Chasing Lost Time: The Life of C. K. Scott Moncrieff; Soldier, Spy, and Translator, by Jean Findlay

I found this book from 2014 in the free used book bin at Coffee Fix, where I get coffee on weekday mornings when I’m at the church. I remembered having read a review in The Gay and Lesbian Review when the book came out. I’d been intrigued then but not enough to read it. But having it show up serendipitously, and for free, I picked it up and read it over several commutes on the train.

C. K. Scott Moncrieff is best known for his English translation of the first six sections of Proust’s In Remembrance of Lost Time. That’s what intrigued me. He died, in 1930, while at work on the seventh and last section, which was completed in English by Sydney Schiff under the pseudonym Stephen Hudson.

Scott Moncrieff (both names are his last name. The C. K. is Charles Kenneth) was Scottish, born in 1899 the youngest of three sons. His father was a provincial judge. His mother encouraged his literary education. Initially, he thought to be a poet but eventually recognized his insufficient talent, although he continued to write poetry throughout his life. In school he wrote short stories, published in the school paper, and realized his homosexuality. As an older teen he made connections with a circle of literary gay men in London centered on the legacy of Oscar Wilde, including one of Wilde’s sons, the straight but promiscuous and approving, Vyvyan Holland, three years older than Scott Moncrieff. The two began a lifelong friendship and, fortunately for the biographer, correspondence. (After Wilde’s conviction, Vyvyan’s mother changed the family name and Wilde had no contact with his two sons. Oscar Wilde died in 1900 when Vyvyan was aged 4.)

When the First World War began Scott Moncrieff joined the British army as an officer and saw service in France. He saw the romance of war rather than the horror, or at least he suppressed that feeling in deference to patriotism. The heroism of the war and the camaraderie of the men invigorated him, but the physical deprivations ruined his health. He developed “trench fever” a viral infection that forced him away from the front lines and into military hospitals or back to England on several occasions, and continued to plague him through the rest of his life. On April 23, 1917, while leading his men in an attempt to take a German position in Belgium, Scott Moncrieff was severely injured when a British shell launched from behind his charge landed short. It exploded in front of him piercing his right thigh with shrapnel and breaking his left leg in two places. He avoided having the leg amputated but the surgery left the leg an inch shorter than its mate.

I found the schoolboy and soldier part of the biography interesting but was eager to get to Proust, which is the reason to write Scott Moncrieff’s biography. The chapter titled, “Translating Proust” doesn’t arrive until chapter 12 of 16, and also, as it turns out, exactly three quarters through Scott Moncrieff’s short life. The biographer, Jean Findlay, by the way, is Scott Moncrieff’s great-great-niece, which gave her a family reason to write the biography, as well as giving her access to family sources.

Scott Moncrieff returned to England and worked as a journalist, writing book reviews, especially of new poetry. He became a regular contributor to The New Witness, edited by G. K. Chesterton. He also began to work as a translator, making his name with translations of Chanson de Roland, and Beowulf. In 1919, he suggested to his publisher that he translate Proust. Proust’s first volume had been published in 1913 but the second, delayed by the war, had just come out. Scott Moncrieff never met Proust, although Findlay includes in her biography the tantalizing possibility that Scott Moncrieff as a boy may have been visiting with his family in the same seaside hotel in France where Proust as a young man was vacationing. Scott Moncrieff’s translation of Swann’s Way appeared in early 1922 to good reviews. Proust lived long enough to read the translation and praise it before dying in November of that year. The last three volumes of his work were finished but unpublished at the time of his death.

Reading this section of Scott Moncrieff’s biography, early 1920s, a war veteran, a kind of poet, damaged by the war, living in London, made me think he could have been the model for Septimus Smith in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. In fact, Scott Moncrieff never met Virgina Woolf though his literary world did include Noel Coward and Compton MacKenzie the author of Whisky Galore, as well as G. K. Chesterton and several poets.

His military experience and connections led to him being recruited for the final role in his life, and in his biography’s subtitle: spy. As Mussolini took power in Italy, Mussolini began to maneuver against England for control of North Africa and the Middle East. Scott Moncrieff’s experience as a poet, journalist and translator gave him the perfect cover for living as a writer in Italy. His homosexuality had taught him to be discrete and to hide a double life. He settled in Pisa, moving to Rome only for his final years. In Italy, he discovered his second important work as a translator, introducing Pirandello to an English audience. He also worked on translating Stendahl, including The Red and the Black.

Unfortunately, for security reasons, Scott Moncrieff destroyed all of his notes relating to his intelligence work so this section of the biography, potentially the most exciting, is actually the least interesting. Findlay can only guess which of his meetings in Italy with English friends had an ulterior purpose, or what intelligence he may have gathered and relayed.

I also wished for more stories of Scott Moncrieff’s sex life. Most of what Findlay can know comes from letters to Vyvyan Holland, but these were often joking and elliptical. I’m not exactly sure what I wanted, certainly not sex scenes, and it seems the sex Scott Moncrieff did have was brief anonymous encounters not ever with a romantic lover. I noticed that Findlay includes in her list of sources the William Andrews Clark (misspelled as “Clerk”) Memorial Library in Los Angeles, due to their extensive collection of Wilde material, which I know about from having read Twilight Man, the biography of Clark’s lover, Harrison Post.

Scott Moncrieff died of stomach cancer in Rome, in 1930, only 40 years old. I felt sad for a life where he had to be so circumspect about his sexuality, even while translating Proust’s work which deals openly (though not uncritically) with homosexual characters. His one great love, according to Findlay, was the poet Wilfred Owen, who returned his affection but not his love and who died in the war, age 25.

I’ve read Proust twice now, in the version by Terrance Kilmartin from 1981 where he revised Moncrieff’s translation, as finished by Stephen Hudson, incorporating a corrected French edition called the Pleiade that had been published in 1954. Kilmartin says of Moncrieff’s translation:

“A general criticism that might be leveled against Scott Mondrieff is that his prose tends to the purple and the precious–or that this is how he interpreted the tone of the orginal: whereas the truth is that, complicated, dense, overloaded though it often is, Proust’s style is essentially natural and unaffected, quite free of preciosity, archaism or self-conscious elegance. Another pervasive weakness of Scott Moncrieff’s is perhaps the defect of a virtue. Contrary to a widely-held view, he stuck very closely to the original (he is seldom guilty of short-cuts, omissions or loose paraphrases), and in his efforts to reproduce the structure of those elaborate sentences with their spiraling subordinate clauses, not only does he sometimes lose the thread but he wrenches his syntax into oddly un-English shapes: a whiff of Gallicism clings to some of the longer periods, obscuring the sense and falsifying the tone. A corollary to this is a tendency to translate French idioms and turns of phrase literally, thus making them sound weirder, more outlandish, than they would to a French reader. In endeavoring to rectify the weaknesses, I hope I have preserved the undoubted felicity of much of Scott Moncrieff while doing the fullest possible justice to Proust.” (from Kilmartin’s Introduction to his Proust edition).

An example of taking the French too literally, a mistake which Scott Moncrieff caught himself after the first volume had been published, was when he translated the French “chapeau melon” as “melon hat” when it’s actually the more ordinary “bowler hat” (p. 196). Because Findlay is Scottish, there are a few English-isms of her own I had to smile at as an American reader. His injured leg, “shoogled unset again” (p. 130) and when trying to exercise on the lame leg, “he hirpled round the garden” (p. 138).

As death approached, Scott Moncrieff grew bored with translating the final volume of Proust. He caught up on his reading instead. Shortly before his death he wrote to T. S. Eliot, “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 Possedes, The Wings of the Dove, War and Peace.” (p. 292).

As I enter my sixties, I’m also thinking about the novels I still want to read. I’ve read Moby Dick several times. I read War and Peace last year. I’ll get to The Wings of the Dove certainly, perhaps not the others Scott Moncrieff mentions.

One other book from his reading list, though, I’ve already begun, based on this sentence from the biography and quoting a letter from Scott Moncrieff to his publisher. “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.’ 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'” (page 289). So says the translator of Proust. I’ll see if I agree.