Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  Owen spent Saturday with the aristocratic poet Osbert Sitwell and Sunday evening with Charles again. Slightly jealous of Owen’s other friends, Charles showed Owen that he could pass judgement on Sitwell and Sassoon alike. He had just reviewed three anthologies of poetry for The New Witness the week before: A Book of Verse on the Great War edited by R. Wheeler, from the Yale University press, Georgian Poetry 1916–17, from The Poetry Bookshop and The Muse in Arms, edited by E. B. Osborn, which contained Charles’s ‘The Field of Honour’, ‘Domum’, ‘The Willow Tree Bough’ and ‘Back in Billets’, along with poems by Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Nichols, Graves, Sassoon, Sitwell and Charles Sorley. He wrote, ‘Captain Sitwell represents what might be called the Saki and Lawrence school of poetry – showing us the massive dignity of a Lawrence portrait peppered and salted with the wit of a Chronicle of Clovis.’ He called Sassoon’s ‘Rear Guard’ a ‘singularly vivid and effective war-photograph’. However, he went on to write that Sassoon had obviously suffered in action with an effect easy to discern in his work, that his ‘bitter cynicism contrasts harshly with the ingenuity of his earlier work’.20 Impressed, Owen quoted several sentences from Charles’s review in a letter home.

  Owen was pleased that Charles had mentioned him in his criticism of the first American selection by Wheeler: ‘Our younger fame seems not to have reached him: there is nothing in by Robert Nichols, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, W. J. Turner, Wilfred Owen, Osbert Sitwell…’ Given that Owen had never published anything, it was a blast of advance publicity. Later that night Charles saw him off for his return to Ripon. It was a calm, clear, moonlit night as Charles limped back from the station to his lodgings – perfect for an air raid. He was woken from his sleep by cries in the street and the firing of guns – a large-scale German air attack, the sixth of the year was starting over London. It lasted less than an hour but over forty people were killed and two hundred wounded. Four planes were brought down as thousands of curious sightseers watched a pitched aerial battle. The next day Charles wrote a sonnet expressing his sadness at Owen leaving and his disappointment in returning to a ‘lone bed’, but relief at his safety,

  All Clear

  Last night into the night I saw thee go

  And turned away; and heavy of heart I clambered

  Up the steep causeway; weary, late and slow

  By my lone bed arrived. But, I enchambered,

  Out cried the sullen alert artillery;

  Shrill watchmen; woke the slumbering streets in riot.

  And I was sad for my night’s swallowing thee,

  Then was I glad because thy night was quiet.

  But wer’t thou near, I should not be afraid,

  But, thou away, there is no harm to fear;

  Thou not endangered, I am undismayed,

  Yet must danger hide when thou art here.

  So I am double saved and safe shall stay

  Thine arms being close or all thyself away.21

  It was a tender wish, with a physical longing for Owen, which Owen did not reciprocate. Like Graves, he started sending his poems to Charles, asking his technical advice and also hoping he would use his influence to get them published in literary magazines, like the Fortnightly Review, the Westminster Gazette or The Nation. When Charles wrote a draft dedication for The Song of Roland and gave it to Owen, Owen was flattered enough to keep it, along with a love sonnet from Charles and a photograph taken of him in 1913; in his golden youth looking handsome and unblemished by war. The dedication began ‘To you, my master in assonance, I dedicate my part in this assonant poem…’ He then wove in to this dedication his entire ethos as an officer, something he would significantly impress on Owen and that would influence Owen’s return to the front:

  At this time lessons are to be found in the Song of Roland that all of us may profitably learn. 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. So I have worked and written that the Song our Saxon forebears heard our Norman forebears shout at Hastings – may not be altogether unheard in their children’s armies.22

  Again he was linking himself with soldiers from the past, and taking their wisdom to pass on to soldiers of today. Early in their friendship, Owen had composed a ballad, which could describe a scene from the Chanson de Roland:

  Nay, light me no fire tonight,

  Page Eglantine;

  I have no desire tonight

  To drink or dine;

  I will suck no briar tonight,

  Nor read no line:

  An you be my quire tonight,

  And you my wine.

  They both identified with soldiers in all time, past and present. When Owen wrote his poem

  I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair.

  Along the wharves by the water-house,

  And through the cavernous slaughter-house,

  I am the shadow that walks there.

  the first person he sent it to was Charles, who, for fun, translated it into French. ‘Je suis le petit revenant du Bassin; le long du quai, par l'abreuvoir, et dans l'immonde abattoir j'y piétine, ombre fantassin.23

  Charles later said in a letter to Edward Marsh that Owen’s reaction when he read the translation had been that the last word, ‘fantassin’, meaning infantry soldier, was the word which gave the key to its meaning: ‘During the influenza epidemic in 1918, I tried to turn it into French prose, rhymed. I give the first verse, on account of the last word, which Owen welcomed rather as tho’ it put the key in the lock of the whole.’24 This was the ghost of an infantry soldier, perhaps one he himself had killed. Owen was also working on ‘Strange Meeting’, a poem that took several drafts and concerned the poet meeting his opponent soldier, or his own doppelgänger, in the underworld, talking to him, and accepting the truth of what he has done in killing him. It has a discomforting use of pararhyme throughout,

  And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;

  By his dead smile, I knew we stood in Hell.

  Meanwhile Charles, pursuing chivalry and dreaming of heaven, wrote a more explicit sonnet and gave it to Owen who kept and dated it 19 May. Written in turquoise ink on Half Moon Street paper, the first R is decorated and enlarged like an illuminated letter:

  Remembering rather all my waste of days

  Ere I had learned the wonders thou hast shewn

  Blame not my tongue that did not speak thy praise

  Having no language equal to thy own

  Blame not my eyes that, from their high aim lowered

  Yet saw there more than other eyes may see

  Nor blame head heart hands feet, that overpowered

  Fell at thy feet to draw thy heart to me.

  Blame not me all that was found unworthy

  But let me guard some fragment of thy merit,

  That, though myself dissolve in the earth, being earthy,

  In thy long fame some part I may inherit.

  So through the ages while the bright stars dwindle

  At thy fresh sun my moon’s cold face I’ll kindle.25

  The sonnet was hurriedly dashed off, and restricted by the constraints of its genre. However its sentiment is full of hero worship, like the address of a medieval knight to his lady, written by a man who was mentally living the Chanson de Roland, and laying himself at the feet of the young man whose mind, soul and poetry he ardently admired. The poem was also visionary in its certainty of Owen’s future fame. Because of the line, ‘Blame not my eyes that, from their high aim lowered/ Yet saw there more than other eyes may see’, the sonnet may have implied a failed seduction. Owen was not so enamoured of Charles, writing in a letter to his mother two days later, ‘Scott Moncrieff is a lamed Captain, related to the General of that name known as the “Father of the War Office”.’26 He described him as a ‘lamed Captain’ not a poet or a critic, or an intimate friend, but someone with influence who could help him get a home posting.

&n
bsp; Charles did start applications at the War Office that weekend to try to get Owen a position training troops in Britain as he had been able to for Graves. Slow negotiations followed between the General Staff, who were satisfied with Owen’s competence, and the Adjutant-General’s Department who had found it necessary to insist on the return of every fit man to the field. Charles pursued the work of both war and love with unequal energy. The sonnet was followed eight days later by the following letter,

  No sealing of the fount of passion is indicated by the cessation of the flow of sonnets – but simply an inflow of work here which will keep me busy till this damn pamphlet leaves the printers.

  He was writing a propaganda pamphlet.

  Nichols turned up today and Graves’s brother yesterday who wants to go and be a cadet at Oxford. We might send you to teach him.

  Word was out that Charles saved poets from the front, and he dangled the power, but returned to his love for Owen,

  As to the sonnets – you mustn’t take them too seriously. It’s vivisection really – of both you and me – I want very much to add to the Shakespeare controversy27 a conclusive word based on experience. I feel pretty certain Shakespeare selected some wight to whom he sent ‘From Fairest Creatures’ in a letter … He made use of the amazing free lines which as simple lines were always coming into his head … Bare ruined choirs where late the sweet birds sang, Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May etc etc Lines which had obviously come first like raisins on the kitchen table before the mince pies are mixed. Hurry up and send me Aliens. Either Aliens or Aliens of War you must call it. Alter that line about experience and I will try and get it into the Fortnightly.28

  The letter is written hurriedly in the same turquoise ink used for both the sonnet and the Chanson dedication, on a page ripped from a jotter, yet Owen kept it carefully. Was Charles trying to say that he did not really mean this passion, was it passing, was it all just an experiment for the sake of poetry? Owen might have reacted differently if he had encountered love, rather than ‘vivisection’, but Charles was trying not to frighten Owen with the strength of his passion. We do not know if there were any letters from Owen to Charles at this point.29

  On 7 June The New Witness published Charles’s old sonnet to Alec Tonnochie, ‘Thinking Love’s Empire lay along that way/ Where the new-duggen grave of friendship gaped…’ which indicated that a step too far over friendship had been attempted, that physical love might have spoilt the friendship. This time it was meant for Owen to read.

  The pre-war Charles, the younger, healthier, carefree Charles would have been more likely to succeed at seduction. But the sick, limping, less handsome, careworn and Catholic Charles stopped short, or started then stopped, realising the ardour was one-sided. It is unlikely that the conservative and law-abiding Owen would have welcomed an advance: his poetry admired beauty in younger men, while Charles was aged by war wounds and covered in eczema.30 He laid claim to a greater privilege as he wrote in his sonnet to Owen published with the Chanson de Roland; that of sharing with Owen the light of ‘eternal day’ in heaven, where their ‘contented ghosts’ would stay together for ever.

  Graves had written to Charles on 24 March that year, ‘You are splendid the way you look after the post-Georgians: may God requite your labours with one really good poet.’31 But the poet Charles recognised at once as ‘really good’ was the man he had fallen in love with at Graves’s wedding. Graves went on blithely to fantasise:

  I think a farm on the Downs would be great fun. You would manage the office. S.S. [Sassoon] the horses, Nancy and I the ploughing and sowing and spuds, Bob Nichols the sheep with an oaten pipe. Robbie Ross would hang the pictures and act as mess president – Alec Waugh perhaps the ducks and hens …32

  Charles used his influence and two of Owen’s poems were published in The Nation on 15 June. ‘Hospital Barge’ and ‘Futility’ both explored assonance, and the first also had an archaic feel:

  Budging the sluggard ripples of the Somme

  A barge round old Cerisy slowly slewed.

  Softly her engines down the current screwed,

  And chuckled softly with contented hum.33

  Charles showed the poem he had advised Owen to retitle ‘Aliens’, but which Owen called ‘The Deranged’, to Osbert Sitwell, who wanted to include it in the next edition of Wheels. Owen, no doubt influenced by Charles’s critical attitude to the Sitwells, wanted to read a copy of Wheels before agreeing to be part of it. ‘I want to see the Sitwells’ etc. works before I decide to co-appear in a book!’34

  June was a month of intense public stress. The war was still raging, a flu epidemic was killing more people than the war, and amid the unrest came an extreme popular movement. Noel Pemberton Billing, an MP and aviator, alleged that the war was being lost because of corruption in high places. There were, he insisted, a band of homosexuals in prominent positions who passed secrets to the Germans, all named in a Black Book containing 47,000 names. Oscar Wilde’s play Salome was in rehearsal for a production starring an actress called Maud Allan, whose erotic dancing evoked the character well. Billing alleged that Allan was part of a lesbian cult called the Cult of the Clitoris, linked, he claimed, to the colourful Margot Asquith, wife of the last Prime Minister. Allan took Billing to court for defamatory libel. The libel case stirred up the same sort of prurient public hysteria surrounding the trial of Oscar Wilde and Billing was acquitted to huge popular acclaim.

  Charles at once used the only weapon at his disposal, his irony, in an article called ‘The Moral Curfew’, published on 21 June. ‘How the nations, allied, neutral and enemy will laugh: they will laugh themselves almost into an armistice at the picture of Englishmen sitting urbanely down, the barbarian at their gates, to disapprove of one another’s morals’, ‘let us line the grate, thoughout the coming winter, with the grimy pages of Wilde, Pater, Swinburne, Rossetti, Ruskin, Beddoes, Keats, Shelley, Congreve … and above all the unutterably slimy Shakespeare’ … ‘so we shall establish for all time on these islands an Intellectual Uniformity.’35 He concluded that his fellow soldiers would rather fall and die in battle than return to find Mr Billing on the throne of justice. To Vyvyan Holland he wrote, ‘I have not minced my words in my article and rather hope it will land me in the courts as I have wanted to do murder on a certain nobleman [undoubtedly Alfred Douglas] for some time.’36 He was trying to reassure Vyvyan, for the Billing trial reminded the papers of the Wilde trial and disinterred long-buried feelings of shame. He assured Vyvyan that it was a diversion, ‘Everyone forgot the war here altogether, especially we who have taken a mild professional interest in it.’ He said it would all pass quickly: ‘You see, English people have barely heard of Salome and foreign people have never heard of Billing.’ Then he made light of it, ‘I am not really so sorry for you, though I am sorry for Miss Allan who is practically kicked off the earth, and for no fault whatever in this world save the exercise of her lawful profession.’37

  Charles’s relations with his family were close and good, although his intimate life had always been a secret and would remain so. Meg helped Charles to move from his expensive lodgings in Arlington Street to a cheaper but no less smart address in 70b Cadogan Square. ‘A tiny cleverly contrived little house, looked as if it had been a cottage once, tiny, tiny rooms,’38 noted the tall Meg. The house in Cadogan Square belonged to an elderly lady called Lady Augusta Fane whom Charles had met at Deene Park and who wanted a paying guest. They became great friends and a month later Charles invited Lady Augusta to meet his mother and the whole family at Edgware. He used the outing as an opportunity to pick up books and clothes, and Lady Augusta stayed to lunch. Meg noted that Charles looked much better and happier and she thought he seemed reconciled to never being fit for active service again. ‘The lame leg is an inch shorter than the other but he has had a large thick boot made for it so that walking is easier. But he will always limp, I’m afraid,’39 she ended.

  At the War Office Charles was still struggling to get Owen a ho
me posting. Given another medical, Owen was placed on a list for France on 11 August, then taken off it again. He was safe for a while until the Military Secretary’s department claimed paradoxically that, having been returned home a year earlier in a condition that hinted at loss of morale under shell fire, he could only under shell fire be entrusted with the command of men. The case was put more briefly, but in words that Charles thought did not look well in print. Essentially he was accused of cowardice and would have to prove his valour in combat if he wanted to clear his name. By the end of the month of August Owen was back on a draft for France. Charles’s last meeting with him was on the hot night of 30 August. Charles was, he admitted, ‘irritable and ill’, sickened by his failure to keep Owen in England and angry with himself for his unhealed wounds and the endless strain of working and living in London. Owen wrote to his mother the next morning: ‘Arriving at Victoria I had to wheel my own baggage down the platform and through the streets to the hotel which was full. But I got a bed as I…’40 The lower half of the page is missing. Charles’s account continues: ‘If I was harsh with him, may I be forgiven, as we tramped wearily round the overflowing hotels. In the end a bed was found in Eaton Square, and we sat down to a strange supper in the Queen Mary Hut, a cenotaph, now vanished, which covered many such last nights in England.’41 Owen wrote, ‘found no room in Hotels so got put up in an Officers’ club thanks to S. Moncrieff’s knowledge of the region.’42

  From Eaton Square, Charles took Owen the half-mile to his own room in Cadogan Square to ‘a few intense hours of books and talk in my lodging’. Then he accompanied him back to the Hut where Owen realised, Charles reported later, that he had, ‘left his stick behind, but insisted that it was too late to return. I left him on the doorstep and went home to find not only the stick but his pocket-book with, I suppose, all his money on my table. I went back with them, but I hope he was already asleep. I never saw him again.’43