Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  In February 1923, T. S. Eliot, who was editing the ambitious literary periodical, The Criterion, founded the year before, wrote to Jacques Rivière, the editor of the Nouvelle Revue française, saying, ‘J’ai causé avec Monsieur Scott Moncrieff qui s’est fait un succès éclatant par sa traduction de Swann’40 (‘I have spoken to Mr Scott Moncrieff who has made a brilliant success of his translation of Swann’), and could the Criterion please have a morceau of unpublished copy and Scott Moncrieff would translate it. Eliot wrote to Charles saying that it would be a coup for The Criterion to print something not yet printed even in French. Charles agreed but Rivière delayed sending the piece. Meanwhile Richard Aldington, Eliot’s assistant, was given the task of dealing with Charles, but went to Italy, so Charles was left hanging, not knowing what was going on until Eliot sent him a courteous letter explaining the situation and insisting he would rather print the piece in French than have any translator other than Scott Moncrieff. The promised unpublished fragment, ‘The Death of Albertine’, eventually appeared in July 1924.

  Charles also sent Eliot a short story, ‘Cousin Fanny and Cousin Annie’. This was a 10,000 word story written from a child’s point of view about a young boy who is left with an elderly cousin, her cook and her dog while his parents are in India. He loves the cook, Annie, and calls her ‘cousin’ too, to the amusement of his elderly relative. When he is sent to boarding school he still spends the odd holiday with his increasingly impoverished and ageing cousin whom he judges with all the callowness of youth. It is not until, having gone through the war, he becomes a man that he wonders what has become of the old servant Annie, who has left his Cousin Fanny. He goes to find her tenement in Glasgow and is called upstairs by a neighbour who knows who he is, because Annie spoke of him so much. He enters the bare, single room, ‘frowsty with the smell of poverty’ to discover she died the evening before.

  He had stood this way by many of his intimate friends during the last five years, had lain awake in hospital wards where someone or other died every night, had helped bury brother officers, and men of his own company, when the ground was frozen too hard for a pick to break it; but Annie dead; Annie to whom he had scarcely given a thought all that time, was different. He knelt by the bed, sobbing, felt for her hard little hand and kissed it again and again, then rose and stooped over her face and kissed her shining forehead …41

  He recalled for the first time all the ‘laborious, loving, ungrudging service of all those years, poured out for himself and other people without any question of their response to her’.42

  The story was harsh, moving and very moral. What was striking was how unlike Proust’s in every way was Charles’s own voice. Eliot wrote to Alec Waugh saying how much he liked the story, and asked for Charles’s address, as he wanted to publish it in the spring. He did not manage this until 1926 when The Criterion brought it out in two parts; the first in April covering the childhood, and the second in July, taking us through the boy’s youth and manhood. It is the most autobiographical of Charles’s writings, describing his Victorian childhood and the social hierarchies that were gradually crumbling with the levelling process of the war.

  Two more of his short stories were printed in the London Mercury of August 1923, ‘The Mouse in the Dovecote’, a Saki-style story about a social climbing wife who has just acquired a country house to take guests from London, and ‘The Victorians’, a tale of a butler who discovers that he is in fact the son and heir to the stately home where he serves. Being born before marriage was regarded as a shame to the family and he was brought up as a servant. He must therefore remain a butler, although he is in fact the child of the lady he serves. Both stories were satires on bourgeois and aristocratic snobberies.

  With regard to Proust, Charles was having trouble with the title of the second volume, À l'ombre des jeunes filles en fleurs, with its ‘amphibologie voulue’ being that of young girls blossoming, or starting their period. He did not think that allusions to menstruation would go down well among the English, where the subject would prompt disgust, while for the French it was more poetic and the sensibility was one of productivity; flowering to bring forth fruit. He wanted to choose a line of poetry – Proust himself had borrowed the phrase from Baudelaire, ‘Car Lesbos entre tous m’a choisi sur la terre/ Pour chanter le secret de ses vierges en fleurs’43 (‘For Lesbos chose me among all the earth/ To sing the secret of its blossoming maidens’) and Charles went to others for help. His demands were rhythm, brevity and association; he thought the title should be short enough to be printed on the spine of a book without cramping, admitting that his own name was a serious inconvenience to the binder. In early January he spent a day with Joseph Conrad at his house in Kent, and Conrad suggested ‘In the shade of young girls in bloom’ and ‘In the shade of blossoming youth’. Too long for Charles. Conrad was by now the most famous living writer in Britain and America and his appreciation of Charles’s writing and his company meant a great deal. George Moore came up with ‘Under blossoming boughs’. Charles wrote to Geoffrey Whitworth at Chatto suggesting several: ‘For many a rose lipt maiden’ from Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, ‘Under bowers of embowering blossom’ from Shelley’s ‘Sensitive Plant’, ‘A Rosebud garden of girls’ from Tennyson and Marvell’s ‘To a green thought in a green shade’. He finally chose ‘In a Budding Grove’ from William Allingham’s poem of that name.

  Charles’s social life still revolved around his old friends. He entertained them to dinner at the Savile Club and in January he invited Edmund Haynes, Alec Waugh, Beverley Nichols, Stanley Mercer and Vyvyan Holland. Charles’s bawdy banter was reserved for his letters to Vyvyan, and in April he began, ‘You dashed past me the other day in Lower Regent Street as I was putting my nephew into a Tube – which is, after all, better than putting one’s tube into a nephew…’44 Charles had a habit of reading his translations to Vyv, as he called him, who was not as tolerant as Oriana. For Vyv simple apologies would not do, Charles had to tease him about his women and say sorry for ‘boring you so. It is as bad as a mistress showing you her miscarriage and asking for 2/6 a week on the strength of it … I always want to see you and promise not to read to you.’45

  Charles longed for a discerning mind who felt as passionately about the translation of Proust as he did, and on 26 March 1923, he read in the London Mercury a letter from arts patron Edward Marsh about Proust. It was a plea, through the Mercury, to both French editors, Gallimard and Rivière, for ‘a tolerable text of the masterpieces’. Complaining that Proust’s novel was printed in a ‘corrupt’ form, even though he was venerated by all of literary France, Marsh went on to list the errors he found in the French version such as ‘forme’ for ‘femme’, and ‘defend les ports’ for ‘devant les portes’, alongside mistakes in punctuation. Proust’s elaborate style put a strain on readers

  and the strain is wantonly increased when the comma, which can be such a useful little creature when under control, is allowed to gambol among the long paragraphs like an ignis fatuus. Proust himself seems to have taken but little interest in his commas, even when they were ‘inverted’; but this makes it all the more incumbent on his Editors to keep them in their places.46

  Marsh’s passion for commas struck a note, especially when described as ‘wanton’ and ‘inverted’. ‘Invert’ was the medical euphemism for homosexual, and this article started a lifetime of exchanging innuendo between Charles and Edward Marsh. Marsh was a sophisticated polymath, educated at Westminster School and Trinity College, Cambridge, and now a powerful civil servant. Private Secretary to a series of ministers, though mainly Winston Churchill, he was also an energetic patron of artists and poets. He had edited the five collections of Georgian Poets, had encouraged and corresponded with Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon, and knew all about Wilfred Owen. Charles could not hope for a more kindred spirit. He wrote a reply at once: sending him three pages of the ‘worst howlers’ that he had so far come across in Jeunes Filles. ‘What worries me,’ wrote Charles, ‘is how f
ar I am justified in tidying up the discrepancies when translating. You are the only person I have come across who is enough interested in the text of Proust to have noticed them, and almost the only one who has remarked on the misprints.’47 This started a correspondence about the problems of translating particular sentences and Edward Marsh became the man to whom Charles submitted all his worst problems over translating Proust for the rest of his life. In the meantime the two men had much in common and Charles suggested a meeting.

  I have so long known you, as Bloch père knew Bergotte, sans le connaitre, that I am fully ready to bring that unsatisfactory state of mind to an end. Unfortunately my habit of spending the evening in Printing House Square makes it impossible for me to dine except on Saturdays when you, I imagine, are usually out of town.48

  Marsh was an elegantly dressed, monocled bachelor, who was either out of town at important people’s houses at weekends or attending first nights at the theatre. He did however arrange not to be out of town one Saturday and invited Charles to dine with him at Gray’s Inn. Charles accepted the invitation from his desk at The Times: ‘I look forward to April 7th as Proust looked forward across his Giboulées de la Semaine Sainte to Florence and Venice’ – and then continued to discuss the errors in Proust’s text.

  … extrêmement identique is so bad that even if P. wrote it it should not be made public. Exactement identique is otiose and a little better; but extrêmement identique is like a badly laced pair of stays.

  He knew all about typographical errors from working on The Times, where compositors corrected as they went along,

  When he sets a line right and inadvertently repeats it, he discovers his mistake and fills up the second line with a ‘pie’ of odd letters, xs and so forth. If by an oversight they get into the paper, they are utilised next week to afford the readers of Punch a good hearty laugh. So I picture this printer setting up extrê realising his mistake, having to finish the line, and doing the next line correctly. Anyhow exactement is consolidated by the first edition.49

  It was an intimate dinner, after which Charles no longer called him Mr Marsh but addressed his letters to ‘Dearest Eddie’. Marsh showed him his famous art collection; he had specialised first in the English watercolourists, then in 1904 with the help of Robert Ross he had acquired a collection of drawings. In 1911, he first bought a painting by Duncan Grant, and gradually became a patron of contemporary British painting, adding John Currie, Mark Gertler, John and Paul Nash and Stanley Spencer to his collection: by 1914 he had brought together the nucleus of what became one of the most valuable collections of modern work in private hands. It covered every inch of the wall space in his apartments at 5 Raymond Buildings, Gray’s Inn. Surrounded by colourful paintings, they had a lively and literary conversation, and Charles left at 2 a.m.50

  Charles then went to stay for a week at Deene Park in Peterborough, where he had been before for convalescence, and wrote to Dearest Eddie from there, ‘but I owe you many apologies for keeping you up so late – my consolation is that I am sure the delights of your conversation must have caused many similar offences’.51 On his return, they met for dinner at Charles’s Club, the Savile, which had the tradition of communal dining at long tables like at school, but Charles promised to sequester him away from bores. As it was, they dined with Street and Sedgewick, two ‘discerning young Proustians’. He then sent Marsh a naughty limerick on a Savile Club postcard, which referred to Street’s civil service licence job,

  There was a young poet of Praed Street52

  Who said: I am dreadfully afraid Street

  Will refuse me a licence

  For my play on the Nice Sense

  Of the Smell of a Man as a Maid’s Treat.

  Charles also apologised for not being a good host as he had just come down with flu and was rather muddled, and thought he had done Marsh out of a cab fare by handing him coppers by mistake. Probably all Charles had at this point were coppers. He had now given up his job at The Times after a post-Northcliffe shake-up, and had decided to dedicate all his time to literature. As he explained to Prentice, though, he had ‘others to provide for, nine hungry nieces and nephews’. He took a short-lived placement at an advertising firm, the London Association, which, though well-paid, was a job he found antipathetic. In the evenings he wrote occasional reviews for the periodical the Saturday Review with the hope of being appointed as its next drama critic. Judging by the names of its former incumbents, Bernard Shaw and Max Beerbohm, this was a prestigious post; but later that year the position was given to the critic James Agate.

  Translating Proust took up more energy than Charles had anticipated. His letters to Prentice were full of gallantry: on 4 May he wrote, ‘in the course of these afternoon conversations which emerge, in memory, the sole green islets in the troubled sea of the last six months, I have entire faith in the good will and loyalty of your firm, and therefore approach any offer that you may make me in a spirit of acceptance.’53 He asked Prentice to deal with the complex details of the contracts with the American publisher, Seltzer, and with Gallimard, and laid out in painstaking pound signs what he needed to ensure that he and his ‘heirs and ensigns’ got a good deal.

  I have given you the lengths of the first three books of Proust, which are: Swann, 188,500 – Jeunes Filles 232,500 – Guermantes 257,500. Total 678,500 words. For translating these words (they are not all different words, of course), I am to receive, assuming Seltzer comes in level with you, £750, or a little more than a guinea per thousand words.

  His health was not good: the ‘flu’ lasted for a long time, and was probably a recurrence of his trench fever. Lady Seaforth from Brahan Castle, newly widowed and in poor health herself, suggested in July that they go together to Germany for a rest cure. She was a Steinkopf by birth and knew of a good wateringhole at Bad Kissingen, and Charles was happy to accompany her. Despite being in her sixties, Lady Seaforth was adventurous and wanted to go to Germany by air. Air travel was still in its infancy – the first solo transatlantic flight would not take place until 1927 – there were no passenger terminals, and the trip meant flying from an open field in Croydon to Amsterdam and then on to Berlin. The party consisted of her ladyship, her doctor, her maid and a caged pet bullfinch as well as Charles, who wrote to Eddie Marsh about the flight on 19 July 1923,

  Never having recovered from that evening at the Savile I took an aeroplane from Croydon to Berlin (a safe but slow method – 36 hours from end to end) and duly arrived here where I am gradually growing stronger. I have never been in this country before, and wish I had been in it before all these hostilities came to exacerbate us. I cannot but feel that if Palamède de Charlus had been sent to the Pariser Platz ten years ago, all that might have been averted.54

  Proust’s character of the Baron de Charlus was a fiendish diplomat, one who, Charles felt, had he been real, might have helped avoid the war. As for Bad Kissingen, the rich and famous, crowned heads of Europe as well as Tolstoy, Bismarck and Shaw, had come to the resort for over a century to drink the waters tasting of sulphur, bathe in the waters smelling of sulphur, be attended by the doctors and be rested and cured. Lady Seaforth had her own German doctor who brought his sister and his nephew Erik to join the party. They all booked into the Kurhaus Fürstenberg. ‘The only custom I cannot acclimatise myself to is that of people standing like seagulls round a liner and saying “Mahlzeit”, [din-dins] as I go in to dinner. And that is chiefly because I do not know the “mot juste” to retort with. I usually say “granted” but I feel somehow that it is not right,’55 Charles explained to Eddie. To Vyvyan he was more frank, ‘After I got here I had a bad breakdown, more or less in connection with my brother’s death at this time 3 years ago, and for two days could do nothing but weep.’56 Erik, who had also been wounded at Monchy, came and discussed literature with Charles in his room; he thought Oscar Wilde the greatest writer who ever lived, which Charles conveyed to Vyvyan.

  By 2 August they had moved to Oberhof in Thuringen, with Charles report
ing to Eddie that since arriving in Germany, he had done one third of Guermantes I. Looking out of his balcony window, he continued,

  This place is almost 9000 feet above the railway station, and I walked up to spare the horses. All the male visitors wear knitted jumpers, bound with leather belts. The jumpers are the loveliest colours – but the women are more soberly dressed … I have pitched my German doctor through Sodome et Gomorrhe to his great edification. It takes our minds off the Ruhr. And he argues that there is no literary form like it in German.57

  Lady Seaforth quarrelled with the hotel over a bill of several million Deutschmarks, and Charles quarrelled with her over the fact that inflation was out of control and they must give them what they asked. She left and Charles stayed on,

  when I, after a day of magic solitude in the woods, courted only by dragonflies, was standing naked in a wash hand basin preparatory to passer un smoking and go down to my 600,000 mark table d’hote – the door opened and a blushing post boy, chaperoned luckily by his hotel porter, who looks as if he had faced one in a trench, came in and said whatever the German is for ‘sign please’. This is a beautiful place, marvellously beautiful …

  Charles elaborated on his disagreement with Lady Seaforth:

  I know what you feel about Germany – as W’s late hostess feels the exact opposite and gives me no peace, thank God she has left this hotel. Being very rich she always ordered the worst wine; now I, being alone, and very poor, can still afford and do prefer the best … She, de son etat, was a Miss Steinkopft – a fille unique of the man who made all the Apollonians water, and considerably rich. Widowhood has accentuated her hatred of the French, whom she chooses to personify in me. I say that so pigheaded a woman should have been nee Schweinkopft – and also that it is a pity that seeing that at her baptism the faeries denied her the power of thought, they should have let her have the gift of speech. The rest of the party is her personal doctor, from Berlin, a very good and intelligent man, who discussed with me his nephew’s relations with the Hausdiener at the Kissingen hotel in the frankest manner conceivable as though it had been the weather …58