Two weeks later, I went to a Dame Myra Hess concert at the Chicago Cultural Center. The concert, played by a youthful woodwinds quintet, was roughly 45 minutes long. The crowd, like most classical music audiences, was less than spritely. The man seated to my left fell asleep just before the performers were introduced and woke—refreshed, I assume—only at their finish. I found myself rising to my feet to applaud, and went happily off to lunch with friends afterwards. Successful as this outing was, I feel no urge to return, at least not soon.
No, the best arrangement for me is what I think of as the Proustian solution. Marcel Proust was a regular concert-goer, and his interest in music was intense and highly intelligent; his fictional composer Vinteuil in In Search of Lost Time attests to that. He was especially enamored of the music of Beethoven and César Franck, and in particular of Franck’s String Quartet in D as played by the Poulet Quartet.
One night around 11 o’clock in the winter of 1916, wanting eagerly to hear the Franck quartet, Proust paid a call on Gaston Poulet, the leader of the Poulet Quartet. When Poulet came to the door in his pajamas, Proust informed him that he would like very much to hear his group play the Franck composition that very night in his apartment on the Boulevard Haussmann. Lured by the high fee Proust offered, Poulet agreed, and he and Proust in a cab rounded up the other members of the quartet. They arrived at Proust’s apartment near 1:00 A.M.
As they began the César Franck quartet, Proust listened with his eyes closed. He enjoyed it so much that he asked the musicians to play it again, and then went to a small Chinese box from which he extracted a stack of notes redeemable for 45,000 ordinary francs, a sum grand enough for the Poulet Quartet to play the piece a second time without diminution of energy. In subsequent months, Proust called on the Poulet Quartet to play others of his favorite compositions in his apartment, Mozart, Ravel, and Schumann among them, each time one assumes for a similarly lucrative fee.
I should mention that when Proust’s mother died, in 1905 at the age of 56, she left her son the equivalent of roughly $4.6 million in current dollars, a sum that allowed him to tip waiters at the Ritz 100 percent and more and to listen to live music in the ideal conditions of his own apartment.
If only I could adopt Proust’s solution to my concert-hall problem. How I should like to have the Chicago Symphony perform for me alone in my living room! And perhaps someday I shall, once I figure out how to do so without dipping into capital.
C. K. Scott Moncrieff
(2015)
Without translators, all but the omniglot among us would be rendered hopelessly parochial. Even after having lived off their labors, one struggles to name more than half a dozen or so laborers in this ill-paid field. One begins with Constance Garnett who brought the great Russian writers into the Anglophone world; Willard Trask, who did superior work in both German and French; Gregory Rabassa, who translated Latin American writers; William Weaver for modern Italian literature; Richard Lattimore, David Grene, Robert Fitzgerald, and Robert Fagles for Greek and Latin, with Benjamin Jowett still the main man for Greek philosophy.
The supreme figure in the annals of modern translation is C(harles). K(enneth). Scott Moncrieff (1889–1930), the translator into English of Marcel Proust’s monumental seven-volume novel Remembrance of Things Past. When Scott Moncrieff began his translation in 1920, Proust, who died in 1922, was still correcting the typescript for La Prisonnière, the fifth volume in his vast novel. Scott Moncrieff began translating the novel without knowing how long the completed work would be. Roughly, it turned out, a million and a quarter words and more than 3,200 pages, the whole dealing with some 2,000 different characters. Scott Moncrieff spent nine years translating Proust, while simultaneously working on translations of Stendhal, Pirandello, and (in medieval Latin) Abelard et Heloise.
Scott Moncrieff’s Proust translation has never been free of controversy. The controversy began with the title he gave his English version of the novel. Proust’s overarching title, A la rechere du temps perdu, translates as “In Search for Lost Time”; Scott Moncrieff took his title from a phrase in Shakespeare’s Sonnet #30:
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought/I summon to remembrance of things past/I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,/And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste. . .
In his only letter to his English translator, Proust criticized Scott Moncrieff’s title as well as his calling the first volume of the novel Swann’s Way (the French is Du Côté de chez Swann). Swann’s Way, Proust felt, gave the book an unwanted double meaning, suggesting that it was not alone about the milieu of Charles Swann but also about his general manner. He died fearing that Scott Moncrieff would make a frightful botch of his masterwork.
Translations, like lovers, the old saw has it, are either beautiful or faithful, but they cannot be both. In his translation of Proust, Scott Moncrieff went, without hesitation, for the beautiful. Jean Findlay, in her elegant and even-handed biography of Scott Moncrieff, who was her mother’s great-uncle, does not intricately examine the character of her ancestor’s translation. She does provide a single example of the difference between it and the more literal 2004 translation of Swann’s Way by Lydia Davis, one of the six different translators who have done a new English version of Proust’s novel for Penguin Press. Here is the last sentence in a paragraph rendered by Ms. Davis: “He [Charles Swann] brushed against all those dim bodies as if, among the phantoms of the dead, in the kingdom of darkness, he were searching for Eurydice.” Scott Moncrieff’s version of the same sentence runs: “Anxiously he explored every one of these vaguely seen shapes, as though among the phantoms of the dead, in the realms of darkness, he had been searching for a lost Eurydice.” Among other touches, Scott Moncrieff has added the penultimate word “lost,” which does not appear in Proust’s French text. This is known as taking liberties, and the question before any reader is whether they are liberties worth taking.
As Ms. Findlay’s biography makes plain, Scott Moncrieff, given his character, could scarcely have produced a literal translation. Once one knows the facts of his life and how his mind was tuned, the thought of his having done so is unthinkable. Although not so eccentric or unconventional as Marcel Proust, C. K. Scott Moncrieff was himself a raffish character in whom wildly contradictory qualities resided quite comfortably.
As an English officer in World War I, Scott Moncrieff was fearless and heroic. He was awarded the Military Cross, though the men who served under him and who greatly admired him thought he should have been awarded the higher Victorian Cross for his bravery and coolness of command under fire. The masculine military leader was also a cruising homosexual, a member in good standing of the English homintern of his day, which included Robert Ross, Norman Douglas, Reggie Turner, E. M. Forster, Noel Coward, Harold Acton, and others.
Scott Moncrieff chose to keep his homosexuality from his parents, whom he much loved, and who, he felt, would have been saddened by knowledge of it. His mother held out hopes he would marry up to the time of his death; and so, according to his biographer, did he. Born into the Calvinist Church of Scotland, as a young man he became a serious Catholic: confession allowed him to live more easily with what he felt the spiritual complexities of his sexuality. Before he died he received, as Ms. Findlay notes, the last sacraments of confession, viaticum, and extreme unction.
Jean Findlay speculates that Scott Moncrieff was drawn to Proust in part because both men had in common homosexuality and a great fondness for their mothers. Charles Scott Moncrieff was the youngest of three sons born into a middle-class Scottish family. His father was a judge; his mother, whom he adored, read books to him well in advance of his age. Until he was three, his nanny, a Belgian, spoke to him only in French. He displayed intellectual precocity from an early age, and won a scholarship at Winchester, one of the great English public schools. In perhaps the major disappointment of his life, he failed to gain entrance to Oxford or to Cambridge. He went instead to
the University of Edinburgh, where he studied—“read,” as the English say—law and literature, the latter under George Saintsbury, who imbued him with a love of French literature.
Scott Moncrieff’s active military service ended when a bomb blast broke his leg in two places and left shrapnel in his thigh, resulting in one of his legs being permanently shorter than the other, and bestowing upon him a permanent limp. After the war, he eased into London literary life. Among his close friends were Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, and Vyvyan Holland, the son of Oscar Wilde; the last, it seems necessary to add, a notorious heterosexual. Scott Moncrieff had written poetry from as early as his Winchester days, many of his youthful poems masking his homosexual yearnings. He edited an anthology of Georgian poets. He published the occasional negligible poem, but the superior poems of Wilfred Owen persuaded him that poetry was not his line. “I don’t write good poetry,” he wrote to his friend Edward Marsh, “and fortunately I know it.”
He took up reviewing, writing weekly for the New Witness, a magazine founded and edited by G. K. Chesterton and described by Osbert Sitwell as “a queer bastard socialist-ultra-Conservative paper.” As a reviewer, Scott Moncrieff was often acerbic, and never more so than when writing about the Sitwells, Edith, Osbert, and Sacheverell, whom T. S. Eliot, giving way to his bawdy side, referred to as “the Shitwells.” Jean Findlay writes that the Sitwells “regarded a failure to admire their poetry as an affront to their aristocratic status.” In Scott Moncrieff’s view, they were neither poets nor aristocrats, thereby anticipating F. R. Leavis’s remark that what the Sitwells really belonged to was “the history of publicity.”
Scott Moncrieff seems not so much to have planned as to have backed into translation, which was to be his literary legacy. One day in a London bookshop, he discovered a student copy of Chanson de Roland, and, despite not having Old French, set out to translating it into English. In doing so he discovered that the key to successful translation was assonance, the repetition of vowel sounds in non-rhyming syllables. The sound of a translated text, its cadence, he felt was of primary significance. Once he began his Proust translation, his regular procedure was to read aloud to friends his Englished version of the novel to get a feel for its sound. In this he would have agreed with Robert Frost, who wrote: “The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.”
In the early decades of the last century, Marcel Proust was a hard sell for English publishers. When in 1919 Scott Moncrieff proposed a translation of Proust to Constable & Company, the publishing firm’s editors replied that they saw little point in publishing a translation “of Prevost.” The following year he wrote to J. C. Squire, who worked on Hilaire Belloc’s magazine Land and Water, to inquire whether it “would consider for a moment running Marcel Proust’s book (which recently got the Prix Goncourt) as a serial in English.” Apparently it would not. Edmund Gosse, the English man of letters, tried to discourage him from doing a translation of Proust and suggested he attempt instead a translation of the Roman de la Rose, another medieval text. In the end, Scott Moncrieff decided to take on the Proust translation on his own.
During the years Scott Moncrieff worked on his Proust translation, he held other jobs, among them at the British War Office; as a private secretary to Lord Northcliffe, the febrile owner and publisher of the London Times; and, finally, under cover of working for the British passport control department in Italy, as a spy reporting on the disposition of Mussolini’s troops and naval forces and on British subjects in Italy thought to be fascist sympathizers. As the work on Proust progressed, he took time out to translate Stendhal, whose prose, next to the complexity of Proust’s, was a bite of madeleine, for he could translate Stendhal directly from the text to the typewriter. Although he claimed neither to speak nor write Italian well, he also began to translate Pirandello, plays, novels, stories, and claimed he wanted to do the entire oeuvre, which ran to 218 volumes.
While in Italy, Scott Moncrieff entertained family and friends in his various Italian apartments and hostels, chased boys, engaged in a vast correspondence that, to selected friends, often included hilariously obscene limericks. He also helped pay for the schooling of his various nephews and nieces. (In his Who’s Who entry under the rubric Recreation, he wrote: Nepotism.) When he worked at his Proust translation, however, nothing was allowed to interfere. “He may have developed a Catholic soul,” Ms. Findlay writes, “but he always had what we understand as a Protestant work ethic, the legacy from his father and the Church of Scotland.”
Jean Findlay recounts obstacles that Scott Moncrieff incurred along the long and rocky road to completing his Proust translation. Censorship was not least among them. Laws against homosexuality were still on the books in England, and Proust’s fourth volume Sodome et Gomorrhe, with its account of the homosexual adventures of the Baron de Charlus, had to be toned down, through euphemism and innuendo, for the English version of the novel. The title of the volume in itself presented a problem. Scott Moncrieff came up with the splendid substitute of Cities of the Plain, which to friends he referred to as “Cissies of the Plain.”
Of his own French, Scott Moncrieff said, “I know comparatively few French words and no grammar, so when I come to a frightful howler, like the German musician on whose score a fly alighted, ‘I play him.’” Yet he turned out a translation of Proust that most Proustolaters—this reviewer among them—find unsurpassed, and probably unsurpassable. The polyglottal Joseph Conrad, a friend of Scott Moncrieff’s, held that he preferred his translation to Proust’s original. Virginia Woolf wrote to Roger Fry that reading Scott Moncrieff’s translation was for her, in Ms. Findlay’s paraphrase, “akin to a sexual experience,” and she apparently lifted a number of his English phrasings for To the Lighthouse. George Painter, Proust’s best English biographer, called it “a masterly recreation of the original.” F. Scott Fitzgerald claimed that “Scott Moncrieff’s Proust is a masterpiece in itself.”
Scott Moncrieff was able to bring off his astonishing translation because he was attuned to the sensibility of Proust in a way that perhaps no contemporary translator can be. The two, author and translator, were temperamentally suited to each other. Scott Moncrieff had an instinctive sense of Proust’s cast of mind, and a strong appetite for the subtlety of observation and analytical intricacy behind the layered sinuosities of his prose. His translation succeeded above all because Scott Moncrieff, too, was an artist (however otherwise manque), who discovered his mission in life in vastly widening the audience for the work of a much greater artist.
Consumer note: For those ready to make their first literary ascent up Mount Proust, from which, be assured, the views are dazzling, the best edition in English is the three-book 1981 Random House version, with revisions in C. K. Scott Moncrieff’s translation by Terence Kilmartin. Kilmartin’s revisions correct the many mistakes found in the original Gallimard French version of Proust’s novel from which Scott Moncrieff had of necessity to work, but which were eliminated in a later Pleiade edition. Mr. Kilmartin sometimes drains the purple from Scott Moncrieff’s prose and corrects his occasional errors—“elemental but unimportant errors, ” George Painter calls them—especially in translating idiomatic French. The 1981 Random House edition is also generously leaded, leaving ample space between lines of the text, a mercy in reading a novel that can itself, in French or in English, sometimes seem crowded by too teeming brilliance.
The Young T. S. Eliot
(2015)
Readers of the current day, no matter how young, will not in their lifetimes, and quite possibly in the lifetimes of their children and grandchildren, encounter another poet who achieved the fame and had the literary authority of T. S. Eliot. That fame and authority ranged through the Anglophone world roughly between 1922, with the publication of The Waste Land, and Eliot’s death in 1965. If an example of its magnitude is needed, Eliot, in 1956, lectured on the subject of “The Frontiers of Criticism” in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota b
efore a crowd of 15,000. He exchanged amusing letters with Groucho Marx. His approval or disapproval of writers, living or dead, could elevate or deflate their standing instantly. While still young, he had the confidence to declare Hamlet a flop—“So far from being Shakespeare’s masterpiece, the play is most certainly an artistic failure”—lightly scolding Goethe and Coleridge for their misapprehension of the play’s true meaning.
At the close of his brief essay on the failure of Hamlet, Eliot wonders why Shakespeare attempted this play for whose central problem—the guilt of a mother in the eyes of her son—he, Shakespeare, could find no objective correlative. The phrase “objective correlative,” which Eliot brought over from philosophy into literary criticism, refers to “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts . . . are given, the emotion is immediately evoked.” In order to understand this failure, Eliot claims, we should have to know a great many facts about Shakespeare’s life that are unknowable. “We should have to understand things which Shakespeare did not understand himself.”
Mightn’t something of the same be said not about T. S. Eliot’s failure but of his extraordinary success? How did this success come about? On what was it based? What was his own estimate of it? Biography, with all its limitations and inadequacies, is our only resource in pursuit of the answers to these questions. To understand them, to paraphrase Eliot, we should have to understand things which T. S. Eliot himself did not understand.
To begin with, there is the interesting circumstance of Eliot’s turning himself from a Midwestern American into an Englishman, in some ways even more English than the English. His model here was his fellow American Henry James, whom Eliot much admired, and whose cosmopolitanism he hoped to emulate. “It is the final perfection, the consummation, of an American,” Eliot wrote apropos of James, “to become, not an Englishman, but a European—something which no born European, no person born of any European nationality, can become.” Eliot also drew inspiration from James’s double talent as artist and critic, which is of course what Eliot himself would become: a powerful critic, the most influential of his day, and an avant-garde poet of the highest rank and power. The combination of the two, poet and critic, conduced to the great réclame that Eliot enjoyed.
The Ideal of Culture Page 21
