A bout of trench fever meant that he missed the worst of the Somme, though his luck ran out when his leg was broken in two places by friendly fire in April 1917. Or perhaps it continued to run, given that he was left, on recuperation, with only a limp, a disability just severe enough to preclude his return to the front line and the slaughter still to come. Invalided home, he met Wilfred Owen at Robert Graves's wedding. Scott Moncrieff fell in love with Owen; whether that love was consummated or even reciprocated is more doubtful. From his desk in a new job at the War Office, he tried – and failed – to prevent Owen's return to the front.
After his friend's death, Scott Moncrieff renounced poetry as a vocation, turning instead to translation. It seems that he did not have any particular passion for À la recherche du temps perdu. He suggested a translation to Constable in 1919, it seems, only because they had turned down a collection of his own satirical verse. Proust, he had heard, was popular on both sides of the channel but at this point only two volumes had been published and he had no idea the final text would run to 1.2 million words. Judging from his grumblings about the later volumes, his devotion to the novel became more a labour than a love.
He worked rapidly, scribbling down a passage whenever he had a spare moment, then reading it aloud to a select group of listeners, usually older, richer women, to check the sonority. He was self-deprecating about his own abilities – "My trouble," he wrote, "is that I know comparatively few French words and no grammar," – but beat himself up over his mistakes, even though the early editions of Proust were riddled with typesetting errors. The translation of the fourth volume – which Proust had entitled Sodome et Gomorrhe and Scott Moncrieff more tactfully called Cities of the Plain (he referred to it in correspondence as "Cissies on the Plain") – was particularly tricky, as Chatto & Windus were conscious that the discussion of "inversion" (homosexuality) might lead to the book being banned on grounds of obscenity.
After a gruelling stint as a sub-editor on the foreign desk of The Times, Scott Moncrieff moved to Italy in 1923, where life was cheaper and less strenuous. He supported himself through his translation – not just Proust, but Stendhal, The Letters of Abelard and Heloise and Pirandello, whom he introduced to English-speaking readers – and by a sinecure at the British Passport Office. The latter job was, in fact, cover for some agreeable espionage work against Mussolini's fascist government: he stayed in plush hotels around the country, befriending Italian fighter pilots, observing troop movements from railway platforms and poking around naval shipyards. In September 1929, at the age of only 40, Scott Moncrieff was diagnosed with terminal oesophageal cancer – the result, he claimed, of too much fellatio. He received the last sacraments in the Calvary Hospital in Rome less than six months later.
Jean Findlay's biography has nothing new to say about Scott Moncrieff as a translator and glides lightly over his literary personality. It also displays a rather wearing fidelity to chronology that gives rise to too many summer holidays at the beginning of the book and too many royalty statements towards the end. But there is a tenderness with which she cherishes even the most inconsequential of events. Findley is Scott Moncrieff's great-great-niece and her book is fitting tribute to a man who died before he could get stuck into the last volume of his life's work, to be entitled, with mournful irony, "Time Regained".
Chasing Lost Time: the Life of C K Scott Moncrieff, Soldier, Spy and Translator by Jean Findlay
349pp, Chatto & Windus Telegraph offer price: £22.50 (PLUS £1.95 p&p) (RRP £25) . Call 0844 871 1515 or see books.telegraph.co.uk
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