what Putin is doing. 150 Russian Orthodox clergy have signed a moving petition against it, even though, disgusting to relate, the Patriarchate approves of the invasion. The plotters will already be plotting, if only individually, since they realise that the only way to stop the economic and moral collapse of their country is to remove the psychopath. The Russian people made a terrible mistake twenty years ago in deciding that they had ‘done’ democracy and wanted a ‘strong man’. They were too lazy to make democracy work. Yet never underestimate the Russian people: as Pushkin wrote in similar circumstances, ‘Rossiia vsprianet oto sna’ (‘Russia will spring up from its sleep’). How long, though, will it take?

7 March
To my intense chagrin, Sam&Sam have had to cancel our participation in the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) conference here in Cambridge 8-10 April. Sam1 in Moscow told me nearly four weeks ago that it was too risky for him to leave Russia, and I agreed. I was determined to man our stall with Jim. However, 85% of our books are in Russian and printed in Russia, so it is now too dangerous for Sam1, with his history of dissidence, to be seen to be associated with a western event whose organisers have publicly condemned the invasion. There was no alternative, then, but to pull out, and the President of BASEES emailed me: ‘I think it is the right decision.’ Moreover, certain ranting, Russophobic members of BASEES are planning to disrupt the conference and I don’t want to be either boycotted by them or harangued/interrogated by them. In the present climate, Sam&Sam would risk looking irrelevant. I fear the conference may not take place at all.

11 March
Some readers have asked me what George Sandison died from, and even whether he did die. Well, he certainly died, at the age of eighty-one, but I haven’t seen his death certificate so I can’t be definitive about the cause. He had had a very stressful day, of course, and it is well known that if you suffer from angina you should not suddenly raise your arms as it will put too much strain on the heart. Two of my relations died this way — one hanging up the washing, the other putting up a pelmet — not to mention other people I know of.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘This comprehensive, meticulously researched and highly readable biography, which the author describes as a “story” rather than an academic biography…’ Michael Pursglove, East-West Review

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘The book is written with great assurance and the reader always feels in safe hands. I liked the idea of it being a story and I read it the same way I would read a novel.’ Harvey Pitcher, writer

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Ghoune', 'Sleep and Death', A.J.A. Symons, Alexander I, Amazon, Andrew Tatham, angina, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov: A Short Life, archivists, Baron Corvo, BASEES, BASEES Conference, biographies, biography, birds, butterflies, Cambridge Tales, Carole Angier, Cheshire Cat, Chris Packham, Clays of Bungay, comments, conservation, death, democracy, examinations, Frederick Rolfe, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, George Sandison, heart attacks, Kittie Calderon, NATO, Niccolo Machiavelli, page margins, printers, RSPB, Sam&Sam, short stories, Speak, Speckled Wood, Taganrog, The Edwardians, The Holocaust, The Quest for Corvo: An Experiment iin Biography, trimming, typesetting, Ukraine, Vladimir Putin, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, W.G. Sebald, W.H. Hudson, Winterwatch | Leave a comment

Cambridge Tales 4: ‘Sleep and Death’

Posted on February 28, 2022 by Patrick Miles

For Madeleine Descargues

Despite his gammy leg and stick, the College’s senior fellow succeeded in walking from King’s Cross to the hospital and arrived at the dying man’s bedside just after eleven a.m.

Two emeritus professors of French and one of Italian were already there. He nodded to them.

The Queen’s Professor of Spanish lay with a hand on the coverlet and his silver-bearded head jerked upwards to one side. A young nurse was attending to something attached to his other arm. Before anyone could say anything, a nurse in a darker uniform stopped at the foot of the bed and said:

‘Has he had his little visit, nurse?’

‘Yes,’ the first replied. ‘At six o’clock this morning.’

The senior fellow looked at his old colleagues and raised his eyebrows. When both nurses had gone, Byng, the Haberdashers Professor of French, said:

‘It’s an old wives tale. They believe that someone can’t die until they’ve been “visited” by a dead person they knew.’

‘Extraordinary,’ said the senior fellow. He pondered who, in this particular case, it might be. Sancho Panza?

He bent over the long, gaunt form of the Queen’s Professor, touched his hand, and whispered:

‘Jim, it’s Sandy here… George Sandison from Cambridge. I’ve come to say goodbye.’

There was absolutely no reaction.

‘He flickered his eyelids when we first arrived,’ said the Haberdashers Professor, ‘but nothing since.’

‘Hm…’ The senior fellow looked from face to face.

…Les parties blanches de barbes jusque-là entièrement noires rendaient mélancolique le paysage humain de cette matinée, comme les premières feuilles jaunes des arbres alors qu’on croyait encore pouvoir compter sur un long été…

Sandison had never been a professor, but his knowledge of Proust was encyclopaedic. He was very popular in his college, where he was also famous for having had a cat that had to be registered as ‘Dog’ to conform with the Statutes.

Between pauses, the four standing figures exchanged one-liners.

Suddenly a Bach harpsichord sonata, subdued and strangely Platonic, was extruded from some hidden source. They looked at each other, but another nurse appeared and began to draw the curtain round the bed.

‘We had better go,’ said the other Professor of French, and having each touched the Queen’s servant’s hand they went out into the corridor. There, the Professor of Italian said:

‘Well, gentlemen, I don’t know when we shall see each other again, in Paradiso I suppose!’

‘Yes, in Paradiso… In Paradiso!’ they agreed.

…toute mort est pour les autres une simplification d’existence…

The senior fellow hobbled back to King’s Cross and was in Cambridge well in time to attend his sixty-first college modern linguists graduand buffet.

It was a radiant May Week day, but too hot and steamy for him really, the exertions of the morning and the lunch were telling on him. He crossed the college lawn to the stone steps up to his rooms, but as he drew himself onto the first step he lurched and clipped his head on the wall. It was nothing, he would be all right once he got in and could subside into his reclining chair in front of the French window. First, however, he took a bottle of Meursault from the fridge and poured himself a large glass. He shuffled to the window, opened both leaves fully, and lay down.

Ah…how appropriate that simple Aligoté of Castor’s was with those superb slipper soles in aspic that the College did so well…perhaps he should not have had so many glasses of Chablis to follow, but soddit…and those young people were so lovely…their conversation was so fresh and invigorating…

He looked down at the river and across to the college gardens. The sunlight was brilliant, the river sparkled, and young people were punting slowly past there, like every summer he could remember. The university year was over again, quiet college life and Pimms parties would descend once more, even if that morning his bedder had jarringly reminded him that ‘the organs will soon be up’, meaning the candidates for organ scholarships… ‘The organs’! Dreadful woman, but it was still paradise, paradise…

He loosened his tie and sipped the chill Meursault. The Master’s Garden below was a vision of pink lavatera… The undergraduate at the back of that punt, complete with boater, had a cheeky little bum, and was full of grace…though nothing to compare with dear Adrian… ‘A young Apollo, golden-haired’ indeed… Les vrais paradis sont les paradis qu’on a perdus… No no, not that ghastly quote again…

He heaved a deep sigh. Girls’ laughter and voices reached him from the river, but he drifted into a dazed sleep… Then he gradually became aware of someone looking at him from above the trees beyond the river. He opened his eyes and started.

‘It’s Ginger, my old cat!’

He threw his arms up towards the great feline head, and passed over.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 'Sleep and Death', À la recherche du temps perdu, Aligoté, Apollo, Cambridge Tales, cats, Chablis, college life, Dante, death, Don Quixote, Frances Cornford, J.S. Bach, Marcel Proust, May Week, Meursault, paradise, Pimms, Plato, Professor of French, Professor of Italian, Professor of Spanish, professors, Rupert Brooke, Sancho Panza, wine | Leave a comment

Cambridge Tales 3: ‘Invisible Worm’

Posted on February 14, 2022 by Patrick Miles

For Damian Grant

The large auditorium was politely full – all those present were sitting about three feet apart. On the stage was a blackboard with a large flow chart hung on it, somewhat resembling the innards of an oil refinery.

The distinguished figure of Head of Faculty, in an immaculately ironed gown, was concluding his introduction of the guest speaker from the I.P. Onanovský Institute of Zoosemasiology, ‘famous throughout Central Europe’.

His guest, wearing a granular grey jacket and flamboyant open-necked white shirt, was rummaging in a battered brown attaché case on the floor. It evidently contained underclothes, several manuscripts, soap, a cucumber, and a hunk of black bread. But with a toss of his mane he produced the text he was looking for, slammed the case shut, and in two strides was at the podium.

‘…it is therefore my great pleasure to call upon Professor Lubomir Żuk to deliver the forty-fifth Hochstapler Memorial Lecture, entitled “Blake on White”.’

Żuk seized his script ravenously with both hands, jerked his head back, stared fiercely at the far wall, and was off. The little platinum blonde with enormous tortoiseshell glasses sitting in the middle of the front row immediately began writing.

‘It is known the animal symbolicum’s semeio-analysis of functional linguistic systems of poetic language – which we shall call PL for simplicity – contains the code of the logic linear. It postulates the isomorphism of paragrams. Further, we will expose in it all the combinatory figures that the algebra has formalised in a system of artificial signs and which are not externalised on the level of the manifestation of the usual language! In the functionment of the modes of conjunction of PL is comprised the dynamic process by which mechanism the signs are charged with, or themselves metamorphose, the signification. The phonologisation of these signs, articulated or not with a certain step of logoneurosis, is accompanied by distinct, we may say unique, situation-ness, and can only be comprehended hermeneutically (which we shall designate HER for simplicity).’

Not a muscle moved in the auditorium. You could have heard a pin drop. Żuk sharply inhaled and continued:

‘As Torop illuminated (1922, 1958, 1979), the semantics of the sub-system “literal description of strange world”, which we shall designate Φ (x₁…x_n) for simplicity, imply the polysemous transgradiency of diachronic antinomial tropes – ’

He bounded to the flow chart and stabbed a finger at various numbered black entrails. There was an audible shifting of posteriors and clearing of throats.

‘However, the constructional semantics of fictionality operating in the vectoralised empirical apparatus of fragments of PL suggest clustering and switching of codes and actional/axiological functions that correlate with the same “reality” but imply HER denotants through their inclusion as units (“words”) in an entirely different semiotic system, whose pragmatics are characterised by increased complexity of the semantic structure in consequence of interaction of extended series of distinct reticulatedness and transgraded valency within the given socium – ’

A solid block of tension had formed above the audience’s heads.

‘This we may observe in the fragmentary specimen of PL which I have chosen for dissection and shall now read.’

He bent over the text, cupped his hands round it as if it were a trembling butterfly, grinned toothily at it, and intoned:

O Rose, thou art sick…

Women screamed. Men roared. Several women flopped forwards onto their desks and the little blonde ejaculated ‘Crimson joy!’. Several men leapt up and stared about them as though lost. Some women burst into tears. Some men punched the air and one bellowed ‘Bless relaxes!’. Other women suddenly felt damp below. Three people were carried out unconscious. A student ululated hysterically, and an elderly professor fought his way into a gangway and throwing up his arms danced ecstatically out of the hall with cries of ‘Glad Day! Glad Day! Glad Day!’.

Żuk did not see. Wringing his hands slowly over the words, he continued:

The in-vis-ible worm –

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 'Glad Day', 'Invisible Worm', 'The Dance of Albion', 'The Sick Rose', Cambridge Tales, Central Europe, Damian Grant, Dullness, Hochstapler Lecture, Lubomir Żuk, pedantry, structuralism, William Blake, Zoosemasiology | 4 Comments

Cambridge Tales 2: ‘His Letter’

Posted on January 31, 2022 by Patrick Miles

He had had the honour of presiding at dessert, where he always drank the accepted minimum. He had entertained some of the guests with his account of the council estate on which he had grown up, and his bedder’s perennial inability to reposition objects correctly on his mantelpiece.

He returned to his rooms, hung up his gown, went straight to his desk still wearing his biscuity jacket and college tie, sat down, and pulled out a sheet of headed paper. He took from his breast pocket the black fountain pen he was given when he passed the 11-plus, unscrewed the top, and wrote:

Dear Master,

A case for restricting undergraduate guest hours can be made simply on sociological grounds, without reference to religious or moral scruples (which I hold, but do not argue here).

A residential community of scholars is not a microcosm of society. We of the Fellowship are all aware of the historical origins of the College in an ecclesiastical, contemplative and celibate way of life. Scholars have for centuries freely chosen to isolate and insulate themselves from the ‘world’ in order to concentrate all their energies and noetic powers on the gleaning of knowledge and pursuit of truth.

One implication of this is that over-mastering distractions, whether of thought or emotion, have to be shunned. In this respect it is a universal experience that most serious love-affairs during adolescence are destructive of serenity of mind. It is unnecessary, perhaps, to review the many contributory factors: infatuation, jealousy, fear of contagious disease, worry about chance pregnancies, exacerbated impecuniousness, psychosomatic penalties of violating a subconscious morality, etc. Even when an adolescent is constrained by conventional hindrances to such affairs, it is not easy to avoid distraction. It would be irresponsible (to say the least) for a College to remove a chief hindrance by providing comfortable facilities round-the-clock. It is significant that the proposal is being pressed by certain students whose tenor of mind is assuredly not the pursuit of learning, but is squalidly manifest in Rag magazines and the like.

That all-night stops scandalise College servants is generally acknowledged. It is signally to the credit of our lady bedmakers that hitherto none has communicated what she may have witnessed or suspected to a Sunday newspaper.

There are, I believe, two groups of persons to whose judgment the College must be especially alert. First, there are generations of members of the College who never enjoyed loose guest hours themselves, certainly do not approve of them now, and may well voice their disapprobation in the strongest of terms. Doubtless many will choose to withhold benefaction from an institution that sets at naught the authority of their experience and wisdom.

A second group consists of those young men who wish to respect the monastic tradition by reason of religious or moral convictions. Little sensitivity is needed to feel how intolerable they would find nightly proximity, on the same staircase or even in the same court, to proceedings they abhor. A College can not afford to sacrifice the allegiance of such men.

For these reasons alone I believe that guest hours at least as restrictive as those now obtaining should be rigidly enforced.

Yours very faithfully,

Alan Cook

He sat back and sighed. If that didn’t do it, he would resign. The College’s days were numbered.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 'His Letter', Alan Cook, Cambridge Tales, college life, college servants, guest hours, sex, short story, students, The Fellowship, The Master, undergraduates | Leave a comment

Cambridge Tales 1: ‘Ghoune’

Posted on January 16, 2022 by Patrick Miles

It was a dark, diluvial, owl-infested night.

Despite the glass of Aquavit that he had downed at two in the morning after filling out, checking and re-checking his mark sheets, he tossed and turned in his bed. There was nothing he could do about it, it was the annual November nightmare.

‘Gratias Deo agamus pro collegio dilectissimo examinatorum…’

Aaaargh…they were processing in, led by the Impactor in black doublet and hose carrying the University Statutes… Turn over, turn over! Another glass of Aquavit…

Whoo-oo-er, whoo-oo-er, wobbled the owl in the tree outside his bedroom window, and was answered by several in the garden.

The chief examiners gathered round the original, six-hundred-year-old oak Board like rooks, or plague doctors, with their gowns – blast it, g-hounes – flapping and covering their hands. There was the abominable Professor ‘Zeus’ Griggs, who always nit-picked junior examiners’ marks…

‘Oculi omnium in vos respiciunt, docti…’

Oh God, were they? Was he sure he was wearing the right gown, the jet-black, sable-trimmed ghoune? (‘We pronounce the ‘h’ in it: g-houne, as they did in 1370.’) The right trousers? The right pants?

He tossed. The owls whoo-oo-ered. Rain lashed the window.

Was he absolutely, absolutely sure he’d got the marks right?

Riley, 25 and a half Composition, 28 Translation, 64 Literature…equals 117 and a half equals 58 and three quarters plus a half, a half, and another half…equals 60 and a quarter, check 12 and three eighths times 5…

And the blessed Hodgkinson, the weakest candidate but the first he’d marked, had he got that right, or had he marked too hard? He must check it…mo-der-ate…

Composition…a half, a half, a half (really?), a half, and a half (definitely), 18 and a half over 40 equals 9 and a quarter times five equals 46 and a quarter…

Fortunately, the real warfare was conducted in English:

‘And now I call upon Dr Robinson to present the marks for the Entrance candidates in Swedish…’

Aaaargh, his opening response still had to be in Latin! Was the text of it firmly stuck inside his mortarboard, was it legible enough, and could he doff the absurd hat and hold it at quite the right angle for no-one to see he was reading from it?

…19 over 40 equals 9 and a half times five equals 47 and a half per cent 23 and three quarters call it 24 over 50…

Aaaaargh! Griggs was interrupting him, peering over his half-moon glasses…

…13 and a half over 40 equals 6 and three-quarters re-check…23 and three-quarters equals 24 over 50 plus 34 over 2, minus a half, a half, a half…

Whoo-oo-er, whoo-oo-er…lash-lash…g-houne…g-houl…goon…

At about four in the morning, the business was concluded. ‘Zeus’ approved his final adjusted marks with a slow, savoury ‘Benedictum’, whereupon all the other rooks round the table cawed:

‘Satis habemus in rationibus doctoris Robinsoni – impinge ei, lictore!’

The great moment of release had come.

He bowed over his examiner’s desk. The Impactor Librorum strode round, stood before him, lifted the tome with both hands, and brought it down on his head…

A sheet of blackness engulfed him, like a billowing ghoune.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged 'Ghoune', Academe, Aquavit, Cambridge Tales, Entrance to Cambridge University, examinations, Impactor Librorum, Latin, mortarboards, nightmares, November, owls, Robinson, Swedish language, Zeus Griggs | 2 Comments

From the diary of a writer-publisher: 16

Posted on January 6, 2022 by Patrick Miles

17 November 2021
Today at 9.54 a.m. I emailed my 408-line poem Making Icons to the excellent Long Poem Magazine, the only organ in Britain that publishes poems at least 75 lines long. The magazine appears twice a year and November is the submission window for the Spring issue. After taking twelve years to write the poem, I suppose I should not be surprised that I spent almost a week getting it into the exact format needed for submission, with a short preamble and detailed notes, and that the whole process was rather emotional.

Frankly, I don’t expect them to take it, as it’s too ‘forthright’ for the younger modern taste. In consideration of that, I suggested that the words ‘tear off your Tar-Baby’ in stanza 4, line 11, could be replaced by ‘tear through your thornbush’ (I trust the reason is clear). I found the required preamble (113 words) took almost as much effort to write as a stanza of the poem, and thought it wise to begin with: ‘This is not a religious poem.’

26 November
The ‘late’ chrysanths in the garden are coming to an end, to be replaced next month by Christmas-flowering ones, but there are still enough to help fill a vase…

The spotted laurel leaves come from a seven-foot high bush that I grew from a cutting I was given in 1970 by the warden of Chekhov’s house in Yalta from a laurel planted in the garden by the great man himself.

3 December
I am reading the third set of proofs of my Anton Chekhov: A Short Life, which Sam&Sam are publishing at the end of next month. As I read, I stop to check facts for which I can’t remember the source off the top of my head (I wrote the first edition, published by Hesperus Press, in 2007). I’m glad to say there aren’t many such, but this afternoon I had to verify my statement in chapter 11, ‘Chekhov, Anti-Semitism, and Democracy’, that ‘It was probably between 1897 and 1899 that the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion were fabricated in France by the Tsarist secret police, with incalculable consequences for Russian and European Jews in the twentieth century’. I knew that there is a recent school of thought that the Russian secret police (Okhranka) was not involved in the fabrication. However, after consulting Sam1’s Russian translation of Norman Cohn’s Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World-Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Scholars Press, 1981) I concluded as before that the Okhranka was.

On page 117 my eye was caught by Hitler’s statement (1924) that ‘Jesus was not, of course, a Jew, but an Aryan’. A bell rang. At the Third International Congress for the History of Religions, held at Oxford in September 1908, a German professor read a ‘sensational’ paper ‘The Ethnology of Galilee; or, Was Jesus a Jew by race?’. Clearly, in restrospect this was part of the campaign of anti-semitism that gathered head across Europe following the Dreyfus Affair and helped make Nazism possible. For some reason, I felt a flush of ‘pride’ in George Calderon, when I recalled that he stood up after the German paper and according to the Manchester Guardian stated that ‘there was no Aryan race, and Jesus was undoubtedly a Jew by religion and nationality’.

15 December
Today calls for a double celebration! Jim (Sam2) brilliantly completes my series of posts on Japan — from the point of view of someone who has actually lived there — and we have met our deadline of submitting the text and cover of Anton Chekhov: A Short Life to Amazon. We might receive the first proof from Amazon by Christmas, but I doubt it. It won’t matter, because there should still be plenty of time to receive two proofs in the New Year and get the book out there by publication day, 29 January, Chekhov’s birthday. Here’s a preview of the back cover:

Click to enlarge.

21 December
‘Getting in the holy and the ivy’. I am clearing the bottom of the garden in order to sow it with the mixture of grasses that the caterpillars of the Speckled Wood, Hedge Brown, Meadow Brown and Ringlet butterflies feed on. They have bred in other, small areas of wild grass in the garden, but need encouraging. This project enables me to cut back a large branch of ivy for decorating the house together with sprigs from a holly:

We live in what a postgraduate student of mine called ‘suburbia’, twenty minutes walk from the centre of Cambridge, yet holly and ivy can spring up here in any part of the garden if you leave it long enough. It’s almost mysterious. As though the quintessentials of a medieval English Christmas will always reassert themselves. With the inevitable robin, of course — where does that bird always spring from?

6 January 2022
Twelfth Night, as we reckon it at least. It always feels more definitely the end of a year than 31 December itself. Not only do I now resume the years-long quest through Lent to reduce my weight to a healthier 12 stone, but we have completed a Kon-Tiki of projects and there is to be a real break.

First, Sam&Sam will be publishing no more books for at least a year. (By 29 January we shall have published two in seven months.) I shall be concentrating on marketing and selling all our English- and Russian-language books.

As part of that, between now and the end of March I shall be working on the preparations for our appearance at the annual conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies (BASEES) 8-10 April at Robinson College, Cambridge. There’s not really any way of telling, but I hope we shall sell a lot of books, and especially copies of George Calderon: Edwardian Genius at the reduced price for delegates of £20.

I am also trying something new on the blog. Between 15 January and 14 March I shall be posting four ‘Cambridge Tales’. They come from the book of twenty short stories I am working on (slowly) at the moment, to be entitled Ghoune/White Bow. I don’t think it would be reasonable to post any story longer than about five pages. After the Conference, I shall probably post another four. They all derive from notes and drafts from the late 1970s/early 1980s…but most were only ‘written down’ last year, thanks to Black Crow. I shall be interested in any response. It will be rapidly apparent that they are set in an academic world that has gone forever; but I don’t think the essence has changed.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged 'Making Icons', Academe, Adolf Hitler, Amazon, anti-Semitism, Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov: A Short Life, Aryan myth, BASEES Conference, biographies, butterflies, Cambridge Tales, Christmas, chrysanthemums, Congress for the History of Religions, cut flowers, Dreyfus Affair, ethnology, George Calderon, Ghoune/White Bow, holly, ivy, Japan, Jesus Christ, Jewish people, Long Poem Magazine, marketing, Nazis, Norman Cohn, Okhranka, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, religion, robins, Robinson College, Sam&Sam, spotted laurel, Tar-Baby, Twelfth Night, Warrant for Genocide, Yalta | 2 Comments

A year of promise

Posted on January 1, 2022 by Patrick Miles

A very happy new year to all Calderonia’s subscribers and viewers! Thank you for staying with us through 2021, which was our eighth calendar year, and I can promise you at least another year of posts from me and my guests on things directly, tangentially and not even remotely connected with George Calderon, the source of the blog and subject of my 2018 biography (see Advertisement at end of this post). Keep the Comments coming, please, whether positive or negative!

Of course, what we all hope is that successful vaccination programmes and increasing understanding of the Covid-19 virus promise an end in 2022 to the worst epidemic Britain has suffered since the so-called Spanish Flu of 1918-19.

For Sam&Sam, the Anglo-Russian publisher that Sergei Bychkov and I founded in Moscow in 1974, the new year promises reaching more readers through our first public appearance in the U.K. — a stall at the annual conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, 8-10 April at Robinson College, Cambridge.

As well as the cracking Russian- and English-language books already on our website, the first two months of 2022 will see the appearance there of a new book by Sergei about the ‘dissident’ priest Gleb Yakunin (1934-2014), and on 29 January (Chekhov’s birthday) the Sam&Sam edition of my biography of Anton will become available from Amazon:

Sam2 (U.K.) has done a brilliant job designing and typesetting a book in a format that is new for us. To quote from the blurb, Anton Chekhov: A Short Life ‘draws on all available material about Chekhov’s life, including his complete published correspondence, but offers a manageable reference biography for students and the general reader’. It comes in at 121 pages, with a detailed index, and I have added over 2000 words on subjects that readers asked me to expand on or that are dear to me, e.g. Chekhov’s view of a writer’s tasks, his sexuality, religion, humour. It is better than the first edition…I promise!

Patrick Miles

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Anton Chekhov, Anton Chekhov: A Short Life, BASEES, biographies, British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, Calderonia, comments, COVID-19, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Gleb Yakunin, Jim Miles, pandemics, promises, Robinson College, Sam&Sam, Sergei Bychkov, Spanish Flu, The Great War, World War I | 2 Comments

Guest post by Jim Miles: ‘DONG!’

Posted on December 15, 2021 by Jim D G Miles

The most striking aspect of Japan, right from the moment I arrived, was how different from the UK it wasn’t. People talk about culture shock and in particular how Japan ‘just does things differently’ (often with an almost-patronising ‘isn’t this quaint’ tone) but I was astounded — and greatly reassured — by how at home I felt right from the beginning.

A large part of this was the food. Something like toast and butter with coffee at breakfast (particularly popular in my Japanese ‘home town’ of Toyohashi) or a classic spaghetti bolognese, potato gratin, etc. were not what I thought I’d have easy access to but there they were, on the menus of countless restaurants and making me feel as though I was still in Cambridge!

Walking into a supermarket or convenience store and seeing the same Casillero del Diablo wine and Snickers chocolate bars as in the UK equally set me at ease.

Perhaps it is a matter of perspective. I may have been picking out what felt familiar to me and holding onto those for reassurance rather than focusing on that which was unfamiliar and being unnerved by it. I’m not sure.

I do distinctly remember on my second day in Japan standing at a pedestrian traffic light and noticing those little ‘bobbles’ on the concrete that we also have in the UK and sincerely wondering if I was part of a reality TV show to see how long I would notice that I was actually just still in England and everyone around me was an actor. It felt that something as fundamental as the patterning on concrete was a giveaway in a sense (a clue that no-one had noticed and which would blow the ruse), but of course I was really in Japan and the concrete patterning really was just like back home and this really did reassure me that I was still very much in my comfort zone.

There are many other ways that Japan felt like home, such as the personality of the people I encountered. Something about the etiquette and acknowledgement of others was very similar to how I experienced people treating each other in England. One theory about this is that because both countries (Japan and the UK) are islands, and of similar size, certain alike aspects of human etiquette independently emerge from the proximity of the people living there. I’ve always liked this notion, though I prefer to keep it as a ‘nice idea’ than something rigorously and scientifically true!

Despite these examples, I think that the largest factor for feeling so culturally comfortable in Japan was the incredible family at whose language school I taught. Rie Goto was my boss, hiring me to teach English at her school and she has a husband and three daughters. The family would involve me in their activities as much as possible, but were always sensitive about if I had other things I wanted to do, or was too tired, etc. I lived in a flat just down the road from them so was independent, but always had this support network. It was incredible.

To flip the script on my post so far, it really is quite unreasonable for me to fire off about not feeling culture shock in Japan, and act like it was all down to the availability of Snickers in the supermarket, when the host family and their wonderful level of welcomingness were the true reason!

This picture was taken in my final week in Toyohashi on a night out with the older students. The girl next to me is Emma, who I was training to take over from me at the school, and the two in the middle at the head of the table are Rie and Hiro.

In the second part of this post, but keeping with the same theme, I would like to tell a story about how welcomed and accepted I felt in Toyohashi on a particular occasion at this time of year. I should explain that Christmas itself is celebrated in Japan, but in a unique way. It is observed in a non-religious sense with shops selling Christmas-themed goods, decorations being displayed, and many families ordering a Kentucky Fried Chicken meal on Christmas Day (the long-reaching result of an exceptionally effective marketing campaign by KFC in the 70s). The story I am going to tell is not set at Christmas. It happened at the New Year, which is when Japanese typically have winter holidays. That ‘Shōgatsu’ holiday period is a reasonable equivalent to the time that UK people have away from work around Christmas Day.

It was New Year’s Eve, 2010, and I had planned to go to one of my favourite local restaurants to see the year in. ‘Karubi’ was a Korean barbecue restaurant about 10 minutes walk from my apartment where I would order an enormous plate of various delicious meats and sit at my table for hours barbecuing and eating it, drinking beer, and generally reflecting on things, with my laptop or a book. Often I would come here after work and post-process my lessons — what I had done well, what I could improve, and so on. I enjoyed teaching and felt that analysis in that way was a very important part of the job, so I would relax with it over food after a long day.

However, as I approached the restaurant (at about 11pm) I saw that they were closing up. Although Karubi usually stayed open until 2am, I should have realised that on New Year’s Eve that may not be the case.

It didn’t bother me and I walked back to my flat, thinking that I would pick up some food from a convenience store and have that at home.

‘DONG.’

Was that a bell?

I kept walking, thinking about what I would eat tonight.

‘DONG.’

It’s definitely a bell!

Following this sound seemed much more entertaining than food so I changed course and went north-westwards in the direction from which I could hear it coming.

‘DONG.’

The bell was getting much louder and I knew I was closer and closer to the source.

After about 20 minutes walking from where I had been when I first heard the bell, I came to a familiar temple that I had seen before when exploring the local area. There were huge crowds of people in the temple grounds and a few fires burning.

I moved closer to get a better view and a tiny child called out ‘James! James!’.

It was one of my kindergarten students.

His parents looked slightly confused and the child explained (or did his best to) that I was the English teacher at the kindergarten. I realised that everyone was in a queue for something, so I said to the parents something like ‘koko, ii desu ka?’ (≈ ‘is here okay?’) and joined at the back, a few spaces behind them.

People around us were eating various snacks (not convenience store snacks — these were temple-produced traditional ones!) and the fires were keeping everyone warm.

But I still didn’t know what we were queuing for.

‘DONG.’

The bell kept ringing.

At some point the queue had moved enough that I could see the bell, on a wooden platform, being rung.

I was queuing to ring the bell!

It suddenly occurred to me that a gaijin (foreigner) doing this might not be the most diplomatic thing in the world so I caught the attention of one of the official-looking people and said in somewhat broken Japanese, with a big bell-donging gesture, words to the effect of ‘am I allowed to ring it too?’. The person made it absolutely clear that of course I could, in fact I should!

I can’t quite express how accepted I felt in this moment, standing in a queue with lots of people who I couldn’t really see, but many of whom recognised me as the teacher of their children, or perhaps as a man who came to their shops/restaurants, or maybe even just as that English guy they had seen cycling around Toyohashi. The feeling was that I was one of them, a Toyohashi resident, and I was absolutely going to be joining them in ringing that bell.

‘DONG.’

Time passed and it must have been about 1am that I got to the front of the queue (though it didn’t feel like a long wait) and I was ushered up the wooden stairs. I waited for my instructions, which were in Japanese but I later found out approximate to something like ‘make your new year’s wish as you ring it’ and I hit the big wooden ringer into the very large bell, ringing it just like I had heard from across town near Karubi.

The bell I rang was similar to this one.

I stepped down from the platform and was given a traditional snack by one of the officials (possibly they were monks).

I walked home eating the snack, then went straight to bed, reflecting on the most unique new year’s celebration I had ever experienced.

We wish all Calderonia readers a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged bells, Buddhist monks, Buddhist temples, Cambridge, Casillero del Diablo, Christmas, culture shock, England, etiquette, food, friendliness, Goto family, islands, James Miles, Japan, KFC, kindergarten, language teaching, New Year, population densities, Shōgatsu, Snickers, Toyohashi, traffic lights | 4 Comments

Sensei Pulvers’ miraculous year

Posted on December 1, 2021 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to find this book on amazon.

A friend of Jim’s in Japan brought Roger Pulvers and me together three years ago. The friend referred to Pulvers in the most natural way as ‘Sensei Pulvers’. And this is totally appropriate. Anyone whose children have attended karate classes will know that there ‘sensei’ means ‘martial arts instructor’, but actually in Japanese it approximates to Teacher, Mentor and almost Philosopher.

There can be few non-Japanese in the world as well qualified to teach the rest of us about Japan, to induct us into its life and culture, as Roger Pulvers. In 2019 Alison and I attended the UK premiere of Pulvers’ film STAR SAND, set in post-war Japan, and were overwhelmed by its truthfulness and beauty. His books The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn and The Unmaking of an American carry you straight into the mind of modern Japan. I cannot wait to read also his My Japan: A Cultural Memoir, the 2020 English-language edition of an earlier book in Japanese entitled If There Were No Japan.

Pulvers’ energy is staggering. He spent much of 2020 in lockdown at his home in Sydney, Australia. This unfortunately meant that he had to postpone shooting his next film, which was all set up to go, but instead he produced a 195-page selection of Sergei Esenin‘s verse in his own translation (Pulvers was a Russianist before he went to Japan), wrote the play and lyrics in English and Japanese for the musical of Miyazawa Kenji‘s novel Night on the Milky Way Train, and published a 200-page book of all the other poems that he had translated from three languages and himself written in lockdown, not to mention performing his translations every few days on YouTube!

Anyone interested in Russian literature but who does not know Russian should read Wholly Esenin, which has been well received over here. Not only has Pulvers snappily and accurately translated a wide selection of Esenin’s verse, his extremely informed commentary amounts to a short biography of the ‘blonde angel’.

But my personal choice from Pulvers’ annus mirabilis is Poems 2020, whose cover I feature above. A third of its contents are translations of Japanese poems that I did not know before. Again, Pulvers’ notes are as readable and enjoyable as his English versions. Inevitably, perhaps, I am drawn to ‘new’ haiku by one of my favourite Japanese poets, Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902). Here are two, with commentaries:

Autumn fly
The swatters are all full
Of holes

This is an intriguing image. The swatter [fly swat] has been used so much that holes have opened up in it. This indicates that the autumn fly’s life may be saved thanks to the sacrifices made by its predecessors. (p. 171)

The snail is enticing
Rain clouds
With its antennae

This haiku employs one of the key elements seen in the genre, that of contrasting scale. We can see the snail’s antennae, the sky and the whole space in between at once. Haiku often make you look elsewhere in order to see something central. In other words — and this can be said for much of Japanese aesthetics — things on the periphery of or quite a distance away from something may call attention to that thing much more vividly than the thing itself. It is a kind of poetic entanglement. (p. 173)

You may think Pulvers uses ‘entanglement’ here in its ordinary English sense…but you can be sure that he is also referring to the EPR Effect of quantum physics, i.e. ‘measurement on particle 1 produces instantaneous change at particle 2 […] some counterintuitive togetherness-in-separation between 1 and 2’ (John Polkinghorne, Quantum Theory: A Very Short Introduction, p. 79). You can be sure, because Roger Pulvers is almost as much a polymath as George Calderon — Pulvers is the uomo universale of the Antipodes!

With its direct, unrhymed versions of Pushkin, Tiutchev, Gumilev, Pasternak, Akhmatova, Mandel’shtam, Tsvetaeva, Mickiewicz, Borowski and other Russian and Polish classics, accompanying those of twelve Japanese poets, Sensei Pulvers’ Poems 2020 is fantastic value.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged annus mirabilis, entanglement, EPR Effect, fly swats, George Calderon, haiku, If There Were No Japan, Japan, Japanese poetry, John Polkinghorne, Masaoka Shiki, Miyazawa Kenji, My Japan: A Cultural Memoir, Night on the Milky Way Train, Poems 2020, poetry in translation, Polish poetry, polymaths, quantum physics, Roger Pulvers, Russian poetry, sensei, Sergei Esenin, snails, The Dream of Lafcadio Hearn, The Unmaking of an American, Wholly Esenin | 1 Comment

‘These magnificent metal beasts’

Posted on November 15, 2021 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to find this book in Tim Easley’s online store.

Sam2 gave me this book last Christmas and it’s been a source of endless delight ever since. At 8.5 x 12.0 inches and beautifully produced, it may seem like a coffee table book, but it is much more. I have read it several times in full, but I also love just opening it at random, studying every detail of the superb images by award-wining designer and photographer Tim Easley, and savouring his captions. I feel that the amazing diversity of the (sometimes outsize) vending machines shown, and their background settings, can tell me something about Japan if only I can ‘read’ them properly. I am still ‘reading’ them.

The shadows on this one, the little overhanging branch, the soft wood on the right, and the Perspex background oddly reminiscent of bamboo, suggest the lingering presence of an older, ‘poetic’ Japan. The box’s proportions and its entirely unnecessary curved red roof are positively classical. Every item on the face of this machine has been positioned with care to achieve an intriguing interaction with empty space (is this effect perhaps what Japanese aesthetics call mo, which has been translated as ‘dreaming space’?), and the tiles for the consumables themselves seem almost secondary. Other machines in the book are more in your face, even brutal, garish and occasionally distressed with graffiti and stickers.

As Easley discovered on his first visit to Japan, vending machines are a way of life there. (5.5 million of them, or one to every 23 people in the country, he tells us in his useful section ‘Factoids’.) They sell everything from ice cream, T-shirts, cigarettes and souvenirs to every hot and cold drink imaginable. I conclude that the Japanese believe in convenience. In Japan he found

Vending machines that actually worked. Anywhere you went, whether it was up a mountain or in a train, you could buy a cold drink, they were reasonably priced, and they were always fully stocked.

But he also discovered their infinite variety. He may call them ‘robots’, ‘guys’, ‘a gang’, ‘lonely machines’, ‘magnificent metal beasts’, but he knows that they are more than the latest word in Japanese technology. With their whimsical cartoon figures, floating Japanese characters, weird English, ‘mix of American and pastels’, sheer wit and clean design, they amount to ‘pieces of art’ — a modern, original, Japanese art.

Tim Easley can be found on Twitter at @TimEasley, and his books/work including Vend can be purchased from his site.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged aesthetics, balance, cigarettes, cold drinks, comments, design, hot drinks, Japan, Japanese art, Japanese poetry, Japanese technology, machines, photographs, Sam2, semiotics, souvenirs, T-shirts, Tim Easley, Tokyo, vending machines | 3 Comments

Guest post by Alison Miles: Some geographical aspects of a visit to Japan in 2013

Posted on November 1, 2021 by Patrick Miles

I visited Japan in autumn 2013 and my main reason was to see Jim, who lived there for several years. It was about six months after I retired so a wonderful opportunity to take a long-haul flight (my first ever) to somewhere on the other side of the world. Everyone knows about the spring cherry blossom in Japan and how much it is celebrated. I had considered a spring visit, but October/November was more convenient. So I was delighted to discover that the autumn colours in Japan are also fantastic. As the two weeks of my holiday progressed the maples and other trees and shrubs intensified in colour, to bright reds and oranges.

But it wasn’t just the autumn colours that amazed me. There were so many other aspects of the country that were fascinating including the cities I visited — Tokyo, Kyoto, Nagoya and Toyahashi. It was also wonderful, in all senses of the word, to experience features associated with active vulcanicity particularly in the area around Hakone, where I stayed with friends who have a house there.

Wherever I go, I rarely switch off from my background as a geographer (to the amusement, or maybe irritation, of my companions!). So my Japan holiday was a perfect way to observe aspects of the country that really interested me — and have led to the title of this guest post.

My two geographical themes are ‘Urban structures’ and ‘Earthquakes and volcanoes’.

Urban structures

From the mid 1960s I have been very much aware of urban structure, including some of the models that originated in North America in the first half of the 20^th century, starting with Burgess’s concentric rings model, first proposed in the late 1920s based on land use in Chicago. It demonstrates correlation between economic status and distance from the centre (where the central business district, CBD, is located). As you would expect this very simple model has its limitations and in real life the situation is far more complicated. However, it provides a starting point for looking at urban structure. The key to the colours for both the models drawn below uses the word ‘class’ to help describe the nature of each zone, for example ‘low class’ – small residential properties occupied by factory workers, ‘medium class’ – larger properties and more open space, and ‘high class’ – larger still with plenty of space, sometimes known as the commuter zone.

It was soon evident that a more complex model would be better and by 1939 the sector (or Hoyt) model was proposed.

Although these two early models of urban land use are based on American cities almost 100 years ago, I find they give me a pattern to think about. Inevitably they are massive oversimplifications of reality. It is, however, possible to find some aspects of even the oldest models that help when it comes to making sense of the layout and functions of a European city.

For UK towns and cities I find it relatively easy to identify the different ages of properties, the uses of buildings and the way the urban areas have grown. There are reasons for this, the most obvious being my own experience of living in the country over many years as well as a tendency to try and make sense of what I am seeing. So the UK city/town centre of narrow streets and old properties replaced further out by residential ribbon development then late 20th century estates, interspersed with commercial sites, is totally familiar to me.

In Japan I was essentially a tourist, sightseeing rather than doing geographical fieldwork, but I am interested in my surroundings. The Japanese cities that I visited were fascinating. There was a mix of high rise and single/two-storey residential buildings, retail parks, open spaces (sports fields and urban parks) and all the usual trappings of modern transport whether rail (train and tram) or road. But I had difficulty identifying actual patterns of different land uses and could not answer questions such as: Is there a retail area? Where are offices concentrated? What evidence is there of residential expansion? The cities that I visited are huge — the smallest, Toyohashi, has a population of over 350,000 — which partly explains why structure did not jump out at me. Most of the buildings look very modern:

A view of Toyohashi that I took looking north from the station area

Although I could not identify old city core areas, I visited two areas of old-style properties (now tourist attractions) in Tokyo and Kyoto, Asakusa and Gion respectively. Japan-Guide (https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3004.html, and https://www.japan-guide.com/e/e3004.html ) says: ‘Asakusa is the centre of Tokyo‘s shitamachi (literally “low city”), where an atmosphere of the Tokyo of past decades survives. Gion is Kyoto‘s most famous geisha district and attracts tourists with its high concentration of traditional wooden machiya merchant houses. Due to the fact that property taxes were formerly based upon street frontage, the houses were built with narrow facades only five to six meters wide, but extend up to twenty meters in from the street’.

Apart from reconstructed areas built in the traditional style, buildings did not look old but there were many areas where streets were narrow, properties very tightly packed and often high rise, suggesting high land values that are often typical of commercial sectors.

A photo that I took of a narrow street in Tokyo

In contrast, other areas had wider streets, longer frontages, fewer storeys and some open spaces. Then there were mixtures – single or two-storey properties mixed with higher ones.

A final contrast

It was easy to travel between Japanese cities:

Shinkansen (bullet train), a photo that I took at Toyohashi station in October 2013

In the UK, I was used to more old-fashioned trains:

This photo of an intercity diesel train was posted on Taunton Trains blog in 2012

Earthquakes and volcanoes

Japan lies on the western edge of the Pacific Ocean, part of the ‘Pacific Ring of Fire’. This phrase refers to the incidence of volcanic activity round the Pacific Rim, where crustal plates move towards each other. Japan lies along the boundary of the Pacific plate as it moves westwards converging with and sliding beneath the Eurasian and Philippine plates. This leads to instability that results in volcanoes and earthquakes.

Over the years there have been devastating earthquakes in Japan.

One of the most recent was in 2011, the Tohoku earthquake, the strongest recorded in Japan, affecting the north-east coast of Honshu. The earthquake triggered a tsunami that flooded the Fukoshima nuclear power plant and killed nearly 20,000 people. I remember visiting the Kaetsu Educational and Cultural Centre in Cambridge (sadly now closed but its website still exists for archive purposes: http://www.kaetsu.co.uk/ ) where they were raising money for the people in the devastated area. The displays and presentations gave me some understanding of the problems for displaced residents, starting with homelessness and lack of occupation/employment.

The 1923 Great Kanto earthquake caused huge damage to Tokyo and over 100,000 deaths. Asakusa, mentioned above, was devastated by fire. It happened at lunchtime as people were cooking, leading to massive fires across the city that took days to control. Following that disaster there was a review of building structures to reduce risk in future earthquakes.

One very interesting aspect of my visit to Japan was the technology area in the Okumura Corporation Commemorative Museum in Nara, south of Kyoto (https://www.okumuragumi.co.jp/en/commemorative/ ):

I took this photo to show how the building sits on a seismic isolation system. The ‘ground’ floor houses an area with interactive displays that demonstrate the effects of technologies designed to reduce earthquake impacts.

As well as earthquakes, I saw an abundance of evidence of volcanic activity starting with Mount Fuji, the cultural icon of Japan, and incidentally a good example of a composite cone, or strato-volcano.

When I visited the Hakone volcanic area the weather was good enough to see Mount Fuji so I was lucky to take this photo. In the foreground are signs of the smoky sulphurous area of the Owakudani valley.

The Owakudani valley was created around 3,000 years ago when the Hakone volcano exploded. At the same time Lake Ashi (Ashinoko) was formed in the caldera of the volcano, and it is one of the many tourist attractions of the region.

I took this photo from a ‘pirate ship’ that provided trips across the lake – popular with everyone, particularly Chinese tourists on the day I visited.

The pirate ship berthed at the end of the Hakone ropeway which gave access to the Owukudani valley. The valley is very spectacular with vents (fumaroles) emitting sulphurous fumes and steam. At the time, 2013, the warning sign below and a few closed paths were the only restrictions to visitors but in 2015 the site was closed because of increased volcanic activity. It was partially reopened in 2016 with warnings that ‘high volcanic activity’ made it unsuitable for ‘people with asthma, bronchitis, heart disease, heart pacemakers, and pregnant women’.

In the Hakone residential area there was plenty of evidence of natural hot water, for example the ditches along the roadsides were steaming (and, incidentally, plants in the verges included the dreaded Japanese knotweed — no problem as the ecosystem has natural controls including insects and fungi).

This brief account highlights a couple of themes that particularly interested me when I visited Japan. There is a huge amount more that I would like to see and do – maybe one day!

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Alison Miles, Asakusa, bullet train, Burgess Model, cities, earthquake management, earthquakes, geography, Gion, Hakone, Hoyt Model, Japan, Kaetsu Educational and Cultural Centre, Kyoto, Lake Ashi, Mount Fuji, Nara, Okumura Corporation Commemorative Museum, Owakudani Valley, Pacific Ring of Fire, seismicity, Shinkansen, Tohoku earthquake, Tokyo, tourism, town planning, Toyohashi, trains, urban models, urban structures, volcanicity, volcanoes | 1 Comment

Hayashi Fumiko’s nuclear winter

Posted on October 18, 2021 by Patrick Miles

Click the cover to find this book on Amazon.

Japan’s genocidal war crimes do not go away. They constantly feature in our media and I for one will never forget them, as my uncle died in Japanese captivity in 1945. A recent article in The Spectator was headed ‘Not prosecuting Hirohito was a mistake’. We all know what ended the war with Japan, and the controversy still surrounding that end. We know the facts about Japan’s war…but I have to say I never knew how it affected ‘ordinary Japanese’, particularly the working class, until I recently read this book.

Selected, translated and published by the American Japanologist J.D. Wisgo, most of these nine stories are set in wartime/immediately post-War Japan, particularly Tokyo. Although Hiroshima and Nagasaki are never mentioned, the March 1945 bombing of Tokyo that virtually destroyed it forms the background to the stories: one of such devastation of life and property as to approximate, I think, to a picture of nuclear winter. They are tales of extreme poverty, starvation, death and personal tragedy; bleakness unforgettably evoked.

At their core is usually a woman-man relationship which is explored fully, with impressive knowledge and confidence. I put the relationship that way round, as the Japanese women portrayed here are stronger, less crushed, more active and emotionally complex than the men, who are often deeply traumatised by the war and its destruction of their families. Stereotypic western ideas about Japanese women go out of the window. A seventeen-year-old daughter saves her doting widowed father from a post-War marriage whilst deftly leaving the family home to live with her older lover (‘The Master of the Wanderer’s Tavern’). A young woman runs away from the country to the ruins of Tokyo, works as a dancer, becomes pregnant, but is determined to have the child and is supported by an older woman and a homosexual (‘Downfall’). A male medical student is torn between a chubby housemaid infatuated with him and an impossibly beautiful woman he meets one night in the communal bathroom where he has gone ‘as usual to wash his two pairs of underwear’ (the hilarious ‘Tale of the Seishūkan Guest House’). Most moving of all, perhaps, a penniless married couple whose clothes shop has failed and who decide they must separate for economic reasons and because the woman believes they are incompatible, at the very last minute rediscover gentleness and love (‘Days and Nights’). Truly, in Fumiko’s stories life begins the other side of despair.

However, from the point of view of educating oneself about Japan the most valuable thing about them, I think, is their ‘strangeness’, i.e. their sheer cultural difference; what some readers might consider weirdness. There are constant references to the dimensions of rooms in metres. Suicide is an accepted choice. The idea of ghosts has a strong hold on people. Chronology keeps being broken, so that the total effect of the story is more compositional than linear. Similes are startling: ‘a suited salesman stood smoking absent-mindedly with a head of hair glistening like the eyes of a dragonfly’ (p. 95), a woman brushes a man’s hand ‘roughly off like an eagle cleaning its feathers’ (p. 104). ‘A girl with black earlobes served him tea’ (p. 100), and a man suddenly grabs his wife’s fingers and starts to ‘bite her fingernails, one at a time — pointer finger, middle finger, and pinky’ (p. 117). ‘Black earlobes?’ one exclaims; ‘bite her fingernails?’ Why? The translator has perhaps prudently decided not to explain these things to us in notes, for once started where could he end? Fumiko takes them all for granted, of course, and that is what one needs as a foreigner if one is going to engage with a raw, unfiltered Japan.

‘Strangest’, most ‘unrecognisable’ of all in these stories is the world of feelings and the sudden explosions of violence. The heroine of ‘Employment’ doesn’t herself understand why she is so angry, but screams as she throws pebbles at the sea, then ‘fell down abruptly onto the sandy ground, rolling around and kicking up bits of dry sand like a dog, thrashing about’ (p. 57), whilst the amiable hero of ‘The Tale of the Seishūkan Guest House’ rages ‘violently like a tiger’, repeatedly throws a surgical knife into a wall, and cuts his books ‘to shreds’ (p. 36) — and the passionate biting of a woman’s fingernails has already been mentioned. I certainly didn’t understand why many of the characters of these stories behave the way they do; but that is exactly what you would expect of a totally different culture and your task is to grapple with it if you are going one day to understand it. For instance, it was a complete revelation to realise that several of the Japanese women in these stories are emotionally upset, silently weep, or are stressed out, because of what they perceive (or foresee) as the emotional consequences for their men of the men’s own actions; in other words the women are not suffering from the direct impact of actions on themselves, but from the violent effects of empathy and pity for the other. I don’t know that this is a very common English phenomenon.

In case you are wondering what the word ‘pinky’ means in my quotation above, it is the American for little finger. These are translations by J.D. Wisgo into his native American, and I think this is a very good thing for two reasons. First, it enhances for the U.K. reader the sense of strangeness that is vital to the experience of reading another culture’s literature. Second, as a consequence of that terrible war American is Japan’s other language. I for one am immensely grateful to Wisgo for initiating me through Fumiko’s stories into the post-war world of Japan. I have never recommended a book to a reading group before, but I do recommend this one as the experience is bound to provoke widely differing responses, discussion and even argument. I have read the book three times, feel I have understood more about Japanese values and culture each time, and will surely read it again.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary, Uncategorized | Tagged aerial bombing, atomic bomb, body language, bombing raids, cultural traditions, Days & Nights, emotions, Emperor Hirohito, feminism, foreign cultures, ghosts, Hayashi Fumiko, J.D. Wisgo, Japan, Japanese literature, poverty, reading groups, sex, short stories, strangeness, suicide, Tokyo, United States of America, women's writing, working class, World War 2 | 2 Comments

‘Deep North’…and far out?

Posted on October 1, 2021 by Patrick Miles

This was only the second ‘Japanese’ book that I ever read after The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, and of course there was a connection: I won’t say that Bashō (1644-94) is my favourite Japanese haiku-writer, but he’s surely the greatest. I wanted to know more about him and, particularly, his art. Where the latter is concerned, I immediately learned something fundamental about the haiku: note after note by Nobuyuki Yuasa at the back of his Penguin Classics translation revealed to me that Bashō’s haiku (originally ‘hokka’) are very often of ‘irregular form’, i.e. not 5-7-5 syllables!

That was in 1976. I have read this slim book many times since, including three times in the past six weeks, and I know I will always come back to it. It actually contains five travelogues. The first four are between six and twenty pages long, ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ itself is forty-seven pages, each has a character and beauty of its own, but ‘Narrow Road’ is the masterpiece. I always read it with a rush of fresh perceptions, probably because its very keynote is variety: variety of places, landscapes, weathers, people, events (present and long past), phenomena, facts, moods, plants…

All this passes before you at what always seems exactly the right pace; never too quick or too slow. It’s utterly mysterious how he has managed it so that you always feel you are on the move with him, there is always an excitement about what is going to happen next, experience after experience is contemplated yet you always know that the journey must keep going, that it has a purpose and a unity greater than its multitude of parts. It is a journey to shrines and sites of deep Japanese historical significance, but also to phenomena of the natural world (a thousand-year-old pine, ancient cherry trees, a famous willow, rocks), and they are described with great wit (sometimes he does not find the famous pond reflections, irises or rock pattern that he has come to see). The effect is overwhelmingly aesthetic: you feel you have been initiated into the artistic way of seeing of an incredibly sophisticated civilisation.

All our journeys are personal journeys (e.g. George Calderon’s Tahiti), but not every journey is a spiritual one. ‘Narrow Road to the Deep North’ is. Bashō is so modest that on a first reading it is easy to overlook that the journey is grounded on danger, in existential terms it is a ‘boundary situation’. When Bashō sets out in 1689, he sells his house as he does not expect to come back from penetrating what was regarded as unexplored territory. When he reaches the ‘barrier-gate’ to the North, the gate-keepers are ‘extremely suspicious, for very few travellers dared to pass this difficult road under normal circumstances’ (p. 120). He teeters over abysses, he literally has to crawl on all fours up a mountain, he forces his way through bamboo thickets, he negotiates a swollen river in a cockleshell boat, he is laid low by illness. The backbone of this travelogue, then, is existential risk and angst. It forces Bashō to question the value and meaning of his life, of all human life, of the universe’s life. (He often weeps.) He says that when he got home after nearly three years, ‘everybody was overjoyed to see me as if I had returned unexpectedly from the dead’ (p. 142). In a sense, he had. His self had been far out.

However, no encounter with a different culture can be without difficulty, and there was something that profoundly worried me about this book when I first read it. On the second page of the first travelogue, ‘The Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton’, Bashō comes upon ‘a small child, hardly three years of age, crying pitifully on the river bank, obviously abandoned by his parents’. The child was ‘so pitiful that I gave him what little food I had’, but then Bashō philosophises about the causes of the child’s ‘great misery’, concluding:

Alas, it seems to me that this child’s undeserved suffering has been caused by something far greater and more massive [than his parents] — by what one might call the irresistible will of heaven. If it is so, child, you must raise your voice to heaven, and I must pass on, leaving you behind. (p. 52)

Outrageous humbug, I thought, surely he could have rescued the child? In fact the abandonment of children by their parents, of old parents by their children, and of other humans by Bashō himself, is a theme that runs throughout ‘The Narrow Road’. This would be understandable enough as mere truthful reporting, but it always seems to be accepted as a fact of life, never deplored or acted upon. I began to think there was a moral vacuum at the heart of the book, even at the heart of Japanese life at that historical time, and that the source of it was the ‘fatalism’ and ‘resignation’ of Bashō’s Zen Buddhism. The latter profoundly imbues his haiku, and there are those who consequently believe you cannot write haiku unless you believe in Zen. I don’t accept that, and I’m very unsettled by the feeling ‘The Narrow Road’ leaves me with sometimes, that its world is amorally ‘aesthetic’ and ‘philosophical’, and that Bashō is an entirely self-centred artist.

On more recent readings, I have come to interpret the above scene, and Bashō’s moralising rejection of the tearful concubines in ‘Narrow Road’ (p. 132) as Zen symbols, not necessarily reportage at all, since parts of the narration, I gather, are as fictive as some aspects of George’s Tahiti. I must admit, as symbols they are sublime. On the other hand, I also find myself wondering whether Bashō’s passing by on the other side (although he is always full of pity) is not an early example of the Japanese phrase taigan no kaji, which Roger Pulvers explains in his autobiography means a fire that burns on someone else’s riverbank, so although you can see it, ‘you can be indifferent to its cause or effect’.

Yet an equally strong impression from ‘The Narrow Road’ is that of sociability, of human contact, collaboration, interaction, people being aware they can contribute something to other people; dialogue, in fact. A simple example would be the ‘disciples’ and strangers who at every point volunteer to accompany, guide and help Bashō on his journey. He is rarely alone. My impression at the moment is that Japanese life is as sociable and collaborative as that today. I shall have to wait and see. But one can hardly accuse Bashō of being an ‘entirely self-centred artist’ when so many of the haiku in this book are contributed by his companions and he is so complimentary about them!

I cannot begin to do justice to ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’ in a blog post that is already over-long. Bashō’s journey is a world classic that everyone should read.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Personal commentary | Tagged Bashō, boundary situations, civilisations, classic, collaboration, comments, dialogue, disciples, ethics, fatalism, George Calderon, haiku, hokka, Japan, Japanese literature, journeys, morality, Narrow Road to the Far North, Nobuyuki Yuasa, Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, Penguin Classics, Records of a Weather-exposed Skeleton, resignation, Roger Pulvers, shrines, sociability, symbols, Tahiti, taigan no kaji, travelogues, world classics, Zen Buddhism | Leave a comment

‘Another culture’ (A series of seven posts)

Posted on September 15, 2021 by Patrick Miles

Sam2, aka our son James Miles, worked in Japan as a teacher from 2011 to 2014 (his first job when he got back to England was to set up Calderonia!). My wife Alison visited Jim in Japan in 2013. Jim has been urging me to visit Japan myself, and our current plan is to go there together in 2023. Although apprehensive about the long plane journey, I do want to go. I have been ‘engaging’ with Japan through English-language books ever since I bought The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse in 1970; I would like to experience the reality.

‘Japan’

So, the sequence of haiku and senryu above (click on it to enlarge) is literary shots of Japan from the West — that is why the title is in inverted commas. It’s how Japan has affected me without my knowing Japan in the flesh. ‘Wasabi’, by the way, is that green paste made from the Mountain Hollyhock that you have with sushi and takes the roof off your mouth. In the next six posts, which will take us up to Christmas, I shall look at some other glimpses I have gained of Japan through books, and both Jim and Alison will talk about their own experience of the country in separate posts.

I should acknowledge that three of the above poems were published in HQ Poetry Magazine and Blithe Spirit, 2019, but written many years before.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged Alison Miles, Blithe Spirit, Calderonia, chrysanthemums, comments, culture, foreign cultures, guest posts, haiku, honesty pods, HQ Poetry Magazine, James Miles, Japan, Japanese literature, koi carp, Masaoka Shiki, Pleiades, saké, Sam2, senryu, sushi, tea, wasabi | 1 Comment

A new photograph of George Calderon

Posted on September 1, 2021 by Patrick Miles

Whilst sorting his family papers, Mr John Pym recently found the photograph below, which undoubtedly shows George Calderon on the right. It is a contact print of a photograph, obviously not in sharp focus, which Mr Pym and I believe was probably taken by his grandmother, Violet Pym (1881-1927), who was a keen photographer.

The back is inscribed as follows in the hand of either Violet’s husband Charles Evelyn Pym (1879-1971) or their son John Pym (1908-93): K. & G. Calderon about 1905. However, the woman sitting next to George is older, much fuller in the face, and less fashionably dressed than Kittie in another photo of 1905, reproduced on page 204 of my biography. Who, then, might this person be, and the lady on the far left?

The previously unknown photograph, c. 1905

John Pym believes that the seat is one from Foxwold that he now owns, but that the massive trunk behind it is not one of a tree at Foxwold; rather, perhaps, that of a cedar planted by Frederic Lubbock (1844-1927) at nearby Emmetts. The seat may originally have been at Emmetts, therefore, and the photograph taken there.

We know from Foxwold’s Visitors Book that there was only one occasion when George and Kittie stayed at Foxwold in 1905, and that was on 27 December in the company of an old friend of the Pyms, the humorous writer Anstey Guthrie. It would be perfectly normal for the Foxwold party to visit Emmetts on that occasion, as Charles Evelyn Pym had married Frederic and Catherine Lubbock’s daughter Violet earlier that year (although the couple were living in Sussex). The person to the left of George might therefore be the then-resident of Foxwold, C.E. Pym’s stepmother Jane Hannah Backhouse Pym (1852-1912). The person to the left of her bears some resembance to Catherine Lubbock (1850-1934).

All this is speculation, however, as the inscription says only ‘about 1905’, there looks to be more foliage on the trees than one would expect on 27 December, and surely it would be odd for George to be wearing a boater in winter? On the other hand, he does look slightly crumpled, and this would accord with his state of health at the time (see pages 202-7 of the biography). On 28 December 1905 Nina Corbet’s son Jim wrote to Kittie that he hoped ‘Uncle George’s’ health was better for having had a Christmas holiday. The alternative date for 1905 is 21 May, when George’s signature appears in the Foxwold Weigh-in Book, but not in the Visitors Book.

I am touched and immensely grateful to John Pym that he has added this photograph to his already generous donations to the Calderon archive. Together with other items of Calderoniana that I have bought or been given since 2019, it will eventually join George and Kittie’s papers at the Houghton Library, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.

Posted in Edwardian character, Edwardian literature, Personal commentary | Tagged biographies, biography, boaters, Catherine Lubbock, Charles Evelyn Pym, comments, Emmetts, Evey Pym, Foxwold, George Calderon, George Calderon: Edwardian Genius, Harvard University, Houghton Library, identification, Jane Hannah Backhouse Pym, Jim Corbet, John Pym, Johnnie Pym, Kittie Calderon, Lubbock family, Massachusetts, Nina Corbet, Violet Pym, visitors books, Weigh-in Book | Leave a comment

‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’: Fragments of a response

Posted on August 20, 2021 by Patrick Miles

When I read the novel for the first time, I was bemused by the in-your-face tone of the narrator, who is even given to exclamatory comments: ‘But that is how men are!’ — ‘But Emma said No!’ — ‘Yes, she sat there!’ — ‘More violent sobs — self-conscious!’ Could one expect anything very profound from such a story teller? But Lawrence knew what he was doing. The tone clears the air and increasingly identifies with Lady C.’s own untrammelled responses to her environment. And as she ceases to be ‘Constance’ and becomes ‘Connie’, so the narrator calms down into that affection, compassion, empathy and understanding of her that are so moving.

* * *

Is it likely that mine owner, ‘first lieutenant in a smart regiment’ and ruling class bastard Clifford Chatterley could become a successful writer of short stories? Well, no; there is nothing in the pre-novel of chapter 1 that suggests he has any interest in or talent for creative writing whatsoever. Lawrence can make it happen before our eyes, however, because he understood so well what made a fashionable writer of his time: ‘That slightly humorous analysis of people and motives which leaves everything in bits at the end’, as Connie sees it, and ‘a display, a display, a display!’ The only examples of Chatterley’s writing that Lawrence gives are letters. ‘He wrote very good letters: they might have been printed in a book.’ Ouch! There is a brilliant example of Chatterley’s literary phoniness, when he writes that ‘sometimes the soul shoots like a kittiwake into the light, with ecstasy’. The kittiwake, poor bird, is used for mere display.

Kittiwake in flight: a beautiful bird, but a flashy image.
(BBC news)

* * *

The depth of Lawrence’s self-belief and seriousness of intent in this novel is borne out by the fact that he forgets to check whether his words could have a farcical meaning. ‘He [Michaelis] couldn’t keep anything up’, or ‘He [Mellors] was a thousand years older in experience, starting from the bottom’, are likely to be construed within the novel’s central context of sexuality rather than the particular context Lawrence intends. In other words, Lawrence has laid himself open to appearing humourless.

* * *

In 1982 I was reading and helping to order the residual papers of the novelist William Gerhardie (1895-1977) acquired by Cambridge University Library. I was particularly interested in any unpublished manuscripts of his relating to Chekhov, about whom he had written the first book in English (1923).

I came across a typescript of his account of visiting D.H. Lawrence at home in 1925 and was incredulous to read that Lawrence had told him he, Lawrence, was incapable of ‘satisfying’ a woman as he suffered from premature ejaculation. What? The foremost writer about heterosexual sex in the English language? Could this possibly be?

Gerhardie omitted the ‘fact’ from his Memoirs of a Polyglot (1931), but in God’s Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age, 1890-1940 (1981) he set it on record and related Lawrence’s condition to the excruciating, almost Expressionist episode in The Rainbow when Ursula attempts to obtain ‘consummation’ from Skrebensky as she lies in the sand hills ‘motionless, with wide-open eyes looking at the moon’.

William Gerhardie, c.1930

I gather it is now accepted that Lawrence suffered from premature ejaculation and could not ‘satisfy’ a woman that way. It would explain his obsession with simultaneous orgasm in Lady Chatterley’s Lover — an odd obsession in today’s world, surely — but also Mellors’s somewhat basic technique. One cannot help hypothesising that Lawrence suffered from p.e. because he saw sex as a sacramental, almost religious act of ecstasy that couldn’t come fast enough, so to speak, once he had embarked on it. The Lawrentian (purely male) conception of sexual climax as sacramental/religious (i.e. virtually spiritual rather than physical) might explain why Skrebensky, Michaelis and Mellors are bitter about their partners not achieving it, rather than blaming themselves (the men).

Mellors’s attention to Connie’s body is wonderful (she herself thinks: ‘he was kind to the female in her, which no man had ever been’). But does Lawrence intend Mellors’s very juicy use of the ‘c’ and ‘f’ words, and the gamekeeper’s penchant for ‘tail’, to imply there is something superior about Mellors’s ‘Anglo-Saxon’ brand of sex?

‘He [Mellors] hated mouth-kisses.’ Why? Nothing, it seems, changes more quickly and is more personal than sexual mores; and this makes the novel peculiarly ‘dated’, or historical, and difficult to discuss today. (It’s a sex and gender minefield!)

* * *

Doris Lessing’s introduction (2006) to the current Penguin edition of Lady Chatterley’s Lover is challenging and in my view superb. She relates how she came to see it as ‘one of the most powerful anti-war novels ever written’:

It is not that once having seen how war overshadows this tale, threatens these lovers, the love story loses its poignancy, but for me it is no longer the central theme, despite what Lawrence intended. Two defenceless people, their lives already wounded by war, fly into each other’s arms, fugitives from such horrors, trying to find a little safe place, like small animals fleeing from a forest fire, the wings of flame already close behind them [i.e. of the Second World War].

I admit that, unlike Women in Love, whose narrative ends before 4 August 1914, the First World War is responsible for much of the state of things in Lady Chatterley’s Lover: Clifford’s injury, Mellors’s restlessness and extreme alienation, the terrible debasement of values and words apprehended by Connie in the passage quoted first in Damian Grant’s preceding post. Lawrence’s own description and diagnosis of PTSD is masterly. But I don’t agree that the war is the central theme. We are explicitly informed at the end of chapter 1 that Clifford Chatterley had been ‘virgin when he married [unlike Connie]: and the sex part did not mean much to him’, nor had Connie’s sexuality been awoken by her experiences with German men. This was all true of them before the War, and is the crux of the problem. The central theme remains the new, or as Lawrence expressed it, ‘phallic’ marriage that the novel actually celebrates. ‘Where there is real sex, there is the underlying passion for fidelity’ (A Propos of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’).

* * *

I have now read the novel twice in swift succession and am struck by the parallels with Women in Love: Clifford Chatterley becomes as ruthless a mine-moderniser as Gerald Critch; Mellors is as anti-establishment, and as big a talker, as Rupert Birkin; the let-out for the lovers, as in Women in Love, is a trust fund that will give them a private income; at the close of Lady Chatterley’s Lover a phoney artist is exposed by Mellors in a way reminiscent of Ursula’s argument with Loerke in the earlier novel. In broad terms, Connie’s and Mellors’s love follows a similar curve to Birkin’s and Ursula’s, and is even described in similar language. When Connie achieves her perfect sexual fulfilment with Mellors, ‘it was the sons of god with the daughters of men’. In Women in Love ‘it was the daughters of men coming back to the sons of God’. One wonders what had happened in the meantime for Lawrence to demote ‘God’ to ‘god’.

SOME RESPONSES TO GEORGE CALDERON: EDWARDIAN GENIUS

‘This meticulous yet nimble book is bound to remain the definitive account of Calderon’s life’ Charlotte Jones, The Times Literary Supplement

‘The effort of detection, it must be said, was worth it. The biography is a delight to read.’ Emeritus Professor Laurence Brockliss, The London Magazine

‘It is a masterly synthesis of your own approach with scholarship and very judicious discussion of the evidence.’ Emeritus Professor Catherine Andreyev, historian

‘A monumental scholarly masterpiece that gives real insight into how the Edwardians viewed the world.’Arch Tait, Translator of Natalya Rzhevskaya’s Memoirs of a Wartime Interpreter

‘Presents the Edwardian age, and Calderon in particular, as new and forward-looking.’ Emeritus Professor Michael Alexander, in Trinity College, Oxford, Report 2017-18

A review by DAMIAN GRANT appears in the comments to Calderonia’s 7 September post.

A review by JOHN DEWEY appears on Amazon UK.