by Jean Findlay
Robert Ross, disciple of Oscar Wilde, whose house on Half Moon Street became home for a literary and homosexual coterie.
Philip Bainbrigge was a close friend of Charles’s during his university years. This is his entry in the Edgemoor visitors’ book.
Charles on a visit to Durie in 1916. He loved animals, dogs especially; later, in Italy, he kept a pet owl.
Charles surrounded by his first company in the KOSB at Portland Bill in 1914, before they set out for France. Charles was very attached to his men and hated leaving them whenever he got ill.
Robert Graves in 1920. Poet, writer, friend. Using his War Office contacts, Charles managed to get Graves a safe home posting in 1916, and as a critic he promoted Graves’s poetry.
Wilfred Owen in 1916. Charles fell in love with Owen at Graves’s wedding in 1918, subsequently writing him letters and sonnets.
Charles (in spectacles) was badly wounded in the leg in 1917 and spent time in the Ducane Road specialist leg hospital.
A page from Charles’s Bible showing the places and dates he attended mass while in France
from 1915 to 1916. He converted to Catholicism in 1915.
Portrait of Charles painted in 1922 by Edward Stanley Mercer, who shared a house with Vyvyan Holland in Carlyle Square in Chelsea.
Marcel Proust in uniform in 1889. Charles and Proust never met, sadly. Proust died in 1922, the year Charles’s translation of Du Côté de chez Swann was published by Chatto and Windus to great acclaim.
Charles Prentice in 1935, with Norman Douglas. Publisher, friend and correspondent, Prentice was senior partner at Chatto and Windus and published Charles’s translations of Proust and Pirandello.
Edward Marsh, civil servant and patron of the arts, took a deep interest in both Charles and his translations of Proust. They became great friends and lifelong correspondents.
Luigi Pirandello, whom Charles first met after a performance of one of his plays in Pisa in 1925.
A sketch of Charles in 1925 by Estelle Nathan, an artist who spent time in Italy and whose daughter Pamela was one of Charles’s friends in Rome.
Vyvyan Holland and Charles visited Milan together and had a cinematic flip book made of their dinner conversation. They had a loyal and flirtatious friendship and wrote to each other frequently about their intimate lives and gossip about mutual friends.
In between translating and spying, Charles (left) was a constant tour guide for his many friends who came to visit him in Italy.
A portrait of Charles’s great friend and confidante Oriana Haynes as a young woman. She spent many hours listening to Charles read his translations viva voce.
Ruby Melville (second from left) in Italy in 1923. Vyvyan Holland (far left) said of her: ‘What an idiot I made of myself to be sure, following her round Florence and Paris, and she surrounded by dowry-happy gigolos.’
Charles was devoted to his nieces and nephews, especially after the death of his older brother John. To his young niece Sita, he would send postcards like this one of the Hotel Nettuno in Pisa, where he often stayed.
Charles on holiday with Louis Christie at Durie in 1926. It was here in 1923 that Louis probably first broached the idea of Charles spying for him from Italy.
Claude Dansey, the spymaster. Charles knew him at the War Office in 1917 and Dansey was later head of station in Rome.
Charles on an Italian mountainside, taken by Vyvyan Holland in 1926. He looks noticeably ill here. He was to die four years later.
Like Proust, Charles was fascinated by genealogy, drawing family trees as a child and later compiling a complete history of the Moncrieffs with his cousin. This scrap is a dedication to his own ancestors.
A Note About the Author
Jean Findlay was born in Edinburgh and studied law and French at Edinburgh University, then theater in Kraków with Tadeusz Kantor. She ran a theater company, writing and producing plays in Berlin, Bonn, Dublin, and Rotterdam, and at the Pompidou Centre in Paris. She has written for The Scotsman, The Independent, Time Out London, and The Guardian, and she lives in Scotland with her husband and three children. She is the great-great-niece of C. K. Scott Moncrieff. You can sign up for email updates here.
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Contents
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
1 Bloodline
2 Childhood
3 Winchester
4 First Love Affairs
5 To Edinburgh
6 Lightness in War
7 God in the Trenches
8 Critic at War
9 Wounded Out
10 In Love with Wilfred Owen
11 Sniping in the Literary World
12 Translating Proust
13 Writer and Spy in Fascist Italy
14 Discovering Pirandello
15 A Death and Eviction
16 Rome
Epilogue
Family Postscript
Acknowledgements
Sources
List of Published Works by C. K. Scott Moncrieff
Published Sources
Notes
Index
List of Illustrations
Photographs
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
18 West 18th Street, New York 10011
Copyright © 2014 by Jean Findlay
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2014 by Chatto & Windus, Great Britain
Published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
First American edition, 2015
eBooks may be purchased for business or promotional use. For information on bulk purchases, please contact Macmillan Corporate and Premium Sales Department by writing to [email protected].
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014959509
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71401-7
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