by Jean Findlay
Write to me and tell me – not secrets, of course, – about the Treasury. Do you help to interfere with prosecutions? Will you stop them from prosecuting me if I translate Sodome et Gomorrhe. Do they give you an adding machine? It must be delightful.
I am seriously delighted that Winston has returned to power, and hope to see him Prime Minister when I return to England. I suppose his difficulty will always be to secure followers; but what followers more can a man need who has the exquisite, endless and devoted service of yourself?4
Marsh was the intellectual Jeeves to Winston Churchill’s Wooster, following him to every department until his retirement in 1937 when he was knighted. At the end of 1924 Marsh’s own translation of Forty-Two Fables of La Fontaine was going to press. He sent Charles a complimentary copy and Charles replied with comparisons of La Fontaine’s characters to key political figures who mingled daily with Marsh at Westminster, asking if the similarities were intentional.
Guy Chapman had asked Charles that year to begin work on the medieval Latin text of the letters of Abelard and Heloise, which Charles started as soon as he had received the £150 advance. The first page of his translating jotter5 titles the book, Letter the First which is a History of the Misfortunes Calamities of Abelard written to a Friend. The ‘l’ in the word ‘calamities’ is crossed and the last ‘i’ omitted, making it read ‘catamites’. Above it is a fine sketch of an ejaculating penis. The doodle is either a sympathetic gesture to the fate of Abelard who was castrated, or a representation of Charles’s own activities. He told Marsh that he had been to Florence to visit, ‘the fleshpots and fiaschi’6, and on return, to his remorse, found that his owl had died from cold, hunger and neglect. He was mortified, and went into a flurry of work. He wrote a gloomy and confused letter to Prentice saying that he had inherited the family trait of ‘accepting diametrically opposite advice and feeling the full importance of things that don’t matter.’7 The death of his owl did matter, and the fact that he had left her alone while he went off to seek sensual pleasure made him guilty on top; even more so, he was reminded of the death of his dog Dido when he was ten and many deaths of loved ones that he had mourned since then. To make matters worse, the post brought ‘a horrid budget of American Proust “clippings” among which the American Nature proves what I had long suspected, that I know no French at all. I feel a proper idiot, as B. and Charlus say, “Je suis seul, je suis veuf, et sur moi la nuit tombe.”’8
However, entertainment was always around the corner. That December, his favourite literary enemies, the Sitwells, turned up at the Hotel Nettuno as he gleefully told Marsh:
After the Sitwells had left the other day, in what the Maitre d’Hotel called a ‘magnifico Rolls-Roger’ he told me that they had inquired about me, and my last name being little used here, were told that Signor Scott divided time in Pisa. They will probably send a report that I am living under a false name. He also asked me whether they were signori o scrittori which left me at a loss for an answer.9
Were they gentlemen or writers? Charles would have answered neither. There was not the same dilemma over Puccini, who had died suddenly in November at the age of sixty-seven, after a glorious and controversial career composing great operas. Charles had attended a gala performance the night before of Manon Lescaut, and the curtain had not come down until four minutes to one:
… which would hardly have suited a London audience. We rose and stood for a moment in pitch darkness in homage to the soul of Puccini who walked from Lucca to see a performance of Aida when seventeen, with a bosom friend they took a single room in a hostelry outside the Lucca gate, in his friends name – Puccini entering through the window – it was then that he decided to be a Maestro.10
On Christmas Eve Charles went to midnight Mass at the Duomo, the ‘most beautiful church in the world’11 and stood at the chancel rail in front of a group of drunken students, one of whom shouted into the painted dome, ‘Io faccio un discorso’ (‘I want to make a speech’), going on to protest that the students’ study of obstetrics gave them a professional interest in the Virgin birth. His friend kept telling him to shut up, in French
‘Tesez fou, je fous prie; l’église est la meson de Die’ and a slim smart carabiniere who was with them, muffled in his cloak, kissed him from time to time in the hope of keeping him quiet. All very odd in an English duomo, I couldn’t help thinking.12
The winter was cold and wet and Charles at last bought an oil-fuelled stove, finding the domestic heating inadequate. The New Year 1925 began with an all-night party in Charles’s flat to celebrate his completion of The Charterhouse of Parma, which, with red wine spilt on the first page, was then dispatched to London. A few days later, Charles noticed that the post office was shut on the Feast of the Epiphany, remarking that the Italians were still outwardly religious, despite the offices of the local Catholic newspaper being completely destroyed the week before by supporters of the government.
Mussolini had always argued that violence was a necessary part of his regime. In January 1925 he declared that for the good of the country he was assuming dictatorial powers; opposition politicians were arrested and national newspapers handed over to fascist proprietors. The Catholic press had been professional in reporting violence by Blackshirts, and they were destroyed overnight – the presses smashed and the personnel disappeared. Mussolini cleverly fostered the church divide by wooing the Papacy, who already thought the Catholic press too liberal, with conservative proposals. Over the next year Mussolini banned contraceptives, put a tax on bachelors, and received the official backing of Pope Pius XI. A year later, in November 1926, all non-fascist political activity, whether in the press or public meetings, was prohibited. The Fascist Grand Council replaced parliament, they compiled a list of candidates for election and the electorate had the right only to accept or reject their entire list. Charles began to notice that he was sometimes being followed.
In spite of or because of the political situation that year, Charles hoped to work on Abelard, then Stendhal’s Abbess of Castro, three short stories about appalling corruption among medieval Italian aristocracy, one of which dealt very squarely with incest. He gave up the idea of translating Stendhal’s Chroniques Italiennes and decided to hand over Stendhal’s volume on romantic love with women De l’Amour to Vyvyan Holland who, he explained to Prentice, was constantly falling in love with women: ‘It is much more his line and gives no scope whatsoever for prose style which is generally considered to be my stunt.’13 Next he lined up Le Rouge et le Noir and a collection of Pirandello short stories. Charles was on a mission to propagate Pirandello and was convinced the critics would compare his short stories to Tolstoy and de Maupassant, and his plays to Chekov. He was to be proved correct in forecasting the public’s appreciation, for when the stories were published – brief, dynamic and full of tragic absurdity – the reviews poured in more copiously than they had even for his Proust. Short stories were more satisfying than a million-word novel, even in volume parts, it seemed.
As Charles worked furiously in Pisa, his parents came south again, like birds for the winter: George, old and ill, was taken by Meg to the French Riviera for some January sun. For Charles, duty called. He tore himself away from his lovingly reassembled library, fearful of the gloomy prospect which might await him by his father’s bedside, arriving on 12 January in Eze-sur-Mer, at the ominously named Hotel Terminus. George, however, did not die. Instead he revelled in reading the copy of James Melville, the sixteenth-century Scots memoir-writer, which Charles had asked Chapman to send on. He did not think it wise to let his father read Petronius. The parental tour, organised by the indefatigable Meg continued and a week later they arrived at Beaulieu, still on the Riviera. His parents were blooming, but Charles, struggling with Abelard’s letters vi and vii, fell victim to the ‘treacherous dolls house climate’,14 and was too weak to type the rest of letter vii. There was the continual problem of which translation of the Bible to use, because what was familiar to the public was not necessar
ily appropriate to the text, so he had sometimes to translate straight from Abelard, who would have used his own Latin eleventh-century version.
He complained to Chapman that:
There is not the least vestige of love in Abelard’s last letters; in fact he obviously was tired of her when he sent her to Argenteuil, or at any rate when he lost his worker’s dreadnoughts.15
As with his other books, Charles started to care about the characters. Before long he realised that George Moore had written his fictional romance based on the seventeenth-century French version of the letters, which differed almost entirely from the medieval Latin original. By the end of January he was only halfway through ‘the insufferable Abelard’. Chapman encouraged him by saying the booksellers were expecting it. Any clamour from booksellers, Charles replied, was doubtless because of his name as the translator of Proust rather than any assumed erotic popularity Abelard might be expected to have, ‘though I suppose people will read his letters as they go to see the Ermafrodoti at the Uffizi, with a comfortable sense of their own entirety’.16 Abelard’s castration continued to preoccupy him, as did any whiff of sex in the medieval latin,
The passage about fornication at Argenteuil you will find on my folios 76-77. They did it in the refectory, apparently, in a smell of stale mutton fat and wine lees.17
Still with parents in tow on 11 February 1925, he took his typewriter to the Pensione Ginevra in Viareggio on the via Manin, opposite the sandy beach and near the Burlamacco Canal with its restaurants that cooked the catch directly off the boats. The beach had romantic if tragic associations, as the body of the shipwrecked Shelley was washed up at Viareggio in 1834, and was immediately cremated there on a pyre attended by his friend and fellow poet Byron. A string of English writers and poets came on pilgrimages to this beach at some point in their lives and a Protestant English church was built in Catholic Viareggio to accommodate the growing number of visitors, which increased as the town became a fashionable wintering place. Charles’s parents were now staying in front of the beach at the other end of the straight, windswept promenade, and the daily walk to see them gave him both rheumatism and tonsillitis: ‘It is cold and damp – I must abed and go on reading d’Annunzio’s Fuoco which is longer even than Abelard’s evasion of his conjugal duties.’18
At the end of February, he was hurriedly typing the last of letter vii in between visits from his parents. He had the idea of writing the introduction also in the form of letters; one from himself to George Moore, which he would make controversial, and then the reply from Moore. He wrote to Chapman on Abelard:
Only the irrepressible young prig who insisted on lecturing impromptu upon the interpretation of Ezekiel, and expected his better instructed seniors then to sit under him, could have grown into the intolerable old egoist who could write to his wife (in the Fifth Letter) of his own emasculation: ‘Neither grieve that thou wert the cause of so great a good, for which thou needst not doubt that thou wert principally created by God.’19
Charles did, however, admire Heloise; not many female scholars still call out from the twelfth century. Heloise unflinchingly describes her desires in her letters: Abelard may have been castrated, but she has not. Her letters are truly loving and she has a professional and conscientious interest in running her convent, whereas Abelard, Charles maintained, was motivated by lust and self-interest. In the introduction, George Moore defended Abelard, and identified with him and his life of lamentation, remembering that Abelard had to contend with the line from Deuteronomy 23:1, ‘He that is wounded in the stones or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter into the congregation of the Lord.’ George Moore, like Abelard, saw Heloise as a sexual object and ended by fantasising, somewhat absurdly, about her sitting as his Muse at the end of his ‘mahogany-rimmed bath’, whispering words ‘so shocking that I dare not repeat them.’20 Whereas Moore could only see, and exploit, his erotic and romantic fantasy of Abelard and Heloise, Charles, the scholar, both worked from the original letters and tried to tease out the truth of their relationship. He saw Abelard’s hurt pride and priggish ambition and realised that Abelard had not loved Heloise, while she did love and desire him.
Charles moved back and forth from Pisa, working in the intense cold of a north-facing room while wind was blowing off the snow in Viareggio. Fortified by whisky and Ellimans Embrocation he finally managed to finish the ‘wretched stuff’ – just in time, as Arthur Waugh senior, Chapman’s colleague and managing director and chairman of publisher Chapman and Hall, was due to arrive in Italy, expecting to be entertained by Charles and taken on guided tours. They travelled to Florence, back to Pisa and then to Rome for five days. However Waugh’s refusal to learn a word of Italian made him a very dependent traveller. They visited St Peter’s, which for Charles was a great disappointment; he now admired St Paul’s in London more than ever. The main reason for the trip to Rome was to meet Pirandello and discuss copyright. Charles took Arthur Waugh and Captain Frezzan, the literary aviator from the Nettuno, on a tour of the Roman theatres and eventually found Pirandello in the Metastasio, rehearsing his company for a summer tour of England. He invited Charles to his home the next day and they thrashed out the copyright problems. ‘He is a most delightful simple old gent. With large eyes the colour of good coffee, like A. France.’21 The geniality of the man and the excitement of the meeting overshadowed the business aspect, but finally he was there. In June Prentice wrote to say that the coast was clear for Charles to start translating two of Pirandello’s novels, Si Gira and I Vecchi e i Giovani. His translation of the first paragraph of Si Gira (Shoot!) spoke comically to him about his own hectic life:
I study people in their most ordinary occupations, to see if I can succeed in discovering in others what I feel that I myself lack in everything that I do: the certainty that they understand what they are doing.22
Shoot! is a novel about filming a captivating actress called the Nestroff, who trifles with the affections of two actors. It was peculiarly relevant to Charles, who was in the midst of his own fascination for a woman introduced to him by Vyvyan: ‘Life without you is almost more intolerable than life with you,’23 Charles complained. Vyvyan had become entangled with a Mrs Ruby Melville, a London society beauty. In the 1920 society portrait by William Orpen she has lively brown eyes, a sharp red bob, a daring lace décolleté showing off long white arms, hands on her hips, slender fingers splayed over a wasp waist. She looks unafraid of anything. She was now on the run from her wealthy ageing husband and vivaciously interested in other men in Italy. Vyvyan fled and Mrs Melville stayed behind, ringing Charles who gave excuses on Vyvyan’s behalf, using it to tease him as usual, ‘… and told her that you had conceived a violent but wholly unnatural passion for the fascista who collects the tickets at the uscita at Pisa station … She much shocked, promised not to breathe a word to anybody about your sad laps [sic].’24
Five days later Charles, ever in love with Vyvyan’s company, implored him by letter, ‘I want you badly – will you come to Capri with me for a fortnight?’25 He went to Florence in search of Vyvyan. Walking into Casoni’s, the fashionable café on the via Tornabuoni, he saw Ruby presiding over a cake party. Consul Evans came up to Charles and said abruptly, ‘I don’t like your beard,’ and Ruby rounded loudly, ‘I like every bit of him.’ He then had to escort her round the town and home and ‘press my beard into her face … R. seems to like me because I am so utterly different to what she gets served up to her … and has even asked me to marry her, to protect her from honourable intentions.’ Meaning Ruby did not want to settle down and if married to Charles would be free to move from man to man just as he did. ‘My beard is lovely now … and eminently desirable by women.’ Charles was mesmerised by Ruby, she was the only woman he had ever met who was as confidently promiscuous as he was. In fact she made off with one of Charles’s nubile young Italian consorts named Pippo. Charles consoled himself with another regular friend named Nello who was in need of finances for his sick sister, and whose brother
and mother both arrived asking for money. At this point Charles’s life read like a bedroom farce: escaping from women, getting postcards from young Italian men, consoling a man in love with Vyvyan who had briefly fled back to England, calming mothers of young upset lovers, and writing spontaneous limericks to Vyvyan, such as, ‘There was a young man of Faenza, who had terribly bad influenza: he plugged his meatus with Kidd’s apparatus and drank selz, non con cognac, ma senza.’26
He would often give Vyvyan advice about what to translate, advising him to take on Stendhal’s De l’Amour as he himself found Stendhal easy. ‘You can do it straight on to the typewriter without even stopping to masturbate, as in the case of Proust.’27 Vyvyan meanwhile sent Charles shirt samples, asking if he could try and match them with Italian cotton. Charles replied with customary innuendo, ‘I am extremely busy … I am not in the shirt trade: I prefer what lies, or occasionally stands behind.’28 Charles had to go straight to Bologna for a few days on an intelligence exercise for Louis, during which he had time for all the local churches and sights and sent ‘Vybs’ a postcard.
Through the hectically social summer of 1925, Charles translated Stendhal’s two-volume novel Le Rouge et le Noir, and The Abbess of Castro, Stendhal’s collection of short stories. Proof sheets of The Guermantes Way came from Chatto and the Letters of Abelard to Heloise from Chapman to be corrected at the same time, while he continued translating Si Gira, Pirandello’s novel about the film industry. He dedicated the translation ‘To O.H.H. and V.B.H. who have seen and survived the Nestroff’ (meaning Ruby Melville). In October the Nouvelle Revue Française published the fifth part of Proust’s novel, originally titled La Fugitive, but retitled as Albertine Disparue by Gallimard, to prevent it being confused with Tagore’s La Fugitive of 1921. There was still pressure on Charles from Proust’s American publisher, however, to work on Sodome et Gomorrhe. Charles was dreading the moral onslaught this translation might bring. These two volumes of Proust’s novel began with the introduction, ‘Introducing the men-women, descendants of those of the inhabitants of Sodom who were spared by the fire from heaven.’ The first volume concerned the character of the Baron de Charlus, the ageing homosexual aristocrat, with his pot belly and make-up, seeking out the young hairdresser Jupien.