Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  This literary gossip all had a bearing on his future as a translator. His translation of Sodome et Gomorrhe, even euphemistically renamed ‘Cities of the Plain’ or, as Charles quipped, ‘Cissies of the Plain’, still could not be published. On the advice of Counsel, experts on the Obscene Publications Act 1857, Chatto could not take the risk. Charles felt distressed that Prentice was £400 out of pocket on his behalf, having paid him for a translation he could not publish, and now having to go to private publishers to see if they would take it. On 11 April 1928 Prentice wrote to Charles that Chatto had taken advice from two counsel and that they both advised against publication, and suggested they approach Sylvia Beach at the Shakespeare and Co. bookshop in Paris who had published Joyce’s Ulysses.

  America, on the other hand was not flustered. Boni Inc. had already published Cities of the Plain and were sending copies by post to England to those clamouring for the next, stalled, instalment of Proust. They were paying Charles generously, without a murmur, £500 per volume, with six volumes to go. Charles offered Chatto an option of the English rights of the future volumes and for them to continue only to pay £75 per volume as before. He felt flush with American money and dearly loved his English publisher, confidant and friend, Charles Prentice, to whom he wrote, ‘I am expected to complete the whole work by the end of June 1930, which should be quite feasible, though boring.’ Albertine bored him because there was so much grammatical footwork: Proust had died before he had the chance to correct his proofs. On the other hand, he enjoyed working with Proust’s style, which he thought superior to Joyce’s Ulysses, and could not see why they were compared as similar by critics. That Christmas he wrote to Prentice saying that his association with him had been one of the pleasantest things in his whole life.

  Albert Boni realised that Charles worked fast and sold fast, and suggested in December 1928 that he translate the whole of Boccacio’s works, without investigating their length. Charles discovered the job ran to 17 volumes, much of it in medieval Latin. He proposed to take it on as a full-time job after he had finished Proust at the rate of $450 a month, telling Boni that he had to clear £1000 a year because he was still paying for the education of many of his nieces and nephews. The only possible barrier to this was that he had also agreed to translate the whole of Pirandello.

  He was working hard and keeping irregular hours; ‘I work nightly til 4 a.m,’ he told Vyvyan, ‘read Balzac for 2 hours, wake at 1.30 p.m. and go out as little as possible.’24 When asked in December 1928 by society hostess Mrs Strong to go and meet a German scholar of Proust who was in Rome on a visit, Charles refused and replied with two quotations from Balzac written on scraps of jotter: ‘le temps est le seul capital des gens qui n’ont que leur intelligence pour la fortune’ (‘time is the only capital owned by people who have to live by their wits’), and ‘les succèss littéraires ne se conquierent que dans la solitude et par d'obstines travaux’ (‘literary success is only achieved in solitude and by dogged hard work’). This only intrigued the German scholar further, and that winter he was determined to meet Charles. When Ernst Curtius, critic and professor at Bonn University, was eventually introduced to Charles, a friendship blossomed. Curtius was four years older, sensitive, literary and a lot of fun. Ernst later wrote that he found Charles

  enchantingly original. I had imagined the translator of Proust to be an aesthete. He was something much better: an individual character … He was a Roman body and soul. It was not an antiquarian or artistic interest that drew him to Rome, but the everyday life of the city. The via della Croce was for him a complete universe in which all human wants could be satisfied … By the dim light of a little lamp, and the smell … of a reluctantly burning oil stove, he sat at a table buried under books and papers, leaving just enough room for a half emptied fiasco of Chianti. He generally received me with some strong abuse of Albertine, whose moods and vicious habits were at that time keeping him very busy: he was translating one of the last volumes of Proust. The world of Proust was to him as familiar as the Via della Croce, and he roamed in it with the same enjoyment, though with a sarcastic want of respect … A dominating, brilliantly humorous mood was his usual attitude, whether it was a question of Proust, the latest newspaper rumour, or social events.25

  Charles returned his admiration and affection and dedicated to him the volume about Albertine, which he titled The Sweet Cheat Gone. He wrote to de la Mare to ask if he could use this last line of a poem published in the 1916–17 anthology of Georgian poets, ‘All the grey night/ In chaos of vacancy shone; Nought but vast sorrow was there … The sweet cheat gone.’ Walter de la Mare agreed to the use so long as he was not mentioned himself, as a family man he did not want to be publicly connected to Proust. Curtius had no such worries and welcomed the dedication which ran – ‘Ernst Robert Curtius, zugeeignet, obwohl die arme Albertine verschwunden ist, haben die Brüder Albreche gut gewusst wie uns zu trösten’ (‘As Ernst Robert Curtius said, although poor Albertine has gone, the Albreche brothers knew how to comfort us well’).

  The brothers Albreche ran a beer house in via Rasella near the Trevi fountains where a small circle of friends met over a beer and sausage with sauerkraut nearly every evening. It was the gaiety of these evenings that Charles referred to as consoling them for the loss of Albertine. As Ernst knew, Charles did not need consolation, he was glad to be rid of Albertine; but the evenings were full of jokes and allusions to Albertine’s coquettish behaviour which could also be seen in the men and women of their café life. Charles would illustrate the conversation as it flowed with pen drawings on the marble table tops, ‘he was always a congenial companion, a laughing philosopher, a satirical censor, a bubbling fountain of wit’.26

  This wit was widely appreciated among the expatrate social life of Rome. William Rossetti’s daughter Helen, whom he called ‘the little Angeli,’ sought Charles out on a visit, and he said of her, ‘she looks exactly the same, like a newly washed kitten in a blanket’.27 In October he went to a party given by Estelle Nathan, a Jewish painter whom he had met with Marcel Boulestin and who had done a pencil portrait of him in London two years earlier. He went with Lucy and met Antonio Scarfoglio, son of the great Neapolitan journalist, as well as several ‘pleasant and intelligent people including Pamela, who is 22 and the Prix de Rome Scholar. In about half an hour I must go to a farewell party at the British School. There is a very sympathetic lot there: painters, sculptors, architects, archaeologists, historians, embryo dons, and what not.’ His letter ended, ‘I must stop now and go up to the passport office as it is the night the Kings Messenger goes north and we dine at 7:30 and it is now 7:40.’28 He was still networking and reporting for the Passport Office.

  A week later he gave a lunch party for Macartney of The Times to meet Alec Randall, Britain’s unofficial diplomatic agent at the Vatican, who also worked in intelligence. Randall was a writer who contributed to The Criterion and reviewed German books for the Times Literary Supplement. Randall and his wife, whose children were ill, arrived in deepest black …

  oozing black silk handkerchiefs from every pocket; I met them in the pend outside the restaurant assuming that all their children had died but that they were being brave about it; so I squeezed their hands hard and said nothing. Late in the evening I realised that they were in court mourning for the Empress Marie. Randall is in charge of his ministry until the new Minister arrives so I suppose they have to be extra strict. I think they might have told me however.29

  Another dinner companion was Father Mather, one of the priests at the Scots College, with whom he went on a trip during the following summer to Pisa and stayed with the monks at Calci. In Rome he sometimes dined with him at his clerical hotel which on one occasion was full of Irish policemen on a trip to the Vatican. Mather said that they had just been to the Pope’s Mass and received Holy Communion from him. Afterwards their general gave the Pope a thank-you offering of fifty pounds, and one of them told Mather that the Pope was so excited at the sight of fifty pounds that he �
��simply fell on the general’s neck! Italians not being used to large sums of money.’

  Charles was working hard between interruptions and had neither the time not the energy for a holiday, unless Pisa for Christmas. ‘Tired in brain and body but things are looking up and I do hope to be enormously rich next year and provide for all the children.’30 He did reach Pisa for midnight Mass at the cathedral and on Christmas morning recited Milton’s Nativity Ode from memory, as he had every year on Christmas morning since the age of six.

  * * *

  In the end it was the Americans who were ‘fearless’ about the British obscenity laws. In the spring of 1929, Cities of the Plain in two volumes was at last published in England, by the American Alfred Knopf, who took over the rights from the still fearful Chatto as well as the rights to the rest of the series, paying Charles another £480. The review in the Times Literary Supplement by Orlo Williams on 21 March stated, ‘There is no object in disguising the fact that a large part of this section is concerned with the observation of homo-sexuality in men and women: but Proust must be taken whole or not at all.’31

  Charles also managed to persuade Chatto to reprint Frederic Rolfe’s Hadrian VII, because, he teased, he had lost his own 1904 edition. He was at last becoming a man of influence. Finally, after all these years, the literary agents Curtis Brown offered ‘unusually remunerative arrangements’ for his first novel. ‘What does that mean? They don’t say. Fifty pounds I suppose, less ten per cent for them. Are they any use at all? They involve me in endless correspondence and make me give them opinions on books I have to go out and buy…’ He was too old in spirit, cantankerous and otherwise well-paid to take the offer.

  As Lent came, Charles began fasting, no food but bread and water on Friday and Saturday, and no meat on weekdays. His landlady, who carried a lorgnette in one hand while she did the rooms with the other, and said she was a photographer and a Russian aristocrat, was impressed with this regime. In April he wrote to Aldington, ‘Rome has suddenly turned warm: the sun has, indeed, in the ram his halfe course yrun; two swallows fell down the kitchen chimney on Saturday – in the passport office, a most suitable place for swallows to call at. Smoked spectacles are invading the Piazza di Spagna.’

  He was thinking nostalgically of home, ‘I often dream that I am back in Lanark, usually with Johnnie, and in that commonplace house we discover all sorts of rooms and contrivances that never existed before, nor will again.’32 He still felt close to his family and his governess Helen Stephen with whom he had always corresponded,

  About the death of your mother, you know that everything that touches you, touches me, only with regard to mothers we must all face the moment when we have to survive them, and I think that moment is worse for sons than for daughters, as sons must often feel that they have not been good sons.33

  He was still guilty about his homosexual life and even, at this late stage, still considered the idea of marriage. ‘I am thinking earnestly of getting married … to Miss Lunn,’34 he confessed to Vyvyan, but then made it into a joke by asking Vyv to invite her for cocktails while still on her London visit, followed by a game of ‘hearth rugger after dinner. Do you prefer full back or centre forward by the way?’ But he ended seriously, ‘I should very much like your advice on the subject.’35 He also mentioned his nephew George who had just moved round the corner in Sydney Street. ‘My only friends in Chelsea are Jacqueline Hope and yourself. One will corrupt his body, but the other his soul; so that I don’t think I shall give him any introductions. He is a bright lad, much cleverer than myself, perhaps because he has had less education.’36

  An article he wrote for Country Life about Carrara in April made him nostalgic for Pisa, especially the description of a ‘synod of lawnsleeved clouds assembling on the Apuan Alps’. His mind was turned towards the religious, or at least the aesthetic parts of religion, though it was rarely reflected in his reading. He did not read many holy books, having all the latest novels sent by Prentice upon which he would comment, and reading all his friends’ novels out of curiosity. He spent the summer evenings outdoors with friends by the Tivoli swimming pool where he could still impress as a fine swimmer and high diver. Ion Monro, a freelance journalist, described him as ‘the elusive, swift-minded, and faun-like leader of evenings in trattorias, nights among books…’37 The Pirandello battles continued: both in persuading Chatto to publish a complete works, and in trying to wrest the rights from the Italian agent, as well as trying to track down the elusive writer himself. In June the search paid off,

  Pirandello came to dinner on Friday. He was 23½ hours late, as he had fixed Thursday evening at 8.30 and came on Friday at about 8 while I was down here changing my coat. I got up to 12 via Gregoriana and found him having a tête-à-tête with Lucy, she addressing him in German and he replying in Italian.38

  Pirandello had at last appointed an agent in London and Charles was in the middle of translating his unpublished play, Lazzaro, which was to be produced in fourteen days’ time. Charles’s sheer perseverance ensured that Lazzaro became unique in Pirandello’s repertoire as the only play to be premiered in English, on 9 July 1929 (while the Italian premiere was on 7 December that year in Turin). Charles translated the title, as Though One Rose, from Luke 10: ‘Though one rose from the dead…’ A challenging play with numerous characters all shouting at once, tackling difficult ideas about faith and the afterlife, it was produced at the Theatre Royal in Huddersfield by the dauntless impresario Alfred Wareing. Wareing was a theatre producer of boundless energy who had known Charles’s friends, the actors Frank Benson and William Armstrong. He had written the famous manifesto of the Glasgow Repertory Theatre in 1909, declaring it Glasgow’s own theatre, a citizens’ theatre in the fullest sense of the term and making it no longer dependent on plays from London. Wareing had now bought the Theatre Royal in Huddersfield. His bracing letters include one advising Charles on a cure for his terrible stomach pain, ‘immediately after waking in the morning and before anything else, a tablespoonful of rum with a raw egg in it, not beaten up but in the yolk like an oyster, swallowed whole!’ ending the letter, ‘Cheer-up! Yours sincerely, Alfred Wareing.’

  Charles was far beyond the egg-yolk cure. He wrote to Prentice, ‘I am very unwell just now, and creeping gradually into my grave. I shall be 40 tomorrow and feel already more like 80. I can neither eat nor sleep, nor indeed work, but I can read novels.’39 He read seven novels of Balzac one after the other, maintaining that Lost Illusions was the greatest novel ever written, ‘There is no other novelist really worth reading, and never will be.’40 Lucy, now back in Rome, was worried about his health and wrote a long, exasperated letter to Vyvyan to ask him to help advise Charles to go to hospital and see the doctors recommended by his family. Vyvyan duly did and an X-ray showed a growth round Charles’s oesophagus for which he was prescribed radium treatment. ‘No sympathy, please,’ he ordered Vyvyan. ‘I am quite hardened to it. Probably due to excessive s.a.w.’41 Fond of grim irony himself, Charles appreciated that the particular sexual act begun in his childhood, written about in his infamous story at Winchester, and practised so much in the playground of liberal Italy, should be his nemesis.

  In spite of regular radium treatments, he took himself to Naples on 9 December to see his nephew Colin off by boat to Singapore. Death concentrated the mind and Charles thought of family and home and Scotland. That month his cousin Lucy Pearson sent him a copy of the Scots Observer, where he learnt of the early days of the Scottish National Party which the paper called ‘proud and narrow’. His retort was,

  Granted that we are proud, is it not well that we should be taught to have something to be proud of? Granted that we are narrow, should we not be widened? The Scots are quite as capable of governing themselves as the Swiss – and have as much right as they to do so. Representative government may be a good or a bad thing, but it should be representative … I would cheerfully see all Parliaments abolished as they are most mischievous institutions, but so long as they exist Scotla
nd ought to have one, and so ought England …42

  It was probably the most political statement he ever made. But he was back to work on 2 December 1929, correcting the proofs of Albertine. That day he wrote to T. S. Eliot. A section called ‘The Death of Albertine’ had been published by The Criterion in 1924. He realised that the text had already been changed. ‘In several passages my Criterion version does not conform to the French text afterwards published by Gallimard,’ he told Eliot . He was convinced the Gallimard text was wrong. ‘But how did it come to be falsified?’43 He once had the original but had given it to Mucci, who translated it into Italian; Mucci, however, had now become the Governor of Rome and was entirely inaccessible.

  In the meantime his critic friend Payen de Payne wrote to Charles complaining of the flu, to which Charles replied with a play on his friend’s unusual name,

  Payen-Payne,

  What’s this you say?

  You’re an invalid again?

  Grim the tidings you convey, Payen-Payne!

  Much against my usual vein

  I indite this roundelay

  In a melancholic strain:

  Nearer draws the reckoning day;

  And for every cup we drain

  We must soon – ah, wellaway! Pay, in pain.44

  He had drained many cups. Writing to Oriana in a similar melancholy strain he wondered, ‘I begin to wonder if our driven barks will ever rub sides again in the same harbour.’45 She and Vyvyan travelled to Rome to drain more cups, but after only one night’s revelry Charles took himself off to hospital with what he described as gastric ulcers. ‘You must not think that I am running away from you, but it is not that, I am fearfully weak, and the two delightful evenings with you and V. just tipped the beam and made it impossible for me to stay at home any longer. Lucy is unpacking at this moment in a double-bedded room which the nuns seem to want her to share.’46 Another X-ray showed ‘a foreign body exercising a stranglehold round the foot of the oesophagus which’, he told Oriana, ‘kept going up and down like the service lift in a block of mansions, thus obviating the necessity of more than one meal a fortnight.’47