Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  The occupation of professional translator was perfect for an undercover agent, writing occasional reports on the rapidly changing fascist regime; Charles was free to travel wherever he liked all over Italy with the excuse of research or journalism. He rented rooms in Pisa or Rome for periods of up to a year, but he never spent more than two weeks at a time in any one place. His letters bear the addresses of pensioni; up and down the country.

  Meanwhile, he enjoyed the ex-pat literary life. D. H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda lived on and off in and around Florence – and the English Florentine colony of the 1920s was parodied in Lawrence’s novel Aaron’s Rod: original characters trying to live a stylish life on limited means. Among them were Norman Douglas and Reggie Turner, both writers, now in their mid-fifties and constantly searching for work. Douglas was a bohemian aristocrat with a scandalous past; he had been a diplomat, but was expelled from St Petersburg for having affairs with three Russian women at the same time. He moved to Capri, the setting for his most famous novel, South Wind, and there he married an Austrian cousin and had two children, but got divorced on the grounds of her adultery and obtained custody of the boys. Douglas had been prosecuted in London in both 1916 and 1917 for misdemeanours with young boys and jumped bail to Italy again. He had already published ten novels and travel books and was living on meagre royalties. Douglas had a fine head of white hair and good features, he was dominating, garrulous and liked a drink, yet when he wanted to ingratiate he had charming manners. His charm worked on Charles, who also rated his novels and tried to help get Douglas some work with his publishers. Suggesting to Guy Chapman that Douglas do a translation of Latin classics, he wrote, ‘I think Eumolpus must have been rather like Norman Douglas.’ (Eumolpus is the pedantic poet in the Satyricon.) Douglas lived on the Lungarno delle Grazie, near Charles’s pensione, with Giuseppe (Pino) Orioli, the Italian bookseller who operated a small, private press and printed editions of his friends’ works.21 Orioli was small and chubby with a debonair manner and a gift for telling long, profane stories in the manner of Boccaccio. He maintained Charles’s translating method was a casual part of daily life:

  He carried in his left hand the French volume he was translating, read a few lines of it, interrupted his reading in order to talk to me, and then took a notebook out of his pocket and wrote in English the few lines he had just read, leaning against a pine tree.22

  Douglas’s friend, Reggie Turner, author and aesthete, had written twelve novels and was living frugally on their royalties. He had his own very neat and tidy flat at 35 Viale Giovanni Milton on the north-west side of the city. Douglas and Turner spent as much time as they could at other peoples’ elaborate lunch and dinner parties where each was a demanding conversationalist. At the second party Charles attended, Douglas complained that he was unappreciated and would leave for Africa unless someone would rent him a flat. He was often escaping the police because of his pandering to young boys and his predilection for not paying debts, ‘but I shall believe him gone when I have seen him go,’ Charles told Prentice. Reggie Turner would regale dinner parties with his many personal anecdotes about his friendship with Oscar Wilde, including one about Wilde on his death bed, waking from a reverie, frightened, saying, ‘I dreamt I was having dinner round a table with the dead,’ and Turner consoling him by replying, ‘I am sure you were the life and soul of the party.’

  These three men were particularly good sources of useful information concerning the entire British ex-pat community, while Orioli knew all the Italian gossip. Another writer in the town was Ada Leverson, Violet Schiff’s ageing aunt, also known for her connections and correspondence with Oscar Wilde. Ada spent her energy promoting the Sitwells. Sir George Sitwell, father of Osbert, Sacheverell and Edith, was currently renovating a fortress-like Baroque castle, Montegufoni, perched on a hilltop near Siena. Also part of this English-speaking community around Florence was the antique dealer Arthur Acton and his American wife who owned the Renaissance villa, La Pietra. Charles visited and made friends with their son Harold, then at Oxford. He would later be knighted as a diplomat, but at the age of nineteen was suitably impressed with the thirty-four-year-old translator, who presented him with a copy of his Song of Roland that Christmas, with a written dedication in the flyleaf, which is now in the library at La Pietra.23

  Acton’s parents had bought the fifteenth-century villa in the late 1890s. His mother Hortense had American banking money and his father a habit of collecting antiques: an eclectic selection of medieval religious statues and paintings, marble busts, gilt picture frames, chairs and tables. They collected obsessively until the villa was full, and designed a terraced garden which fell on four levels from the drawing-room window, full of white statues, walks and perspective views. Harold grew up there but went to school at Eton and then to Christ Church, Oxford, where his languid, flamboyant character attracted the admiration of Evelyn Waugh. Acton was the original student to declaim Eliot’s The Waste Land over a microphone at a party, a feat that Waugh gave to his character Anthony Blanche, although later Waugh claimed Acton was not in fact the model for this character. In Memoirs of an Aesthete, published in 1948, Acton recalled entertaining Huxley, Lawrence, Aldington and Charles in Italy:

  Talking of Proust, I remembered that Paul Claudel had thundered against Du Côté de chez Swann, as ‘that world of snobs and lackeys’. Were we snobs? Not according to Proust’s definition or that of the Oxford Dictionary. We did not puff ourselves out or try to enhance our importance. I am only a snob in so far as I often want better company than my own.24

  Charles may have mixed with aesthetes and read and written about them, but his personal habits were more ascetic. Frieda Lawrence described a tea party in 1924 at which Charles and Acton appeared together.25 D. H. Lawrence had railed at Acton’s snobbery and attacked their admiration for Henry James, whom Charles had defended. Prose style was the point where they parted company: James and Proust made an art of implicit suggestion, evocative description, fine discernment; while Lawrence, Charles felt, hammered a point home till you were sick of it with his use of repetitive prose style. Nor did Charles like his ‘filthy’ sexual diversions, equally explicit and repetitive. Lawrence did not warm to Charles either; in his autobiography he describes a tea party with Charles and Turner as ‘old queens bickering round a teapot’. At that particular tea party, ‘Douglas took Lawrence’s side and the argument degenerated into a broadside against James’s Americanness.’26

  * * *

  ‘This is Armistice day here, and the Carabinieri have got plumes in their hats, and the Neptune statue is sloshing all over the Signoria, most obscenely,’27 Charles wrote on 4 November, the night he had dinner with Aldous Huxley and his wife Maria who were staying at the Schiffs’ villa in Florence. For fun, they sat around the fire reading Huxley’s Antic Hay, the alternate pages only of the uncut novel. Charles said he was now in a position to write a review of it for the English language newspaper the Italian Mail and in return Huxley agreed to write a review of Marcel Proust – an English Tribute for the same newspaper. Charles gave Huxley a copy of The Satyricon, with all the pages cut, in the hope that he would also review that. The Times Literary Supplement acknowledged this reprint of the lusty romp but gave Charles’s name as C. E. Scott Moncrieff, ‘which is my eminently respectable and married cousin the Revd. Canon D. D. Vicar of Buxton; he will be very cross, like the little rabbit.’28 Prentice, who also published Huxley, sent encouraging cuttings of good reviews of the Tribute from the Literary Review and the New Statesman and Charles asked Prentice to send a copy of his Tribute to his friend Bruno at Deene Park, who had finally solved his financial problems by getting married.

  Before moving on to Guermantes II, Charles asked Prentice if he could have a break from Proust. Instead, he proposed translating some Stendhal, which Compton Mackenzie, a Stendhal scholar (and director of the Aegean Intelligence service during the war) had suggested to Charles as a marked contrast to Proust’s laborious style, offering to lend him hi
s copy of La Chartreuse de Parme. Mackenzie had a copy of the 1846 edition, preceded by a letter of Balzac’s; this letter he had never seen translated. Stendhal had chosen to settle in Italy in 1814 in preference to his own country, combining the activities of writing novels with spying for the Napoleonic regime. Stendhal’s realist style was not appreciated in his lifetime, and he was only now beginning to be more widely read. Since Charles was living in northern Italy where the novel was set, it had a particular appeal, and, moreover, there were three volumes, meaning a future in Stendhal could be mapped out. Prentice first wanted to know if he would consider translating Proust’s early works but Charles was not keen, calling Proust’s Pastiches et Mélanges ‘a series of parodies of French stylists which it would be utterly impossible to render even into Belgian’.29

  A handwritten postscript to Prentice was Charles’s final cajole regarding Stendhal, ‘His body lays in Père Lachaise as someone said of HBV’s father.’30 HBV was their pet name for Vyvyan Holland – it was his initials backwards, and a reference to the Blessed Virgin. Charles constantly suggested works for him to translate, including at one stage Pittigrilli’s Cocaina, ‘the most amusing novel I have read for years; he has all the humour that Morand lacks.’31 Guy Chapman at Chapman and Hall, however, looked at a few pages and said that he would be ‘marched between two constables to Bow Street within three days of publication’.32

  Vyvyan made numerous visits to Italy over the next seven years to see Charles. He wrote about touring a thirteenth-century church in Stazzema, Tuscany, with him during the empty siesta period, looking into one of the confessionals and seeing printed instructions on which sins had to be referred to a higher authority before absolution could be given:

  These consisted of five: murder, blasphemy, abstention from the sacraments for over a year (which implied excommunication), the seduction of minors and, finally, indulging in sorcery of any kind, and particularly gettatura.33

  ‘Gettatura’ was cursing on the scale of the Brahan Seer. ‘The seduction of minors’ brought to mind again Charles’s short story, written at Winchester: ‘he felt that a millstone round his neck might perhaps be less offensive than the picture of those small, startled features hung for all eternity before his eyes.’ Prostitutes in Italy were often minors and Norman Douglas was often in trouble for his dealings with boys. The other Douglas, Lord Alfred, whose father had obtained evidence from rent boys for prosecuting Wilde, was now being prosecuted by the Crown for libelling Winston Churchill. Charles commented, ‘It is nice to think of Alfred Douglas in gaol at last, but almost too much to hope that they’ll keep him there.’34

  On 23 November 1923 Charles was still in Florence at the Pensione Balestri with his parents where he had developed a ‘sort of Proust reading circle among the guests’. From there he wrote to Chapman, who had published Chanson and Beowulf, proposing a translation of The Letters of Abelard and Heloise from medieval Latin. He had been told by George Moore, the writer and former neighbour in Ebury Street, who had just written a fictionalised version of the lovers’ story, that no one had ever translated the letters from Latin to English. Previous translations had been from a debased French text. Charles looked at the French one first and found it ‘stodgy’. In the Florence City Library, he found the only Latin text readily available in the Patrologiae Cursus Completus, a collection of writings by the church fathers.

  From December 1923 until March 1924 Charles’s parents stayed to winter in the Italian Riviera, in the hope that the weather would be kinder on all three semi-invalids. ‘I am sweating blood to finish vol v. of Proust before moving to Rapallo on the 10th. I did 3,500 words yesterday and have 2,500 today, mostly in a café with Italians roaring all round,’35 Charles complained, having had to escape the hotel where his father was unable to move with flu and cough. Finally, in late December all together they made the train journey to Rapallo along the coast through tunnels under cliffs, often with arches cut out of the cliffside so that they could see glimpses of the glittering Mediterranean beyond the beautiful Cinque Terre. In Rapallo Charles had booked rooms for them at the Grand Hotel Savoia.

  The Grand Hotel Savoia was sadly not as grand as its name. Rapallo was a picturesque seaside town with magnificent churches and elegant buildings right on the coast, but the hotel was inland near the railway station, in a valley with no views and moreover rather damp. To make matters worse, Charles immediately turned yellow with jaundice. Meg moved him to her larger room and tried to persuade him to see a doctor. Eventually he agreed and on 2 January 1924, a doctor who shouted his limited English in a staccato rhythm said, ‘The colour! It will be for two weeks! It is not serious! He is safe!’36

  Reggie Turner travelled from Florence to see Charles in Rapallo and decided to stay; he was introduced to Charles’s parents as a novelist and aesthete. His mother thought he was ‘a very pleasant little man, and good, easy, interesting talker’.37 George thought him ‘a sweet dog’ – hardly complimentary, but he did spot Turner’s great quality of loyalty to his friends. He came to Rapallo with the express purpose of visiting the sick Charles and cheering him up by taking him to visit another close friend, Max Beerbohm, with whom Turner had enjoyed a lifelong correspondence.38 Beerbohm, essayist, caricaturist and parodist, lived in Rapallo with his wife, Florence Kahn, in a house overhanging the coastal road. He had known Wilde and Beardsley and told Charles that he did not like Proust and never had; but when Charles showed him a review of the Tribute from the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche, Max ‘was rather braced at seeing all about it in a strange (MB’s ancestral for that matter) tongue’.39

  By now Meg had decided to move to a rented room overlooking the sea with its own balcony rather than spend so much on an expensive hotel with poor food. The new room was in a pleasant villa and had its own fireplace. She hoped that the sea air and the open fire would quicken George’s recovery. One day Charles and Reggie Turner brought Max Beerbohm and his wife to tea with the parents at the villa. Beerbohm looked at Meg’s sketches of sails and said very appreciative things, while she described him as, ‘a little elderly man with sparse grey hair and round features – they live very simply’.40

  Charles stayed on at the hotel, given it was where his considerable correspondence was directed for the moment; he did not stop working, jaundice or no. The British Passport Office had doubtless already paid for it, as Charles had explained to Prentice, ‘I shall be there for about a month, and then probably at Rome, with one of the Embassy people.’41 This done, he returned to Florence and took a room in a bohemian house on the left bank of the Arno at 54, Costa di san Giorgio, owned by an obscure British artist called Stephen Haweis. The two WCs were accessible only though Charles’s bedroom and another, while the bathroom opened directly on to a woman’s room, and from the noise above he suspected that there must have been some sort of sawmill on the roof, ‘but it is all very jolly, and when warmer weather comes, I shall be able to work on the roof which commands a boundless view of Florence across the river.’42

  Teddy Wolfe, an artist and another friend of Marsh’s whom Charles had known in London, was also living in the house. He was a high-spirited South African who had been at the Slade, and a member of the Omega Workshops, founded by members of the Bloomsbury Group in 1913. He took Charles to visit the historian and art critic Bernard Berenson at his villa, I Tatti, outside Florence, and in return Charles read part of his translation of Proust to him and asked Prentice if Wolfe could do some wood-cut illustrations for the cover of Within a Budding Grove. One trial wrapper symbolised the Champs-Elysées or Gilberte or both, the other a seascape with girls lying on the cliff; but Prentice declined.

  Charles had lost time through illness in Rapallo and through caring for his parents; but he was now finally ready to hand over the first one hundred folios of Guermantes II. He explained to Prentice, ‘They are what diplomats call identic, so you can send either to Seltzer [his American publisher].’43 On finishing the first volume of the Guermantes Way, he dedicated it to Oriana Hayne
s and composed an acrostic poem for her forty-first birthday. The first letters of each line spelled out Oriana Huxley Haynes and he prefaced the dedication, ‘To Mrs H … on her birthday.’

  As to the rest of Recherche, he told Prentice, there were still two tomes to appear, and the Anglo-American community could not understand the stalling on Sodome et Gomorrhe. In Britain the publication would cause scandal and possibly legal action against translator and publisher. Teddy Wolfe appeared one day with a well-bound copy of Ulysses, published the year before in Paris to escape strict British censorship laws. Also,

  Seltzer seems to have secured an important decision in the US courts, entitling him to publish pretty well what he likes. If he is to print the book, the risk from (not of) suppression in Britain should not be very great. Reading one of Firbank’s books here this morning, I am sure that there is nothing in Proust so indecent as almost every page of Firbank.44

  Charles finished the second part of The Guermantes Way in five months; the same amount of time as it had taken to complete the first half. ‘It has taken far too long,’ he remarked, while admitting that of all three parts, The Guermantes Way was easily the best translation, being ‘not so “literary” as Swann – which is probably a good thing’.45

  By now Prentice had met the Schiffs and become extremely fond of them, though he did not visit Cambridge Square very often. ‘I dare say you find their atmosphere rather exhausting,’ wrote Charles, ‘like tuberoses in a bedroom: that awed reverence for what the Philistine would regard as a bawdy book.’46 Reading Schiff’s latest novel, Richard, Myrtle and I, written in the second person and based on the couple’s relationship with Proust, Charles commented, ‘a grisly array of family skeletons’.47 He did however continue to send Mrs Schiff proof sheets of his translations, although he soon realised that the Schiffs would not be able to help much with the difficult job of correcting errors. It had become a mere formality to send them his work ever since he had left London, especially since Mrs Schiff was so ‘modest and laudatory, she will not venture to correct any slips’.48