Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  It was maintained by one of Owen’s biographers, Dominic Hibberd, that a seduction of Owen by the older Charles took place at Cadogan Square. The fact that Owen’s pocketbook was left behind, Hibberd said, would not have happened had he not removed his clothes.44 But a pocketbook can be taken out and left behind for many reasons: to make notes or share photographs, or simply because the mind of a poet is on other things. We do not know where the landlady, Lady Augusta, was that night; if she was at home a seduction was unlikely. Charles was certainly romantically in love with Owen. It is more likely, considering the sonnet in turquoise ink, that an attempted seduction took place in May, and in spite of it the friendship continued, with Owen keeping Charles’s letters and poems. Charles walked miles that night in August: first to Victoria, then to Eaton Square and round about looking for the hotel, then back to Cadogan Square. He escorted Owen back to his room then returned and made another trip later with the wallet and stick. Walking on his wounded leg was still slow and painful for Charles and he exerted himself well beyond endurance.

  The two men had a profound effect on each other: on Charles, professionally, because he had met a poet so superior to him in his writing that he felt he should give up his own poetry for good; he called Owen ‘a master of assonance’. The friendship set Charles on the course of ceasing to write poetry and turning to translation, which would also, unlike poetry, provide an income. Owen had relied on Charles to get him a posting in Britain and, although Charles failed to do this because he was, sadly, not the last word at the War Office, Owen himself felt he ought to return to the front. Charles’s attitude to the war was well known; it appeared in his reviews: he was not against the war, did not think it was all folly and a waste of time, rather he believed that Britain was fighting to protect itself against invasion. He honoured its history and culture; also he held that as men together in the field, the soldiers were fighting for each other.

  By 2 September Owen was in France in the Base Camp at Etaples: there was a YMCA rest hut there run by Conal O’Riordan, the Irish novelist with whom he had become friends. Charles was determined not to lose Owen and at once set about getting himself sent to France again. With his limp there was no hope of active service, but within his Military Intelligence Department at the War Office was the Press and Propaganda section, known as MI7,45 and through that he applied for the position of Assistant Press Officer to the General Headquarters of the British Expeditionary Force in France. He failed his first medical, but with all his determination passed the second on 19 September 1918. The medical report ran: ‘He states he can manage to walk for 9 or 10 miles a day. He cannot run at all. Degree of dis-ablement 30%.’46

  He invited his mother to lunch with him at the Savile Club on his twenty-ninth birthday, 23 September, to say goodbye, but it was too crowded and they went to Jermyn Street instead. For Meg it was not so sad a leave-taking as the previous farewells; as a press officer with a bad limp he would not be in mortal danger as before. Charles found a new home for Molly, who required a tough master, with a retired army captain. On 11 October, Gladys Dalyell came to visit Meg, looking very pretty and told her, blushing, that Charles had taken her to dinner with friends and to the theatre afterwards. Gladys was in love with Charles who was in love with Owen who hero-worshipped Sassoon who was in love with someone else altogether.

  That month, October 1918, Charles met E. J. Dent, the Cambridge musicologist who was part of the elite homosexual coterie that included Sassoon and the novelist E. M. Forster. He gave Dent the ballad he had written, the one he had read to Gladys two years before in front of the fire in Lanark. This time it represented the sentiment he felt for Owen, ‘My heart is at war with a good-natured rifleman’ and Dent set it to music.

  Charles went to Edgware to deposit his boxes and pack the things he wanted to take to France. An evocative letter arrived from Richard Reginald Ball, a friend from Edinburgh days, and the original inspiration of the sonnet ‘My Mistake’. Ball was working as a medical orderly on the Russian Front and described the funeral of a refugee in the snow, led by children holding icons and a woman carrying a wooden cross for the grave,

  shoulders hunched against the intense cold, followed by bearers carrying the body in its white grave clothes lying in the open coffin. The white linen seemed frozen like very thin white ice. It was half a mile walk from the church onto the open steppe behind the village. The children who were too small, very small people in diminutive sheepskins – passed by the body and blew a breath to it several times. Breath, in the church in front of the open west door is a very visible thing. When you open a door in going into a cottage, the cold air leaps into the room like a dragon across the floor in front of you, shooting out tongues of white steam.47

  Charles and Meg both knew that with Russia in a turmoil of revolution and bloodshed, there was little chance that Ball was still alive. Then on the morning of 3 October, Charles read in The Times of the death of one of his closest friends, Philip Bainbrigge, killed instantly on 18 September as he was leading a patrol over a sunken road where the enemy were hiding.

  Shocked and saddened, feeling stalked by death, Charles went out to the theatre then to Half Moon Street with a relatively new friend, the young, and as yet unknown, Noël Coward, whom he had met the year before. In his autobiography Present Indicative, Coward wrote, ‘I will put on record that between 1917 and 1919, I knew…’ then a list of eight people with whom he was ‘intimate’, including the actress Gertrude Lawrence and Charles Scott Moncrieff. He then listed those with whom he was on pleasant but not intimate terms, and finally those whom he could nod to and be nodded to by. He was therefore, on his own admission, intimate48 with Charles. Coward was eighteen and announced himself as a ‘boy actor’. Sassoon had chosen the same evening to drop in unannounced, having escaped from a loud Bloomsbury party after the ballet. Sassoon was still hurt by Charles’s barbed review three months earlier. Charles was too caustic for him, too pedantic and scholarly and eager to criticise. That evening Sassoon was ‘unpardonably petulant’ and Charles guarded and morose. Seemingly oblivious to this atmosphere, Coward was delighted to meet Sassoon, who in turn found him ‘gushing’.49 Coward told Sassoon excitedly that he had just spent a holiday in Cornwall lying on a rock reading Counter Attack out loud to the female novelist G. B. Stern. He begged for his autograph and Sassoon reluctantly inscribed a copy of the poems from several lying on Ross’s table. He was not in the mood for bubbling sociability; when he made to leave, Ross saw him to the door. He took his hand and Sassoon looked at Ross for a long moment, later writing: ‘His worn face, grey with exhaustion and ill-health, was beatified by sympathy and affection.’50 Two days later, at the age of fifty, Ross died suddenly of a heart attack.

  After this strange evening, Charles spent the day with Philip Bainbrigge’s father who showed him a letter from Philip’s commanding officer – who had been in hospital with Charles the year before – and they consoled each other. Charles showed him Philip’s own poem about the possibility of his death, which he had sent to Charles at the time of Brooke’s ‘If I should die’, of which it was a parody:

  If I should die, be not concerned to know

  The manner of my ending, if I fell

  Leading a forlorn charge against the foe,

  Strangled by gas, or shattered by a shell.

  Nor seek to see me in this death-in-life

  Mid shrieks and curses, oaths and blood and sweat,

  Cold in the darkness, on the edge of strife,

  Bored and afraid, irresolute, and wet.

  But if you think of me, remember one

  Who loved good dinners, curious parody,

  Swimming, lying naked in the sun,

  Latin hexameters, and heraldry,

  Athenian subtleties of δηζ and ποιζ,

  Beethoven, Botticelli, beer, and boys.51

  Charles crossed the Channel on a troopship the next day, and only heard that evening of the death of Robert Ross, his ‘kindest of friends’.
Immediately after the news of Bainbrigge, it doubled the pain. He wrote to Owen at once with the news. Owen, meanwhile, had led his company in a victorious attack on the Fonsomme line and having been immediately cited for gallantry, looked forward to a Military Cross. On 7 October he wrote Charles a letter that was ‘big with his pride in his company who had fought well and with amusement that the War Office who had besmirched his character would have to announce the award of his military cross’.52

  My dear Scott Moncrieff,

  I received your note in a pill-box which I and my glorious little company had captured a few hours previously.

  You may be able to inform yourself of the circumstances and Effects (in the Sassoonic sense) of our attack (2nd Man. Regt.) of Oct. 1st. I’m really glad to have been recommended, and hope an M.C. will come through – for the confidence it will give me in dealing with civilians.

  I’m frightfully busy (as O.C.D.) and many glorious Cries of the blood still lying on my clothes will have to be stifled.

  My Captain, wounded, was Somerville, M.C., of Edinburgh Univ. He thinks he knew you there. I find I never wrote a letter with so much difficulty as this. Perhaps I am tired after writing so many relations of casualties. Or perhaps from other causes.

  I am far enough out of the line to feel the acute discomforts of Billets (ramshaks of corrugated iron.) Do write soon, with all the news you can spare of Peace Possibilities.

  Yours ever W.O.53

  He found he ‘never wrote a letter with so much difficulty as this’. And thinks perhaps that he is tired, ‘Or perhaps from other causes’. The unspoken question hangs in the air. Did he now, upon reflection of the shortness of life, find that he did in fact reciprocate Charles’s feelings of romantic love?

  * * *

  But life sped on. From 8 October, in one of the greatest achievements of the war, the British Forces took three days to fight through the strongest section of the Hindenburg Line. So rapid were the advances that it was difficult to keep day-to-day records of the front. Charles experienced the exhilaration of travelling with the journalists William Beach Thomas and Philip Gibbs in a hooded car with a very low roof in the wake of the advancing troops. In a few hours they travelled the same distance they had crawled forward in three years of trench warfare and Charles hoped to whisk over to see Owen in the same car. However just at that moment Owen’s battalion moved to Bohain, to Bussigny and then to St Souplet. The brilliant young poet, only twenty-five years old, was killed on the line west of Oise-Sambre Canal six days before the war ended. Charles did not hear of his death until weeks later.

  After staying with the journalists at GHQ in Amiens, Charles then motored across five miles of destroyed country amid rumours that the Kaiser had abdicated, that there was revolution in Berlin, and so forth. He was in Lille when General Birdwood marched in with his troops and exchanged flags with the mayor, surrounded by rejoicing people.

  On Armistice Day, 11 November, Charles was supervising a photographer and a cameraman capturing a series of momentous meetings:

  Sir Douglas Haig and the Army Commanders met in conference, duly photographed and filmed by two of my men, a historic scene, a small knot of troops outside, motor drivers, etc. When the chief came out they suddenly gave a ringing cheer, which you will see in the film by the row of opening mouths. After lunch, the Prince of Wales slipped up very quietly in an open car to congratulate the Chief on winning the war. Today’s excitement is the repatriates, who are beginning to come through. There is much to do and so few of us to do it that I quite despair.54

  Until Christmas, Charles was busy flying about France and Flanders with his photographers making records of great events. His base and flat were in Lille which had a theatre where he and his fellow officers staged the Christmas pantomime for the troops. As befitting his role in the Propaganda Department, he wrote a patriotic song on the back of the playbill. ‘I fancy,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘I can retain some sort of job here as long as the Army lasts, and hope during that time to pick up enough health to face the struggle for existence at home. The prospect is not very bright, and I can easily understand that partly disabled men will be a drag in the market and command a very low wage. A profound apathy reigns everywhere except in the demob branches.’55

  It was in Lille, that December, that he eventually heard of Owen’s death, and he sat down in his cold but comfortable flat above a shop to write his last sonnet to the man he loved, later published as one of the three dedicatory poems in his Chanson de Roland. Certain of Owen’s greatness, he wondered possessively whether he would form part of it in centuries to come.

  When in the centuries of time to come,

  Men shall be happy and rehearse thy fame,

  Shall I be spoken of then, or they grow dumb,

  Recall thy glory and forget thy shame?

  Part of thy praise, shall my dull verses live

  In thee, themselves – as life without thee – vain?

  So should I halt, oblivion’s fugitive,

  Turn, stand, smile, know myself a man again.

  The poem ends with the sort of sentiment a man would write on his wife’s tombstone, that of longing for the day when they would meet again in heaven.

  I care not: not the glorious boasts of men

  Could wake my pride, were I in Heaven with thee;

  Nor any breath of envy touch me, when,

  Swept from the embrace of mortal memory

  Beyond the stars’ light, in the eternal day,

  Our contented ghosts stay together.

  In a school debate at Winchester in the spring of 1907, he had held that ‘loyalty died after the Battle of Flodden. Courage and loyalty were pre-eminent in ancient warfare…’56 But his innocent idealism had not been killed by the war. In fact he had tackled fiercely and rejected the attitude of futility and cynicism about war in books and poems he reviewed. Throughout the conflict Charles had produced a steady stream of criticism from trenches, base camps, rest areas and hospitals. He had reviewed many books on the war and been savagely critical of most. He suggested that war played a trick on English poets, distorting their perspective, confusing their roles and exiling their muses. He maintained that real poets did not improve through war, if anything they deteriorated. He attacked the emotion war inspired in poetry, its demolition of idealism, its degradation of human hope. Poetry for him was about truth and beauty and preserving these as shields for the human heart. This sentiment was expressed in Owen’s last poem, ‘Strange Meeting’:

  Whatever hope is yours

  Was my life also; I went hunting wild

  After the beauty in the world,

  Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,

  But mocks the steady running of the hour,

  And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

  To say that the war was a futile exercise and a pointless cull of lives was a slur on the memory of his friends. Owen’s death left a crater in Charles’s life. Owen’s poetry changed for ever the way we look at war. Charles recognised this, not distinguishing between his feeling for Owen’s poetry and his love of Owen himself. Much later he wrote to Owen’s mother, describing a passion based on a mutual love of poetry.

  Owen was during the last year of his life, one of my most intimate friends; and I may therefore (though I think not) be prejudiced in my opinion that in his death the war dealt the severest of all its blows on English Letters. He employed a very thorough knowledge of English poetry with exceptional taste, and, while eminently sound in his derivations, was equally daring in innovation.

  Charles went on to discus Owen’s use of assonance and to compare him to Pope, Swinburne, Keats and Milton, but ended the letter:

  As I read these passages over they seem to me terribly priggish and cold blooded as if I cared only for W’s literary value, and not for the inestimable value of his friendship.57

  After Owen’s death, Charles was cold-shouldered by the group of war poets he had thought were his friends. The light an
d intimate correspondence between Charles and Graves stopped abruptly after Owen’s death when a rumour went out from the Half Moon Street group that Charles had seduced Owen. This also stopped any communication from Sassoon and the Sitwells who had prepared Owen’s first book of poetry for publication, even though Charles himself owned a number of Owen’s first drafts. There was no proof anywhere of seduction, there were no witnesses and no confessions. However, the rumour later found its way into the first edition of Goodbye to All That, Graves’s autobiographical novel of the First World War, published in 1929. Harold Owen, Wilfred’s brother, started a libel suit and had the entire first edition pulped, and a second ‘first edition’ had to be issued three months later. Graves never spoke to Charles again, and continued to believe that he had seduced Owen. The whole incident was shrouded in gossip, half truths and hypocrisy.

  CHAPTER 11

  Sniping in the Literary World

  The flash of one poet catching almost intuitively the emotion of another long dead …

  Richard Aldington, Times Literary Supplement

  11 December 1919

  After covering the first few months of the Paris Peace Conference Charles sailed back to England on 3 April 1919 looking very thin. He was a ghost of his former self. The war had taken in an ebullient and confident man and delivered home someone prematurely aged and weary – physically broken, in constant pain from his injuries and bereaved of his finest friends. At least he was alive.

  Even finding lodgings was a trial. On his first visit to Edgware, he told his mother that he felt constantly tired; he had spent one night in a hotel near Piccadilly, but on going back the next night found they had sublet his room and thrown out all his things. He then passed a night in the Turkish Baths at the RAC club, there being no spare room in the club rooms, either. Luckily he bumped into an acquaintance, Lady Hill, who invited him to stay with her; relieved, he took the next day off and took his mother to lunch with Lady Hill in town. Charles made a habit of making good friends with genteel elderly landladies whom he always introduced to his mother. Lady Hill also owned a seaside cottage in Sandwich which Charles rented for a week in May as a present for his brother Colin’s family.