Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

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  For Alastair, Theodore, Hugo and Fergus

  Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it is grief that develops the powers of the mind.

  Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past, Time Regained

  Let us be grateful to people who make us happy, they are the charming gardeners who make our souls blossom.

  Marcel Proust, ‘Regrets, Reveries, Changing Skies’, Pleasures and Regrets

  Introduction

  While studying French at university in Edinburgh, I wanted to write my final thesis on Proust. An old uncle whose humour I respected said, ‘It killed Proust to write it, it killed CK to translate it; it’ll probably kill you to read it…’ I took his advice and settled for Balzac. The CK to whom he referred was my mother’s great-uncle, always known by his initials, as there were a number of Charleses in the family.

  I grew up with stories of CK. He was my great-aunt Dorothy’s godfather and she would explain with a grave and sad expression, ‘He was a chomosecshooal, you know.’ In a framed box on the wall in her drawing room she carefully kept his war medals: a Military Cross, the 1914–15 Star, the British War Medal and the Victory Medal, which was the handsomest of all, with a rainbow ribbon and a gold winged figure of Victory. She showed me a fragment of red and yellow stained glass picked up from the ruins of Ypres Cathedral, also a ring made by a French officer out of a shell case. My mother, Lesley Scott Moncrieff, told me that as a child she had slept in an attic beside a dark portrait of Charles with a rip in the canvas, which was later mended and given to the National Portrait Gallery in Edinburgh.

  Years later, I was given a battered leather suitcase containing the forgotten letters, diaries, and notebooks of Charles Scott Moncrieff; and I settled down to read his translation of Proust. The general editor of the new translation of Proust’s great novel reckons it is now beyond the capability of one single person to translate Proust. The 2002 edition took seven translators seven years. Scott Moncrieff spent eight years from 1921 to 1929 working on this by himself, while also translating Stendhal, Pirandello, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise, as well as handling huge amounts of journalism and correspondence. So inspired was his translation that some critics felt he was improving on the original. Joseph Conrad wrote to him in 1922:

  I was much more interested and fascinated by your rendering than by Proust’s creation. One has revealed to me something and there is no revelation in the other … [You have] a supreme faculty akin to genius …

  The Scott Moncrieff translation is widely seen as a literary masterpiece in its own right, and he is considered one of the great translators into English of the twentieth century. But there was more to him than the translating genius Conrad discerned. An influential player on the English literary scene, he was a man of contradictions: a dedicated and decorated soldier as well as a poet; an ardent Catholic convert and a lover of men. He explored many of these paradoxes in his own poems, of which he said, ‘I am not a good poet and fortunately, I know it.’ They are mixed in quality, but are a great insight into his character, and as they are generally unavailable, I have put together all of the poems in my possession, both published and unpublished, in a separate book.

  He was not only a man of letters; his war record was outstanding, his attitude to war unusual. His many letters from the front were appreciative and entertaining. Here was a very sensitive, highly intelligent, active poet, who drew enjoyment from being a soldier. His letters threw new light on my view of that time of slaughter.

  He was a splendid letter-writer with an habitually irreverent turn of mind. He revealed a complex soul and a dry wit; especially in letters in the Berg Collection in New York Public Library, written to Edward Marsh, civil servant and patron of poets. Charles met him late in life not long before moving to Italy which was an easier climate for his wounds and cheaper on his pocket. There was also an expat colony of English writers. The young Evelyn Waugh wrote to him there in 1923, hoping to become his secretary because he was known by then as a critic and controversial man of letters who had loved Wilfred Owen, was hated by Osbert Sitwell, idealised by Noël Coward, cold-shouldered by Siegfried Sassoon, admired by Joseph Conrad and sniped at by D. H. Lawrence. Waugh dreamt he would spend his time, ‘drinking Chianti under olive trees and listening to discussions of all the most iniquitous outcasts of Europe.’ However, Charles could not have a secretary who was not privy to his second double life; that of an intelligence agent. When he finally did get one, she also worked in intelligence.

  The Society of Authors still awards the annual Scott Moncrieff Prize for translation from French. Conscious of his task of selling Proust to the English-speaking world, he did not make an exact literal translation but a poetic one – one he knew would appeal to the post-Edwardian public – and one that has been the subject of appreciation and controversy ever since.

  My research and writing have been a great adventure which took me to the battlefields of Flanders and Picardie; to Florence, Pisa and Rome, staying in the same hotels that Charles did, and finding his exact flat in 67, Via della Croce, Rome, to rent. One autumn I travelled round the Italian Riviera, carrying my baby son’s pram up and down the same steps where Charles had limped in the railway stations in the 1920s. He had used the London Library, and so did I; and there, at the foot of the stairs, is a bronze bust of Edmund Gosse, emanating the effortless self-confidence that made me understand his fatherly but cavalier attitude to Charles.

  The most startling discovery was that Charles had also been an intelligence agent for the British in Mussolini’s Italy. He had learnt early on how to live parallel lives, both of them sincere and believable: the Charles at home, religious, loving and dutiful, as well as the young blood among the homosexual coterie with Robert Ross and his friends in London. The lives did not overlap, nor come into conflict, he just stepped from one parallel to the other. This natural subterfuge made it easy for him to become a spy. (Perhaps a reason so many homosexuals were successful spies.) In fact he enjoyed the sophistication. There is also a connection here to his translating. He translated a work much as an actor took on a character, jumping into someone else’s skin and walking around in it. It became effortless; leaving behind one aspect of his character and taking on another.

  * * *

  The role of translator normally requires obedience, almost a shadowy role as a medium for another great mind, but Charles was determined to have the same size of ego as that of any creative writer. No other translator prefaced their works with dedicatory poems to their friends. Likewise his profile in the media thanks to critics like Edmund Gosse was as high as any creative writer. His was an interpretation of a great work, like Casals interpreting Bach, or Olivier enacting Shakespeare. He was compared to Richard Burton, whose translation of the Arabian Nights was bold and imaginary, inventing his own vocabulary if necessary.

  Having spent the flower of his youth on the war, he felt t
hat he was chasing lost time for the last ten years of his life. This feeling of being hounded by time led to a frenetic work schedule, and him publishing nineteen volumes of difficult translation, writing thousands of letters and neglecting his physical health. It is unlikely he ever cooked himself a meal, relying on black coffee and wine by day and dining out at night where he was celebrated as a first-rate entertainer by his friends. Proust wrote a slow exploration in search of lost time, but Charles was actively chasing time, he was a man never at rest; constantly making unnatural demands on himself, leading an action-packed life. Fuelled by his high ideals:

  To pursue chivalry, to avoid and punish treachery, to rely upon our own resources, and to fight uncomplainingly when support is withheld from us; to live, in fine, honourably and to die gallantly.

  He embodied virtues that we have forgotten or are ashamed of, or associate with jingoism and folly. He never ceased from mental strife. This made the quest for the mystery of this man wholly absorbing, taking me through great characters and great literature, walking all over London, Edinburgh, Rome, Pisa and beyond, and dwelling on the Word, the Sentence and its Commas.

  After I’d finished writing this book, and set down a tale of a life that was high-minded, abstemious, hardworking and a little lonely, I then discovered 458 pages of letters and postcards to Vyvyan Holland, the translator, and son of Oscar Wilde. These spanned from 1910 to Charles’s death, his whole adult life. They are witty and frank: full of Rabelaisian adventures, homosexual badinage, gossip, limericks and the detail of his thoughts and feelings on every activity, especially his sexual affairs. Vyvyan was the one person to whom Charles revealed his sex life; in the absence of these letters I had believed that after the war he was celibate. The letters proved that he practised an exuberant sexuality even until his final illness. To escape being compromised, the letters are in French, Italian, Latin, Greek and German. I felt I ought to ask Vyvyan Holland’s son, Merlin Holland, if he would mind my publishing letters that referred so frequently to his father’s intimate life. His reply was a relief. ‘I don’t have a problem with my family because all the skeletons fell out of the cupboard with a gigantic crash in 1895.’ The book is now a literary and spiritual journey, recently sown with nuggets of sex.

  CHAPTER 1

  Bloodline

  Every Scottish man has his pedigree. It is a national prerogative, as inalienable as his pride and his poverty.

  Walter Scott

  Charles Scott Moncrieff lay dying in Rome. Through the arched window of the Convent of St Joseph he could see the cypress trees on the Palatine Hill, while a nun in a white wimple and blue veil entered silently to give him Holy Communion.

  In the first volume of Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past in bed at night the boy remembers longing for his mother to come and kiss him goodnight and he compares the apparition of her face to the white, consecrated host.1 Charles, a man of forty, was certain that the consecrated host carried by the nun was the body of Christ. His journey to that point was as absorbing to him as his translation of Proust, through which he had lived much of the past nine years.

  He knew he was dying. His body was emaciated and his face skull-like. Stomach cancer had been diagnosed only eight weeks before. Morphine muffled his pain. His life lay behind him, coloured and detailed like the view from the window; and beyond that lay his forebears, all gone before him on this final adventure. Except for his mother, still alive and now at his side, visiting, ministering, treating him again like the child he had once been.

  Charles’s parents were second cousins once removed and shared the family name before as well as after marriage. His father, William George Scott Moncrieff, had died three years before in the same month, February. In childhood Charles had caught his father’s passion for the tales of his ancestors. Together they had drawn family trees tracing the line back to the beginning of his name, one of the oldest double barrelled names in Scotland. As was common in Scotland, the name was not hyphenated which distinguished Scots from English double surnames.

  In 1740, John Scott of Coats, a doctor, married Madeleine Moncrieffe of Easter Rhynd in Perthshire; their son Robert was the first to register a compound name in 1771. What gave him the idea? Robert Scott Moncrieff was by family reports a liberal, well-travelled man, a friend of Wilberforce, and a founder of the Edinburgh Orphan Hospital. Perhaps one hundred years before the Married Women’s Property Act, he wanted to acknowledge his mother’s contribution to his estates. Later in life he sold one estate, giving as an excuse to his son, ‘I would not wish to see you or any of my children an idle country laird.’2 The next Robert became a banker and he and his wife were duly painted by Raeburn.

  Charles eventually traced his forebears even further back than his father had done. In 1926, his cousin William Moncrieffe came to him for help with a two-volume genealogy of the family.3 Charles was then translating Proust, Stendhal, the letters of Abelard and Heloise, and the works of Pirandello; his imagination was peopled by crowds of characters, but his own ancestors seemed equally vibrant. It was more than a passion: for a sick man in exile from the land and family he loved, it was an establishing of identity. Now he could go back eight hundred years to the first Moncrieff, called Ramerus. In 1121 he sailed to Scotland from Spain to be Wardrobe Keeper to King Alexander the Fierce, son of Malcolm Canmore and Saint Margaret of Scotland: bringing Spanish silks and feathers to decorate the king among the frozen hills. In 1249, the next King, Alexander II gave lands to Sir Matthew de Moncrieff and his heirs, taking the name from the hills he gave them in what is now Perthshire.

  The dying Charles remembered that there was a letter from William Moncrieff and reached sideways to his bedside table, in vain. The nuns were tidy and his secretary, Lucy Lunn, was for the first time filing all his correspondence. It was a necessary task; he had a mountain of letters from his publishers, British and American, from Pirandello, T. S. Eliot, Joseph Conrad, George Moore … a long list of distinguished men of letters. Then there were some which he would burn: compromising letters full of sexual detail from Vyvyan Holland, love letters, letters from Sebastian Sprott, sometime lover of E. M. Forster, Forster who had described Charles as ‘entertaining, but unentertainable’.4 Charles was, by now, celibate.

  In Cities of the Plain Proust had written of the two angels who are posted at the gates of Sodom to report on the inhabitants’ activities. He imagined a citizen excusing himself, ‘Father of six – two mistresses’, saying that only a man who was a Sodomite himself could detect the fact that the pleader spent his nights with a shepherd on Hebron.5 At least Charles could not be accused of such hypocrisy: he had never been married.

  Charles believed there were three distinct strains in the blood of his ancestors: the warrior spirit, good looks and earnest piety. He had read the diaries of the pious extreme: The Narrative of James Nimmo, a Covenanting ancestor, who began writing in 1622.6 Nimmo’s diaries were letters to God about the state of his soul. Nimmo sacrificed his property, was present with the Covenanters at the Battle of Bothwell Bridge, and left his country to keep his own particular Covenant with the Lord. His wife, Elizabeth, wrote heart-rending diaries of their sufferings in exile in Holland. But Nimmo’s own diary, though written during such tumultuous times, ignored regicide, civil war, even his daughter’s marriage, so busy was Mr Nimmo with the supreme concerns of his own soul. His wife was equally scrupulous, ‘I was afraid I had sinned the sin unto death,’ she wrote, ‘One Sabbath there fell out a strong temptation to laughter in the family … The challenge seemed to come from the Devil, “O says the enemy you have now sinned the sin unto death.”’7

  In the same century, in 1687, at the luxurious and intriguing French court of Louis XIV, François-Augustin Paradis de Moncrif was born, son of a determined Scots mother who single-mindedly manipulated the way for her son’s success at court. As well as a noted satirist and versifier, Paradis became speech writer for the Duc d’Aumont, Ambassador to England in 1713, then to the Comte d’Argenson for whom
he famously wrote love letters which were even sent in his own handwriting. He wrote poetry, lectures, pamphlets, plays and in 1735 was elected to the Académie Française as a much-loved wit; on his death the French writer D’Alembert said, ‘Paradis de Moncrif sera tout à l’heure Moncrif de Paradis.’8 Charles had found a first edition of his fairy stories and resurrected them, translated in 1929 as Adventures of Zeloïde and Amanzarifdine. His long introduction was another excuse to elaborate on the Moncrieff ancestry.

  At the turn of the eighteenth century Charles’s great-grandfather, Robert Scott Moncrieff of Fossoway in Fife, had felt the same way. He was partly educated in England and had many English friends. ‘Yet he was a Scotsman to the backbone rejoicing in the romance, the history, the literature and the beauty of his native land, interested in his own lineage, holding that gentle birth is an incentive to chivalrous action’:9 a conviction held by Charles himself throughout his life. In 1818 Robert Scott Moncrieff married Susan Pringle of Yair, a woman of great beauty who grew up with her ten siblings close to Sir Walter Scott. Her brothers are remembered in Marmion,10 and one of them, Alexander, became Lord of the Treasury under Sir Robert Peel. The Pringle ancestors were famous in Scottish history as standard-bearers to the Douglases by whose side they fought against the English at the great battles of Otterburn, Flodden and Solway Moss from the fourteenth to the sixteenth century. Susan, like her own mother, bore eleven children, and in her short life impressed them with a strong piety. On her death in 1840 she left a letter to them saying, ‘The most valuable worldly acquirement you can make is the power of applying your mind vigorously to whatever you have to do, not loitering over it, but doing it with all your might, and finding idleness a burden.’11 The children were happy and unspoilt, living a simple, frugal, life consisting of, as the eldest, Mary Ann, put it: ‘cold bath and lessons, porridge and lessons, a walk and lessons, dinner and lessons’.12