Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  Visiting Noël with his exhilarating theatre friends was a shot in the arm for Charles. Next door to Noël was another boarding house, run by a Mrs Evans, whose daughter Edith was a budding actress. Noël was playing the part of Ralph in The Knight of the Burning Pestle23 at the Kingsway Theatre and although everyone else received it tepidly, Charles gave the production a rave review. Thinking of Edith Evans, Charles decided to help revive a play he loved. Noël introduced him to a group of actors and writers and together they formed a society whose aim was to revive what were at that time forgotten plays. They called themselves ‘The Phoenix Society’, and Charles was its first Secretary; administration was his forte, and he could no longer move around a stage easily. They began rehearsing a production of John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. Apart from Shakespeare, Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration plays were practically ignored by the theatre in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith was engaged for two performances and Charles worked tirelessly with the actors, managing to play a supporting role himself as one of the executioners. The main players were famous actors: Cathleen Nesbitt as the duchess, Robert Farquarson as the cardinal and the young Edith Evans as Julia. Charles wrote to his friends the Pyatts in Edinburgh, ‘I wish you were both coming to see it. Even if it is not a great play it is full of the most excellent lines in English poetry.’

  The Duchess of Malfi was performed in a Sunday matinee on 23 November 1919 and again in the evening. It was not well reviewed: A. B. Walkely in The Times said the play was ‘no longer a live classic but a museum classic, a curio for connoisseurs’.24 T. S. Eliot argued that the production had failed to uncover the elements that made Webster a great dramatist – specifically his poetry. All of Charles’s friends attended the performances, as did Osbert Sitwell who noted, ‘Our worthy Scotsman was superb, in his favourite role of an iron-clad bourgeois flogging a madman and effete aristocrats and his appearance momentary though it was, served to dispel the whole atmosphere of the play and to recall a pleasant and familiar sense of harlequinade.’25

  Meanwhile the Sitwell feud was still going strong. Aldous Huxley had tried to stop the fury by writing in Arts and Letters, ‘If Mr Sitwell, like most intelligent men, finds Punch boring, snobbish and indifferently illustrated, he has quite as much right to say so as CKSM has to give utterance to his own opinion of Mr Sitwell. It is, we all know, great fun throwing high moral stones but then Safety First, one must beware the glass.’26 Charles wanted the last word, though; and a week later replied that he was not responsible for Punch but that the Sitwells were for Arts and Letters, which he, like many intelligent men, found infinitely more boring, more snobbish and worse illustrated than Punch. ‘I do not pretend to be a poet and he need not pretend to be a critic. I trust this correspondence may soon be closed, as in the words of the Duchess of Malfi, “I have not the leisure to attend so small a business.”’27

  Reviews of the Song of Roland were glorious and Charles inscribed a copy to his enchanting fellow actor Cathleen Nesbitt. Richard Aldington said in the Times Literary Supplement, ‘the flash of one poet catching almost intuitively the emotion of another long dead, the thrill of reading an intelligent transcript of a great poem – these are the valuable things in this book.’28 The reviewer in Country Life called it ‘a version done divinely well’. Robert Nichols, feud now forgotton, wrote in the Observer, ‘so adequate is Captain Scott Moncrieff’s translation that it can but take its place with the classics of the sort … with Florio’s “Montaigne”, Fitzgerald’s “Omar”, Watts-cum-Pusey’s “St Augustine”, Urquhart’s “Rabelais”, and Burton’s “Arabian Nights”.’ Joseph Conrad later wrote to express his ‘profound and wondering appreciation of the difficulties overcome and captured beauty’. The Song of Roland was the exhortation to battle: Taillefer the jongleur went in front of the Norman Army throwing his song in the air, and Charles’s use of assonance brought this vividly to life:

  Marvellous is the battle in its speed,

  The Franks there strike with vigour and with heat,

  Cutting through wrists and ribs and chins indeed

  Through garments to the lively flesh beneath

  On the green grass the clear blood runs in streams.29

  The battle is a bright picture, a scene of visual beauty; it is nothing like the horror expressed by Wilfred Owen. John Middleton Murry in his 1920 review of Owen’s posthumous book of poems said that the poems ‘record not what war did to men’s bodies and senses, but what it did to their souls’. The Chanson by contrast glories in descriptions of its young warriors; it was a magnificent vision of a war against barbarians for the protection of sacred things – a view that Charles still held dear. His old housemaster from Winchester wrote and expressed what Charles had most intended for the Chanson: he said it was, ‘a lovely book, so clean and wholesome, full of chivalry and the strength of battle’.30 It described ‘vassalage’, the precursor to chivalry which it was honourable both to receive and to give.

  G. K. Chesterton not only wrote the introduction to the Song of Roland but he also reviewed the book. In the former he said that he admired the ‘abnegation of the translator, who is himself a very brilliant and individual writer, in having really translated the Song of Roland. It would have been easy for a man of his poetic gift to make out of it a modern poem … to deal with Roland as Tennyson dealt with Arthur.’ But Charles was practising the honourable ‘vassalage’ in his approach to his translating. ‘One of the most remarkable and valuable adventures and achievements of modern letters,’ said Chesterton in his review. The translation scholar Peter France later commented, ‘What Chesterton admired was the literalism that allowed the old text to speak with its own voice, to proclaim its own values. He singled out the notion of “vassalage”, misunderstood by moderns as signifying subordination, but in fact implying a lofty ideal’:31

  Now in this translation, merely because it is an honest translation, the reader will find the word ‘vassalage’ used again and again, on a note which is not only heroic but even haughty. The vassal is obviously as proud of being a vassal as anybody could be of being a lord. Indeed the feudal poet uses the word ‘vassalage’ where a modern poet would use the word ‘chivalry.’32

  Moreover Roland was a song and Charles was writing for the ear. ‘Please read it aloud,’ he wrote to the Pyatts. In his introduction he added, ‘Scottish Presbyterian readers may like to be reminded that the whole poem can be sung, both in French and English, to the tune of their favourite metrical Psalm: ‘Now Israel may say and that truly’. He was thinking of his training in 1914 on Lanark Moor with his superior officer banging out the rhythm on the table with his pipe. He wanted the work to be understood ‘in the light of many of the aspirations, intentions and even the despairs of today’. In a letter to Henry Pyatt he gave his own ultimate statement about the art of translation:

  You must ‘figure yourself’ that I had never read a word of old French until I bought de Julleville’s Roland … As someone, The Times, I think, said, it is a question of instinct; Turpin said the same thing when he offered to go and visit Marsilies. The question is to write a line that you know the original author would approve.33

  He was also trying to write his own fiction. A short story by Charles was published in the 12 December issue of The New Witness. Entitled ‘Ant’, it was the story of a calm and ignored aunt living with her loud nephew and niece in a provincial town. Amid the bridge and tennis, Ant is befriended by a well-mannered young solicitor called Horsley Bracton who listens to her. The innocuous-looking old lady nurses irritation at her position and longs to visit London, where she owns a flat in Hanover Square inhabited by a life-tenant. The tenant dies. Two weeks later Ant dies and at the funeral her brash nephew expresses disbelief that the flat has been left to the quiet, polite solicitor, ‘in gratitude for the services he has rendered me’. More baffling is the fact that in the last two weeks of her life Ant spent time and money staying out all night in London. Bracton acc
epts the house and from then on takes a fortnight’s annual leave in London, ‘and drawing cheques upon her legacy, he consecrates twelve days and nights (reserving Sundays only for his own soul’s benefit) to the poor old lady’s memory, in a round of well-intended and exhausting but perfectly innocuous dissipation.’ Charles hoped this would partly explain his own late-night tendencies to his family who saw little of him but would certainly read his stories wherever they appeared. Bouts of innocuous dissipation interspersed with long stretches of very hard work became the pattern for Charles’s life. Another literary magazine was started that winter by Charles’s friend, the poet and literary editor J. C. Squire. Like Charles, Squire favoured the Georgian poets over the modernist voices of the Sitwells. He called the magazine the London Mercury, and Charles would become a frequent contributer.

  Amid the praise, Charles read a notice in The Times telling of the death of his friend from university, Richard Reynolds Ball, on 17 December of typhus in Warsaw. He had long suspected that he was dead. Ball’s death was much on his mind when he started to translate another war epic, the early Anglo-Saxon Beowulf, giving full vent to his grasp of both consonance and assonance, and using metre and rhythm instead of rhyme. The lines are divided into two ‘metrically equivalent halves’, where ‘at least one accented syllable in the first half-line is alliterated with one in the second’, as in this description of the warrior’s ship:

  There in the roads / ring-stemmed she stood,

  Icy, out-faring, / an atheling’s craft:

  Laid they down / the lovely Prince,

  Bestower of bracelets, / in the breast of the ship,

  Their man by the mast. / There was a mass of wealth,

  Fretted gold ferried / from far away.

  Nor heard I of a keel / more comely-wise garnished

  With brave weapons / and battle-weeds,

  With bills and byrnies 34

  Beowulf was one of the texts Charles had studied at Edinburgh, which made it relatively easy to translate. In the book he included the other Anglo-Saxon texts: Widsith, Finnsburgh, Waldere and Deor. The dedication ran: ‘To Richard Reynolds Ball, who, like Beowulf, travelled fearlessly in a far country, risking his life to help the victims of war and oppression, until he died in Poland in December, 1919.’ The dedicatory poem to Richard followed exactly the rhythm and metre used in his translation of the epic itself, expressing all the sorrow and anger of grief,

  What! My loved companion, / in coldness liest thou,

  Finished with life, / in a land afar?…

  The long poem chronicled their life together and apart,

  Summers and winters, / and four years following

  Busily kept me / among killing banes.

  Then thou wast with foreign races, / Russ-men and Frenchmen,

  Serbs and Poles, /

  And finished with a gentle memory:

  In mood the mildest, / in mercy and pity

  Best beloved, / most beautiful to remember

  In the days / of this our life.35

  In June 1920, still suffering from his war wound, Charles went to the Du Cane Road Special Surgical Hospital beside Wormwood Scrubs prison. It was a dedicated leg hospital as there were so many war leg injuries, amputations and the need for rehabilitation. He required orthopaedic treatment for his leg and foot and got a train to the nearest station, East Acton, which was half a mile from the hospital, too far away for amputees to hobble comfortably. ‘The daily procession of out-patients along Du Cane Road is as harrowing as any I have seen in peace or war; nor is its pathos diminished by the background of empty trains flashing past the hospital every few minutes.’36 Even in his reduced state he was still effective and dynamic. He later started a campaign in letters to The Times to move the station nearer the hospital for ease of access for the limping and legless patients. With advice from his cousin in the Royal Engineers, he even proposed a site, a timetable and a budget for the building of the new station. The Great Western rail company was stony and unhelpful, and with great lack of foresight the Director-General for Traffic Sir Philip Nash said that, ‘however great our sympathy with limbless men might be, it is impossible on business lines to make it work.’ What is now the vast and busy Hammersmith Hospital still has no adjacent station. However in 1920 the letter-reading public of The Times were generous and heartfelt in their response and sent cars and money to help the wounded patients. By the end of his short stay, he had established a fund and rota, which would help taxi patients from the station to the hospital free of charge.

  While at Du Cane Road hospital he wrote to Vyvyan Holland asking if he might help an ex-War Office porter to find a job: ‘he is in his own words as strong as an elephant’,37 realising that the only way in the post-war labour market was through influence. He also begged Vyvyan to visit and gave him directions saying he would have to walk past ‘Wormwood Scrubs murmuring orate pro anima Xpoferi Millard’,38 also mentioning that they must do something about Millard’s imminent fiftieth birthday. Christopher Millard meanwhile sent Charles a small box of chocolates.

  As he was recovering from his leg operation, lying as he wrote, ‘quiescent like a goldfish under a lily leaf’,39 he read in the personal column on the front page of The Times:

  Assistant Private Secretary wanted by well-known Public man, good war record, shorthand, typewriting, and excellent French essential: Etonian or Wykehamist preferred, full particulars in applicant’s own handwriting, photograph, and copies of testimonials, with stamped and addressed envelope for return, to be enclosed. Age under 30, salary commencing at £600 per annum. The appointee will be of a secretariat of three, and his credentials, demeanour, and other qualifications will be minutely examined by the other two. It will, therefore, be a waste of time for any but those exactly answering the description given here to apply.40

  Alfred Harmsworth, by then Lord Northcliffe, was the proprietor of The Times, the once oblivious object of New Witness criticism. Northcliffe liked to have Scotsmen on his newspaper, favouring their exactitude and hard work and it was almost as if the rest of the advertisment had been written to fit Charles. Northcliffe was a self-made man, a gargantuan figure. He took people on as private secretaries for a year, then moved them on to the editorial board of The Times knowing that by then he had trained them by keeping them close to him.

  Charles was hired immediately and took up duties as soon as he was released from hospital a week later, on 12 July. He told Henry Pyatt that he had ‘emerged upon Northcliffe’s right hand’, with £600 per annum to rise to £800 in the autumn (in today’s currency this gave him the purchasing power of over £100,000 a year). Although it was not as much as his father had earned, along with his journalism and royalties, it would mean that he could help both his brothers’ families and at last feel secure.

  The day after his appointment came a terrible blow. His brother Colin received a wire from Fort Jameson in Rhodesia, where John had gone to take up a new job. SCOTT MONCRIEF [sic] ACCIDENTALLY SHOT HIMSELF DEAD THIS MORNING [13th July]. INFORM WIFE SHE SAILS 16TH JULY. STOP HER.41 Charles met Colin at Rhodesia House and they went at once to a church to pray. Charles had to attend a lunch party at Lord Northcliffe’s that day. He felt that he could scarcely sit through it and told Northcliffe before they went in, who was to his surprise, ‘extraordinarily kind and sympathetic’.42 His brother John had gone out to Rhodesia to make a new home for his family having been engaged as the vet at Fort Jameson. Later a letter arrived, written on 15 July from the land agent who had arranged to take John to examine some oxen. ‘He had got up and dressed and was waiting to be called to breakfast about 8am and had been working with a rifle and had accidentally touched the hair trigger with the result that he was shot near the heart.’43 Subsequent generations questioned this account as there was no proper investigation; his grandson44 still thinks it could have been suicide or homicide, since anyone trained to handle a gun cannot possibly shoot himself through the heart by accident; but at the time everyone believed the official
report from Rhodesia House.

  Charles wrote to his brother’s widow, Anna, ‘by the greatest good fortune, I have now arrived at a decent position in the world and I swear to you that as long as I live I will do all I possibly can to be a father to them [the children] and a helper to you.’45 Everyone mourned the handsome, enthusiastic and generous John. Charles went on, ‘I think I knew more about him, knew him more intimately than anyone else but you – and I wish I could be with you to dry your tears, or mingle them with my own.’ Charles contributed to the family income until his death. He was able to ensure that David, his nephew, was privately educated, and he visited the family in Oxford regularly. Such was Charles’s charm and the children’s joy at his arrival that the young David hoped that his Uncle Charlie would one day marry his mother.46

  Meg sought solace in spiritualism like many people after the war who had lost close relatives. She was convinced that she was in close communication with John and also soothed Anna with this idea. In her edited Memories and Letters, published by Chapman and Hall after Charles’s death, Meg inserted a postscript to Charles’s letters, ‘intercourse with the next life is happily possible, and has, especially since the war, become common knowledge to those who will receive it’. For Charles this was simply not true; he wrote of his mother’s amazing ‘tolerance of evil’ in allowing herself to be fleeced by unscrupulous clairvoyants. He did believe firmly in life after death as part of his Catholic faith, in the rejoicing of souls in Heaven, the Communion of Saints and the efficacy of prayers said for the departed. But this bore no resemblance to summoning by clairvoyants with crystals.