Chasing Lost Time

by Jean Findlay

  It was finally confirmed as terminal cancer. He felt fear, certitude and peace. He needed to finish his work, to write some important letters and to read the books he had been meaning to read all his life; also to put his affairs in order: his nephew George, who wanted to be a writer, would inherit his library and his royalties, so that he could be free to spend time in creative writing – a luxury denied Charles.

  Via della Croce could be translated as Cross Street or The Way of the Cross and it is no accident that Charles chose to live there. He had translated Du Côté de chez Swann, as Swann’s Way, meaning Swann’s life, the route he took, his journey; he had a copy of The Way of the Cross by Thomas à Kempis and in his own ‘way’ accepted the challenge of trying to live it. It is striking that he went from the via della Croce to the Calvary hospital, for this slow death was his Calvary.

  The Calvary hospital had been set up in 1908 by a nun called Sister Mary Potter who had been told by the Pope that her mission was to found a hospital for British tourists in Rome. It is still called the British Hospital although it now caters for all, and there is still a portrait of Sister Mary with her blue veil in the entrance hall. She started the nursing order that came to be known as the Blue Nuns, and the order quickly started hospitals all over Europe. The building is on the Coelian Hill, which was then outside the city of Rome, but was only an hour’s walk from the Spanish Steps and Charles’s flat and a few hundred metres from the Colosseum. A cylindrical church with a lead dome formed an integral part of the hospital, with balconies perched up the cylinder so that invalids from the wards on the two floors above could go to Mass for as long as they could stand or sit or bear to be out of bed.

  The windows at the front look out on to the medieval church of San Stefano Rotondo, also a circular church, unusual because of the extreme portrayal of suffering in its sixteenth-century frescos. There are twenty-five larger-than-life size frescos in brilliant colours depicting the martyrdom of the saints: mauled by lions, having their tongues pulled out, hands cut off, being crushed under a slab of stone, chopped to bits with a knife on a slab, boiled in oil, having breasts ripped off with a large sharpened fork, crucified upside down, flayed alive, flung out of a window, St Catherine broken on a wheel … an orgy of torture.

  Slow death by stomach cancer with the help of morphine was by comparison an easier option, not that Charles had a choice. San Stefano Rotondo was near enough for the occasional Mass, and there was the alternative choice of Mass in the hospital church. Going to meet his Maker was a serious journey for Charles and one he approached with all the faith he had accumulated in his life; for most, a short life, but for him, whose friends had died in their twenties in the war, a long and exciting one. He had revelled in the gift of life. He was thankful for the sacrament of confession which meant he could wipe clean the murk accumulated on his soul. His last letters were written happily about his greatest love: literature. To T. S. Eliot on 12 December 1929 he wrote

  I am expecting a long spell of reduced life with these Blue Sisters, with little opportunity for work and much drowsy opportunity for mild reading. I begin by finishing up all the longish books that I have never before finished and have managed so far: Moby Dick, I promessi sposi, the Dynasts, Les Possédés, The Wings of the Dove, War and Peace.

  But for the difficulty of having books located in and fetched from my study at the other end of Rome, and kept here under the disapproving eye of a sister who thinks reading foolish, books untidy, and has never received a telegram in her life, I should have gathered a fair-sized library around me even here. But each volume has to come in and go out by stealth, like Nicodemus, swaddled in cast off pyjamas.48

  Eliot offered to send out more books and mournfully asked: ‘Is there ever any hope of seeing you in London again?’49 They began a discussion about Shelley’s ‘Skylark’ which had gone through Charles’s mind over and over again in the trenches. Now at this hour, again close to death, the same poem re-emerged. Eliot asked, ‘… the real question is: are not all or most of Shelley’s comparisons in that poem irrelevancies? Surely Dante would have shuddered at such a far-fetched simile to express “keenness”.’50 Charles replied,

  Shelley lived in a Jazz Age, like our own, when everything had been upset by 20 years of war, the language most of all … turning to Adonais, whom does he mean by ‘a pardlike spirit, beautiful and swift’? I used to maintain that this was Byron, until I was forced to admit that Byron is suited elsewhere with a ‘brow, branded like Cain’s or Christ’s’. Well then, is Shelley referring to himself? It outrages my sense of decorum that any man should call himself, or even his spirit, swift.51

  Charles doubted that his own spirit would soon move swiftly on. Turner, Orioli, Aldington and Douglas, his friends from Florence, took the train to Rome to say farewell. Later Orioli remembered the numerous saints’ medallions around his neck which he fingered as he spoke to them. Douglas assumed that the nuns, being Catholic and schooled in the benefits of suffering, would not give him enough morphine to deal with the pain. Vyvyan Holland recalled that Charles had a final, bitter, Sitwell moment, saying that it was all very well for them to sneer and call him a body snatcher, ‘But my way was forced on me: I had to earn my own living.’ At which point he threw back the blankets to reveal a wraithe-like body.52

  He was in pain, ‘Heroin is no good. Laudanum is a little more effective, and they won’t even allow me to vomit, which I can do rather well.’53 He could barely eat and lost 20 kilos rapidly. Richard Aldington and G. K. Chesterton visited on separate occasions; Chesterton read Virgil’s Aeneid in Latin to him. Then he was ‘sent to bed like a whipped dog because I vomited again. But a man must have some outlet for his passions.’54

  His mother came to stay in the hospital for the last few weeks of his life and he shared with her his letters to Eliot, to whom on the 29 January, with only a month to live, he still managed a long letter, suggesting a short essay competition about the point in The Turn of the Screw where the little boy is dying and says, suddenly looking out of the window, ‘Peter Quint: you devil.’ Charles’s interpretation being that the little boy is calling his governess ‘you devil’ or that at this point of heightened spiritual awareness, he could see the devil in her. Charles still maintained that his mother’s conversations with the dead were evil, but she continued, mesmerised. He finished his last letter to Eliot, ‘I am iller at the moment than I should have thought it possible for a man to be without being seriously ill, so to speak. Quite incredibly weak and as a rule unable to swallow any nourishment though for the last 2 hours I have been trifling with a cup of tea.’55

  To his cousin William Moncrieffe he wrote, ‘I should be perfectly happy to end my days in this room – looking out at a very pleasant mezzotint landscape…’56 Then came his final literary visit on 14 February when Evelyn Waugh arrived and gave him ‘the first blissful evening I’ve had for months’.57

  A special blessing from the Pope was requested and given. While he was still mentally alert, Charles received the Last Sacraments of Confession, Viaticum and Extreme Unction. He died on the evening of the last day of February 1930. His funeral Mass was held by Monsignor Clapperton in the Baptistry of San Giovanni Laterano, the vast basilica and seat of the Popes before St Peter’s. The baptistry itself dated back to the thirteenth century when it was built for a Pope Hilarious – a detail Charles would not have missed in his funeral instructions. The procession wound its way from the nearby Calvary Hospital round the ancient Roman wall that lines via Rotondo, to the mass at the basilica and from there on, a half-hour walk to the Verano Cemetery. Ion Monro, his journalist friend attached to the Glasgow Herald, was present and wrote: ‘To the little group of friends who followed on foot his funeral car, there joined in with reverend furtiveness here and there along the route humble, weeping Italian workmen and women, folk hitherto unknown to us, but who had cause to bless his memory.’58

  Epilogue

  That poetic, but positive and staccato soul … the supercili
ous curl of his moustached lip, and the fierce, straight look in his eyes.

  J. C. Squire, Obituary of CKSM1, 1931

  This picture, drawn by one friend after Charles’s death, conjures up the elusive and attractive spirit. Charles had a tough, discerning mind which disciplined his own life into several compartments: the literary man to Prentice, Marsh and most of the world; the family man to his mother, brother and relatives; the spy to Louis Christie and the Secret Intelligence Service; and the Rabelaisian homosexual to Vyvyan Holland alone.

  He was a man who on one day could write a metaphysical religious poem of great depth, and on the next a filthy, funny limerick. Charles would write limericks spontaneously onto his typewriter one after another without line breaks. Even dirty stories were written with characteristic wit, ‘Reggie Turner thinks the jewels are concealed in Mrs Otway’s bottom which is highly probable, and therefore should be probed.’2 In the same letter he thanked Vyvyan for sending an Anthology of Catholic Poets.

  A Catholic convert, he was also a family man, military man, a manly poet. A homosexual who flirted with women and had lasting emotional relationships with a number of close female friends: Eva, Oriana, Ruby and Lucy – and did not feel defined or confined by his sexuality. You could say that his conversion to Catholicism freed his spirit. He discovered the sacrament of Confession, where man is reconciled with himself and with God, not trapped in guilt, and this gave his spirit flight. The door was always open to be someone else: he noticed with delight during his last illness that the nuns in the convent hospital expected him to share a bedroom with his secretary Lucy.

  Controversially, he enjoyed the war; his wounding in the leg jolted him for ever into a world of pain, but saved his life by getting him out of France. Healing came with his love for Wilfred Owen, combined with immersion in military intelligence at the War Office. Threaded through his war experience was his career as a journalist and critic, failed poet and fledgling short-story writer. Realising that his judgement of others’ work was more valuable than his own, he recognised and helped bring to fame Owen, Proust and Pirandello. During the fruitful post-war years, he formed friendships with great literary figures of the day including Graves, Coward, Gosse, Waugh, Conrad, Eliot and many others less famous. He mixed with aesthetes and read and wrote about them, but his own habits were ascetic and restrained, living in rented rooms amid piles of books and papers, never having a proper home.

  He lived much of his life under great threat and was bound by honour and secrecy; during the war he never became cynical of his reasons for fighting; later he defended Millard in court and collected from others for Millard’s court fines. Arranging transport to the Du Cane Road hospital for the wounded was a point of honour. Finally, Charles’s sense of honour is evident in his intelligence-gathering exertions all over Italy for the Passport Control Office. Today we often regard honour as fustiness or foolishness, misguided jingoism or false bravado, but for Charles honour meant integrity, nobility of character, distinction, dignity and, above all, self-sacrifice.

  He may have developed a Catholic soul, but he always had what we understand as a Protestant work ethic, the legacy from his father and the Church of Scotland. He worked as hard as possible for two reasons: to support his family and out of a deep love and knowledge of literature. He championed Proust and Pirandello when they were still almost unknown to English-speaking readers and constantly nagged his British and American publishers to support their books.

  He wrote thousands of letters and was a great entertainer to all of his correspondents, as he was to his friends, having a manifest enjoyment of life and people, ‘he had a vivid pen, and a power of stripping superfluities from things and people and exposing their nakedness.’3 Even his only letter to Proust, to sort out their differences over the title, is full of grace:

  My dear Sir, I beg that you will allow me to thank you for your very gratifying letter in English as my knowledge of French – as you have shown me, with regard to your titles – is too imperfect, too stunted a growth for me to weave from it the chapelet that I would fain offer you. Are you still suffering – which I am very sorry to hear, and wish that my real sympathy could bring you some relief – I am making my reply to your critiques on another sheet, and by the aid of a machine which I hope you do not abominate: it is the machine on which Swann and one-third of the Jeunes Filles have been translated. Thus you can throw away this sheet unread, or keep it, or inflict it upon M. Gallimard. Charles Scott Moncrieff.

  Charles not only breaks down our assumptions of stereotypes, he was also a perfect example of a man of his time. A masculine, muscular leader; and at the same time a great pansy. Fact is often more extreme and unexpected than fiction. Fiction orders things, gives them a structure and makes them palatable and understandable, but real life can be extraordinary. His life was tragic, but he managed to stave off the worst through arduous toil and the gift of humour.

  Charles is recognised as having made a considerable contribution to English literature. Proust owes him a debt, as does everyone who discovers Proust in English for the first time, such as Scott Fitzgerald, who said of his translation, ‘Scott Moncrieff’s Proust is a masterpiece in itself.’4

  Over thirty years after Proust’s death his brother and publisher put together a new French edition, re-edited and lengthened by 300,000 words. This edition was retranslated into English in 1981. There are now enough new translations to provide material for arguments on their merits and faults for critics for centuries to come. However, it is generally agreed that if you want to read a translation from one hand, which understands the time of Proust, and which was taken from the French script that Proust personally approved and saw to publication, then that is Scott Moncrieff’s. This was the translation that influenced Woolf, Joyce and the modernist generation. ‘Any translation that appears now will inevitably – whatever its brilliance, whatever its concern to be faithful to the original – bear the imprint of our own age,’ wrote the critic and Proust expert Jerry Farber in 1997.5 Similarly, the critic Robert Douglas-Fairhurst wrote in 2002 in The Observer, when reviewing the new Penguin edition:

  Scott Moncrieff, for all his occasional carelessness and prissiness, was probably temperamentally better suited than many later translators to making sense of a style, which Montesquiou once described memorably as ‘a mixture of litanies and sperm’ … For the Penguin translators, one feels, this version of Proust is a job well done; for Scott Moncrieff, it was a labour of love.6

  Charles understood Proust’s ‘mixture of litanies and sperm’: that the sacred and the profane create an invigorating blend and thereby embrace the whole of life. Just as Proust’s ‘Jeunes filles en fleurs,’ or young girls starting their period, were understood as an element of creation rather than objects of disgust, so it was with ‘litanies and sperm’. You could say that the heady cocktail inspired his life. Charles’s translation was indeed a ‘labour of love’, one production of a man who worked tirelessly for the good of literature as a whole, and cared as fiercely about the written word as he did about family and friends. Charles and Proust were linked by the inspiration of Ruskin who said, ‘No true disciple of mine will ever be a “Ruskinian”. He will follow, not me, but the instincts of his own soul and the guidance of its Creator.’7

  Family Postscript

  After the First World War, there must have been many families and unmarried uncles who cobbled together to support the children of those killed in action – theirs was a fatherless generation. As the only war-wounded member of his family to survive, Charles supported and assisted in the education of his nine nephews and nieces, after John’s early death and Colin’s long illness.

  His entry in Who’s Who under ‘Recreation’ cited only ‘Nepotism’. His brother John had two children, David and Jean, who had three and four children of their own. Of Colin’s large family, sons Colin and Charles died in the Second World War, with Colin leaving one six-month-old daughter. Elizabeth had two sons and Joanna one daughter. Ge
orge, the would-be writer who inherited Charles’s royalties, fathered seven children, one of them my mother. All the first generation retained their Christian faith, with George following Charles into the Catholic Church. In turn these great nieces and nephews have had their children and now grandchildren.

  It is touching to think that Charles, who took such an interest in his ancestors, should by his providence have had an extended responsibility for eighty-three of his family’s descendants.

  Acknowledgements

  This book was suggested in the first place by Euan Cameron, translator and editor, whose unflagging support and lunches at the Havelock have sustained my efforts. The first research I did was in Jamie Fergusson’s book collection, at his dining room table. I have to thank many people on the seven-year journey and apologise for leaving anyone out. Suzanne Foster, the Archivist at Winchester College; Sue Usher at the Oxford English Faculty Library; Steve Crook in New York Public Library; Trevor Dunmore at the Royal Automobile Club; Patricia Cox at the Savile Club; Wendy Maynard at the New Club; Susan Thomas and Kira Ferrant in New York; Ulysses Bookshop, WC1; Peter Ellis; Professor James Fawcett at Kings College, Cambridge and Professor Jon Marenbon at Trinity College, Cambridge; Peter Montieth at the Kings College Archives; the Trustees and staff of the London Library; Neville Shack; Theodore Shack; Anisa Malik-Mansell, Librarian, Shrewsbury School; Sandy Christie; Malcolm Gibb; Christina Scott Moncrieff; Georgia Coleridge; Janet Mcgiffen; Maggie and Jamie Fergusson; Madeleine Fergusson; John Hodge from the Olin Library Washington University, St Louis; Lesley Scott Moncrieff; Eileen Scott Moncrieff; Michael Scott Moncrieff; John Scott Moncrieff; Ann Scott Moncrieff; David Lunn Rockliffe; Jaqueline Lunn Rockliffe; Catherine Moberly; the Macdonalds at Alton Burn Hotel, Nairn; S. Stefano at Suites Rome, 67 Via della Croce; Anna Maria Cruciata in Grossetto; Helen Spande at Villa la Pietra, Firenze; Peter Christie at Durie; James Christie; Anthony Mould; Anthony Fraser; Philippa Fraser; Kit Fraser; Sir Michael Holroyd; Sir Crispin Tickell; Keith Jeffry and Rupert Walters. Ian Martin from the KOSB Museum in Berwick-upon-Tweed gave generous time to checking military detail.