by Jean Findlay
an ethical task, and one that mirrors and duplicates the role of literature itself, which is to extend our sympathies; to educate the heart and mind; to create inwardness; to secure and deepen the awareness (with all its consequences) that other people, people different from us, really do exist.14
Proust was stylistically and morally foreign to a protestant English audience, and bridging that gap was part of Charles’s role. He would have liked to meet the author and Gallimard had asked for Proust to read the translation before it went to press, so a near-finished portion was sent to Paris on 21 November but by February Proust still had not replied. Charles finished the volume and settled on a title without being able to consult him, writing to Whitworth at Chatto, ‘M. Proust will probably have a word to say about the English title of the book and of each volume.’ From Beowulf he took ‘swans weg’ – Swann’s Way – as the title of the first volume, and decided that a line he had chosen from Shakespeare was rich enough in associations to cover the whole multi-volume novel. He knew he could not find an English equivalent, rich in ambiguity meaning time wasted and time lost, involving memory and still reflecting the beauty of what the novel contained, so he chose a line from Sonnet 30: ‘When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/ I summon up remembrance of things past.’
They had still heard nothing from Proust by May, when the volume was at the printers. Charles, who had just moved from Ebury Street to a room on the Strand opposite the Courts of Justice, and whose things were in a state of chaos, received the first proofs. He was furious:
The translation of Proust presents many difficulties, to which I have given a great deal of thought. Every comma was put there deliberately by me … Please tell the printer that if any of my copy is ‘improved’, I shall wash my hands of the book altogether … I felt like a gardener who has stooped all day over his beds, sticking little pegs with labels on them, and finding that a child or a dog or a hen has pulled them all up in the night.15
Proof sheets from Henry Holt, his American publisher, and from Chatto continued to arrive over the summer and he had to reinstate every deleted comma. There was still no word from Proust. It was exhausting, the commas took their toll on the fragile man and suddenly in July Charles was rushed into hospital with appendicitis, operated on and put in a worryingly expensive nursing home. He wrote to Whitworth to ask if Proust was coming to London as Gallimard had suggested, ‘we should welcome him – you on foot, I on a stretcher – beneath the Cavell Statue, and escort him to some of the secret haunts denounced in John Bull – ending in a reception in Seaport House.’16 But the revels never took place. Proust was already far more unwell than Charles; he had only a few months to live.
That August Lord Northcliffe died of infected endocarditis and was buried in Westminster Abbey. Writing to Conal O’Riordan, Charles said, ‘I am still living in hospital coming out for a moment or two to look at the world and read Northcliffe’s obituaries.’17 He was also reading the advance publicity for the translation. Sydney and Violet Schiff, who had become Proust’s closest English friends since meeting him in 1919, were both protective and outraged by the Shakespearean title of the whole work. Sydney Schiff, who wrote semi-autobiographical novels under the name of Stephen Hudson, was the heir to a rich Jewish banking family and considered to be one of the best-dressed men in Europe. He had married an equally cultivated and wealthy woman, Violet Beddington, the niece of the novelist Ada Leverson who had corresponded with Oscar Wilde. It was the Schiffs who had arranged the famous Ritz supper party at which Picasso, Stravinsky, Proust and Joyce were brought together in May 1921, only to have Proust and Joyce talk briefly about their illnesses. Intensely loyal to Proust, the Schiffs were shocked at the liberties that had been taken with the translation of the title and wrote at once to Proust in protest. In spite of the fact that Gallimard had been sent the translation, it turned out that Proust, isolated and ill, had not been shown a copy. He was distressed by what the Schiffs wrote and considered stopping publication. ‘I cherish my work,’ he told Gallimard, who could have prevented the shock, ‘and won’t have it ruined by Englishmen.’ However, the Schiffs bought an early copy of Swann’s Way, sitting down to read it and telegraphing the same day to Proust that the translation was excellent. They then became as passionate and loyal and generous to the translator as they had been to Proust.
* * *
Charles was invited for most of September 1922 to Brahan Castle in Ross-shire, Scotland. His host was James Stewart Mackenzie, the colonel of the 9th Lancers whom he had known during the war. Mackenzie was what Charles described as ‘the finest imaginable type of Highland Chief’. Exactly a year before, in September 1921, the Seaforth Mackenzies had acted as hosts when Lloyd George called the Cabinet together in an emergency. The first Cabinet meeting ever to take place outside London was in Inverness Town Hall. Here the ‘Inverness Formula’ was agreed that would be the basis of negotiations over the next three months that led to the Anglo-Irish Treaty which established the Irish Free State. After two years’ bitter conflict in Ireland, a truce was signed in June 1921 and the urgency was such that the unprecedented move of interrupting the Cabinet while hunting, shooting and fishing in Scotland was taken.
The seventy-four-year-old colonel had inherited not only a fine castle and estate but also an ancient and efficient curse. As a child in Inverness, Charles had heard of the Curse of the Brahan Seer. Kenneth Mackenzie, a labourer on the Brahan estate in the late seventeenth century, had been well known as a seer, or prophet, and when Lady Mackenzie asked him to tell her how her husband, the third Earl, was faring in France, he said he would not. She insisted, so he told her that her husband was in the arms of a Parisian courtesan. Furious, Lady Mackenzie ordered that the seer be burnt in a barrel of tar. Kenneth Mackenzie’s last prophecy was a curse. ‘No future chief of the Mackenzies shall bear rule at Brahan or Kintail.’ Every direct male heir had died without issue since that date, and James Stewart Mackenzie himself was to die the following March without issue, and his barony become extinct. Brahan Castle itself was demolished in 1952 and its stones used as the foundation for the road to Dingwall.
The curse did not alarm or surprise Charles – he was used to the numinous activities of his mother, and this was yet another superstition to be ignored. Meanwhile he waited at a safe distance from London for the public reaction to his translation. He had already made good friends with Lady Seaforth; like many older, married women, she found him charming. She asked him to stay on to be part of her Northern Meeting party. Every year since 1788, the Northern Meeting Society had organised Highland balls to keep alive the tradition of dancing Scottish reels; they also ran a piping competition. Bagpipes, dancing and wearing kilts had been outlawed after the 1745 rebellion and this society, as well as the London based Highland Society, re-established and kept alive that part of Highland culture. Charles, though no piper, was a determined dancer of reels, in spite of his limp, and an entertaining addition to the party. There would be many old family friends and cousins at this Northern Ball, still hoping that he would finally fall in love and marry. There was a great shortage of men after the First World War; Lady Diana Cooper famously wrote as early as 1916 that everyone she had ever danced with was dead.
Charles wrote to his publisher Prentice from Brahan Castle on 14 September advising him that he would like to send copies of the translation ‘to certain people who have shown an interest and have allowed one to inflict long passages on them viva voce’.18 To Oriana Haynes he sent a copy and later wrote to her: ‘there is something great in Proust and in the book – not in the pretty bits at the beginning which are pure window dressing. I use it as a guide to word and action in myself and others, and am constantly explaining things to myself in terms of Proust.’19
To his relief the reviews were good. The Times critic A. B. Walkely said it was ‘very close to the original, yet it is written in fastidious English’.20 John Middleton Murry in the Nation and Atheneum declared, ‘nothing less than amazing. Had
it not been done, it would have seemed impossible. But it has been done … No English reader will get more out of reading Du Côté de chez Swann in French than he will out of reading Swann’s Way in English.’
The praise boosted Charles’s confidence and helped to heal old wounds, but his mother pricked a pre-war conscience when she wrote saying she was, ‘rather depressed by Mlle Vinteuil and Swann’s promiscuous love-making’.21 Battles, bereavements, a new-found faith and his own physical decrepitude had changed his attitude to sex. He was quite celibate for the moment, though he never stopped being charming, and did not stop teasing Vyvyan, ‘It was very kind of Stanley to come on Saturday. I enjoyed him immensely.’22 Vyvyan was now living with Stanley Mercer, the painter, in a large rented house in Carlyle Square in Chelsea. They lived in a sometimes strained companionship: Vyvyan was an avidly practising ladies’ man and Stanley was dedicated to his career as an artist, which meant he could not always cover the rent. Charles would end his letters to Vyvyan, ‘Love to Stanley’ as if they were a couple. For himself, he would channel his romantic frustration into a phenomenal period of work which would both distract and fulfil.
‘You will let me know, won’t you,’ Charles asked Prentice, ‘if Proust acknowledges receipt of his copy. He is a reticent devil.’23 On 10 October, the desperately sick author wrote to thank his English translator:
Dear Sir,
I have been very flattered and touched by the trouble you have taken in translating my Swann. The miracle is that I can thank you at all. I am in fact so gravely ill (not contagiously) that I cannot reply to anyone, you are the only one of my translators in many languages to whom I have written, perhaps after seeing the fine talent with which you have done this translation (I have not yet read it all, but just to let you know that I do not leave my bed and take no food etc). Nonetheless, I have one or two criticisms for you. For example À la recherche du temps perdu cannot possibly mean what you say. The verses that you add, the dedication to your friends do not replace the intentional ambiguity of Lost Time/Wasted Time, which finds itself again at the end of the work in Time Regained. As for Swann’s Way that can mean Du Côté de chez Swann, but also à la manière de Swann. If you had added the word ‘to’ you would have saved everything. I am sorry I have to write to you in French, but my English is so appalling, that no one understands it. ‘How can you criticise,’ I hear you say, ‘when you hardly know one or two words of English if at all – in the face of all the praise for my translation?’
Please give my compliments to your editors for the remarkable way they have had the translation done and please believe in my good faith …24
As he struggled through, however, Proust was, according to his first biographer George Painter, more and more pleased by the beauty of the translation and even more so by the press-cuttings from the London reviews which ‘tended to declare the translation superior to the original’.25 Charles picked out Proust’s phrase ‘l’amphibologie voulue’, intentional ambiguity, and used it afterwards in conversation or correspondence whenever it seemed apt.
Meanwhile, as Charles was basking in success, Proust died, emaciated and febrile, from pneumonia, holding the hand of his faithful servant Céleste on the evening of 18 November 1922. His final word was, ‘Mother’. At his funeral with full military honours, as was due a chevalier of the Legion d’Honneur, were all the great and the good of the French literary world. However, the state of the remainder of his novel was shaky. Five parts had now been published: Du Côté de chez Swann, in 1913, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, in 1919, Le Côté de Guermantes I, in 1920, Le Côté de Guermantes II and Sodome et Gomorrhe I in 1921 and Sodome et Gomorrhe II in 1922. The other three volumes were left in manuscript at his death.
Saddened at yet another death to add to his catalogue, of someone he sensed he knew intimately, though in fact not at all, Charles felt even more obliged to do him justice. In his chaotic room at 191 The Strand, opposite the Law Courts, he realised that he had made a real howler in the first translation. Rushing out to the theatre on the night of Monday the 27 November 1922 to see a production of Shelley’s The Cenci, starring Sybil Thorndike, he wrote to Prentice from the back of the theatre. ‘I made an absurd blunder over “chapeau melon” an expression which seems every day of the week to meet my eye … Luckily no reviewer seems to have reached that part of the story yet, but my howler is quite impossible, even if it means a “stub”.’26 It should have been ‘bowler hat’, but ‘melon hat’ remained to embarrass Charles until the second impression a year later.
Worried that the death of Proust might diminish future interest in the rest of the novel, Charles wrote to The Times five days later. He quoted from Proust’s friend, de Pierrefus, in the Journal des débats: ‘His work which is in the process of publication, is completely finished. He said many times that he had nothing to add to the series of volumes.’ Charles expected the final three volumes La Prisonnière, La Fugitive or Albertine disparue, and Le Temps retrouvé, to be published some time in 1923, but they were not; the final volume of the French edition did not come out from Gallimard until 1927.
In December 1922, fifty illustrious French literary men assembled a 340-page double number of the Nouvelle Revue française to commemorate Proust; the tribute contained fragments of the unpublished volumes then called La Mort de Bergotte and Sodome et Gomorrhe. Charles wrote a review of this extended tribute which appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 18 January 1923, quoting at length from the fragments and describing the whole with all the excitement of the discovery of new literature, seeing the volumes ahead as a ‘kaleidoscope of ever shifting pieces of glass’.27
He had already written to Chatto to ask if he could edit a similar tribute in book form, asking for essays from the best-known English writers of the day. ‘I want a collection of opinions that will make people in this country believe that Proust is worth reading.’28 Prentice agreed, providing he approached Conrad first. In reply to his request Conrad said, ‘It is clear you have done this for love … and there is no more to be said.’ He went on to speak of his preference for the translation over the real thing.
… I was more interested and fascinated by your rendering than by Proust’s creation. One has revealed to me something and there is no revelation in the other. I am speaking of the sheer maitrise de langue; I mean how far it can be pushed – in your case of two languages – by a faculty akin to genius. For to think that such a result could be obtained by mere study and industry would be too depressing. And that is the revelation. As far as the maitrise de langue is concerned there is no revelation in Proust.29
Charles’s translating did require his study and industry, but also confident inspiration, and an understanding that was similar to Proust’s: an affinity with the same literature, a passion for genealogy and aesthetic appreciation. He had lived through the same events and, like Proust, had witnessed the end of the century’s Victorian legacy, its literature, the dawn of the Edwardians, and he travelled often in Europe during that time. Pasternak was to say later in his Notes of a Translator that ‘Translation must be the work of an author who has felt the influence of the original long before he begins his work. It must be the fruit of the original, its historical consequence…’30
For the book of tributes, Charles sought to recruit as many writers as possible. If the French could muster fifty, surely he could find twenty? He wrote to George Moore, who replied that he couldn’t stomach Proust; Edmund Gosse, who deplored Charles wasting his talent translating the man he pronounced Prowst, would not contribute either. Saintsbury, his old professor, wrote that he had only read the first volume in Charles’s translation and asked, ‘Has anybody said that he partakes both of De Quincey and of Stendhal? He does to me and I’m shot if I ever expected to see such a blend.’31 He did eventually contribute a very short piece.
Charles wrote to Alec Waugh, J. C. Squire, E. S. P. Haynes and Walkely. He was even prepared to approach those he did not know, including Lytton Strachey,
Virginia Woolf, Arnold Bennett, Middleton Murry, Desmond MacCarthy, Mme Bibesco and Arthur Symons (whom he was soon to meet at the Schiffs and who immediately sent him a copy of his biography of Aubrey Beardsley for review). The Schiffs persuaded Murry to contribute. Virginia Woolf wrote to Clive Bell in February 1923 with various boasts, ‘Boast Three, Scott Moncrieff pesters for a few words.’32 In the end she did not contribute although she co-signed a short letter to the Times Literary Supplement Charles had written with eighteen others, including E. M. Forster, lamenting Proust’s death and thanking him for enriching our everyday experience with the ‘alchemy of art’.33 Woolf loved Proust, writing of his ‘astonishing vibration and saturation and intensification’.34 She first read Proust in the Scott Moncrieff translation, admitting to Roger Fry that reading the translation was akin to a sexual experience, and in her notebooks all her page references correspond to the translation.35 In To the Lighthouse published in 1927, entire phrases are taken from the Scott Moncrieff translation.36 Similarly there are two coinages in Finnegans Wake, which Joyce started working on in 1922, that can only come from the translation, not the original – ‘swansway’ and ‘pities of the plain’. Proust’s great influence, particularly on the stream-of-consciousness novel, stemmed from Charles’s careful choice of words. In the eventual volume, Marcel Proust – an English Tribute, published by Chatto in 1922 and by Seltzer in New York in 1923, the critic Francis Birrell wrote the longest appreciation including the candid sentence, ‘Proust is the first author to treat sexual inversion as a current and ordinary phenomenon, which he describes neither in the vein of tedious panegyric adopted by certain decadent writers, nor yet with the air of a show-man displaying to an agitated tourist abysses of unfathomable horror.’37 Catherine Carswell said that he recreated ‘the glamour in which for every one of us our own past is bathed.’38 Conrad wrote that, ‘He has pushed analysis to the point where it becomes creative.’39