Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  … Friend – nay, friend were a name too common, rather

  Mind of my intimate mind, I claim thee lover …14

  When he was in London, Charles continued to visit the Ross stronghold at 40 Half Moon Street, with its central table littered with the latest books signed by their authors. Here he met a young man who was to become a lifelong, intimate friend. Vyvyan Holland was the son of Oscar Wilde and had been eight at the time of his father’s trial. He had been sent by his relatives to school in Germany and Monaco, where he had become a Catholic, and then to the Jesuit school at Stoneyhurst in England. His brother Cyril, a year older, went to Radley. Vyvyan was advised not to go to Oxford because of the association with his father, so went to Cambridge to study Law. Vyvyan always remembered his father as ‘the kindest and gentlest of men, a smiling giant, who crawled about the nursery floor with us and lived in an aura of cigarette smoke and eau de cologne’.15 Ross had only met Vyvyan in 1908 and from then had become his and Cyril’s protector and provider – tracking down royalties from Wilde’s plays abroad. Charles and Vyvyan started a correspondence that was to last Charles’s lifetime. It was based on witty sexual badinage, gossip about mutual friends, criticism of Vyvyan’s poetry, and in-depth description of their private lives. Vyvyan was always in need of money; Charles bought his law books from him and lent him both his own and Ball’s money. Charles flirted and longed for Vyvyan to visit: during 1910 he signed off one letter ‘your friend and (olim) bedfellow (at 44 Bramerton Street, Kings Rd, Chelsea)’16, and another ‘you are seldolm absent sacramentally from the bosom of…’17, and ‘this ought to convey the impression that I am really – and unaccountably fond of you: not from sodomistic snobbery…’ meaning that many of Wilde’s followers fell in love with Vyvyan simply because he was Wilde’s son. Knowing this and in order to counteract it, Vyvyan and Cyril both became promiscuously heterosexual and Vyvyan accrued a number of female conquests. Although Charles was three years younger and had no experience to speak of he found himself giving advice to Vyvyan on how to deal with his mistresses: ‘you will be bankrupt before you are thirty … I am afraid you are only detentor not possessor of your mistresses.’18 Then he would tease him: ‘Papa’s nurse died and left me £20 … would you like some of it to buy some horse-hair night robes wherewithal to frissonise your new mistress?’19 Vyvyan knew Millard and Charles discussed him in their letters, saying that Christopher, or ‘Xptofer’ as he referred to him in his half-Greek cipher, would write every month. Charles also sent Vyvyan a critical set of verses on Millard including,

  A man lover, madman, and Millard,

  A spoiler of youth and the young

  A most fatuous fellow and furious

  Unacquainted with girls and with gods

  He is heated, his household is whoreous

  A flatful of sods.20

  Charles would beg Vyvyan to visit, and on holiday that summer in Argyll wrote, ‘I shall have to wait until there is a mistress strike before visiting you (and not even then as a substitute).’21 They exchanged photographs and Vyvyan chided Charles for having photographs of other young men, which Charles denied, but insinuated that Vyvyan had been visiting a clergyman recently who was known for misbehaving with young boys. About this seemingly perennial problem, Charles wrote a piece of dirty doggerel.

  The Dean of St Pauls talks absolute balls,

  The Dean of Westminster showed his to a spinster

  The Dean of Oswestry frisks girls in the vestry

  The Bishop of Birmingham buggers boys while confirming ’em,

  The Bishop of Norwich makes them come in his porridge,

  The Dean of West Ham smears their bottoms with jam.

  With Vyvyan, Charles’s adolescent schoolboy humour never changed. Their correspondence kept alive the witty, clever talk of the Ross set, with in-house criticisms and in-house jokes: it was a far cry from his next experience.

  In December Charles motored through a blinding snowstorm to serve as a presiding officer at a polling booth set up in Biggar High School, near Lanark, for the second general election of 1910. The presiding officer was charged with checking that no one had cheated or voted twice; and also with the counting of votes; it was a duty for which his father put him forward, hoping to stimulate an interest in politics. After nine hours he had polled 346 people and claimed to have made ‘very few mistakes’ in a letter to his parents. Charles revealed little interest in politics but a great deal in people, describing how the Tories were proud to reveal their votes, while the Radicals hid theirs. One man explained, ‘I cudna vera well vote against my own laird, cud I?’

  … We had a horrible old man from Symington with a bright blue face, like a distempered wall, and a fishbasket-bearing man who said, like a miracle play: ‘This old man is John Ritchie of Whitecastle.’ I suppose he was. Anyhow we gave him a vote and he went quavering away, roaring and beating his stick on the ground.22

  In May 1911 Charles went to Ireland as best man to Theodore Dalyell, his schoolfriend from Midlothian who was marrying an Irish girl. Again he made no comment on Irish politics in his letters but he enjoyed the wedding and journey and said that he would go over again in the summer as it was nearer to Edinburgh and cheaper than London. ‘Also it was a very good opportunity of obliging the girls,’ he wrote to Meg. ‘They all looked delightfully pretty: Amy in diaphanous bright blue, very young and sweet: Gladys was a bridesmaid in silver net, and Lily was dashing in a grey frock, enormous black hat and eyes, and fluffy feathers.’23

  Two incidents during his student days reminded Charles that his youth and beauty were not eternal. Having discovered that he had an astigmatism, he got his first spectacles although he often preferred not to wear them. Also in early 1909 he was at home at Lanark with a large, painful abscess on his jaw. A doctor was called, extracted three molars without painkillers and promptly sent Charles back to study in Edinburgh the following day. He was fitted with a plate. He now had glasses and false teeth before the age of twenty. Musing on his own mortality, he visited a dissecting room in Edinburgh with a medical student and wrote some verse to the bodies on the slab, which he suggested would go well to the hymn tune of ‘Jerusalem the Golden’:

  …

  If I can’t earn my living

  Gloved hands will lay me low

  And hew me small for giving

  To boys I’ll never know

  Who’ll find me firm and yellow

  And pare me with a knife

  As I this quaint dead fellow

  That may have led my life.24

  The idea of not being able to earn his living was a real spectre to Charles. He was not going to inherit anything. Not only was he the youngest son, but his mother loved spending his father’s ample though hard-earned income on clothes, house decorating and travel. He had earned no scholarship for university as Colin had, and this shamed him, although his other brother, John, had always been dependent on his parents.

  Now, though, there was a crisis involving Colin. Colin wrote from New Zealand about his interest in theosophy; meaning literally, ‘god-wisdom’, theosophy had interested Meg since the 1880s, when she had read Madame Blavatsky’s inscrutable books, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. Theosophy was a relatively new attempt at an amalgamation of all world religions into one. By 1910 the movement was led by the charismatic Annie Besant who had been a successful writer and trade unionist in London. Now as President of the Theosophical Society she had moved to India, thinking Hinduism was closer to the spirit of Theosophy. A year before, Besant’s mystical colleague, Charles Leadbeater, had met the adolescent Krishnamurti on the beach and had declared him to be the vessel for the new Enlightened Being – a Christ or Buddha figure. Besant became his legal guardian and surrogate mother, replacing his own parents. Gandhi and Nehru were both closely associated with theosophy, though neither formally accepted Krishnamurti’s status. Colin Scott Moncrieff, however, did.

  With the zeal of youth, Colin became interested in the mystical aspect
s of theosophy including clairvoyance and communicating with the dead. His involvement had started when the brothers’ grandfather, Robert Scott Moncrieff, the merchant of Calcutta, died in Edinburgh at the age of eighty on 25 May 1908. Missing his family, and unable to share in their grief directly, Colin employed the services of a clairvoyant who wrote what Colin considered to be the most astonishingly accurate future for himself and Connie: births, deaths and how his boss at the Theological College would object to his theosophical investigations. That final forecast would have taken no clairvoyant skill – the Rector of St John’s College was outraged at Colin suddenly teaching Theosophy instead of Theology, calling it ‘Anti-Christian’. Yet the more Colin was criticised, the more entrenched his beliefs became. On 14 September 1909 he resigned the wardenship of the College and sent Connie home ahead of him, heavily pregnant with twins. With her sailed their nanny and the two-year-old Colin. His father decided to take a detour to India to meet Annie Besant. He had the charisma, intellect and social skills to rise to the higher ranks of the English clergy, but he would never compromise his beliefs for advancement. Devoted Connie went home to her own mother at Merchiston Crescent in Edinburgh, and on 9 April 1910 she gave birth to twins. The second twin came half an hour after the first and ‘breathed and died’.25 The surviving baby, a boy named George, born with a cleft palate, grew up to become the writer of the next generation of Scott Moncrieffs.

  Colin arrived in Edinburgh more than a month later having met the teenage Krishnamurti and been convinced that he was indeed the incarnation of a new enlightened being. He met Canon Erskine Hill of Glasgow who was prepared to find him a job, although he had to accept that he could not preach theosophy from the pulpit of an established church. At this stage, a compromise had to be made bearing in mind a living was required for a wife and two small children, the young Colin and newborn George. By October 1911 he was accepted as curate at Gatehouse of Fleet, Dumfriesshire, a poor living in an Episcopalian Church granted by a private patron Lady Maxwell, who was charmed by Colin and his passionate beliefs. He began to set up his own version of Christianity, an experiment that lasted for a number of years, although it didn’t succeed due to a lack of followers.

  In the following year Charles spent a lot of time with his mother, Connie, Colin and their children. In February his mother started painting a portrait of him from behind, seeing only a quarter-profile with long, dark eyelashes and a strong upper lip – a strange angle to paint, but oddly fitting for a man used to keeping secrets to be only partially visible. Sitting for it gave him time to think. Charles was aware of Colin’s dilemmas; personal freedom versus the need to earn a living – and he himself had tried hard to like the law. He passed Honours in Public Law in 1912 and then begged to be able to study for a degree in English Language and Literature. He could not see himself as a lawyer and the only activity that he was consistently pursuing, almost as naturally as breathing itself, was writing. His parents, liberal and indulgent to all three boys, agreed to support Charles for his further degree at Edinburgh.

  His new director of studies was George Saintsbury, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, a department established in 1762 – the first such department in Britain. Saintsbury, a stooped, white-haired man in his sixties, wrote copious books of literary criticism, always wore a skull cap and it was said that he had read everything ever written in almost every language. He had begun as a critic of French literature; his first essay, on Baudelaire, was published in 1875 in the Fortnightly Review and he went on to contribute thirty articles on French Literature to the Encycopaedia Britannica. Moving on to English Literature he wrote on Dryden, Scott and then a History of Elizabethan Literature followed while also overseeing a forty-volume translation of Balzac and writing the introductions. He admitted that in his career he must have written the equivalent of a hundred volumes of criticism. Charles was impressed and inspired by him and had already started attending his lectures informally while he was finishing his Law degree. As a critic, Charles was later clearly influenced by Saintsbury’s view that, ‘Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world.’26 Saintsbury believed that the true and only test of literary greatness was the ‘transport’, the absorption, of the reader. He was more a man of letters than an academic and clearly inspired in Charles a love of French literature.

  Since his last years at school, Charles had kept up his interest in the army cadet force and spent three weeks every summer on Lanark Moor in cadet training. In October 1912, before he started his literature degree, he was chosen to escort a dozen cadets from his summer battalion of the Royal Scots to the National Exhibition in Canada. Eight months after the sinking of the Titanic this was seen as a risky trip; it was a real adventure and exercise in responsibility, representing Britain in the New World. It would be the only time Charles ventured beyond Europe. ‘Under Captain and Adjutant W. B. J. Reid, comes Second Lieutenant C. Scott Moncrieff’ ran the Scotsman article, with a photograph. The boys attracted crowds as they marched down Princes Street to Waverley Station in their Highland uniforms: scarlet doublets, black ostrich feather bonnets, red and white hackle plumes, kilts, full horsehair sporrans, swords, shouldered rifles, and led by their own piper. They sailed from Liverpool on the RMS Virginian. Introduced into the first-class smoking room, he met the Canadian Minister of Justice, who had been in Britain visiting Lloyd George and been very impressed by him. Charles was not cowed by rank or authority and had recently become more interested in politics. They had a lengthy discussion and Charles lent him his copy of the political and literary periodical, The Eye Witness.

  The journey to Montreal took six days and Charles and Reid exercised their cadets regularly on deck by getting them to dance eightsome and foursome reels to the piper in full regalia. However they soon had to give up as the other passengers crowded round and giggled so much. The spectacle of kilts swinging high was distracting for passengers at close quarters. For the Royal Scots there was nothing unusual in the wearing of the kilt in the traditional manner, without underwear, but they soon realised that it made the other passengers uncomfortable.

  The heat of the late August weather made the ship’s dining room odorous and there was no escape from crowded decks with only two places onboard to spend money and while away leisure time – the barber’s shop and the smoking room. After a trip up the St Lawrence River they arrived in Montreal on 24 August 1912. ‘Everything’, Charles wrote, was bigger and brighter than Scotland: the grass ‘a more sage green than ours’, the vast Quebec railway hotel, ‘The biggest in the world, I think’. ‘It seems a splendid country,’ he declared. From Quebec the cadets travelled overnight on an uncomfortable train, Charles precariously gripping an upper berth, with his great coat for a pillow, scared of falling off in his sleep, to arrive in Toronto, hot and dirty, on a bright Sunday morning. At the hastily constructed exhibition grounds, subject to heavy rains that turned the walks into mud paths, the camp was prettily perched above the lake. He and the Scottish cadets began to make friends among the two Canadian Battalions representing Western and Eastern Canada.

  ‘We march in to the arena and get on to the stage at 9, where we form a big semi-circle facing some twenty thousand people nightly,’ Charles wrote home. ‘Twenty-four rather seedy actor fellows walk in from behind and form a living flag by opening their robes and spreading themselves on an espalier. Then we sing (twice) the chorus of Rule Britannia. Reid has been put on the staff, so I have to do everything.’ This went on for eight days with heavy rain and careless visitors making the grounds increasingly muddy. ‘There is nothing lacking except tidiness. Things are left about here in the most appalling way. An army of men goes about sweeping up paper and candy boxes in the grounds.’27

  After a sightseeing trip across Canada, the cadets returned to Montreal and embarked on the voyage back home. Wiser through experience, Charles and his fellow officers insi
sted on taking the return trip comfortably in first class – and they avoided any form of dancing exercise.

  * * *

  Family life, his degree and the army were absorbing enough, but Charles also continued trying to publish his poetry. He managed it sporadically in the Wykehamist and the Academy, and sent poems to competitions run in the Westminster Gazette and the Saturday Westminster. Two years older than Charles, Rupert Brooke entered his first poems in these competitions and won twice in 1908 for poems under the name of Mnemon. Charles won once that year for a sonnet called ‘The Grammairian’s Wedding’28 and twice got a commended. Famed both for his looks and his talent, Brooke published his first collection of poems in 1911. Charles was well aware of new poetry through his visits to and continuing friendship with Robert Ross. London was the hub of the serious poets and in January 1913, the poet Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop in a narrow slum street near the British Museum. The tiny room was crowded with poets for the first reading. Monro published anthologies, often at his own expense, with the assistance of the civil servant and patron of the arts, Edward Marsh, and was responsible for the first anthology of Georgian Poetry. These poets saw themselves as modern, moving beyond Victorian poetry and its accepted form. The ‘Georgians’ included Robert Graves, Walter De la Mare, D. H. Lawrence, James E. Flecker, Walter Turner, J. C. Squire, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfrid Gibson, Robert Nichols and Rupert Brooke. Five volumes of Georgian Poetry appeared between 1911 and 1922. Had Charles lived in London, or had more confidence in his own poetry, he would certainly have been involved.

  In Edinburgh, he decided to compile an edition of poetry by the sixteenth-century Scots poet Gavin Douglas, with the hope of finding a publisher. Douglas, who was also a bishop and a translator, had written his dream allegory The Palice of Honour in 1501. There were no surviving manuscript copies. It had been published twice, once in London in 1553 and once in Edinburgh in 1579: concessions had obviously been made for anglicisation in the London edition and it palpably lost some of its humour. Charles typed out both versions and put them in parallel text, with a view to proving that the later text, with more Scots, was probably nearer to the original.29