Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  The street was paved with black cobbles of a hard stone, like granite but smoother. Looking out of the window gave a view of all of life: small shops belonging to artisans with whom Charles became friendly; a framemaker goldleafing a frame; fishmongers scaling red mullet on trestles set up in the street; market traders pushing barrows of Sicilian oranges, shouting as they made their way through the crowds of lingering men. Across the street was an artisan who repaired chair seats, reworking the basketry or cane. The place was heaped high with broken chairs; he had done it since childhood, he was an expert, weaving and repairing without looking while the room filled with company, bantering and gossiping.

  Any couple on honeymoon in Rome on the way to the Spanish Steps would be side-stepped every few paces by a young boy selling roses to lovers: ‘Bella Signorina’, ‘Signora’, ‘Ah, bella Signora, bellissima Signora’, foisting a red rose on them, which had just been rejuvenated from the day before by the boy’s removing its outer, faded petals. Early in the morning Charles could see the boys reviving their roses and the black cobbles would be spotted with the bright red petals. In one tiny front room a pasta maker shifted his sheets of pasta from a drying rack, where they hung like pillow cases to dry, to the scored wooden counter where they were cut into shapes for the varieties he sold; here for ravioli, rigatoni, tagliatelli, farfalle; next door for spaghetti, penne and linguini. The salami shop owner would be instructing his assistants in the art of sausagery; slicing and packaging, laying it beautifully on sheets of greaseproof paper. The cheese shop sold tiny cheeses made from cows’, sheep’s and goats’ milk from small farmers outside Rome. A poor person could buy a small goats’ cheese, a few slices of salami and then go to the bakers for one panini. The market two streets away sold every fruit, mushroom and vegetable imaginable; chestnuts, porcini, peaches, tomatoes, lettuce …

  The British Passport Office was nearby and Charles would walk east along the via della Croce to the Piazza di Spagna, climb the Spanish Steps to the Piazza della Trinità dei Monti and turn left into via Gregoriana which descended as steeply as the steps had ascended. It was all good exercise for his leg, which he used as much as he could. Every evening Charles would eat at the office with Louis Christie and Lucy Lunn who was the secretary at the organisation. Petite and determined, with a chestnut bob, Lucy appealed greatly to Charles who said that she was so charming that she must be related in some way to Constance Lunn, his sister-in-law, ‘with a touch of strangeness due to an upbringing in Moscow’.1 English was her mother tongue, but she had fluent French, German and Russian and was currently tackling Italian. She would become his secretary and amanuensis in his final years. As they became close, Charles read her whole Pirandello stories in Italian for hours in the evening, and in his later letters he spoke of ‘we’ to Prentice when he received proofs. He would often head his letters to Prentice, ‘Rome SW7’, to indicate the Office, because London SW7, or Knightsbridge, was the headquarters of secret service operations and the British Passport Office. Charles was proud of the fact that while at the War Office he helped promote the whole idea of the Passport Office as a cover for spying, writing in March 1928 to Oriana about Louis Christie: ‘His career was to some extent invented by myself ten years ago – and by Sir Denison R.’2

  His enthusiasm in being involved in intelligence work was given an abrupt shock in late spring 1928. Louis was now also the King’s Messenger in Rome, employed by the Foreign Office to hand-carry secret and important messages to embassies and consulates. The briefcase was often chained to his wrist. King’s Messengers were usually retired army personnel, like Louis, travelled first class in plain clothes, and were covered by diplomatic immunity. A troubling story was reported in the New Statesman on 16 June 1928, under the heading ‘Why Palliate Fascism?’ It began, ‘A few weeks ago an Official of the British Embassy at Rome was sent to Milan on official business…’ This was the burly Louis who stopped to watch two bullies confronting a third person; they then turned on him and demanded his papers; he refused. A policeman arrived and Louis demanded to be taken to the police station where his identity and his connection with the Diplomatic Service were established, as were the identities of the bullies as two members of the plainclothes fascist police. They were all allowed to leave, but later in the day Louis was knocked down in the street by a blow to the head from behind. He was then kicked and beaten, his body was heavily bruised and his face deeply cut. If there were passers-by, they knew better than to interfere. He recognised his assailants as the two plainclothes fascist policeman he had met earlier that day. The New Statesman questioned why this had been hushed up, both in Italy and in Britain, when it was so clearly symptomatic of the behaviour of fascist Italy. It concluded that Il Duce was a popular despot who made the trains run on time and that Mussolini’s vast energy atoned in some way for the Italians’ ‘delightful habit of letting things slide’3. (As late as 1934 the head of SIS was to give the apparently untroubled admission that ‘the activities of our Passport Control Office all over the world are perfectly well known’.4)

  Louis was so badly hurt that he had to take an extended holiday to recover. He went to Castle Eerde in Holland, a Theosophy community, ‘where he is in charge of the bees, etc. and will have to register 3000 people for next summer’s camp. He is now on retired pay amplified by disability for a few years.’5

  Another reason for Charles moving to Rome was to be near Pirandello. He wanted to translate all his novels, short stories and plays; the complete works. But Pirandello’s agent – who spoke no English and answered no letters – would not part with the English rights, or so it seemed. Shoot! and The Old and the Young had only been acquired by Prentice from the American copyright holder. There were several hundred short stories, dozens of dramas and more novels, not counting what Pirandello might produce now that he had settled down to full-time writing after disbanding his troupe of actors in July 1927. Charles wanted to be the only English translator; Prentice thought this ambitious, if not greedy.

  ‘Poor old Pirandello,’ Charles wrote to Oriana. ‘People go about saying he should take a rest, except for some elderly spinsters, who were sorry for Marta Abba and said: “Poor girl, she should have a younger lover.” I realise with a start – that I am reckoned too old!’6 Charles was nearly thirty-nine and Marta Abba now twenty-seven, while Pirandello himself was sixty. The couple were tortured by gossip about their supposed affair, while in fact it was more of an obsession; the elderly dramatist was dependent on Abba for, he claimed, his sanity: ‘I am petrified to be left alone with myself. All the beasts of my cage wake up to tear me to pieces. And I do not know how to placate them.’7 Charles introduced Pirandello to Ruth Draper, the American wit and monologuist, who was at the end of a season’s tour in Rome. After the first act of Sei personaggi in cerca d’autore, in Abba’s dressing room, Miss Draper recited one of her pieces: ‘Marta with her back to the door keeping out the call boy, shouting, “But you must begin the second act, it’s cheap seats tonight.”’8

  Charles gave a lunch party at Caffè Aragno for Draper and Pirandello, to which, as with all his parties, he invited everyone he came across, and filled up the restaurant completely. Pirandello became so excited by Charles’s plans and so frustrated with his agent that he ‘virtually said print and be damned’. This was reported at once to Prentice at Chatto, who unfortunately had other considerations. The last two Pirandello translations were selling poorly in England. Whitworth, who had worked hard to sell Proust, was not as keen on Pirandello’s works. Charles’s reply was full of righteous indignation; he had got more press clippings about Pirandello in the last six months of 1926 than he had received about Proust in five years.

  It is beyond question that he is better known to the public than Proust and Stendhal put together. It is a little hard that the highbrows should be saying his philosophy is balls, before lowbrows have had time to say, ‘Well, I mayn’t know much about philosophy, but I know what I like.’ Italians dislike him because he has not enough phi
losophy. English people (esp. women of the rabbit-bottomed breed, who dust bookshelves casually with their once snowy scuts) because he has too much, is too difficult, as they used to say about Browning. The trouble is that English people won’t read a book that requires the slightest effort.9

  The irony for all but Charles was that less than six years later Pirandello would be awarded a Nobel Prize for Literature. Charles’s letters to Prentice throughout 1928 re-echo his plea, but sales figures were against him. He became more determined than ever to continue translating Pirandello, even if he had to fund it himself, so he set out to get the English speaking rights from the man himself. In September Richard Aldington was staying and wanted Charles to take him to see Pirandello, but the dramatist was in his home town in Sicily. At the end of September, with Aldington gone, Charles called alone on Pirandello in Rome, and waited for an hour in his salon in the sole company of his pet praying mantis. When Pirandello did finally arrive, he asked Charles to kiss him on both cheeks (‘from which I gather his Venus was no longer toute entière a sa proie attachée, as kisses were rather a drug in the market when I was dancing attendance on him in March’10). Pirandello had found that Abba could not return the ferocity of his passion in equal measure. In fact Pirandello’s life was frequently one of painful despair, and he clung to anyone who showed him warmth and affection: he warmly assured Charles that he would be his official Anglo-Saxon translator. He said he would send a typescript of a new play, Lazzarro, straight to Charles, missing out agent or theatre, so it could be freshly translated with no compromise. Charles realised that it must be printed and he must also find an English supporter, so he asked Prentice if Noël Coward’s producer, Charles B. Cochran, was still in London.11 But a week later he told Prentice, ‘Pirandello has slipped off into the blue, and has not sent me the typescript play he promised. Yesterday at lunch Frezzan drafted a magnificent letter for me to P’s agent at Milan, which I must copy and send tomorrow.’12

  Since he had moved to the capital Charles had also been enjoying the amateur theatricals of the students at the Scots College in Rome. Under the management of Mgr William Clapperton, who soon became a good friend, it was ‘no mean establishment’. When not at via Gregoriana, Charles would dine with the Monsignor, drink much wine and slope off home to sleep it off. He was drinking more, as a respite from the gnawing stomach pain and continual fevers. However, to gladden his heart, the student clergymen at the college staged a production of the Pirates of Penzance. Nuns lived in the basement of the Scots College and came to dress the female impersonators in sumptuous paper costumes, lavishly trimmed with cut-out, coloured flowers. The Major-Domo had a blue frock coat with an Italian officer’s splendid sash and carabiniere trousers, and a paper cocked hat. Both comic and comforting was the fact that, ‘He was surrounded by five daughters with deep voices from which strange Lanarkshire sounds issued.’13

  Charles always conveyed his entertainment to his mother, who was by now living in a mansion block in Maida Vale, not far from the Hayneses,’ who said it was amazing that she had found a haven in such a busy thoroughfare, ‘which makes it sound as though you live in a cabman’s shelter’.14 Renée Haynes had just written her first novel called Neapolitan Ice which Charles told Prentice he found disappointing, but had not yet the courage to tell her so. He wrote Renée a glowing appreciation, however; and mentioned the book in a letter to Edward Marsh. Charles was still teasing Marsh and wrote to him about an incident at 67, via della Croce, ‘We have a male undergraduate living in this house, from Catanzaro, in the warm south, who (as I wrote to Miss H.) looks as if Neapolitan Ice woudn’t half melt in his mouth; last night, going home, I unlocked my letter box and out tumbled a picture postcard inscribed ‘Baci ed abbracci cari. Edoardo’ I was puzzled and thought myself Piers Gaveston15 until I observed that the postmark Catanzaro covered my younger gentleman’s name.’16

  Meanwhile Charles was asked by the American firm Simon and Schuster to translate ‘Jean Richard Bloch’s masterpiece Et Cie’. From their punctuation, Charles originally thought the title of the book must be Masterpiece and Company as he judged Et Cie to be certainly no masterpiece when he finally got round to reading it. ‘A long and (to my mind) tedious book,’17 he told the publishers. Simon and Schuster were not after his literary appraisal, however, only his translation. In September 1928, he accepted a $250 advance in the expectation of another $500 when finished. It was the only time he admitted to having been bought, and having translated what he judged as something less than literature. It was not in the rank of Proust and Pirandello.

  Jean Richard Bloch was a French essayist and novelist, and the novel Et Cie with its penetrating insights into Jewish psychology was about a family of cloth manufacturers who moved from Alsace to Normandy in 1870. Halfway through translating Et Cie, Charles wrote to Simon and Schuster, ‘I must say that I find the book extremely dull, and I cannot believe that it will have a very large sale. I don’t think the Jewish community will enjoy it particularly as Bloch seems to dwell upon all their minor faults in turn. It may appeal to textile manufacturers, but I doubt whether they form a large enough public.’18 But he had already spent the advance and had no choice but to continue.

  At the same time he had a friend ‘staying indefinitely’. Iacopi Frascani, the son of Charles’s old landlady, had come from Pisa to settle the matter of his mother’s pension. He discovered he would get only 12 lire a day, so Charles decided to add the Frascanis to his list of beneficiaries, which was by this time extensive. Iacopi had a doglike devotion and ‘creeps about polishing my shoes until I tell him to go out until dinner time with some pocket money’. Lucy, who was by now Charles’s secretary, helped by taking Iacopi out occasionally – on one day they all went round six churches and on another they went on a trip to Ostia together to swim. ‘I am very old and weak and exhausted and likely to become so increasingly as time goes on,’ Charles complained, noting that he was bathed in sweat every time he moved. It was a hot summer, and his illness was beginning to take its toll.

  By October 1928 twelve boxes of his books had arrived from Pisa and he filled his bookcase with six of them. He pulled the bookshelf out three feet from the wall, making a passage behind and filling in the back of the shelves with the rest of his books, which had been stored in the packing cases long enough to breed a colony of black beetles. He had been given a second room which meant he could have guests. Sebastian Sprott, the professor of Psychology at Nottingham University, came to visit, on the advice of his close friend, E. M. Forster. Forster had written advising Sprott that ‘Scott Moncrieff is reported as being entertaining, but unentertainable.’19 No doubt Sprott needed to work out for himself what that meant. They went out to dinner in Rome and had come back with friends to Charles’s rooms to play scopa, an Italian card game. Charles then wrote inviting him to return and stay in his study where he had a ‘quite comfortable bed’. Sprott had connections in the London literary world, a scene Charles felt no longer part of, being cloistered in Rome. Charles explained to him: ‘I linger on here, hoping to earn enough money to be able to go away at some very remote date. My eldest nephew has got a job, and a paying job, at Singapore, which may perhaps diminish my responsibilities, otherwise I am tied hand and foot by the claims of nepotism.’20

  Charles was still in the middle of indexing the Moncrieff genealogy, to be published privately in two folio volumes the following year. He had got to ‘F: Flodden; Battle of’. The reason it was taking so long was because, although he had now brought all his books from Pisa to Rome, he had left the cards for the Moncrieff index with a friend in Pisa, ‘which I shall bring down one letter at a time, and take back, when copied, to be destroyed there, as they have all sorts of secrets on the reverse side’.21 After Louis’s beating in Milan, and in the general climate of fear, he carefully destroyed them. He told his mother that he kept

  one rather superior one, with the photograph signature etc of the Dowager Lady Crawford and Balcarres … retained as a bookmark …
from where she continues to protest that she did not, when she came out to Italy in 1919, know how difficult the British would make it to get back to England! It does seem absurd as I think Crawford was in the Government at the time, and the younger son, Sir Ronald, who is now at the Foreign Office after being Ambassador in Berlin must even then have been high up in the diplomatic service.22

  Having friends in high places was not always enough, though, even in a cultural context. That autumn, the Home Office in Britain banned Radclyffe Hall’s Well of Loneliness, a novel about love between women: it portrayed lesbianism as a natural state and made the plea, ‘Give us also the right to our existence.’ To Prentice Charles was indignant,

  In 1921 or 22 the House of Lords led by the Archbishop of Canterbury and Lord Chancellor (Birkenhead) indignantly rejected a proposal to make these practices illegal; in which case I don’t see how a book dealing with the tendencies underlying them can be illegal. I should like to take it into court and subpoena Davidson, Birkenhead and Co, and examine them on the Hansard report of their speeches.23

  In November 1928 Faith Mackenzie, the wife of Compton, came to visit Charles and told him that Compton’s novel about the lesbians on Capri, Extraordinary Women, had also been banned, and that Radclyffe Hall, who had suffered over her book was now enduring a long and disabling illness. Charles told Prentice that he hoped Sir Joyson Hicks – the authoritarian Home Secretary – might also have a long and disabling illness. Faith said that the Sunday Times had rebuked Evelyn Waugh for making jokes about the white slave trade in Decline and Fall. Charles had enjoyed the novel, ‘the most profoundly immoral book I have ever read, but immense fun – don’t you agree?’