Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  The Podesta were the rulers of the city council who were by now overwhelmingly fascist and could not be relied upon to keep promises. It was no longer possible for him to live in Pisa without a protector.

  With an almost comical ignorance of Italian politics, many of Charles’s friends had converged on Pisa by Easter 1927. Charles organised rooms at the Nettuno for Mrs Haynes and her daughter Celia as well as for Meg who arrived with Miss Stephen, and an elderly man with a pink face and a spade beard called James Bertrand de Vinceles Payen de Payne, with his wife and son. Payen de Payne was ten years younger than Meg but ‘empathetic to the point of being gaga’30 as he sat beside her and talked to her for a whole meal about asparagus. He was a member of the Savile Club and an expert on Proust.

  Charles took the whole party to Lucca for a few days before they separated to different parts of Italy on their tours; all but his mother, whom he took back to Pisa to the cherished rooms he was about to lose. Meg was now seventy; she was never strong and had always been thin, but, apart from still suffering from grief and bereavement, she was much herself. The death of her husband had pushed her further into her obsession with spiritualism: her diaries of 1926, 1927 and 1928 were so full of automatic writing and communication with the dead that her frightened granddaughters later destroyed them.

  Pisa was too hot, and Meg’s séances made Charles uncomfortable, so he sent her to the Pelagi boarding house by the sea in Viareggio while he cleared up his room at Lungarno Reggio and finished translating Cities of the Plain. On 17 June 1927 this last part of the translation of Sodome et Gomorrhe was sent to America. He sold the American rights for the next six volumes to Albert and Charles Boni, in New York, for $3000, and wrote,

  I believe I am the only person in the world who has taken the trouble to correct the text of this book. It was published shortly before Proust’s death, and the proofs never seem to have been corrected by anyone. An earlier volume appeared in French with a list of over 200 corrigenda; and that list was neither complete nor accurate.31

  He added that he was in the midst of correcting half a million words in two weeks. To Prentice he expressed his difficulties with the names and places that varied their spelling,

  M. de Chevregny is alternately that and Chevrigny; Harambouville is Harembouville and Arambouville, and at one time its attributes seem to be given to Hermenonville, which at another place is mentioned as coexisting with it. All this is very trivial … but I do rather aim at a corrected text.32

  It was a terrible rush trying to leave his rooms before he was evicted. He decided to destroy anything incriminating, including letters from Vyvyan: ‘I have already destroyed all of your letters and others even more precious.’33 He was all ready to go and the packing cases had still not arrived: ever resilient, he considered making them himself, but before having to test his carpentry skills, they turned up.

  His advance for the next volume of Proust was overdue from Chatto. He was due £150 upon their receipt of Cities of the Plain; he was still anxious about its publication, glad in a way that his father would not see it, yet knowing that there were other family members whom it would no doubt offend. He was well aware that the active and promiscuous homosexual world described by Proust was offensive to most people, so in his translation he had tried to soften the blow by not being as direct as Proust could be in French, using euphemism and hidden innuendo where he could. On the other hand this was the world in which he himself lived, but had always had to hide. Every visit to the bank was a visit to Florence where he also saw Orioli, Turner, Douglas and indulged in their decadent world. That July he also caught gonnorrhea and he described the visits to the doctor and costs of the treatment to Vyvyan.

  Charles managed to move out of his flat with no time to spare on the afternoon of 30 June, with the sorry sight of his landlady, in the same state of fear, having her furniture pushed out into a horsewagon on the broad and bright Lungarno Reggio: ‘As she never wears anything but a wrapper without buttons which was pink until her husband died, it will be difficult to evict her with dignity.’34 She had already confessed to Charles that she was keen on taking the morphine in her late husband’s professional supplies. ‘Pisa I have now definitely left,’ he told Prentice on 6 July. He explained that a young man had been watching him from the Arno below his window for some time, to whom the police all nodded as they passed. ‘But I shall pass though Pisa in a train without stopping tomorrow night as I don’t want to stop a bullet.’35

  He was advised to leave Italy for a spell at once after his eviction. At Viareggio, he hired a car and drove with his mother to the twelfth-century town of Cuneo near the French border, ‘but she didn’t get much of an orgasmo,’36 he observed to Vyvyan. For Louis he had to report on what he saw and there outside Cuneo was the Italian army on summer manoeuvres, hundreds of troops under canvas. An urgent summons from the Passport Office had him getting on a train to Rome for a weekend, leaving his oblivious mother in Cuneo. On return the guests at the Grand Hotel Ormea kept asking for the newspapers and Charles found himself evading them and covering his tracks because of his ‘mother’s habit of taking the Daily Mail quite unconsciously up to her bedroom and lining drawers with it, like a swallow’.37

  Meg needed to move on. Too much stagnation meant too much communicating with the dead and Charles preferred to avoid that. To blow away the cobwebs, he drove her for a thrill through the Tenda Tunnel from Italy to France, at that time the longest road tunnel in existence, two miles long and 4000 feet above sea level. The journey in their open-topped car gave him a severe cold and they had to stay in Nice until he was well again, which kept Meg busy for long enough before Charles had to go back to Cuneo to check again on the army, to collect his post and then move on, he was advised by Louis, to Switzerland. The post also contained an offer from Howe, a publisher in Soho Square, to publish Cities of the Plain if no one else was doing so and to take on the other volumes of Proust. Chatto was still stuck taking advice from counsel about the legality of publishing as they were sure to be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. Charles replied that the ball was in the Chatto court and informed Prentice of the offer from Howe.

  As for Pirandello, I vecci e I giovanni which Charles had translated as Generations of Men was to be published both in America and in Britain in by Dutton. Charles wrote an angry letter to the American firm for liberties taken in changing the text before printing and received the following robust reply, from John Macrae of Dutton and Co.

  Quite frankly you must not be too hard on us Americans; you must not expect us to be quite as civilised as you Britishers. The fact is that you have some 400 years of advantage in general culture. You must bear in mind that America is made up of a metropolitan people, a conglomeration of all races. As a matter of plain unadulterated fact, some of the best ability, brain and moral force that ever came out of the groins of the British have come to America … on the whole, man for man and woman for woman, we are about as good as you are.38

  To John Macrae in reply Charles wrote long and thorough letters about spelling, columns, typeface and grammar, insisting that his corrected proofs be adhered to, concluding, ‘I am glad you are not offended by my pugnacious spirit. It is largely inherited; my grandmother’s two grandmothers were Macraes, daughters of Farquar Macrae of Inverinate: and the Macraes, as you know, were always the foremost fighters in Scotland.’39 This formed a firm bond with John Macrae who promised to stick faithfully to every comma and spelling no matter how peculiar.

  The summer was taken up with entertaining his mother with sight-seeing as well as covering his own agenda for Louis: Interlaken, then Lucerne, then Bern. Only then could he return to Italy. They descended to the lush climate of Stresa on Lago Maggiore and booked into the most luxurious hotel they could find. But before long, Meg decided to go back to England, Colin was so unwell that he was considering giving up his duties as a clergyman and with seven children, five of them dependent, that was serious news. Meg returned to England in the c
ompany of her niece, Lucy Pearson, stopping in Locarno for a break on the way.

  With his mother gone, peace descended and Charles could finish the eighteenth-century French memoirs for Aldington. The Introduction to Zeloïde and Amanzarifdine provided a great excuse for delving into his genealogy, about which he now knew everything, thanks to a lifetime of research and its culmination in William Moncrieff’s family history. Stresa was beautiful – another world entirely from the rough send-off from Pisa. The Regina Palace Hotel was a relatively new building, started in 1908 and finished after the war; it was a monster of a hotel, glittering with chandeliers and gilt stucco amidst botanic gardens which flourished in the semi-tropical atmosphere. Snowy-capped alpine peaks surrounded the deep lake, and to escape the humid air, there were the fresh waters of the lake to bathe in. Bathing – at Nairn and Fife as a child, in the Channel and the Somme as a soldier, and all down the Italian coast now – was a constant pleasure in his life.

  There were 100 guest rooms, and the two top floors had full-time staff who outnumbered the guests two to one. The stables were full of horses for the hotel buggies, bumping luggage from the station up the hill, and there was a library on the ground floor with writing desks and armchairs. It was so different from his monastic rented rooms that he did not feel at home. To Vyvyan he called it the ‘Vagina Phallus Hotel’, continuing, ‘I am translating the memoirs of the Duc de Lauzun which are mainly a catalogue raisonée of the ladies who yielded and/or offered him the custody of their pussies, some of them, I regret to say, English.’40

  Stresa was famous for its literary visitors: Stendhal had finished the Charterhouse of Parma here and Dickens and Hemingway were both inspired by the place. George Bernard Shaw had just left the Regina Palace hotel that September after a month’s recuperation with his wife Charlotte. He had been entertained by an American couple, the Tompkinses, who had rented the Isola san Giovanni, a private island with a large villa opposite Pallenza. Molly Tompkins was a wealthy American woman who had everything: youth, beauty, education and a handsome and adoring husband. But she was bored and found writers fascinating. She had spent weeks romancing the seventy-year-old Shaw, trying in vain to draw him into a fully-fledged affair. It had not worked, and she discovered she was pregnant by her own husband. She then took off to Milan for an abortion – being in love with Shaw did not accord with the desire for a child from her husband – and Shaw wisely decided to leave Stresa.

  Unaware of any of this, Charles was asked to lunch by another American, a William Kraut who lived in a villa above Pallenza which Charles compared to a museum, with a huge art collection that included a da Vinci. There he met Molly and Laurence Tompkins and, on being asked at the large lunch party ‘What do you do?’, he replied, ‘I bite rooks – I mean, I translate books.’ Then a voice from somewhere around the table asked, ‘Didn’t you translate Marcel Proust?’ Molly suddenly came to life. She had read all his translations and enthusiastically launched into a lengthy and obscure discussion on Proust. She explained that she had just been to Milan for an operation and wished that she had had Proust with her to aid her recovery, but she had left her volumes in the ‘Paris stoodio’. ‘Poor old Kraut got left behind in the passion of the conversation,’ said Charles, ‘until we played croquet on a very rough bit of grass and he came into his own winning by several hoops.’41

  There was another guest, a Polignac aristocrat, who had known Proust and felt she had to explain to Charles that she was not the template for the Duchess de Guermantes, ‘Ni Madame de Verdurin non plus, j’espère,’42 replied Charles. In Proust’s novel Madame Verdurin was the expert social climber and poseur who ran her own salon.

  Molly Tompkins invited Charles to the Isola san Giovanni and then welcomed him to stay for as long as he wanted. The Tompkinses said that Bernard Shaw was much interested in the fascist experiment. ‘I always thought he would, with his keen disciplinarian instincts, be,’43 commented Charles to Prentice.

  The island, which was large enough for a villa and a garden, nestled near Pallenza, but was entirely private, sheltered by its own border of trees and gardens. During the sojourn Molly slowly began to realise that if she was looking for a literary affair, she would have even less success with Charles than she had had with Shaw. Charles spent a happy four days on the island and thought if not Molly, then Laurence Tompkins was charming. He offered to send them a set of Proust but they declined and then he offered to send a copy of The Charterhouse of Parma, ‘because it is a lot about the lake’, but they protested, ‘don’t you have to pay for them?’ and said they would order the books themselves from Hatchards. They were, he commented:

  … both very good looking and charming. It is an adorable little island; just their villa and a rambling garden with paths down to the lake and little balconies at the ends, and a gardener’s cottage. The gardener belongs to Prince Borromeo and is rather distrustful of them, but the other servants appear devoted.44

  On 14 October he left all his luggage with them to go on to Locarno to see his Pearson cousins and see Charlie Chaplin at the Kursaal. Charles was still worried about whether Cities of the Plain would be banned and suggested T. S. Eliot at The Criterion to Prentice, ‘as they are meant to be fearless’.45 However in October he received two money orders, one from Chatto for the English rights for £150 and one from Boni for the American rights for £200. Soon enough, in November, a letter from Hatchards arrived, c/o Chatto, asking when Sodome et Gomorrhe would be published and, if privately, how could they get copies as many clients wanted it.

  As well as a literary history, Stresa had a great religious and spiritual legacy, being the death place of Antonio Rosmini, the priest, theologian and philosopher whose villa and garden sat a few houses away from the Regina Palace. It was a museum to his memory and housed some twenty thousand of his books as well as the originals of the 100 works on politics, philosophy and theology that he wrote in the course of his reforming life. He was credited as one of the great reformers of the Catholic Church in the nineteenth century, tackling the ignorance of the priests and the political greed of the cardinals. On his deathbed his three words of advice to his great friend, the writer Manzoni, were ‘Adorare, godere, tacere’ (Adore (God), Enjoy (Your talents), and Be silent.) Being naturally garrulous in company, Charles thought this worthwhile advice. He shut himself away and managed to finish translating the Duc de Lauzun and the story by Paradis de Moncrif. He was aware that his fame and recognition and this brief period of being lionised by the wealthy was only due to hard work.

  The visit to Stresa was cut short on 24 October when Charles was required by intelligence to spend a few days in Bellinzona; he wrote cryptically to Vyvyan, ‘I am here on a secret mission to sound the political bottoms of the Ticinese with a view to roping them in next year.’46 He then had to travel to Rome. Florence was, as always, a halfway house, and here he spent a fortnight with old friends. Again, he met D. H. Lawrence. Reggie Turner, Orioli, Harold Acton and he hired a car and drove to call on the Lawrences at the Villa Mirenda outside Florence. Lawrence, recovering from a haemorrhage, was working on Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and was not in a lively conversational mood, telling Aldous Huxley, ‘Reggie and Orioli and Scott Moncrieff came en quatre – I poured tea, they poured the rest.’47

  Charles thought Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ‘indescribably filthy’. Lawrence had a similar view of Charles. He wrote to Richard Aldington, ‘Scott Moncrieff said he’d write to you. He has a nice side to him – but really an obscene mind like a lavatory.’48 In January, when Lawrence was asked by Curtis Brown to review Viani’s Parigi, he said that Brown should rather try Scott Moncrieff, as he himself doubted he could ‘face the unending squalor’.49

  Two years later Charles was still sniping at Lawrence. In a letter to T. S. Eliot he said, ‘He will write about the sexual act as if he on some historic occasion performed it. Why doesn’t he say frankly: I am a eunuch myself, but I admire sex in others. If he ever does die, Frieda’s memoirs should be quaint rea
ding.’50 Meanwhile, Lawrence was being more sympathetic than Charles would ever know. Lawrence had appreciated his witty conversation, and asked Orioli late in 1929: ‘Poor Scott Moncrieff, I hope its not cancer.’51 Two weeks later he asked again, ‘How is Scott Moncrieff?’52

  Nineteen-twenty-seven had been a tough year for Charles’s health; he realised he was rapidly ageing. On top of a huge workload and a lot of travel had come the death of his father, his eviction from Pisa, and his taking responsibility for his mother only to realise that he was not up to it. At the end of the year he received a further blow, news of the death of Christopher Millard. Charles felt that he had neglected him, but that he was part of an irrevocable past and had indelibly influenced his own path in life. He wrote an obituary for The Times which praised the man and noted his achievements. It was published in the early edition, but then the editor took it out on the grounds of Millard’s imprisonments for gross indecency. Charles did not fail to protest, writing to the editor that a paper with such an interest in the Cunard family could not afford to be so prudish.

  CHAPTER 16

  Rome

  The Scots are quite as capable of governing themselves as the Swiss – and have as much right as they to do so.

  CKSM, letter to Helen Stephen, 1929

  The door at number 67 via della Croce in Rome was of studded wood, high enough for a man on a horse to pass into the courtyard. Charles limped through the long entrance corridor of stone mosaics, past wooden pigeon-holes, to a marble stairwell with polished brass balls and a lift cage in the middle; the lift, which had been there since 1900, was a blessing as his leg was troubling him much more now. The high ceiling on the second floor was of painted wooden panels and the floor tiles were of polished clay; his own door was ten foot high with brass handles and metal studs to stop it being kicked in, which was as much a risk under fascism as it had been in the centuries before. His flat was a high-ceiling room overlooking the narrow street; sombre, because the window was narrow and only half as high as the room which rose into the darkness. The shutters had to be half-closed against the cold – or the heat, the flies and the noise. Via della Croce was full of hawkers, horses and lively voices. Opposite were walls of faded pink tempera, peeling artistically but not dangerously, and painted wooden shutters on metal hinges. It was a literary neighbourhood: in the next street was a stone plaque on the house where Elizabeth and Robert Browning had stayed, put up by the municipality of Rome on the centenary of Robert Browning’s birth, 7 May 1912.