by Jean Findlay
Meg came again to visit her son in hospital on 15 October and saw him huddled exhausted in a chair by the fire after having another operation to remove dead bone from his leg. He soon had a new splint, jointed at the ankle and knee with the promise that he could learn to walk again. Within a week Meg saw him on crutches taking a rapid walk through the wards. After six months in a seated or lying position, it was very exciting to be moving. ‘I feel like a child on its birthday,’20 he wrote. At the end of October she took him out to visit his tailor to get some much-needed civilian clothing that fitted his now slender frame.
Impatient to walk, Charles bought a bulldog called Molly as a companion, hoping to learn from her pugnacious spirit. In November his cousin Catherine21 took him to visit the family at his brother’s rectory at Edgware. There he hirpled round the garden and the library rearranging the books, always with Molly at his heels. He then went off in a taxi with Catherine, leaving his wheelchair and the dog at the rectory. The next day, Meg observed that Molly was a quiet beast and most gentle with the children. She was not however gentle with Connie, Charles’s sister-in-law, jumping out on her during a game and butting her violently in the stomach, which caused an internal rupture that needed an operation. Molly also constantly ran away. In December Charles was sent to Eastbourne for convalescence, and when he rang at the end of the month, his voice sounded strong and cheerful. He told his mother that he had been promised work in the War Office at the end of January.
Ronald Knox had often visited Charles when he was in hospital in Carlton House Terrace. Charles informed one visiting priest, ‘If you’d been here earlier you would have met Ronald Knox.’ The priest replied that he would like to meet the man thought of as a ‘second Benson’. Charles was indignant: ‘A second Swift, you mean.’ Knox was an ideal bedside visitor. It was later said of him, ‘the incredibly brilliant and accomplished R. was always there, intermingled with the near-saint and incomparable expositor of alive religion. But in all that he was he gave with both hands – spiritual help, scholarship, entertainment.’22 With his clever, ironical view of the world and immense knowledge, Knox also worked at the War Office, along with his brother Dillwyn the code-breaker, which made the prospect of Charles working there all the more appealing.
Charles could see the War Office from Carlton House Terrace. The new neo-Baroque building housed its largest staff ever, nearly seven thousand of them in one thousand rooms linked with two and a half miles of corridors. They had even erected a new storey of wooden huts on the roof, known unofficially as ‘Zeppelin Terrace’. He started almost immediately in Section IV, Military Intelligence, under Major Claude Dansey. Military was the largest intelligence section, preparing reports and liaising with MI5 on counter-espionage and counter-revolutionary matters. Dansey himself was later described as a ‘copybook secret service man. Dapper, establishment, Boodle’s [Club], poker-playing expression, bitterly cynical, but with unlimited and illogical charm available particularly for women.’23 There must also have been some charm available for men, as he was said to have been seduced by Robert Ross while at a boys’ school in Bruges, Belgium.24 Dansey was in charge of Political Section V, dealing with agents who served in Athens, including Charles’s cousin Louis Christie, and on liaison duties with the French.
Although he was physically wounded, it was a source of great succour to Charles that he could continue to fight with his mind, on a different front, but in the same war.
CHAPTER 10
In Love with Wilfred Owen
It was in January, 1918, at the crowded wedding of another poet, that I first saw him …
CKSM, The New Witness, 10 December 1920
At Robert Graves’s wedding on 23 January 1918 Charles met Wilfred Owen, a man who would enrich his life for ever, and wrote retro-spectively in 1920 in The New Witness:
I had been provisionally released from hospital a few days earlier, and had spent all that day, ineffectively, at a Police Court [magistrates’ court]. I was too sore at first, in mind and body, to regard very closely the quiet little person who stood beside me in a room from which I longed only to escape. But that evening I met him again after dinner and found that we had already become, in some way, intimate friends.1
They were both uncomfortable. Charles’s leg still gave him great pain and remained in an iron truss, and he on crutches. He was also deeply uncomfortable because earlier that day, at considerable risk to himself, he had given evidence in support of bail for his old friend Christopher Millard. Millard, now forty-five, was admitted to court that January for ‘committing an act of gross indecency with a male person and being party to the commission by other male persons of acts of gross indecency’.2 Charles’s application in support of bail was rejected; Millard pleaded guilty and was given twelve months in Wormwood Scrubs prison without home leave.
A man with a homosexual past, which he regretted,3 Robert Graves was marrying the eighteen-year-old elfin feminist, Nancy Nicholson, sister of the painter Ben Nicholson, and an artist herself.4 Graves had thick, dark, curly hair and a crooked nose, broken playing rugby at school at Charterhouse. He had been about to take up a classical exhibition at St John’s College, Oxford when interrupted by the war, and had published his first volume of poetry, Over the Brazier, two years later, in 1916. After Charles gave it a good review, a friendship between them sprang up. Graves was six years younger than Charles and had been invalided out of France with shell shock. Another wedding guest, Wilfred Owen, a fragile and unknown poet, was also recovering from shell shock.
A three-tier wedding cake was brought into the room to shouts and cheers from the guests, but it was a casing made of plaster, and, due to rationing, the real cake underneath was pitifully small and not very sweet. However, twelve bottles of champagne made up for wartime shortcomings. Owen had brought as a wedding present a set of eleven apostle spoons – explaining to the groom that the twelfth had been court-martialled for cowardice and was awaiting execution.5 Throughout the war, over two hundred soldiers were executed for cowardice or desertion when it was likely they were suffering from shell shock. The year before, Graves had written to Charles telling him of his proposed new book of poems, Fairies and Fusiliers; he had mentioned Charles’s bad review of Siegfried Sassoon’s book of poems, but admitted he agreed with Charles’s criticism and that one bad review was healthy. In response to his own poems Graves begged Charles’s criticism before publication, writing again, three weeks before the wedding,
Rotten missing you the other day. A certain compensation in meeting the noble Bainbrigge to whom I took an immediate like. But I should have preferred you both. Want to talk poetry again with someone who understands … Look here, I’ll be brave and trust you with a book of my poems to look at, they are all unfinished. You can therefore note in pencil on the side possible alternatives … Also dear Charles please say if you think any paper would want any of them to publish. I only want advice. Yours ever, Robert le Diable.6
Charles had persuaded William Heinemann to publish Fairies and Fusiliers and his review appeared in The New Witness the day after Graves’s wedding. He wrote, ‘Posterity will give the palm to Mr Nichols for inspiration, to Mr Sassoon for technique and to Mr Graves for a kind of fancy, the elfin equivalent of humanity…’ and ended, ‘I cannot do justice to this book.’7
In spite of such strong ties, Charles longed to escape from the wedding reception, partly because the room was full of other poets, critics and writers. He used his New Witness column as a kind of diary from where he could write at length about whatever he liked and whichever books he pleased. He was not always kind, and some of his targets were in the room. After he had called Sassoon’s war poems ‘a regrettable incident’, Sassoon had written to complain and Charles apologised, saying that he had ‘enjoyed your book much more than I have said’.8 Charles’s eyes searched the room, but Sassoon wasn’t there, surprising as he was also a close friend of Graves. In fact Graves had intervened the year before to protect Sassoon from being court
-martialled for publishing in The Times his letter of ‘wilful defiance’, accusing the British Government of prolonging the war. Instead Sassoon was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital to be ‘treated for shell shock’, where he had met Owen. Although he had sessions with the psychiatrist Dr Rivers, his condition was not like that of Owen and the other inmates who were stammering, trembling and screaming at night.
Wilfred Owen was not at ease at the wedding. He was intensely shy and intimidated by the company, not used to grand surroundings or famous people. At Craiglockhart he had nervously shown Sassoon his poems, and Sassoon had thought Owen a ‘rather ordinary young man, perceptibly provincial’,9 when he first met him, adding, ‘He was embarrassing. He had a Grammer School accent.’10 Sassoon considered Owen’s poems old-fashioned, yet he helped and encouraged Owen who responded with an admiration of Sassoon and his poetry that was close to hero worship, ‘I love you, dispassionately, so much, so very much, dear Fellow, that the blasting little smile you wear on reading this can’t hurt me in the least.’11
Owen’s father was a railway clerk, and the family had struggled financially in his childhood. Having been to the local school and never gone to university, he was in awe of men like Sassoon, educated at public schools, with a private income, who hunted at weekends. Charles, in spite of his Winchester background, had more of the common touch, being Scottish and understanding the necessity of having to earn his own living: there was a genuine compassion in his regard for Owen. For Owen, the wedding reception in St James’s Square was full of impressive people. The writer and cartoonist Max Beerbohm was there, as were Edward Marsh, the publisher William Heinemann, Roderick Meiklejohn, a civil servant from the Treasury, and the poets E. V. Lucas and Robert Nichols. Although Charles had just reviewed Nichols’s new book and called it ‘this dreadful stuff’, Nichols had a mature reaction to criticism and didn’t take offence. Charles may have been in pain from his leg and frustrated by the earlier court case, but he could still impress the quiet but attractive, sensitive and intelligent ‘little person’, Wilfred Owen.
Owen went from Graves’s wedding to dinner at the Reform Club as a guest of Roderick Meiklejohn, who then took him to see Robert Ross at 40 Half Moon Street for after-dinner conversation. There Owen was met by two critics, More Adey and Charles. Charles monopolised him and was excited to learn that on his return to Scarborough where he was stationed, Owen would be near to Philip Bainbrigge, his oldest and dearest friend. ‘To make these two men acquainted was a pleasure almost as great as to share in their fellowship’ for he knew ‘no two men could be more complementary’.12 Charles escorted Owen back to the Imperial Hotel in Southampton Row and left him at 2 a.m. Back in Scarborough Owen did become friends with Bainbrigge. Now that even physically unfit men were being called up, Philip had enlisted in the Lancashire Fusiliers, having tried and failed to get into the same regiment as Charles. Practically blind without his thick glasses, he had memorised the standard army eye test, and passed with full marks. He and Owen met in a Scarborough oyster bar, a stark contrast to the army café that Owen was running for the officers of the Manchester Regiment. They discussed the German advance on Petrograd, and Bainbrigge ‘opined that the whole of civilisation is extremely liable to collapse’.13
While Owen recovered from his mental wounds, Charles was still being treated for his physical ones. He couldn’t look after his bulldog, Molly, properly, so she lived at Edgware with his mother and his brother’s large family. Charles was in and out of hospital having treatment for his leg. In February 1918 he stayed with his family, pottering about among his books, which Meg had moved to Edgware, with the adoring Molly at his heels. Meg saw him off at the station, as he limped with his two sticks to catch the train, and she noted in her diary: ‘The war has left him old and lonely – so many young friends and companions gone – and he has suffered so much.’14
Charles was back in hospital again four days later on doctor’s orders. Much dismayed, he had woken from the latest operation to see that they had removed his entire calf muscle. The calf muscle was often commonly known as the ‘heart spring muscle’. When someone walks with a spring in their step it’s easy to see the heart is happy; the spring is impossible without the calf muscle and the effect of its removal was emotional as well as physical. He was still in hospital ten days later, unable to walk, but given crutches and leg supports. Robert Graves was writing to him about his own problems, ‘My dear Charles, Your letter has comforted me in an evil moment: my fit of the “horrors” that comes on every two months. You know; the bursting shell and the dead men in holes.’15 Using his position at the War Office, Charles then helped Graves transfer from the 3rd Battalion to the 16th as a Cadet Trainer, which avoided his having to go back to the front. Graves wrote a letter of thanks on 14 March, ‘Owing entirely to your kindness I am now posted to no.16 and a nicer lot of people I haven’t met for a long time.’ He wrote out on the letter a fresh poem for Charles, a ‘mediaeval phantasy, automatically written by curacao’,16 entitled ‘Manticor’. A manticor is a mythical man-eating beast,
… Sing then of ringstraked manticor,
Man-visaged tiger who of yore
Held whole Arabian waste in fee
With raging pride from sea to sea …
Still not recovered, Charles was sent by the War Office for three weeks to Deene Park, Hertfordshire, a medieval and Tudor manor house in a fine park with a large stream running lazily through it, then used as a convalescent home. He lay in an antique bed in a ‘huge room with hand painted wallpaper of cruel looking birds chasing dragonflies’, and drew back the curtains at night to watch Rockingham Forest in the moonlight. The house was built on a quadrangle leading to a grand hall like a Cambridge college and was extraordinary by moonlight. He made friends with the owner, Bruno, who dressed for dinner in black silk knee-breeches and stockings and high white flannel waistcoat, like an engraving of a squire in a nineteenth-century novel. Bruno was desperate to marry …
– only it will have to be an heiress as he can only just keep up the place … – and I think he feels that with his deafness, they might not exactly rush to marry him. He has lived there since September and it’s begun to tell on him. These long passages and huge bedrooms on a winter’s evening must be rather trying … No bathroom, no light but candles, no railway, delightfully secluded. I arrived when Bruno was out and found a wonderful equipage of tea, with butter which I literally have not seen since January the 7th.17
Charles returned to London refreshed and almost well, feeling that he had lived for a while in the borrowed beauty of a bygone age. He was full of energy for his new friendship with Owen. We do not know how often Charles saw him between January and May, but he later wrote, ‘Over the next few months I saw Wilfred become happy again, though his dreams were still nightmares, and his thick hair was shot with white.’18 He watched and encouraged Owen’s fresh enthusiasm for the reading and writing of poetry.
On 16 May Owen got a long weekend leave, arriving in London on Thursday evening. Robert Ross let him use the flat above his at 40 Half Moon Street; Charles’s lodgings were nearby in Arlington Street, round the corner from the Ritz Hotel on Piccadilly. Owen spent Friday with Charles at the War Office where they talked about the prospect of a home posting lecturing to a cadet battalion. They were both war shattered and mentally fragile. There was another reason for their excited discussion. Charles had recently ‘found in the coolness of Hatchards on a hot afternoon’ a copy of the Chanson de Roland. It was a school text showing both Old French and modern, done by M. Petit de Julleville; reading it married his training in ancient language and his current war experience in France; and, ‘amid the distractions of that summer in London, where the sound of the olifant came so often and so direfully across the Channel, Roland was a constant solace’.19 In his free time he translated the first fourteen verses and showed them to Owen. He wanted to keep the feel of an ancient ballad, while still making it understandable in modern English. The key to this was assona
nce, the elusive repetition of vowel sounds to create internal rhyming; also consonance or the repetition of two or more consonant sounds. This took its cue from the original Old French, but was not common in English poetry:
Li reis Marsilie esteit en Sarraguce.
Alez en est en un verger suz l’umbre;
Sur un perrun de marbre bloi se culchet,
Envirun lui plus de vint milie humes.
Il en apelet e ses dux e ses cuntes:
«Oëz, seignurs, quel pecchet nus encumbret:
Li emper[er]es Carles de France dulce
En cest païs nos est venuz cunfundre.
Charles’s translation reads:
King Marsilies he lay in Sarraguce,
Went he his way into an orchard cool;
There on his throne he sate, of marble blue,
Round him his men, full twenty thousand, stood.
Called he forth then his counts, also his dukes:
‘My Lords, give ear to our impending doom:
That Emperour, Charlès of France the Douce,
Into this land is come, us to confuse.
Owen’s French was good; before the war he had lived in France and taught English at the Berlitz School in Bordeaux where the elderly symbolist poet Laurent Tailhade had encouraged him in his ambition to become a poet. Owen encouraged Charles to continue translating the Chanson using assonance – which he was also beginning to use in his own poetry, as well as pararhyme. They had discussions about the seemingly infinite scope of assonance and its effect on both the ear and the meaning. Pararhyme was half-rhyme vowel variation but the same consonant pattern: lover/liver, hall/hell, eyes/bless. They were explorers in poetic territory.