Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  Back in England he visited Anna, his brother John’s widow, and her two children in north Oxford, and also spent time with Renée Haynes, now a student at St Hugh’s College. On 8 November he took her and a friend for coffee. Observing a man with a full beard who came in and sat nearby, Charles asked the girls in an undertone whether they knew the distinguished-looking man. They didn’t and lowering his voice even more, he whispered, ‘He holds the Chair of Applied Sin’85, teasing them over their reverence for academics, and remembering his own youthful visit to Oxford and encounter with the ‘Public Man’.

  Charles’s six month stay in Britain ended with his return to London and a series of dinner parties, all very demanding. ‘I don’t think I shall ever dine out again,’ he told Prentice. Christmas was spent with his family at Whitchurch Rectory. Although his visit to Britain was principally to visit his sick father, he could not stay long in any one place. He and Louis Christie both needed to get back to Italy before the New Year, taking the boat train and stopping at the Gare de Lyon to change trains, where he picked up a copy of Dreyfus’s memoir of Proust. He was comfortably back in Pisa on New Year’s Day 1927 and wrote to his father:

  I am enjoying the soothing air, and the sight of my own possessions, and the sound of the bells, each ringing in its own time for some undiscoverable purpose of its own. But the whole lot were ringing in the Tower this afternoon as I approached it, as though to welcome me back.86

  CHAPTER 15

  A Death and Eviction

  ‘I shall pass though Pisa in a train without stopping tomorrow night as I don’t want to stop a bullet.’

  CKSM, letter to Charles Prentice, 1927

  The bells of Pisa were tolling for Charles: three days into January he received the news of his father’s death. On 2 January 1927, a Sunday afternoon, George had fallen asleep and quietly died. Charles did not hear until the Monday about his father’s death: the funeral was set for Tuesday that week: ‘This much to explain why I am not in England,’ he wrote to Prentice. ‘Of course I am bitterly sorry that I was so petulant and impatient during those last months – but we had a long private conversation and mutual explanation after Christmas, which did us both good.’1 Charles had to explain why he could not stay for long by the sick man’s bed. He was busy, busy, busy: partly work, partly inability to sit still. Perhaps the upright and respected judge had finally seemed less distressed about his son’s private life and, also controversial, his chosen religion.

  Charles wrote daily to his mother that January, very long letters, less full of his own grief than comforting her in hers:

  I hope and believe you feel that there is no parting but that a long period of physical servitude – lightly as it lay upon you – is at an end – Certainly no man ever had a better wife or could have – it is marvellous to think of all those long years of loving companionship unbroken by the trials and difficulties and hardships of life.2

  He invited her to come and live with him in Italy, unless she found it boring or uncomfortable: ‘But what about Assisi at Easter – I will go anywhere within say a radius of 300 miles of Pisa without a moment’s consideration.’3 His father had been cremated at Golders Green crematorium, but Charles reminded Meg of a conversation a few weeks before where his father had asked for his ashes to be laid at his mother’s grave in the Dean Cemetery in Edinburgh, next to Uncle John Irving the explorer’s grave, and he suggested that they ought to commemorate their own John Irving in the same graveyard: ‘I shall go out now in your fur slippers and post this.’4

  The waiters at the Hotel Nettuno, where he still took his meals, were kind and tactful, remembering his father from his visits. Camillo Pellizzi, a professor from the university, who told him once, ‘I am no judge of English writing but you seem to have put into good English the mediocre Italian of Pirandello,’5 came to visit, gently and often, taking him out to meals, making sure he was not eating alone, and was eating properly. He invited Charles to his home, where, uneasy one evening, Charles jumped up from the table suddenly on hearing a noise in the street and cut his head on a low-hanging chandelier. Fascism was drawing in its net and those intellectuals who did not toe the line were on edge.

  The obituary of Charles’s father in The Times, written by an ex-colleague, was impersonal, taken from Who’s Who and the Landed Gentry: there went the honoured judge, good citizen, model father and devoted husband. Charles knew he had not exactly followed in his father’s footsteps, and tender memories flooded back. He wrote to his mother:

  What you said about two men carrying him so quietly down the stair reminded me that I had helped and almost carried him up that stair the last time he went up it – with a feeling of parting at the top – and night after night and stood below and watched him go up until he turned the corner – No more now.6

  His mother asked if there were any things of his father’s that he might want: ‘As for wanting “Things” – I have long been conscious of having too many.’7 He suggested that the gold signet ring should go to Colin’s eldest son, also called Colin. Charles himself wore his brother John’s signet, which he planned to give to John’s eldest son David when he left school. He did, however, want some of his father’s books, mentioning Ovid’s Fasti and the Scots Peerage.

  In the meantime diversion arrived at the Nettuno in the form of a young American family called Creal, with a three-year-old boy: ‘They are so sweet and beautiful and innocent as only Americans can be (he asked me if there was anything worth seeing in Rome…) and also rather hard up.’8 Charles took them round Pisa and off to Viareggio where he booked the cheaper rooms with the Pelagi family that his parents had taken two years before. He bought them lunch, gave them a majolica teaset and took them to bookshops and churches, including a tour of the Pisano pulpit. Mr Creal thought,

  … that none of the folk round about the world would know what the scenes meant. I assured him that every brat in the streets of Pisa would know the whole story. I ventured that every child in Europe would know …9

  * * *

  Their child had been born with club feet which were gradually straightening, and the family and Charles walked the length of the promenade in Viareggio, with the child calling him ‘Mr Concrete’. ‘Not bad for a club-footed child of three,’ Charles concluded, ‘and a little tiring for a club-footed man of thirty-seven.’10

  For the meeting with Louis Christie in Rome he booked into the Hotel des Princes on the Piazza di Spagna, now bought by the owner of the Nettuno. Christie was also in the hotel and they dined that night with Mackenzie, the former Chief Passport Officer, whom Louis had now officially supplanted in the Rome office. Mackenzie arrived the following day at Charles’s hotel, ostensibly to take him to a bookshop he thought Charles would like, but in reality for matters to do with the Rome Conference. Charles complained to his mother that the ‘bookshop visit’ was merely another irritating diversion from work.

  Charles’s mother, meanwhile, was staying in Oxford with her daughter-in-law, Anna, and wrote to her son saying that David was doing very well at Lynams, the prep school that Charles was paying for. Charles wrote telling him to ‘work hard this term and have no more diseases’,11 and to try for a scholarship to Winchester where Charles had just founded a yearly Prize for Idiomatic Translation: it was only £5 but he thought that would mean something to a schoolboy. After his father’s death, he now felt the call of family responsibility: Colin was ill and John dead. He had to be a leader. He made suggestions about the future of Anna’s house in north Oxford. It had belonged to his father and Charles suggested it be transferred into Anna’s name, as he did not think she would marry again; no one who was not well-to-do would think of marrying a penniless widow with two children, he observed rather heartlessly. The house could, on the other hand, be transferred to him, and he would give it to them rent free and would not mind eventually living in north Oxford. Anna and the children were very excited by this idea and Charles spent the rest of 1927 dithering over the decision to move back to England.
When Anna wrote to Prentice, thanking him for transferring money from Charles, she noted ‘Charlie changes his mind so much.’12

  While in Rome, another likely secret service man, Michael Parker, ‘an expert on Roman antiquities’, had dinner with Charles at Aragno’s where they bumped into Renato Mucci, governor of the Bank of Rome, who had translated some Proust into Italian and whom Charles had visited on his last trip to Rome. After dinner, Charles and Michael visited the Colosseum, ‘under a full moon – an amazing spectacle – I don’t want ever to see it again by daylight. In the moonlight the gaps are softly covered over and the sloping lines of a wall have a curious, mossy effect.’13 But the ruin was also cold and damp; Michael got flu and was put to bed. To his mother Charles complained, ‘I feel rather tired here always and am not doing enough work. Rome is certainly a charming place … but I feel that I shall have to lead a more and more sedentary life in the future.’14 To Prentice the same evening he admitted ‘When humanity left me in my room, insomnia entered to derange me yet further.’ He also revealed his exhaustion: ‘I am too battered by fate and disease to be capable of feeling anxious.’15

  Beneath the bravura was an exhausted man with far too much on his plate and no one to look after him. He found in Pirandello’s chaotic world the irony he saw in his own life; that the appearance is rarely the reality and the layers of subterfuge people erect to present a face to family, friends or the public is excellent material for drama. Charles sympathised with Pirandello’s themes intimately: his plays dealt with necessary lies and secrecy. In his early play, Liola, where a young labourer cuckolds the impotent landowner for his wife to bear a child, the lie turned out to be more true, or better, than the truth. The short stories waived the simple mask which hid the seething mass of contradictions, forced beliefs, half-held beliefs, and strange history, which formed the real person beneath. Pretence to others was almost second nature to Charles, but now he was guilty of masking things even to himself. His body’s warnings of recurrent illnesses were passed off with a note about flu. He had never consulted a doctor about his stomach-aches, and he carried on eating badly and ignoring all signs of serious ailments.

  He returned to Pisa with Louis Christie, who booked one of the Nettuno’s new bedrooms with a bathroom, and who ‘has kindly offered me a bath at 7.15’.16 Charles took Louis round the Campo Santo and gave him a running commentary on all its treasures, before limping fast up the Leaning Tower with the overweight Louis puffing behind him.

  Financial pressure was again bothering Charles. With his father’s death he felt responsible for his mother. He renewed the offer to buy her a house in Italy for them to enjoy together; whilst also toying with the idea of moving to Oxford. For the moment he wanted her to travel south in comfort. Mrs Haynes was coming out again, heading for Sicily; could she accompany his mother? Even in Italy, life was becoming more expensive, with the drop in the value of the pound and the beginning of a worldwide economic depression. He decided to stop being so discerning about the literary merit of the texts he translated and offered up his skills for whatever job was suggested.

  Nevertheless his plans for Stendhal were completed that year when he finished translating Armance, which he dedicated to Richard Aldington. The preface is an open letter to Aldington, outlining his difficulties in translating the quotations that Stendhal used to start each chapter. Stendhal often got the quotation wrong or attributed it to the wrong author. Charles had decided to give the correct author and work; including Stendhal’s version in a footnote.17 He had now translated a significant body of Stendhal: Charterhouse of Parma, Scarlet and Black, the Abbess of Castro collection and Armance. Orlo Williams, a clerk at the House of Commons, who had also worked for intelligence, wrote for the Times Literary Supplement that Charles’s translations of Stendhal were ‘accurate, faithful, yet smooth … Stendhal is easier to translate than Proust, since his effects do not depend on suggestion.’18 Charles was glad of this ease, the simple and direct approach. He also enjoyed Stendhal’s illustration of the Italian power of rising to noble or tragic intensity under the influence of love, wounded honour or the desire for vengeance; reckoning it was better to be wicked in a transport of passion than coldly correct through vanity or love of money. Transports of passion were his own speciality.

  Pirandello delved even further into the Italian soul, and Charles kept outlining whole stories to Prentice to inspire his enthusiasm. Although Shoot! was now published in Britain, copyright agreements had still not been secured for any of the plays or short stories, despite Charles’s best efforts. Charles had gone ahead and translated many of them; they remain still unpublished today, while his Stendhal and Proust translations continue to sell.

  Richard Aldington had recently been commissioned by Routledge to be the general editor of a series of French memoirs to make up an eighteenth-century French Library. Aldington asked Charles to translate two of these: Mémoires du duc de Lauzun and Les Aventures de Zeloïde et Amanzarifdin. Mémoires was written in 1789 and published in 1822; Lauzun was the ultimate French aristocrat: ‘witty, rich, brave, free and superbly insolent’.19 Charles chronicled Lauzun’s adventures after the memoirs until he was sentenced to the guillotine in 1794, ‘When the headsman comes for him, he is sitting down to a dish of oysters, “Citizen,” he says, “allow me to finish;” and offering the man a glass: “take this wine, you must have need of courage, in your calling.”20 François-Augustin Paradis de Moncrif’s fantasy, Les Aventures de Zeloïde et Amanzarifdine, was written in 1727. Paradis de Moncrif was a distant kinsman and the introduction was an opportunity for Charles to elaborate on his own bloodline. He discovered that Paradis de Moncrif’s mother, whose Christian name was unrecorded, was described as ‘A Lowland Scot, born Moncrieff, of a Presbyterian family which had provided the Cause with several ministers and theologians, she had not inherited the heavy austerity nor the rigid virtue of her lineage, in fact she was quite the opposite.’21 Paradis de Moncrif’s mother was a soulmate from another time, but Charles had little time to study or contemplate her history: the world outside his ivory tower was beginning to shatter his peace.

  The air here is still full of war with France. I am being harassed by a dreary attempt at blackmail, which a fascist friend kindly ‘deals with’ but it keeps cropping up again … not on Mr Piggins scale fortunately, nor do I pay the slightest heed, but it is boring and on top of this my mother arrives in little more than a fortnight.22

  The ‘fascist friend’ was his landlord, the gynaecologist Signor Frascani, who had been a mayor of Pisa three times and had powerful connections in the fascist hierarchy. He died not long after Charles wrote this, leaving both Charles and Signora Frascani without a protector, so to speak. It is not clear whether the blackmail was connected to Charles’s private life or to his secret service activities, or whether he himself even knew which. Random violence and threats of eviction were not uncommon; the entire regime used blackmail as routine behaviour. The Signora and her lodger were given three months to leave the house. Charles decided to board a train at once and:

  … offer the bulk of my library to the British Institute in Florence. What a woundily long book Proust is. I met D. H. Lawrence yesterday for the first time. An odd spectacle: also his German wife. I must go out now and take a bath with some verbena salts, spoils of Florence, which may oter le cafard, but I doubt it.23

  Charles knew that Prentice was one of the few people to whom he could ‘unbosom’ himself. The other was Oriana Haynes, but she was too busy at that point unbosoming herself to Charles, since one of her reasons for escaping to Italy again was to be away while her husband was ‘hobnobbing with Miss Lily Wallows’.24 Vyvyan Holland was the man he was closest to, and to him alone he gave vent to all iniquitous thoughts: ‘My mother proposes to arrive about Easter and speaks darkly of staying at least two years.’25 He also wrote to Vyvyan about the other women in his life. He had seen Ruby, now Mrs Nadi, in Florence in Casoni’s with Pippo, she being ‘packed in manpower’. He had had
difficulty assuring her that the dedication in Shoot did not refer to herself, Vyvyan and Oriana; to Vyvyan he wrote a wicked limerick about Ruby’s sexual proclivities.26 He concluded to Vyv, ‘I long for your company and the elfin comfort you sometimes afford.’27

  Charles was then asked to write the regimental history of the King’s Own Scottish Borderers and seriously considered it. The fee was £400 plus the opportunity to live at the KOSB depot in Berwick-upon-Tweed. But the climate of the Scottish town appealed even less than Oxford, accustomed as he now was to Italian sunshine, food and entertainment. He suggested that his old regiment ask his former colleague Captain Stair Gillon, who did end up writing the official history. In March Charles indexed the Moncrieff genealogy for his cousin, William, and started to sell his large personal library to the British Institute and ‘an illiterate and degenerate millionaire’.28 He wanted to unburden himself and needed the money; some of his books fetched as much as £50 – these were by far his most valuable possessions.

  Disposing of his books was perhaps an intuition about the nearness of death. One night he had a sharp fever for which he took ammonium quinine which swelled his lips and nose and discoloured a large patch of skin on his wounded leg where a blood vessel had broken. The next morning he was given the order to leave his flat within two days, by 30 June. He wrote in exasperation to Prentice that he had just ‘reawakened to the life of external facts on a rather hot morning’. He had earnestly hoped to finish the translation of Sodome et Gomorrhe in his flat, seated at his desk, and to do it well – but please could he know by the end of June whether it was worth going on with Proust? Could Chatto publish without contravening the obscenity laws?

  There are people here who would even give me houseroom, but I feel that it is better to cut adrift altogether and not risk another eviction later on. It is a sudden blow because my landlady had assurances from the Podesta that she would not be turned out.29