by Jean Findlay
Mrs Haynes finally left Pisa just before Christmas 1925, after five months away from her husband and his affair. In his Christmas greeting-card to Prentice, Charles acknowledged how many other lives depended on his employment with Chatto. Montgomery Carmichael wrote in his memoir of Charles: ‘Undeserving waifs, more helpless by far than waifs at home, found him out somehow, and to them all he behaved like an elder and good-natured brother, indeed we used chaffingly to call him Brother Charles.’55
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Charles ended 1925 as he had begun it, with midnight Mass at the Cathedral in Pisa. He was now far more excited by his translations of Stendhal and Pirandello than Proust; but in January 1926 Proust’s Albertine Disparue finally appeared from Gallimard and Charles immediately bought a copy in via Tourabuoni, a street of bookstalls in Florence, and began to read. ‘It seems relatively harmless, though I see that Saint-Loup is to take the wrong turning at last in Vol. 11.’55 As Charles had guessed, Saint-Loup was to marry Gilberte, which he thought was a bad move.
His American publisher, Thomas Seltzer, was eager to go ahead with the previous volume Sodome et Gomorrhe. ‘Please continue translation letter follows,’ he had cabled in September and in December he had asked for the goods: ‘I believe it is best to go ahead publishing at least 4 volumes a year … we must not allow interest in him to flag.’ He also relayed that Edith Wharton had written about Proust in Yale Review, and ‘she carries great weight with the book buying public’.57
Charles sent him the first part of Sodome et Gomorrhe, which he said was the most explicit, to see if Seltzer could stomach it. Seltzer wrote back saying he was a little troubled – he suggested, ‘leave the worst passages in French, untranslated, and then, probably, our censors would not interfere’.58 Charles replied that he did not like the idea of the worst passages left in French: ‘We seem to be groping gradually towards a little more liberty here in England.’59 Both publishers and translator agreed that the word ‘Sodom’ should not appear on the cover. Charles chose the allusive ‘Cities of the Plain’, the biblical reference to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Sydney Schiff accepted his request to dedicate the volume to ‘Richard and Myrtle Kurt and Their Creator’. However, Charles joked: ‘They will both have to give evidence at our trial. The last name is an amphibologie voulue for 1. The Padre Eterno and 2. Schiff himself.’60
In February, he went to the Pisa carnival with Pisan friends. For his disguise he got a three times lifesize mask of a skull, which along with ‘some soiled bedsheets and a pair of white carabiniere gloves, should succeed in putting the devil in hell’,61 which was the object of the carnival, rather like the Scottish Halloween he had grown up celebrating. Removing the outfit, he later dined at the Nettuno with the Prince Borghese, telling him a story he recounted to Vyvyan; it was of a man who went to the carnival ball ‘totally naked save for a blue riband round one testicle. When they said: “But you can’t possibly come in like that. This is a fancy ball,” he replied, “Yes, I know. This is it…”’62
The Prince had been twice to visit Charles since January; this time he ‘unlike most people had gone to Paris and bought the books I asked him to buy’,63 by this meaning the correct edition of Maupassant; the Conard, not the Flammarion. He also invited Charles to Florence to meet the Duchesse de Clermont-Tonerre who had been a friend and sometime critic of Proust since 1903. She embodied the world Proust described, and the meeting promised to be absorbing, but it never actually took place. These explanations of the Prince’s visits were camouflage again for his political work. Prince Borghese was a serious man; as a politician he had been deputy of the Partitio Radicale, a far left party, now out of power. He was an abstemious man of great self-control and had also been a diplomat. Again the meeting would have been to discuss intelligence matters.
Towards the end of February, Arnold Bennett, with his heavily pregnant lover, Dorothy Cheston, arrived at the Nettuno Hotel and Charles acted as guide. Bennett surprised Charles by being more pro-Proust than he was himself, loudly praising everything Charles had translated and promising excellent reviews of all the Stendhal translations in his regular column in the Evening Standard. Bennett was not only a prolific novelist and dramatist, but the highest paid literary journalist in Britain.
Pirandello was putting on several plays in Florence in mid-March and Charles went immediately. He attended the Politeana Theatre seven times in eight nights; during a performance of Cosi e, where a girl in the audience stood up and shouted ‘Pirandello’, Charles saw the ‘old boy appear, looking like some curious caged rodent coming out of the sleeping apartment into the outer cage’.62 He rushed backstage and was greeted warmly by the dramatist, far more so than a year ago in Rome. After the 1925 summer tour in England, which went almost unnoticed by London drama critics, Pirandello must have been aware that Charles had written to London papers to counteract the poor reception: ‘He quite made me feel that I was worthy to enter his room and begged me to look in every evening.’65 Charles again tackled the copyright issue and had Pirandello assure him that in July when the last contract expired, the English rights to his works would go to Chatto and Windus. ‘And before the end of this season, I hope that we shall be eating out of one another’s hand.’66
As he was walking beside the Arno in Florence one day, a small Fiat skidded to a halt ahead of him, then reversed at speed. It was Ruby. Aldo emerged gesticulating and the happy couple drove Charles off to admire their new flat. He presented the two Nadis to Pirandello that night and, ‘Aldo preened all his feathers and beamed.’ The next day at a lunch given for Pirandello in the Palace Hotel, Aldo Nadi ‘speedily outshone the guest of the day’.67
Charles continued to see Pirandello after each performance and the playwright, then fifty-eight years old, introduced him to Marta Abba, with whom he was deeply in love and who played leading roles in most of his plays. ‘She goes from strength to strength and is already at twenty-four a very great actress indeed,’68 Charles noted. The three never spoke of Pirandello’s wife, who was clinically insane and in an institution. In March he could write to Prentice with the news that ‘spiritually I have not been too idle and have built up a pretty fair degree of intimacy with Pirandello’,69even adding that he was ‘a little excited, a little warm from P’s embraces’.70 He found the man attractive. Pirandello looked rather like his own father: the same neatly coiffed beard and immaculate suits. He was also full of the vigour of creativity, alive with electric current. The plays and stories hit a switch in Charles – Pirandello tackled appearance and reality with a twist. Human situations are rarely as they seem from the outside, there is often a secret story, sometimes a sombre, sexual one. Pirandello’s plays touched incest, adultery, prostitution, with a keen and compassionate eye, unveiling dark stories from the inside. Now, here was Charles in the stimulating company of genius. As he had with Wilfred Owen, he felt inspired to offer all his talents in service to this man.
Charles impressed both Pirandello and his agents by compiling a bibliography of the author’s works, which had never been done before, hoping this would entice Chatto to buy the English rights. But he still had to fully persuade Prentice. He bought Chatto’s Tales of Chekhov to show Pirandello what might be done with his tales if he would consent to a cheap issue which would only produce a small advance but would sell better in the long run. He warned Prentice: ‘I wish I could make you feel the same. Three years ago I was suggesting that it might be a good idea to secure Noël Coward’s plays: Benn now has them.’71Losing Coward was something Prentice would regret and he did take Charles’s advice about Pirandello.
Meanwhile, social life was buzzing. Charles had bought a tartan waistcoat in Florence which was ‘the joy of all Pisa’.72 He also bought a gaberdine coat for Ugo Bassi as a late Christmas present. But his relationship though close, was loose; he invited a previous casual lover, a Danish opera singer called Jorlund, to stay. Jorlund in his turn picked up Prince Borghese and three companions while walking along by the Arno and they all cam
e back to Charles’s rooms to consume whisky. Following such excesses, the young Jorlund was sick in Charles’s dressing room, while Prince Borghese and friends were entertained by Charles theatrically reading a Latin dialogue by Philip Bainbrigge about two schoolboys on a Sunday walk. On the subject of sex, the guests informed Charles that there had been raids on the dance clubs in Florence with a view to extracting minors. Laws differed from region to region on the regulation of brothels and the age of consent; in some places it was twelve and others fourteen. Part of Mussolini’s reforms aimed to regulate this and raise the age of consent.
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Charles knew he would have to go back to England to visit his ailing father, now seventy-nine and very ill. First, though, he had been commissioned to write an extended article for The Times on Pisa Cathedral by the thirteenth-century sculptor Giovanni Pisano: ‘More consistently undervalued than any other great monument in existence’.73 Created in the thirteenth century and scattered in the sixteenth, parts of the pulpit had found their way to the Kaiser Frederick Museum in Berlin, ‘Innocently bought but negligently sold’.74 In May 1926 after years of scholarly research, enterprise and patience these were being restored to the original pulpit and Charles described the gentle and compassionate biblical scenes carved in marble relief. He recognised two figures that Proust had put into the sculptures of the church at Balbec: the nurse in the nativity who is dipping her hand into the bath to see if the water is too hot, and the wife at the resurrection who is putting her hand on her husband’s heart to see whether it is beating. Mussolini was to unveil the masterpiece. Il Duce, with great pomp and circumstance, booked into the Hotel Nettuno. He now travelled like a king with a vast retinue as there had been an assassination attempt in April by the Hon. Violet Gibson, the eccentric daughter of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Mussolini had pardoned her but she was deported and spent the rest of her life in an asylum.75 The Italian leader’s reaction to the pulpit restoration was also recorded in The Times; he called it a ‘resurrection’ and stated, ‘Italy is moving towards a time of power and glory.’76 Power certainly, for when there was a second attempt at assassination in October, allegedly by a sixteen-year-old Italian boy, the teenager was instantly ripped to pieces by the fascist guards and his body spread around the town. Even in Pisa, which Charles called in his article ‘the loveliest and most loveable of Italian cities’, sinister things were beginning to happen. Before leaving for London, Charles was asked to make a final intelligence gathering trip to Livorno, where his tiny pieces of gossip fitted into the jigsaw of active Italian relations in the Middle East: it was revealed that twenty Persian naval cadets had been accepted into the Livorno naval academy.
Arriving in London, Charles was thrown into the middle of the General Strike. He volunteered to work for ten days on The Times, and met Richard Aldington, another strike breaker. Although Charles had come across Aldington before, they had never been friends. Aldington had edited the imagist periodical Egoist, married the poet Hilda Doolittle in 1913, and served in the war. He was close to D. H. Lawrence, had been T. S. Eliot’s assistant on The Criterion and wrote for the Times Literary Supplement. At this point Aldington was a troubled man: still suffering from his war experience, he was also disillusioned by his open marriage. He wrote reviews, novels and critical studies of French literature and was about to edit a series of translations of seventeenth-century French literature, one of which he commissioned from Charles.
Lodging was a problem: Charles’s family at Edgware was too far away; Vyvyan and Stanley, together, could not have him to stay for long. At last, Noël Coward’s mother, still a landlady herself, helped him find a room. ‘I wish I’d stayed at Pisa where one is one’s own master, and Ugo Bassi is one’s mistress.’77 He ate at the Savile Club, meeting friends for dinners, parties and theatre. At the back of a theatre, during the interval, Charles spotted Osbert Sitwell, and felt it was time to make peace. He asked a mutual friend to take him to Sitwell and explain to Osbert that an old friend would like to shake his hand. An angry Sitwell refused the proffered hand, ‘because I have for a long time disliked you, and because you have been impertinent’. Charles was puzzled at the use of the word impertinent, more usually used of a child by a teacher, or a lackey by a duke – the old Sitwell snobbery was still in its place – and Charles replied in a way he thought diplomatic, ‘I am sure I don’t know why: I am older than you.’78 Osbert admitted in his account that the encounter shook his nerves, and he was piqued beyond endurance when Charles’s satire on the Sitwells, Four Authors in Search of a Character, came out the following week. He suspected Charles had gone off immediately and written the ‘colossal piece of impudence’. Osbert at once published his response in ‘A Few Days in an Author’s Life’, a chapter of the book All at Sea in which he attacked Charles as Mr X. Mr X had once, he wrote, had the temerity to call him, Osbert Sitwell, an ‘effete aristocrat’. Well, he called Charles’s wit ‘thistle-nurtured braying’, and said he was descended from ‘long and repetitive lines of tedious literary clergy, as so evidently culminate in poor Mr X – a living argument for the celibacy of the priest, if ever there was one.’79 He went on more menacingly to point out that Mr X was involved in a ghoulish cult of the dead, because of his interest in history and genealogy, and that his translation was as good as ‘body-snatching’, both unoriginal and uncreative. ‘Mr X announced his intention of translating into Scotch the works of a great living French author, who died during the early part of this apparently vampiric and voodoo process’,80 implying that the mere act of Charles translating the first volume of À la recherche du temps perdu had been enough to kill Proust off.
The Sitwell knives must have hurt Charles, but there were distractions enough. At the Savile club he met an Italian, Professor Foligno, who presented him with the thesis that Pirandello had written while at Bonn University, in German, about the Italian dialects in Grigenti. He also met Marcel Boulestin, a French chef and author who wanted to write his next article for Vogue on Proust. Charles ‘urged him to get up a Proust dinner, the dishes culled from P’s pages’.81 The Restaurant Boulestin, known as the most expensive in London, opened the following year and Charles had a vision of holding the fantastical Proust dinner in 1928 when the complete translation would be finished, and they could ‘conceal subscription orders in the napkins’.82 Instead, he was invited to dinner by friends: Arnold Bennet, Francis Birrell and Edmund Haynes.
He moved from the Savile Club to the Hayneses’s country house, Tortworth Rectory in Gloucestershire, for a week where the twenty-year-old Renée Haynes, Oriana’s daughter, read for him the proofs of Shoot!, his translation of Pirandello’s Si Gira, and found ‘nothing changeworthy’.83 He also completed The Abbess of Castro, which he dedicated to Edward Marsh, and Scarlet and Black, whose dedication reads, ‘To O.H.H., who had every word of both volumes read to her when she was powerless to resist. C.K.S.M.’ He pointed out to Oriana at once that should she ever need grounds for divorcing Edmund, she need only scratch out the full stop before Charles’s initials. However, Oriana, or Ria as he called her affectionately, informed him that her husband had already taken her back to his bosom.
By September he was staying at the Christies’ house at Durie in Fife, while Louis was home for some fishing and walking. ‘It is perishingly cold here and I am shivering in my Italian summer clothes,’ Charles wrote to Prentice. Charles gave Louis a photograph of himself, taken long ago on a visit to Winchester in 1913 before the war when he was at his most handsome.84 At the foot of the photo is Charles’s signature with ‘1913–1926 semper fidelis’ written above in different, turquoise ink. Presumably he had signed it in 1913 and added the later date on this visit in 1926, ever faithful to the cousins he had known and visited since childhood, and now also worked with. The dates could either point to the duration of a love affair, or the duration of Charles’s work for HMS. On 6 September the diplomatic bag arrived for Louis. It contained for Charles the proofs of Shoot! and for Louis vital communiqués
on what was happening in Italy that month. Charles was the only person in Durie with whom Louis could discuss the issues.
Relations between Italy and Britain were by now very strained, so much so that an immediate meeting was secretly arranged between the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Austen Chamberlain, and Mussolini on a British boat off the coast of Livorno. Chamberlain was now worried about Mussolini’s stated aim to supplant British influence in the Yemen by creating a core of Italian influence. First, Mussolini had backed the Yemeni rebels hostile to Britain by giving them arms, then he had provided engineers, doctors, telegraph operators and a spy network. He had now made economic and political penetration into Yemen a fait accompli and possessed considerable influence with which he could bargain. He proposed partitioning the Arabian peninsula into two zones of influence, British and Italian. Chamberlain realised that beneath supposed peace with Italy there was a covert war in the Arabian peninsula and the Red Sea. He had to decide to hold an official discussion over the question of handing over influence of certain territories to Italian control. They agreed to hold a conference on this in Rome in January 1927, by which time Louis and Charles planned to be in Rome.
While in Scotland Charles visited old friends like the Mackenzies and the Pyatts, and stayed with his distant cousin William Moncrieff of Easter Moncrieffe in Perthshire who was compiling a huge family history, with which Charles agreed to help.