by Jean Findlay
Now that he had settled permanently in Italy, Charles had to tackle the language. ‘I read the Corriere prayerfully, and the Stampa, which has an admirable London correspondent. But I shall never speak the language, still less write it, which seems to be immensely difficult,’49 he told Prentice. However, before long he was suggesting Italian authors to translate. First Mario Mariani, whose Meditazioni d’un Pazzo, (A Madman’s Meditations) he thought ‘not exactly deep but the sort of shallowness sprinkled with allusions to Kant, Schopenhauer, Oscar Wilde and all those johnnies, and a certain amount of rather mordant criticism of contemporary life’.50 Then he suggested the dramatist Luigi Chearelli and the young novelist Guido Morselli – all of which came to nothing. Finally he saw a book called Uno per l’anno, on a stall in Viareggio. He bought it, read it excitedly and wrote to Prentice, ‘he is the goods. Freeze onto him.’51 The author was Pirandello. ‘In a year or two,’ Charles swore, he’ll be booming in England, there is no doubt that he is going to be the big noise in drama in the next decade … Whether his Novelle will be modern enough – they are a bridge between Maupassant and Aldous Huxley – I can’t say.’52 Nor could Prentice, who would later have the problems of dealing with the copyright, and who decided to welcome Charles’s translations of Stendhal first, before turning to ‘Eyetalian’ authors.
Charles was eager to start on Stendhal, but found it difficult to concentrate in Florence. There was a steady stream of tourists, friends of friends from Britain who expected him to be their tour guide; the general literary milieu was too dissolute and indisciplined and the house he lived in with Teddy Wolfe had a number of drug addicts. He wanted a different kind of life. Vyvyan Holland offered to help; he had a friend, whom they called Consul Evans, part of a network of ‘friendships fostered on battlefields’ who lived alone with only servants and dogs in an old villa outside Lucca in a village called Cerasomma, without electricity or modern conveniences. Evans liked Charles and was prepared to have him as a lodger, ‘free of charge in return for my conversation’.53 There was an advantage from an intelligence point of view of staying with Evans. He was also ex-military and lived conveniently equidistant between Viareggio and Pisa. In June Charles bought a bicycle so that he could continue his reporting: travelling around picking up information on the local military bases, air bases and railway stations. Agents were given a train-watchers’ guide to identify military units by the silhouettes of the wagons. You could tell whether a train was carrying an infantry, artillery or cavalry unit by the shape of the transport and number of carriages.
With less social life and more time Charles went into a frenzy of translating. He would cycle into Lucca to buy more Pirandello texts, so that he would have a ready pile to work on. On 19 June 1924 he finished typing Sodome et Gomorrhe I, next he would start the Chartreuse de Parme, then do Abelard and Heloise for Chapman and then move back to the rest of Stendhal and Pirandello. All this he explained in long letters to his publishers. ‘Your letter arrived this extremely hot morning. I should be in Viareggio but am confined to the house and garden because of sore throat and stomach ache probably because of bicycling in the dust from Pisa yesterday.’54 Charles then summarised several of Pirandello’s stories in detail to persuade Prentice that he must take them on. He suggested publishing them in line with the Chatto Chekov series: a book of fifteen short stories of 5000 words each.
Proust was the handbook for the urban haute bourgeois: neurotic, intellectual, tortured, decadent. But Pirandello, what a breath of fresh air – though by no means simple: he could do torture and neurosis just as well – but his insights seemed cleaner. Pirandello came from Sicily and wrote about small town society that stretched from peasants to petite bourgeoisie. Laced through his writing was a different sort of Catholicism – the prayers of the poor. His stories were unpredictable, full of untidy endings and unanswered questions. Like Proust with Ruskin, Pirandello had started his creative life as a translator, translating Goethe. Charles was so impassioned that he wrote to Vyvyan, ‘I am going to translate the complete works of Pirandello, in two hundred and eighteen volumes; it will be very difficult, as I do not know any Italian.’55
That summer Oriana Haynes and her daughter Renée came to Italy. Starting at the mud baths at Abano, they moved to Lucca and Pisa where Charles acted as guide and companion. He took them round the seventeenth-century fortified walls of Lucca, planted with trees; the church of San Michele and the little shops and cafés in the myriad narrow streets. In Pisa he related the history of the Piazza dei Miracoli, the astonishingly beautiful square with its marble cathedral dating back to the twelfth century. He limped up the three hundred steps of the Leaning Tower, without railings, faster than the teenage Renée, and took them to the cafés and restaurants in his favourite haunts. They stayed at the Hotel Nettuno, which Charles had discovered on a trip that February. It was an elegant, palatial hotel overlooking the Arno, built in the early nineteenth century with over a hundred bedrooms, a winter garden, a ballroom for three hundred, reading rooms, concert rooms and a restaurant. All the major literary and political figures stayed there. Before they left, Charles gave Oriana the carbon copy of Guermantes II and the first chapter of Stendhal’s Chartreuse to take to Prentice at Chatto.
Charles made regular visits to Viareggio, for bathing, he explained, and they were always punctuated with a stop at his favourite restaurant at the side of the Burlamacco Canal, where Armando Cassini, restaurateur and citizen of the world, became his firm friend as well as his source for any sailors’ gossip about the Italian Navy, where ships were going and what was on board. But on 9 July he was called to Viareggio for Cassini’s funeral. Distracted by the event he sat down at another pier restaurant and accidentally dropped his typewriter case into the sea – in it were chapters six, seven and ten of Chartreuse – he had just finished chapter ten a few minutes earlier. With them went ‘the French text of Chartreuse and 2 vols. of Pirandello – and the whole floated, or rather bobbed on the tide – two gay hotel labels on top reassuring me with their coloured smile, while an intrepid nude hauled a double sendaline [raft] into the water and finally swam for and rescued the whole.’ He tipped the youth ten lire, ‘which was cheap for the recovery of a month’s work’.56
Not far south, the island of Capri, off the coast near Naples, was the summer haunt of many writers and home of Compton Mackenzie, who invited Charles to stay for a period to discuss Stendhal. ‘Mackenzie says he can read no novels now except Jane Austen and Stendhal.’57 With Compton Mackenzie’s experience of working as a secret agent in Greece all during the war, there was more than literary know-how to exchange. But Charles took his chance, as Mackenzie always remembered,58 to test his translations by reading them out loud for Mackenzie’s judgement. After a week with Mackenzie, Charles moved to the Hotel La Palma for ten days where he just missed the novelist Louis Golding but ‘caught the dust left behind him. He seems to have got Norman Douglas and the Brett-Youngs to lunch together – all most willingly by telling each party that the other had invited him/them. The bill is still circulating between Capri and Anacapri.’59 While in a restaurant with other friends, Charles was locked in the toilet by the waiter, who explained that he had done it ‘per ridere’ (just for a laugh). For Charles it was only funny in retrospect, but what he did find amusing was the fate of the volume of Stendhal he had borrowed from the London Library:
A loyal but misguided servant brought it from Cerasomma on a bicycle, which has rather frayed the boards. I should say however that it is not in great demand at the Library and should hold out another fifty years in its present state.60
He had to move from Cerasomma at the end of July because living with Consul Evans became complicated. After two years in India, Charles thought, he had become insane as he saw all Italians as ‘natives and himself as the only “white man” in a large jungle area’. So Charles moved into the Hotel Nettuno in Pisa, from where he sent the translations of Balzac’s preface to the Chartreuse de Parme. He wrote to Vyvyan that he
revelled in being back in Pisa: ‘I have wild adventures every night under the leaning tower.’ Vyvyan was now inspired to visit. ‘Bring bathing drawers,’ Charles urged, ‘we will bathe in the rivers, of which there are two, one still and one sparkling.’61
A group of young Italian flying officers were staying at the Nettuno. Several of these would invite him to take wine with them every night. ‘They are extremely intelligent like all intelligent Italians and entertaining, like all Italians.’62 One young aviator, Captain Federico Frezzan, was impressed when he heard Charles was translating Stendhal but when he discovered he intended to translate Pirandello, his admiration knew no bounds, and he became a firm friend and a part of Charles’s network. They were excited about the huge investment Mussolini was making in the Italian air force and the details of it expanding into Africa. When twelve Yemeni nobles arrived in Rome to undergo training as pilots, the flying fraternity knew about it.63 By no accident, Wing-Commander Fletcher, the British Air Attaché at Rome arrived at the Nettuno: ‘He has been most useful to me, as I am now accepted as perfectly “orlri” by the local aeronauts.’64
As a further encouragement to Vyvyan to visit, Charles related ‘an interval of disrespectability’, where he went with the head waiter at the Nettuno, another waiter and a friend in a car to Pisa Marina, then on to Leghorn where they
abducted the only woman left in a d:s:rd:rly h::s: and took her to Pisa with a ‘fall out on the right of the road, boys’ en route, in which I did not participate: I was a little revolted when the head-waiter, who took her off into the darkness and had previously served the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, came back calling out, ‘Seconda Serie!’ But such is life.65
Vyvyan Holland promptly arrived and they spent a week in Florence where Charles got ‘flu’ again but luckily had Vyvyan to nurse him and help him back to the comforts of the Nettuno. Then they took off for a tour of Northern Italy, going first to Milan where they had a cinema flick book made of themselves seated at a table smoking and talking, then to Carrara and the Apuan Alps, which they climbed with two donkeys and pack men. Vyvyan took photos of Charles with the muleteers and standing proudly at the summit of Monte Forato. Charles busied himself with correcting Vyvyan’s Baedeker and they both translated en route. Charles was working on Stendhal and they visited the original Charterhouse at Parma, a working monastery.
Returning to Pisa on 1 October he found a parcel from Prentice which he ‘hoped was full of Budding Girls’.66 But it was not until the 9th that the finished version of Within a Budding Grove arrived. When it came, he sent a list of those who would have to be sent free copies including some of the contributors to the Tribute, ‘such as poor old Violet Hunt; she has so few pleasures, as Saint-Loup said of his mistress’.67
Charles enjoyed the Nettuno, which was where Pirandello’s eponymous hero stayed in his novel Il Fu Matteo Pascale, but it was too expensive for permanent life and in September he moved to a flat almost next door. ‘Pisa is a very charming place to stay in,’ he told Prentice, ‘– lively and quiet if you know what I mean. I write in my bedroom window looking down the Arno waiting for a friend to arrive from Viareggio on a bicycle. He may have gone to Cerasomma instead which would be a pity.’ Number 20 Lungarno Reggio was a convenient few doors away from the Hotel Nettuno, where Charles had his meals. His landlord, Signor Frascani, was a gynaecologist and Charles received a receipt for his weekly stream of black coffees on gynaecologist headed notepaper, which he kept, ‘per ridere’, in his translating notebook. The rooms were on the first floor with high ceilings overlooking the main road along the busy Arno, and he could see a tiny marble church set on one of the bridges across the river. The light was fantastic, reflecting off the river and the yellow stucco houses on the opposite bank. On arrival he had thirteen consecutive days of sunshine; he would wake at dawn and lie until his pillow scorched his face, then sit on the balcony in his pyjamas and an old hat and read until breakfast time. His books finally arrived from England and a local carpenter constructed a library. For his intelligence work he covered the walls with maps of the area, large and small-scale, and began sticking them together, and on 21 November he told Vyvyan that he was going on a trip to Siena with one aviator, two infantry officers, and a chemical expert. No further details were given.
Charles’s copies of his translation of Stendhal’s Armance catalogue his journeys up and down the coast: Pisa, Viareggio, La Spezia and Rome, with dates, sometimes only three days in one place. It is likely he was also being sent to watch or report on naval and military activities. To explain the political picture it was necessary to know that the Suez Canal and the Red Sea were the jugular veins of the route between Britain and India, and this was the area of Mussolini’s ambition. It was discovered that Italian arms were being used against the British Aden Protectorate in Arabia. Britain asked fascist Italy to take every possible step to prevent this export of arms to Arabia, but, although Mussolini agreed to stop the shipment of weapons, British intelligence continued to obtain incontrovertible evidence that arms, ammunition, cartridges and guns were continually being smuggled into Arabia under the supervision of Italian naval vessels.68
As autumn advanced Charles felt he needed a companion in his room and fell in love with the large, yellow eyes of a small owl being sold on the steps of San Michele in Borgo, ‘of the kind called Civetta, which means coquette or pretty lady’.69 He bought it for ten francs without a cage and put it, tethered with leather cuffs at the feet, on his balcony, ‘looking drownfully at the Arno … It does not love me yet, but I hope it will,’ he told Prentice, ‘the look of hatred in its painted eyes diminishes my loneliness.’70 His hours of solitude were self-enforced in order to finish his work; this was hard, as he was pathologically gregarious. His landlady suggested the owl should be taught to type, but it would sit and stare, as owls do, behind Charles on a sofa, and was particularly attracted, he noticed, to the emblem of the head of Pallas on Chatto and Windus envelopes. He wrote all about his owl to Vyvyan: one evening he heard a bang from his bedroom; ‘I went in and found a very self-righteous little owl on the floor’, looking like ‘one of the older members of the Savile.’ The owl was hungry, and Charles ‘boldly got some raw meat from the Nettuno, at the sight of which she gave one of her infrequent yelps.’ Eating raw meat left an ineradicable mess on the furniture.
I find it very invigorating to have a strong character battling against my own. I can always quell her by wrapping her in a coloured cotton handkerchief. She tucks in her claws and pretends to be dead … another tip from Tenente-pilote Frezzan was: ‘Don’t liberate her at night, or she will excavate you the eyes.’ A grim thought.71
CHAPTER 14
Discovering Pirandello
The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.
Luigi Pirandello, Six Characters in Search of an Author, 1921
In settling in Italy and finding Pisa a ‘calm but lively’ place to live, Charles was embarking on the most prolific writing period of his life. In the next six years he would translate fifteen volumes, compile a genealogy, write countless articles and thousands of spirited, intimate letters. Most of the time he was in pain from his old wounds, from recurring trench fever, and from the beginnings of what with hindsight can be seen as stomach cancer, but he thought was indigestion.
He longed to write a book of his own and at the end of October proposed to Prentice ‘a kind of meditative Reisebilder book’ travelwriting, memoir, social criticism and literary debate:
There would be Apuan Alps, Massa-Carrara, Parma, thoughts in Milan, Piacenza, Pisa (without the Tower), Lucca, San Miniato al Tedesco, odds and ends from a Lungarno window, the Church of San Piero a Grado, where I saw last Sunday the recently laid-bare walls of the 1st century church built after the Apostle Peter landed there on his way to Rome; also some remarks on Stendhal’s Parma and the real, the Balbec sculptures and Giovanni’s pulpit. Any amount of history and geography, mostly lifted fro
m obscure Italian gazetteers, and of reminiscences, personal abuse and reflexions generally … It would be a relief, as at present I go to bed and start stringing sentences in my mind and get no sleep and scramble over the cement floor looking for a geography book of Tuscany, and awake next morning about 9.15 with the sun scorching the tip of my nose.1
Prentice was encouraging without promising an advance. It would have been an intriguing read; a blend of the vivacity of his letters and the intellectual rigour of his articles. However, he put all his spare energy after translation into his vast correspondence and restarted an affectionate bout with Edward Marsh at the end of November 1924.
Dear, ubiquitous Eddie,
You have been so many times on the verge of receiving a letter from me … opening Henry James’s Letters, a book that fills the emptiest winter room with the warm breath of intimate communicative people, I was immediately taken slap into your company, so much that I felt it almost indecent not to cry out to you that I was there …2
We do not have Marsh’s replies, but Charles wrote a day later: ‘Our letters cross like sky rockets in the breeding season, ut ita dicam, as Abelard says when he is being particularly rude to Heloise.’3
Edward Marsh was now in a position of some power as Private Secretary to Winston Churchill, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, after his re-election in 1924. Marsh remained at the Treasury until 1929, and was also officially Private Secretary at the Colonial Office. Charles begged him: