Coll: 1903-08
Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff (1889-1930) was a Scottish writer most famous for his translation of Marcel Proust’s À La Recherche du Temps Perdu (don’t even pretend you’ve read it all) – which he cast as Remembrance of Things Past. Although Proust didn’t care much for the translations himself, they are still regarded as amongst the finest. In his short life, his friendship circle included G.K. Chesterton, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen; his circle of enemies included Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Sitwell.
It is said that his homosexuality first became evident at Win:Coll: (Coll: 1903-08), where he edited a literary magazine called New Field. In 1908, he published a short story called Evensong and Morwe Song, which was considered scandalous at the time. Apparently (OW Cornflowers has not seen a copy and cannot verify!) it features implied fellatio between two public school boys at the fictional Gainsborough School. One of them (Carruthers) himself goes on to become headmaster of another school (“Cheddar”) where he expels a boy (as it turns out, the son of Carruthers’ fellow miscreant) for the very same thing. Hastily suppressed, albeit not before some copies were sent to Wykehamist parents, a small, private print-run of the story was repeated in 1923.
His saucy approach to literature was repeated in bawdy (and clearly Wykehamical) verse that he is said to have penned:
The Bishop of Birmingham
Buggers boys while confirming ‘em.
The Bishop of Norwich
Makes them come in his porridge.
The Dean of West Ham
Smears their bottoms with jam.
He was not a literary lightweight. As early as 1914, he won a prestigious prize at Edinburgh University (where he studied English literature) for his translation of Beowulf. He wrote literary reviews for G.K. Chesterton’s magazine New Witness. He wrote sonnets (including some addressed to a certain “Mr W.O.”, suggesting a love affair (reciprocated or not) with Wilfred Owen). And he wrote translations, including The Song of Roland, and much of Stendhal’s oeuvre, as well as his Proustian magnum opus.
The age in which he lived also destined him for action on the battlefield. He served in the First World War, fighting on the Western Front from 1914 until 1917, when an explosion from a shell caused him serious injury, and he then had to work at the War Office in Whitehall while convalescing. He was a decorated hero – being awarded the Military Cross as well as the 1915-15 Star, the British War Medal, and the Victory Medal. He also went on to spy for the British in Mussolini’s Italy. His great-great-niece, Jean Findlay, suggests espionage was a perfect profession: he had “learnt early on how to live parallel lives, both of them sincere and believable: the Charles at home, religious [a fervent Roman Catholic], loving and dutiful, as well as the young blood among the homosexual coterie”. Findlay also suggests that translation was natural: “He translated a work much as an actor took on a character, jumping into someone else’s skin and walking around in it.”
CK Scott Moncrieff died of cancer in Rome at the age of 40; he lived at 67 Via Della Croce – perhaps a suitable pilgrimage for the OW Cornflowers Italian Chapter?