by Jean Findlay
Meanwhile Jupien, shedding at once the humble, honest expression which I had always associated with him, had – in perfect symmetry with the Baron – thrown up his head, given a becoming tilt to his body, placed his hand with a grotesque impertinence on his hip, stuck out his behind, posed himself with the coquetry that the orchid might have adopted on the providential arrival of the bee. I had not supposed that he could appear so repellent.
Charles thought that a light warning verse on the last page of The Guermantes Way might be a way of enticing the reader with what was to come next. On 6 June he sent this verse in the form of an acrostic poem to Prentice, the first letter of each line spelling ADIEU A MARCEL PROUST.
A little chit who writes a lot
Declares this book should be destroyed
In fact, as Mister Lynam Dott
Explains, it simply reeks of Freud,
Ugly enough, he says, in Nature;
Ah! But how foul when turned to literature …29
He carried on, teasing his editor about ‘Love mentioned in connection with de Charlus’. Prentice found it funny, but not printable. He would have to read the translation himself then consult a lawyer versed in the Obscene Publications Act.
Accustomed as he was to writing really unprintable limericks to Vyvyan,30 Charles thought his effort to Prentice was rather tasteful. During June, as the weather in Pisa got hotter, Charles lured Vyvyan back and they set off on a trip for fresher air up the Apuan Alps to escape the social chaos. After a climb of 6100 feet, Charles had to let the others go ahead. On the way back he found that his white linen summer trousers were covered in his own blood at the seat. Rectal bleeding is often the first sign of stomach cancer, but Charles did not know this. He still had a walk of twenty miles to the next railway station at Barga Gallicano. He spent the night at the inn there in considerable pain, ‘where the daughters of the house are all speechless and coo like outraged doves’. And then with ‘one hand at the back of my ruined trousers, picked my way through the chestnuts to Barga’.31 Exerting himself to the point of bleeding, he typically remained stoical through the pain, and instead wrote up information from railway stations in reports for the Passport Office, and in letters as entertainment for his correspondents.
One of those correspondents was the young Alec Waugh, son of the publisher Charles had just taken around Rome, and brother of Evelyn, who in 1925 was working in a prep school. Alec, on Evelyn’s behalf, asked Charles if he needed a secretary, seeing that life in Italy in the warmth and among expatriate writers was preferable to life in the cold in England, and Charles in conversation agreed. On the strength of this Evelyn threw in his job as a tutor and dreamed of ‘a year abroad drinking Chianti under olive trees and listening to discussions of all the most iniquitous outcasts of Europe’.32 Charles then wrote to say that he did not want a secretary after all, realising he could not afford one; he moved around too much for it to be practical and his work for the secret service made it all too complicated. He had a card index at Pisa with book research on one side and classified secrets on the back. Moreover at nineteen, Evelyn Waugh could speak no other languages and could not use a typewriter. Evelyn wrote, ‘One night, soon after I got the news from Pisa, I went down alone to the beach with my thoughts full of death. I took off my clothes and began swimming out to sea.’33 Fortunately he met a shoal of jellyfish and was stung back to reality and swam ashore.
* * *
That spring Oriana Haynes had come to northern Italy for a two-month rest cure, but instead caught rheumatic fever which was later complicated by pneumonia. Charles was very disturbed on hearing the news. He had earlier hoped ‘to converge with Mrs Haynes and perhaps carry her off, Centaur and Lapith, to the hills’34 where he planned to read her the proofs of Chartreuse. He leapt into action and had her moved immediately to Pisa, where he sat up all night with her. But there was no point in getting ill himself and nursing was not his calling, so at the Hayneses’ expense he organised for her specific nursing needs a local nun who spoke no English. He also engaged a ‘companion’ – who turned out to be Mrs Ruby Melville – by way of some entertainment. With all three female charges he moved to the Palace Hotel in Livorno, the most luxurious hotel in the vicinity – a great, pompous yellow palace on the beach in the sea breeze. Charles began at once to read his translations to the bedridden Oriana, with the help of Ruby Melville, who could not quite take the pace, soon collapsing into bed herself. Not to waste a helper, Charles presented her with the entire translation of Proust so far, six volumes, for her entertainment and his observation. As he explained to Prentice, ‘one needs to be bedridden to absorb them all; indeed, there might be a special edition with a red cross on the cover and a pocket for thermometers, syringes etc, inside the boards.’35 Charles made Suora Agata laugh, but the nun had to turn him out when he stayed too long with her charge. On 2 August he read Pirandello’s play The Rules of the Game to Oriana. In this drama on marital infidelity, the main character chooses not to feel angry and betrayed at his wife’s affair, but instead empties himself of all emotion and talks to her lover.
Charles had to go down to dinner after the second act and when he came back Oriana was sitting up in bed, tense with excitement. The play did not have a happy ending, but explored a situation Oriana was living herself. She was to spend nearly five months being read to by Charles, being sickly and not eating much: ‘A sumptuous meal, with the ribbons, is brought up twice a day, but eaten by nuns, with enormous relish.’36 Meanwhile Ted Haynes wanted his wife back in England, ‘Ted Haynes clamours at every post for his conjugal rights, which he cannot have for the moment.’ Charles suggested to Vyvyan, ‘I wish you would find him some easily assimilable substitute.’37
Life at the Palace Hotel Livorno held even more drama than Pirandello’s plays. At dinner in a nearby castello, Harold Acton had introduced Charles and Ruby to a Livorno legend, Aldo Nadi, one of the greatest fencers of all time. He and his brother Nedo were Olympic gold medallists and came from a long line of fencers. Known as the ‘bad boy’ of fencing, he crushed his opponents and celebrated afterwards with champagne. Handsome, romantic, macho and deadly serious he fell at once for Ruby. Charles had hoped that ‘the occupation of a sick room may take her mind off the omnipresent male organ’. However, that was too much to imagine for Ruby; she and Nadi were romantically involved at once. They motored around between Livorno, Pisa and Florence. Charles suspected Ruby would emasculate Nadi: ‘Mrs M seems thoroughly sick of Leghorn, and I fancy her fancy man is rather coming to the end of his social resources. He has a fight or match or display at Forte de’Marmi on the 21st, and when he’s lost that, I expect his father will tell him to keep off the Punch and Judy show for a bit.’38 In fact, the twenty-four-year-old Nadi was not disempowered; he was at his zenith and Ruby was a match for him. They stayed in the Palace Hotel and dined regularly with Charles, who later called Nadi, the man ‘who put the L in Leg horn’.39 On 17 August Aldo proposed to Ruby, who accepted and asked Charles to act as witness at the wedding planned for 20 August. ‘I am to be her witness and shall invalidate the proceedings if possible.’ He doubted her wisdom, and was, it seems, slightly jealous, but she ‘has rather let herself in for it as A. N. intends to outrage himself with a revolver if she doesn’t – and she is too tender-hearted to cause his suffering.’40 Charles noticed that her temper kept Nadi in check, but suspected she might miss being able to mix with other men; however, he thought marriage might be more steady for her this time round. Ruby went with the Nadi family to the Palio at Siena and saw her ex-husband, Harry, in the crowd and bolted. ‘I hope to God he doesn’t turn up here,’41 wrote Charles to Vyvyan. Ruby was in financial difficulties and Charles tried to help by introducing her to Douglas Fenzi, of the Fenzi banking family, ‘But I shall make her clean off the paint from her mouth and the jewels from her person before entering the house, which will be a lesson to her.’42
Charles continued to enjoy himself at the hotel; when the waiters went on strike on the gr
ounds of overwork and underpay, ‘they all came up to my room instead, and we played tiddlywinks, to the envy of the other unmarried visitors.’ The Nadi wedding was imminent, tensions were high and Charles was concerned that Aldo had run his fiancée through with ‘the wrong weapon’ and escaped with her jewels. Going to the hotel bar late one night he saw, Ruby, Nadi and ‘Pippo in a blaze of erectile tissue’. Pippo made a noise like a steam train whistle when he was being naughty. At one point Ruby found a letter from Vyvyan to Charles which read, ‘Is the A. N. affair really drawing to a languid close? Who is the sobraspaliente de espada if any?’43 Charles had great physical difficulty in preventing her showing the letter to Nadi, who in turn burst into tears because he could not see it. However the marriage was duly celebrated on its appointed date, but was to be kept secret in England. Somehow through the haze of gossip, news arrived in London which made Ted Haynes believe that Charles had married an Italian actress.
Meanwile, ‘we have all the plagues of Egypt here including crabs on the lift-boy’,44 wrote Charles of the hotel. Oriana was ill in bed, Ruby was now, post marriage, ill in bed, and a friend of Ruby’s called Valerie Churchill arrived with a small dog named Pronto. Charles was circulating between sick women, when who should enter but Harry Melville, Ruby’s ex-husband, ‘as fresh as paint could make his senile form. He really is unbearably disgusting, more so than last year, though his voice is quieter.’45 Ruby stayed in her room and fortunately Aldo Nadi was away in Rome for another fencing competition. Charles was left to deal with Harry Melville, whom he managed to dispatch to Siena.
All this time, Charles was doing a chapter of Stendhal by day and a chapter of Pirandello by night. He was also picking up intelligence information for Louis Christie. Livorno was a major naval base, and Charles gleaned facts from restaurants and sailors. British intelligence in 1925 discovered the extent of Mussolini’s shipping of arms to the Arabian Peninsula where Italy was supplying Arab potentates hostile to Britain.46 Italy wanted to claim the Farasan Islands, strategically positioned in the Red Sea, which was Britain’s route to India. On one side of the islands was Eritrea, already colonised by the Italians, and on the other lay Yemen, a British protectorate. Mussolini wanted both and was by now infiltrating Yemen with weapons, diplomats, spies and industry.
Oriana’s sympathetic company encouraged Charles’s satirical wit, and while reading to his captive audience, he also wrote The Strange and Striking Adventures of Four Authors in Search of a Character. He told Chapman, ‘I have written a highly diverting pastiche about the Sitwells in the manner of Edward Lear’s Story of the Four Little Children (Guy, Violet, Lionel and Slingsby) which I want to have illustrated with woodcuts and issued as a Christmas book.’47 Chapman recommended the new, private Cayme Press in Kensington where books could be published in limited editions for private circulation. The booklet appeared in 1926 with woodcuts in the style of Edward Lear, done by Charles’s nephew George who was then sixteen. It was signed by ‘P. G. Lear and L. O.’ (P. G. Learandello).
The story began: ‘Once upon a time there were four dear little children whose names were Frogbert, Sacharissa, Zerubbabel and Lincruston, inhabiting a stately home in the country entirely surrounded by every attention that natural affection could prompt or luxury afford.’ It brought up their quarrel with the Georgian Poets: describing trees on a desert island ‘the branches of which were peopled with Georgian poets of an unimaginable rusticity…’ Towards the beginning of November they arrived opposite a chemist’s shop, where with the utmost prodigality they purchased ‘four ounces of delectable lozenges and a demijohn of London Mercury, prepared in the stillroom of the adjoining Squire’. They reached the ‘edge of a monocular Marsh’, set foot upon the ‘shores of Ross’, where they learnt thirty-seven languages, then were ‘wafted into the Alimentary Canal, which speedily bore them to a dinner table in South Belgravia…’
Sitting down outside a place of refreshment on the ‘Square of the Hypotenuse’, they had a ‘comforting cup of rococo’. It was all in the tradition of nonsense prose, with recognisable satire. No one minded except the Sitwells, whom he had ruthlessly lampooned. On the other hand, Charles had just read Osbert’s first work of fiction, Triple Fugue, and identified himself in a character called ‘Clubfoot the Avenger’.
By the end of August Oriana was well enough to go back to the Hotel Nettuno in Pisa and a few days of motoring followed, as Charles and she took sunny drives. Charles asked Chapman to pay his final Abelard cheque into Cox and Co. on Pall Mall, as he wanted to use the money to pay the school fees for his niece and goddaughter, Dorothy, who was now nearly fourteen. Proudly, he later sent her to a finishing school in Paris run by a connection of Mrs Haynes who had given him a reduction in school fees. Dorothy48 always remembered that her wealthy classmates wore new Paris fashions while she bravely sported lengthened and patched hand-me-downs. Chapman was told, ‘Your forty pounds have at last been dispensed already to my yowling dependents, for the noblest of all causes, education. Cura ut valeas, as Heloise would say.’49 Charles was by 1925 a renowned and much in demand translator, continually being asked to take on different works. Chapman suggested the French poet Villon, which Charles maintained could only be satisfactorily translated into fifteenth-century Scots, and ‘it would not be worth my while to do it on contract, though I might take it up as a subsidiary recreation of my old age, should your firm last as long, which I doubt.’
Meanwhile, that October 1925, Dr Robert Proust, Marcel’s brother, visited Chatto and Windus in London. As Prentice described it the visitor was ‘squat but tremendously broad, with black ringleted hair slightly streaked with grey, moustache, and a hand-grip of iron.’50 Robert Proust spoke of the editing he was doing on his brother’s novel, saying that the last part Le Temps retrouvé would appear within a year – which Prentice thought highly doubtful. He seemed really genuinely impressed with Charles’s translations, but he did not ask any questions about its continuation. The meeting lasted less than ten minutes, after which Dr Proust ‘drove off in a vast Luxus automobile’. Prentice was left with the memory of his referring to the novels ‘of my brother Marcel’ and his black-edged, mourning, visiting card.
On 15 October finished copies of Abelard arrived in Pisa. Charles said he would have preferred the tops cut and gilt: ‘I hate the nonsense of unopened copies which fetch fancy prices, and merely prove that their former owners have been illiterate.’51 His work did not stop. He returned to Prentice the corrected proofs of The Abbess of Castro and the text of Scarlet and Black, while continuing the translation of Pirandello’s Si Gira. All of these he worked on whilst still reading to Mrs Haynes in bed as she made suggestions, helping as the listening ear. He complained to Oriana and Prentice that he had left his pen behind on the Palace Hotel bus, which he was determined to retrieve, having used it since he joined Northcliffe in 1920 and written out six volumes of his Proust translation with it. This was true, but in reality he also had to return to Livorno to see Montgomery Carmichael, who as former British Consul at Leghorn, was a colleague in work for the Passport Office, and they had business there. Although he said he spent a pleasant time with Carmichael and his wife, who both loved and admired him, Charles did not manage to find his pen and he was irritated at having lost the tool of his trade, one which had been with him for so long.
* * *
That autumn Charles met a young Italian named Ugo Bassi. Charles took him up the mountains, gave him English lessons and briefly paid for painting lessons which did not last as the money was instead used to help the legion of sick relatives of his young friend. It was not a new occurrence: he had also paid expenses for former lovers, many of whom still kept turning up and asking for money. By and large, he gave cheerfully. As he explained to Vyvyan by way of discussing Stendhal’s De l’Amour,
Amour-gouter is of course five o’ clock love, as in the Kosy Khorner Tea-dive. Amour-physique I should be tempted to render as bodily or sensual love rather than physical. But it is a thorny prob
lem. I have never felt any myself except l’amore deici-lire, which is pretty boring if done more than five times in an afternoon, anche costoso.52
Since arriving in Italy two years before, Charles had resorted to casual contacts for his sex life, but Ugo lasted longer. To take the short trip up the mountains with his young lover, Charles had guiltily abandoned the long-suffering Mrs Haynes. By 17 November, he wrote to Prentice: ‘Mrs Haynes is now doomed to remain here at least a month. A bore for her but a great help to me having to go over these dreary typescripts. Only I can no longer say “this is my own unaided work” … Every word weighed in her admirable mind. The improvement in style should be at once remarked.’53
Two days later Alan Cobham, the aviation pioneer, flew to Pisa and booked into the Nettuno. Cobham had been in the Royal Flying Corps during the war and was now undertaking the Imperial Airway Survey Flight with the purpose of investigating aviation in Africa. He was also attached to the Air Ministry. It was essential at that point to ascertain the position of Italian military, naval and air bases in Africa, and Cobham was flying with a professional photographer. Charles explained to his mother that it was only a social call and that this was the first of twenty-two legs on the journey to the Cape. Given that Cobham had never met Charles before, and that Pisa was not an obvious first leg of such a mission from the Air Ministry, it is likely that this meeting was the last part of the link involving the Italian flying fraternity, Wing-Commander Fletcher, the British Air Attaché at Rome and the Passport Office intelligence network. They planned to ask Cobham to take aerial photographs of Italian bases in Africa. Charles gallantly took charge of ‘entertaining’ the party all evening, then did two hours work until 2 a.m., and saw them off at 8 a.m. Cobham was knighted the following year for services rendered.54