Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  Northcliffe, though not in the best of health and with only two years to go before his death, took Charles under his wing. He took him to meet Joseph Conrad in Kent, and a friendship and correspondence sprang up. Charles would come and stay with the Conrad family for a day or two several times in the next two years. Charles’s translation of Beowulf was published by Chapman and Hall in the autumn of 1921 as a companion volume to Song of Roland. There is only one dedicatory poem this time; to Richard Reynolds Ball, but the book was dedicated to three people, including his brother John and Gladys Dalyell, who also died in 1920. Lord Northcliffe wrote the introduction and asked, ‘How many thousand Beowulfs have we not sent out in the last seven years from these islands to face subtleties of horror as incredible as Grendel, fire as scathing as the Worm’s, sea-monsters against which no armament was proof?’ Northcliffe’s final sentence, ‘But I welcome this version of Beowulf because I find in its hero what I lament in countless men who have fallen in the field, simple courage, untiring endurance, stainless honour’, might well have drawn still more scorn from Charles’s enemies, those who felt that the myth of heroism fed war, and that potentates like Northcliffe only benefited at the expense of the blood of innocent men. Although rightly accused of whipping up war fever at the beginning of the war, Northcliffe was also credited with helping bring it to a speedier end by being a major force in bringing in the Americans.

  Edmund Gosse reviewed Beowulf positively in the Times Literary Supplement and wrote a letter to Charles, worrying about what he was to translate next, recommending another medieval text like the Roman de la Rose,

  I know no other man living who can retain the form of the middle age and yet not get wrecked in Wardour Street. Think of it seriously, as a duty. Since you told me you were translating Proust I have not felt happy. Not here, O son of Apollo, are haunts meet for thee.47

  Rather like his old headmaster, Gosse thought of Charles in a fatherly way as being ‘clean and wholesome and full of chivalry’. He warned against Proust, ‘I grudge months of your best life spent shaking these French powders into your English box.’48 Gosse was convinced of the superiority of the clean, protestant English ethos, as opposed to the decadence of the French. He did not know that Charles was not only homosexual but also Catholic, or that his more English and Apollonian interpretation of Proust might be all it needed to give it balance.

  While translating Beowulf, Charles had continued to contribute to The New Witness. Of Lord Alfred Douglas’s tenth book of poems, he said, ‘The later work seems to lack whatever it was that charmed us, years ago, in the earlier.’49 As the year turned from 1920 to 1921, he wrote four all-encompassing articles entitled ‘The Poets There Are’, about contemporary poets including Wilfrid Gibson, Walter de la Mare, Wilfred Owen, the Sitwell circle, John Masefield and Robert Graves. Of Edith Sitwell’s The Wooden Pegasus, he said,

  … painted toys; the wooden toys of the nursery cupboard, the porcelain toys of the drawing room mantelpiece. Pretty but lifeless and therefore harmless; moving, thinking, and acting only when Miss Sitwell moves thinks and acts for them … her puppets are safe because they are lifeless; and because they are lifeless they are lasting. ‘tout passe, tout casse, tout lasse’… whispers a voice in her ear. ‘Does it?’ mutters Miss Sitwell and smothers a doll with paint. ‘Seulement l’amour dure’ the voice goes on, ‘It doesn’t,’ says Miss Sitwell, reaching for her scissors, and deftly snipping out the dolls heart.50

  In the same article, he said of Robert Graves’s new volume Country Sentiment, ‘… like the first growth of new leaves in a burned thicket. The wounds wrought by war on this poet’s mind have healed…’ His writing was self-referential; the wounds wrought by war on Charles’s mind had barely healed. His love had not lasted, and Owen’s death, Bainbrigge’s death, Ball’s death had deftly snipped out his own heart. He could look at his leg where there was a five-inch scar on the inside left thigh, a three-inch scar on the calf, the calf depressed and stuck to the bone, his ankle swollen and his left leg one inch shorter than the right. But looking into the mind was rarely done in 1919. His reaction to the mental wounds was a critic’s strafing of other writers, a retreat into himself, a disillusionment in his poetry and creativity, satirical verse. What he needed was a shoulder to cry on.

  CHAPTER 12

  Translating Proust

  While, both at once or each in turn,

  Sharp-tongued but smooth, like buttered knives,

  We pared with studied unconcern,

  The problems of our private lives …

  CKSM, Swann’s Way, dedication, 1922

  Reading Proust, with its slow dissection of meaning, was the antithesis of the quick-fire mentality of life on the front line. Just as the translations of Chanson de Roland and Beowulf gave tongue to Charles’s masculine exultation in war, so Proust was the opposite, giving him time to slow down and recover and explore the ebb and flow of human relationships. Charles’s friendships became deeper and more of a lifeline:

  Those tiny problems, dense yet clear,

  Like ivory balls by Chinese craft

  Pierced (where each hole absorbed a tear)

  And rounded (where the assembly laughed).1

  The process of translating Proust gave Charles two important female confidantes: Oriana Haynes and Eva Cooper, to whom the verses above were written. After work at The Times offices Charles would spend evenings at the home of Edmund and Oriana Haynes. Edmund was a fellow contributor on The New Witness and a member of the Reform Club, a pioneering lawyer and a warm man of formid-able energy. He was tall and stout with a full head of brown hair and compassionate eyes. His wife Oriana was a beautiful and charming society hostess, welcoming musicians and writers to lavish soirées at their villa in St John’s Wood Park, where Charles would entertain by reading aloud current works by Sinclair Lewis and Edgar Lee Masters in the panelled drawing room, or, in vivid Scots, his own satire, the further adventures of ‘Mrs Jane Awlbruster Cramms’ who wrote scandalised letters to Scottish newspapers.

  The cultivated Oriana was excited by his translation work and offered to help, so when they were alone, Charles would read aloud Proust’s novel as he translated it. His method was to read a passage silently, think on it, and scribble a version in English in a jotter which he would then test by reading aloud to a discerning ear. Later, as he got faster, he would ask Oriana, or another friend, to read the French aloud while he produced the English version, then read it back himself. Only after the oral test for rhythm would he begin to type it.

  But there were also technical issues to grapple with. Proust’s novel was published in France before, during and after the First World War.2 There was a shortage of typesetters: many were dead and those who remained were overworked with under-trained assistants. The first volumes were printed with a lot of typesetter errors, far more than average because Proust was a complex writer and not all typesetters could follow the ideas or the sense of his sentences. Charles, however, did understand Proust. He also worked in a newspaper office and knew how typesetter errors occurred. In France the box of e’s and the box of a’s were adjacent to each other and to mistake le for la was a common error, but more so in Proustian compound sentences where the le or la is one of the many objects of the sentence, and could well be an idea. Much of the work in translating Proust was for Charles also a work of interpretation and instinct. He did not have access to the original manuscript (which was in longhand and extremely difficult to decipher anyway) and he still had a demanding day job.

  In July 1921 Charles finished his year as personal secretary to the increasingly demented chief of The Times and was moved to the editorial offices. Northcliffe himself was preparing to go on a round-the-world cruise for his health, and his behaviour, always dictatorial, was becoming extreme. Charles was appointed as a foreign sub-editor at The Times which meant preparing foreign reports and articles; his work started at 5 p.m., when all copy had to be in, and ended at midnight. Translating, socialising and negotiati
ng contracts had to be done in the few evenings he had to himself.

  Charles had agreed a contract for the translation of the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu with Chatto and Windus, one of the most respected publishers in Britain, offering £150 for exclusive UK rights – the equivalent of £20,000 in today’s earnings. At the end of May, Chatto had agreed a deal with Proust’s French publisher Gallimard, predicting that the translation would be released the following spring. In 1921 Chatto and Windus was run by Geoffrey Whitworth and Charles Harold Prentice. A Scotsman only a few years older than Charles, Prentice was to become an intimate friend. Charles’s letters to his editor read like his own diaries would have done, had he kept them. As it was, he had no time for extra writing and all his descriptive and entertaining power went into his letters to friends. The novelist Richard Aldington described Prentice as ‘gentle, almost hesitant in manner’ and a good, generous man with benevolence shining from his pink, oval face behind gold-rimmed spectacles. He was both a scholar and a competent businessman. By education and taste devoted to classical Greek literature, he steered the firm of Chatto and Windus in the 1920s towards the great authors of his era, publishing Lytton Strachey, Aldous Huxley, Proust and Pirandello. He was a confirmed bachelor, living in a Kensington flat amid, what Aldington described as ‘a chaos of books, boxes of cigars, wines, and pictures by Wyndham Lewis’.3 His holidays were spent in the wilds of Scotland fishing and hiking. He had huge patience and forbearance, not only with Charles but with all his writers.

  In September 1921 Charles met another important female confidante: Evangeline Astley Cooper, of Hambleton Hall in Rutland. It was Noël Coward who brought him to Hambleton for a birthday break and on the train told Charles of his history with the place. At fourteen Noël had become close friends with a painter called Philip Streatfield for whom he did some modelling. Philip took Noël on holiday with him to Cornwall where they made friends with Stephen Astley Cooper, walking the cliffs and beaches together. In 1915 when Philip was dying of TB, Mrs Astley Cooper had asked him if there was anything she could do for him, and he asked her if she would look after Noël and take him home with her because he needed taking care of. She agreed and took the charming fifteen-year-old home to Hambleton Hall. This was Noël’s first experience of English country-house life and he took much of his high society banter in later plays from these early visits to Hambleton. Although a Catholic convert, Evangeline had a racy and unorthodox mind. It was said that she reappeared in his plays as a stock witty, upper-class lady of the Lady Bracknell variety, still part of Victorian England in terms of style and class, but far more liberated in life and opinions. Other visitors to Hambleton were the writers Hector Hugh Monro (Saki) and James Lees-Milne, who said Eva had ‘a particular wry, no-nonsense kind of humour … She was just a tyrant with a heart of gold.’ If her husband was unfaithful, she said, ‘The children have good complexions, and one could not have everything.’4 Charles benefited from the hospitality of the lady who loved to have what her grandchildren called a houseful of ‘pansies up from London’.5

  Until the 1930s, the aristocracy came to Rutland for the hunt. It was the classiest hunt in England, attended by royalty. Built in 1890, as a hunting box, Hambleton Hall’s purpose was fun. The motto over the door said Fay ce que voudras from Rabelais, meaning ‘Do as you please’. Even the architect had fun designing it, as a hotchpotch of styles – mock Tudor, Elizabethan, Georgian and Victorian, making it look as though it had grown organically, added to successively over the centuries. The substantial stables built in a quadrangle had a motto of their own, Ride si sapis, – laugh if you are wise – but a play on words makes it ‘ride if you know how’.

  Charles could no longer ride, but he could certainly laugh from the sidelines. The sundial in the garden said, Nunc ora bibendi, now it’s time for drinks, le temps passe, l’amitié reste, c’est l’heure de bien faire – time passes, friendship remains, time to do what you like. There Charles would sit, translating the first volume of Proust which he dedicated to his hostess and friend, who became the next discerning ear to whom he read aloud his translations. Charles was unique as a translator who dared to preface the books he translated with long, personal poems or dedications of his own. He dedicated Swann’s Way to Mrs Astley Cooper in the form of a six-verse poem which was an evocation of the atmosphere at Hambleton and the intimacy of their friendship.

  Here, Summer lingering, loiter I

  When I, with Summer, should be gone …

  Where only London lights the sky

  I go, and with me journeys ‘Swann’

  Whose pages dull, laborious woof

  Covers a warp of working times,

  Of firelit nights beneath your roof

  And sunlit days beneath your limes …6

  Evangeline Astley Cooper was four years older than Charles’s mother, far less handsome or well-dressed, but thoroughly open-minded. Her husband was a vigorous member of hunting society, and Eva, too, needed a confidant. She said that Charles was ‘the most intelligent person I ever knew’, appreciating his mordant sense of humour. ‘When he came to luncheon, he prepared all that he was going to say and then “let us have It”.’7 By 1921 her face was old and worn, but her eyes were young, large, blue and rather prominent. Aldous Huxley described her as ‘one of these large handsome old-masterish women who look as though they had been built up from sections of two different people – such broad shoulders they have, so Junoian a form; and growing from between the shoulders such a slender neck, such a small, compact and childish head’.8 During the war, Eva had turned Hambleton into a convalescent home for British soldiers and almost 600 wounded men had passed through. Noël would come down from London, sometimes only for Sunday night when he was acting, and sing and play for the invalids. ‘I shall always say,’ Eva maintained, ‘the real cause of the war was the deep-seated jealousy of the Germans at the way the Englishmen wore their clothes – a sort of careless ease.’9

  But Eva was also patient and generous. She sat with Charles under the lime trees in the garden, reading Proust in French out loud as he read his English translation so that he could get the rhythm of the prose. She later wrote in an unpublished autobiography, using a metaphor from her hunting life, ‘I often used to look ahead and wonder how he was going to get over some of the fences, for what can be said in French without offence cannot be said in English. He surmounted them without a moment’s hesitation.’10

  What was it that made Charles such a superlative translator? Nearly a century later the scholar and translator Sian Reynolds compared the new Penguin translation with Charles’s version and saw its approach as one of ‘clarity of mind’, while Scott Moncrieff had an approach of ‘maturity’: ‘choosing to think about the text, to mull his sentences over, and wait until they were ripe for writing down’.11 Reynolds takes a sample of text for comparison. Here, in the middle of the first volume, Swann is looking everywhere for Odette in a state of high anxiety:

  D’ailleurs on commençait à éteindre partout. Sous les arbres des boulevards, les passants plus rares erraient, dans une obscurité mystérieuse, à peine reconnaissables. Parfois l’ombre d’une femme qui s’approchait de lui, lui murmurant un mot à l’oreille, lui demandant de la ramener, fit tressaillir Swann. Il frôlait anxieusement tous ces corps comme si parmi les fantômes de morts, dans le royaume sombre, il eût cherché Eurydice.

  Scott Moncrieff translated in a way that the new Penguin translator, Lydia Davis, found ‘dressy’:

  Meanwhile the restaurants were closing and their lights began to go out. Under the trees of the boulevards there were still a few people strolling to and fro, barely distinguishable in the gathering darkness. Now and then the ghost of a woman glided up to Swann, murmured a few words in his ear, asked him to take her home and left him shuddering. Anxiously he explored every one of these vaguely seen shapes, as though among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been searching for a lost Eurydice.

  Davi
s translated a leaner version, shadowing the French text more closely,

  Lights were beginning to go out all round him. Under the trees on the boulevards, in a mysterious darkness, fewer people wandered past, barely recognisable. Now and then, the shadow of a woman coming up to him, murmuring a word in his ear, asking him to take her home, would make Swann start. He brushed anxiously against all those dim bodies as if, among the phantoms of the dead, in the kingdom of darkness, he were searching for Eurydice.

  In Charles’s version we can see his interpretative leap – he takes liberties, but he is there. We are on the Champs-Elysées, we can see the restaurant lights going out and these are prostitutes, soliciting, coming up to Swann and, because he is looking for a loved one, the suggestion that he take home a whore makes him shudder. Not ‘start’ as in fright, but ‘shudder’ with something deeper. He adds the word ‘lost’ to Eurydice, for better rhythm, and also because, as we learn, Odette is indeed a lost soul. Charles emphasises the Eurydice metaphor because if Swann wants Odette, and, later, Marcel wants Albertine, then they must be prepared to visit their own Hades.

  The new Penguin translation is more literal, but Charles’s version goes through the sieve of his soul; it involves his history, his education, and his experience in the trenches. The translation scholar, Peter France, made the point that translation …

  is not merely a technical task to be carried out with proper efficiency (as done ideally – though not so far in reality – by a machine). The sort of translation to be discussed here has to do with the values, the personality, the intention that underlie the original. In relation to these, the translator’s duty is in part ethical (or even political).12

  Ethics and duty were an essential part of Charles’s make-up, both the soldier and the writer. Once he became a translator, he devoted himself solely to the task; he never owned a home, had no children, lived through his work. Susan Sontag described the roll of the translator in her St Jerome Lecture in 2002.13 She agreed that translation was: