Ask Satan, please, to be my friend:
He would do anything for you.
CKSM, ‘To a Public Man’, 1909
Named after Joseph Lister, the father of modern surgery, Lister House was an eighteenth-century tenement, five storeys tall with a dormer attic peeking out on to the slate rooftops. Off the top of the Royal Mile near Edinburgh Castle, an arched entrance to a narrow passage opened out into a courtyard, where ragged children were playing hopscotch and skipping. Charles had to climb three storeys to his room, up a stone stairway with no light, but his twelve-paned window looked out on to the highest view in all Edinburgh: from the top of the Mound across the Firth of Forth to the Island of May and the Kingdom of Fife.
Charles and Meg had visited this student residence during the summer and ‘liked it’ as she recorded. But as the winter closed in Charles scribbled notes on the back of envelopes about freezing among piles of bleak, unforgiving stones. After a brisk Scottish childhood, he had experienced teenage warmth and companionship in an English public school – and now he had come back to study in the cold winds among the smoke-blackened stone of Auld Reekie. He found one other Wykehamist at Lister House, ‘Young Maconochie, who is in his tenth year of Law,’ he quipped to his parents in his first letter home. ‘Also there is a pianist who plays the same polka, or at least stops in the same place every time on the floor below …’1
He was not enrolled in any faculty when he first moved to Edinburgh in 1908. He had begged his parents to be allowed to try once more for the Oxford and Cambridge Entrance Examinations and to have this year to study for them. Convinced that he could win the same honours as Colin, his parents agreed to pay his way, not having had to pay full school fees during his years as a Winchester scholar.
He often went home for house parties at Lanark when he would invite a guest, or meet family friends of his and his brother John’s age. His mother made sure there were plenty of young women invited. Among these were Amy, Gladys and Lily Dalyell, sisters of his friend Theodore from Winchester. Also three of the seven Wood sisters Anna, Rita and Molly from Edinburgh; Anna would eventually marry his brother John. John was still studying and failing veterinary exams at Glasgow, which he had been doing since 1902; his attempt to pass as a vet would go on for another five years during which time he gave up and was sent to the Colonies twice, hated it and returned home. He was the least academic boy in the family but his understanding of animals and his determination saw him through. He finally qualified, to everyone’s relief, in July 1913. Lanark was equidistant from Edinburgh and Glasgow and the brothers saw a lot of each other. Colin, however, was far away in New Zealand, teaching and starting a family with Connie.
That Christmas John and Charles read Milton’s ‘Ode’ in front of the fire before breakfast with their parents as they had done for as long as they could remember. They also acted, as they always had, in their mother’s play The True Lover, first for family and friends and then as a New Year entertainment, for the Convalescent Home in Lanark, Charles playing the lead male part and their friend Norah Bayley Jones the leading lady. The Bayley Joneses had their own New Year pantomime in Edinburgh where Charles played the part of Prince Charming before family and friends and local charitable organisations. Ideal for the part, Charles at nineteen was strikingly handsome and was invited to balls and house parties around Scotland, partnered by the prettiest and most interesting of women. Sadly for his mother, his letters hardly ever mentioned these girls. If romance was on his mind it was with men, and he could only share that with his book of private poems. In March 1909 Charles brought a new friend, Alec Tonnochy, back to Lanark for the week. Meg wrote that he sang beautifully and was a tall, delicate and gentlemanly lad – ‘Like a swan’.2 They went to church on Sunday where ‘Charlie read the lessons with so much feeling – I do wish he were going to be ordained.’3 Meg then travelled to Edinburgh leaving Charlie and Alec at Edgemoor. On her return she noted that Tonnachy was gone and, alone ‘Charlie swam in the Mouse [a freezing hill loch] which seemed risky.’4
In Charles’s book of poems is a sonnet entitled ‘My Mistake’ dated April 1909:
Thinking Love’s Empire lay along that way
Where the new-duggen grave of friendship gaped,
We fell therein, and, weary, slept till day.
But with the sun you rose, and clean escaped,
Strode honourably homewards. Slowly I
Crept out upon the crumbling other side.
And thither held my way where love should lie
But scorn set hedges rent my cloke of Pride
And stones my feet – that yet no nearer came.
I looked to you – but you were gone from sight
To honour in an honest house of shame:–
Should I press on, hills hide the road, and night.
And should I turn the bitter pathway lies
Across that grave; where, smothered, friendship dies.5
It was St Augustine who wrote that his own homosexuality was primarily a sin against friendship. Charles’s ‘new-duggen grave’ suggests that he had pushed friendship too far. It did not bother him for long; a month later he was in love once more, writing to a friend in the south;
Dear man!
Those birds remembered first to sing
That saw together you and me and Spring;
And I was happiest.6
That May he went to Winchester for the Eton match, visited old schoolfriends in Cambridge and then dropped in on Robert Ross in London. Later that summer his experiences moved from happy to bitter. On his visit to Oxford in August to resit entrance exams, he thought he would take up an invitation from Frank Benson, an actor he had shown round Winchester in his last year there. Inserted into his poetry book at this date is a letter from Benson of 15 July 1908 – the year before – thanking him for his kind hospitality to his wife and himself on Pageant Sunday at Winchester and inviting him to visit him when next in Oxford. Charles’s poem ‘To a Public Man’ was probably the result of his meeting with Benson:
I have admired so your life,
So watcht you on your curious way!
I am too male to be your wife
And most I look towards the day
When, slightly leaner in the loin,
Strippt of your pretty pants and paints,
Death shall dispatch you, dear, to join
A cunning company of saints.
Then will my prayers like smoke descend
And melt like well-developed dew.
Ask Satan, please, to be my friend: –
He would do anything for you.7
Benson was famous: later, in 1916, his performance in Julius Caesar pleased King George V so much that the monarch summoned him after he came off stage at Drury Lane and promptly knighted him. (At that time very few actors were knighted, the first being Henry Irving in 1895.) ‘Strippt of your pretty pants and paints’ – who wears paints but an actor? The final damning lines of the poem invoking Satan with a Faustian invitation imply that this encounter with Benson was one where Charles felt exploited and begs the question of his actual sexual experience to date. Perhaps it was not the romantic Millard who took his virginity, but the hurried, and married, Benson. This is the only really angry poem he wrote until after the war.
When Charles sat the Oxford entrance exam again, of the five subjects, he received high marks only in Latin, passes in English and French and low marks in Greek and Mathematics. With such results he gave up all hope of Oxford and began in 1909, as had his father, grandfather and great-grandfather before him, to read for a Law degree at Edinburgh. In his first academic year he attended the lectures of Professor Hardie in Latin and of Professor Millar on Constitutional Law; the following year, he studied logic and metaphysics under Professor Andrew Seth Pringle Pattison and took Honours in the class of Public Law. This blast of rigour and rote learning in a cold climate was refreshing but he missed his schoolfriends and the exotic company of Ross, Millard and the Wilde group with whom he kept in contact: Ross wrote to Millard in January 1909 asking, ‘I wish you would tell me what has happened to Moncrieff. Is he reformed?’8 ‘Reform’ was always an option for any attractive but serious young man who had finished with homosexual experimenting, and was constantly offered to Charles in the form of introductions to young women.
His travelling from Edinburgh to the south in search of congenial company and old friends continued throughout his time at university. But he did make one great friend at Edinburgh. His name was Richard Reynolds Ball – referred to as Ball by Meg in her diaries where she described him as a designer of metal and glass who shared an interest in her carving, painting and design. Ten years older than Charles, Richard was the only son of a clergyman, an old Wykehamist, and a graduate of Trinity College, Cambridge. He became almost a fixture at Edgemoor, and Meg sometimes visited his Edinburgh workshop to see his designs. By 1910 he was sharing rooms with Charles at Lister House. A family story told how Charles and Ball found a crate of rotten oranges; the two students took them to their rooms, set up a catapult with pieces of rubber and fired the oranges out over the Mound across to Princes Street below. We do not know if in the dark, they hit anyone, but citizens were amazed next day to see oranges lying beneath the trees in Princes Street Gardens.
During this friendship with Richard, Charles wrote his best and most carefree love sonnet:
The Beechwood, 5th Feb 1910
Tired we are of people and the waving town –
While on every beech bough hot buds burst and grow
To a radiant wonder of greenness: we will go
Now into the green woods and lie lightly down,
Lie down and watch the sun fluttering through green leaves;
I will lie still and just gaze on you where you lie,
And you will smile to see the delicate new sky
Pierce those silken curtains that the green beech weaves.
Happy, happy dreamers! But before evening:–
While gentle, like the spirit of some slain young thing
A white moon creeps up where little clouds go racing;–
We will rise and shake off last year’s brown leaves that cling,
And cross the valley slowly, slowly climb the hill
Then laugh to hear our respectable streets so still.9
Richard was a gentle soul who understood him. There is a diffuse eroticism in the hot buds bursting, the delicate new sky piercing the silken curtains, and the slain young thing. But the gap between wishful poetic imagery and actual physical love is unclear and we will never know the full nature of their relationship. However, the lovers in the poem do laugh at respectability – the avoidance of which seemed easier on visits to the more populous south where he could be anonymous. Here he was to meet Philip Bainbrigge, a man who did become his lover.
Charles did not discuss politics in his letters, but 1910 was an unusual year. In July Charles went to Cambridge ‘with Bainbrigge and a man Spring Rice who is a Nationalist from Kerry. We had tea with Francis Birrell, the son of the man who runs Ireland.’10 The first general election that year brought in a Liberal Government with the Irish nationalists holding the balance of power. In return for their support the liberals promised to bring in a Home Rule Bill. It seemed to many that Home Rule for Ireland was inevitable. Charles was merely a ringside spectator, ‘When we got back I routed out Bewley … from the Euston Hotel, and we set the two Nationalists to converse one with the other. Bainbrigge and I sat awestruck watching them, and supped.’11
Philip Bainbrigge was at Trinity College with Charles’s old schoolfriend Ralph Wright. He was the elder son of a London clergyman, had been a King’s scholar at Eton, where he was friendly with Ronald Knox, before going up to Cambridge as a classical scholar. Philip later came to Edgemoor for visits and fitted in well with the family as his mother had come from Lanark herself. He gave Charles an edition of The Oxford Book of English Verse and a manuscript copy of his explicit version of Plato’s Symposium, both of which Charles treasured. Philip was an exceptional Classicist, but despite his ‘incalculable breadth and depth of classical and modern reading’, as Charles wrote years later, he was ‘creative only in correspondence, in light verse, parodies and ballads of a topical and private kind’. Being too racy for publication, not many have survived. However, one of his clerihews was judged by the inventor of the form, E. C. Bentley, to be a perfect example,
The Emperor Pertinax
Kept a certain axe
With which he used to strike
Men whom he did not like.12
Striking men with axes was far from Philip’s own nature. He was described as ‘a tall, delicate weedy man with very thick glasses in his spectacles without which he was as blind as a bat’.13 His forehead was large, with a thin receding hairline; a Greek nose in profile, delicate straight lips, ears that stuck out noticeably from his rounded head, steady brown eyes and a clear complexion. He later taught at Shrewsbury and was remembered as a brilliant young sixth-form schoolmaster, though a natural reserve and diffidence caused him to hide his erudition. Philip became more than a friend, as Charles wrote in a poem much later,
… Friend – nay, friend were a name too common, rather Mind of my intimate mind, I claim thee lover …14
When he was in London, Charles continued to visit the Ross stronghold at 40 Half Moon Street, with its central table littered with the latest books signed by their authors. Here he met a young man who was to become a lifelong, intimate friend. Vyvyan Holland was the son of Oscar Wilde and had been eight at the time of his father’s trial. He had been sent by his relatives to school in Switzerland and Italy, where he had become a Catholic, and then to the Jesuit school at Stoneyhurst in England. His brother Cyril, a year older, went to Radley. Vyvyan was refused admission to Oxford because of the association with his father, so went to Cambridge to study Law. Vyvyan always remembered his father as ‘the kindest and gentlest of men, a smiling giant, who crawled about the nursery floor with us and lived in an aura of cigarette smoke and eau de cologne’.15 Ross had only met Vyvyan in 1908 and from then had become his and Cyril’s protector and provider – tracking down royalties from Wilde’s plays abroad. Charles and Vyvyan started a correspondence that was to last Charles’s lifetime. It was based on witty sexual badinage, gossip about mutual friends, criticism of Vyvyan’s poetry, and in-depth description of their private lives. Vyvyan was always in need of money; Charles bought his law books from him and lent him both his own and Ball’s money. Charles flirted and longed for Vyvyan to visit: during 1910 he signed off one letter ‘your friend and (olim) bedfellow (at 44 Bramerton Street, Kings Rd, Chelsea)’16, and another ‘you are seldolm absent sacramentally from the bosom of …’17, and ‘this ought to convey the impression that I am really – and unaccountably fond of you: not from sodomistic snobbery …’ meaning that many of Wilde’s followers fell in love with Vyvyan simply because he was Wilde’s son. Knowing this and in order to counteract it, Vyvyan and Cyril both became promiscuously heterosexual and Vyvyan accrued a huge number of female conquests. Although Charles was three years younger and had no experience to speak of he found himself giving advice to Vyvyan on how to deal with his mistresses: ‘you will be bankrupt before you are thirty … I am afraid you are only detentor not possessor of your mistresses.’18 Then he would tease him: ‘Papa’s nurse died and left me £20 … would you like some of it to buy some horse-hair night robes wherewithal to frissonise your new mistress?’19 Vyvyan knew Millard and Charles discussed him in their letters, saying that Christopher, or ‘Xptofer’ as he referred to him in his half-Greek cipher, would write every month. Charles also sent Vyvyan a critical set of verses on Millard including,
A man lover, madman, and Millard,
A spoiler of youth and the young
A most fatuous fellow and furious
Unacquainted with girls and with gods
He is heated, his household is whoreous
A flatful of sods.20
Charles would beg Vyvyan to visit, and on holiday that summer in Argyll wrote, ‘I shall have to wait until there is a mistress strike before visiting you (and not even then as a substitute).’21 They exchanged photographs and Vyvyan chided Charles for having photographs of other young men, which Charles denied, but insinuated that Vyvyan had been visiting a clergyman recently who was known for misbehaving with young boys. About this seemingly perennial problem, Charles wrote a piece of dirty doggerel.
The Dean of St Pauls talks absolute balls,
The Dean of Westminster showed his to a spinster
The Dean of Oswestry frisks girls in the vestry
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.
With Vyvyan, Charles’s adolescent schoolboy humour never changed. Their correspondence kept alive the witty, clever talk of the Ross set, with in-house criticisms and in-house jokes: it was a far cry from his next experience.
In December Charles motored through a blinding snowstorm to serve as a presiding officer at a polling booth set up in Biggar High School, near Lanark, for the second general election of 1910. The presiding officer was charged with checking that no one had cheated or voted twice; and also with the counting of votes; it was a duty for which his father put him forward, hoping to stimulate an interest in politics. After nine hours he had polled 346 people and claimed to have made ‘very few mistakes’ in a letter to his parents. Charles revealed little interest in politics but a great deal in people, describing how the Tories were proud to reveal their votes, while the Radicals hid theirs. One man explained, ‘I cudna vera well vote against my own laird, cud I?’
… We had a horrible old man from Symington with a bright blue face, like a distempered wall, and a fishbasket-bearing man who said, like a miracle play: ‘This old man is John Ritchie of Whitecastle.’ I suppose he was. Anyhow we gave him a vote and he went quavering away, roaring and beating his stick on the ground.22
In May 1911 Charles went to Ireland as best man to Theodore Dalyell, his schoolfriend from Midlothian who was marrying an Irish girl. Again he made no comment on Irish politics in his letters but he enjoyed the wedding and journey and said that he would go over again in the summer as it was nearer to Edinburgh and cheaper than London. ‘Also it was a very good opportunity of obliging the girls,’ he wrote to Meg. ‘They all looked delightfully pretty: Amy in diaphanous bright blue, very young and sweet: Gladys was a bridesmaid in silver net, and Lily was dashing in a grey frock, enormous black hat and eyes, and fluffy feathers.’23
Two incidents during his student days reminded Charles that his youth and beauty were not eternal. Having discovered that he had an astigmatism, he got his first spectacles although he often preferred not to wear them. Also in early 1909 he was at home at Lanark with a large, painful abscess on his jaw. A doctor was called, extracted three molars without painkillers and promptly sent Charles back to study in Edinburgh the following day. He was fitted with a plate. He now had glasses and false teeth before the age of twenty. Musing on his own mortality, he visited a dissecting room in Edinburgh with a medical student and wrote some verse to the bodies on the slab, which he suggested would go well to the hymn tune of ‘Jerusalem the Golden’:
…
If I can’t earn my living
Gloved hands will lay me low
And hew me small for giving
To boys I’ll never know
Who’ll find me firm and yellow
And pare me with a knife
As I this quaint dead fellow
That may have led my life.24
The idea of not being able to earn his living was a real spectre to Charles. He was not going to inherit anything. Not only was he the youngest son, but his mother loved spending his father’s ample though hard-earned income on clothes, house decorating and travel. He had earned no scholarship for university as Colin had, and this shamed him, although his other brother, John, had always been dependent on his parents.
Now, though, there was a crisis involving Colin. Colin wrote from New Zealand about his interest in theosophy; meaning literally, ‘god-wisdom’, theosophy had interested Meg since the 1880s, when she had read Madame Blavatsky’s inscrutable books, Isis Unveiled and The Secret Doctrine. Theosophy was a relatively new attempt at an amalgamation of all world religions into one. By 1910 the movement was led by the charismatic Annie Besant who had been a successful writer and trade unionist in London. Now as President of the Theosophical Society she had moved to India, thinking Hinduism was closer to the spirit of Theosophy. A year before, Besant’s mystical colleague, Charles Leadbeater, had met the adolescent Krishnamurti on the beach and had declared him to be the vessel for the new Enlightened Being – a Christ or Buddha figure. Besant became his legal guardian and surrogate mother, replacing his own parents. Gandhi and Nehru were both closely associated with theosophy, though neither formally accepted Krishnamurti’s status. Colin Scott Moncrieff, however, did.
With the zeal of youth, Colin became interested in the mystical aspects of theosophy including clairvoyance and communicating with the dead. His involvement had started when the brothers’ grandfather, Robert Scott Moncrieff, the merchant of Calcutta, died in Edinburgh at the age of eighty on 25 May 1908. Missing his family, and unable to share in their grief directly, Colin employed the services of a clairvoyant who wrote what Colin considered to be the most astonishingly accurate future for himself and Connie: births, deaths and how his boss at the Theological College would object to his theosophical investigations. That final forecast would have taken no clairvoyant skill – the Rector of St John’s College was outraged at Colin suddenly teaching Theosophy instead of Theology, calling it ‘Anti-Christian’. Yet the more Colin was criticised, the more entrenched his beliefs became. On 14 September 1909 he resigned the wardenship of the College and sent Connie home ahead of him, heavily pregnant with twins. With her sailed their nanny and the two-year-old Colin. His father decided to take a detour to India to meet Annie Besant. He had the charisma, intellect and social skills to rise to the higher ranks of the English clergy, but he would never compromise his beliefs for advancement. Devoted Connie went home to her own mother at Merchiston Crescent in Edinburgh, and on 9 April 1910 she gave birth to twins. The second twin came half an hour after the first and ‘breathed and died’.25 The surviving baby, a boy named George, born with a cleft palate, grew up to become the writer of the next generation of Scott Moncrieffs.
Colin arrived in Edinburgh more than a month later having met the teenage Krishnamurti and been convinced that he was indeed the incarnation of a new enlightened being. He met Canon Erskine Hill of Glasgow who was prepared to find him a job, although he had to accept that he could not preach theosophy from the pulpit of an established church. At this stage, a compromise had to be made bearing in mind a living was required for a wife and two small children, the young Colin and newborn George. By October 1911 he was accepted as curate at Gatehouse of Fleet, Dumfriesshire, a poor living in an Episcopalian Church granted by a private patron Lady Maxwell, who was charmed by Colin and his passionate beliefs. He began to set up his own version of Christianity, an experiment that lasted for a number of years, although it didn’t succeed due to a lack of followers.
In the following year Charles spent a lot of time with his mother, Connie, Colin and their children. In February his mother started painting a portrait of him from behind, seeing only a quarter-profile with long, dark eyelashes and a strong upper lip – a strange angle to paint, but oddly fitting for a man used to keeping secrets to be only partially visible. Sitting for it gave him time to think. Charles was aware of Colin’s dilemmas; personal freedom versus the need to earn a living – and he himself had tried hard to like the law. He passed Honours in Public Law in 1912 and then begged to be able to study for a degree in English Language and Literature. He could not see himself as a lawyer and the only activity that he was consistently pursuing, almost as naturally as breathing itself, was writing. His parents, liberal and indulgent to all three boys, agreed to support Charles for his further degree at Edinburgh.
His new director of studies was George Saintsbury, Regius Professor of Rhetoric and English Literature, a department established in 1762 – the first such department in Britain. Saintsbury, a stooped, white-haired man in his sixties, wrote copious books of literary criticism, always wore a skull cap and it was said that he had read everything ever written in almost every language. He had begun as a critic of French literature; his first essay, on Baudelaire, was published in 1875 in the Fortnightly Review and he went on to contribute thirty articles on French Literature to the Encycopaedia Britannica. Moving on to English Literature he wrote on Dryden, Scott and then a History of Elizabethan Literature followed while also overseeing a forty-volume translation of Balzac and writing the introductions. He admitted that in his career he must have written the equivalent of a hundred volumes of criticism. Charles was impressed and inspired by him and had already started attending his lectures informally while he was finishing his Law degree. As a critic, Charles was later clearly influenced by Saintsbury’s view that, ‘Criticism is the endeavour to find, to know, to love, to recommend, not only the best, but all the good, that has been known and thought and written in the world.’26 Saintsbury believed that the true and only test of literary greatness was the ‘transport’, the absorption, of the reader. He was more a man of letters than an academic and clearly inspired in Charles a love of French literature.
Since his last years at school, Charles had kept up his interest in the army cadet force and spent three weeks every summer on Lanark Moor in cadet training. In October 1912, before he started his literature degree, he was chosen to escort a dozen cadets from his summer battalion of the Royal Scots to the National Exhibition in Canada. Eight months after the sinking of the Titanic this was seen as a risky trip; it was a real adventure and exercise in responsibility, representing Britain in the New World. It would be the only time Charles ventured beyond Europe. ‘Under Captain and Adjutant W. B. J. Reid, comes Second Lieutenant C. Scott Moncrieff’ ran the Scotsman article, with a photograph. The boys attracted crowds as they marched down Princes Street to Waverley Station in their Highland uniforms: scarlet doublets, black ostrich feather bonnets, red and white hackle plumes, kilts, full horsehair sporrans, swords, shouldered rifles, and led by their own piper. They sailed from Liverpool on the RMS Virginian. Introduced into the first-class smoking room, he met the Canadian Minister of Justice, who had been in Britain visiting Lloyd George and been very impressed by him. Charles was not cowed by rank or authority and had recently become more interested in politics. They had a lengthy discussion and Charles lent him his copy of the political and literary periodical, The Eye Witness.
The journey to Montreal took six days and Charles and Reid exercised their cadets regularly on deck by getting them to dance eightsome and foursome reels to the piper in full regalia. However they soon had to give up as the other passengers crowded round and giggled so much. The spectacle of kilts swinging high was distracting for passengers at close quarters. For the Royal Scots there was nothing unusual in the wearing of the kilt in the traditional manner, without underwear, but they soon realised that it made the other passengers uncomfortable.
The heat of the late August weather made the ship’s dining room odorous and there was no escape from crowded decks with only two places onboard to spend money and while away leisure time – the barber’s shop and the smoking room. After a trip up the St Lawrence River they arrived in Montreal on 24 August 1912. ‘Everything’, Charles wrote, was bigger and brighter than Scotland: the grass ‘a more sage green than ours’, the vast Quebec railway hotel, ‘The biggest in the world, I think’. ‘It seems a splendid country,’ he declared. From Quebec the cadets travelled overnight on an uncomfortable train, Charles precariously gripping an upper berth, with his great coat for a pillow, scared of falling off in his sleep, to arrive in Toronto, hot and dirty, on a bright Sunday morning. At the hastily constructed exhibition grounds, subject to heavy rains that turned the walks into mud paths, the camp was prettily perched above the lake. He and the Scottish cadets began to make friends among the two Canadian Battalions representing Western and Eastern Canada.
‘We march in to the arena and get on to the stage at 9, where we form a big semi-circle facing some twenty thousand people nightly,’ Charles wrote home. ‘Twenty-four rather seedy actor fellows walk in from behind and form a living flag by opening their robes and spreading themselves on an espalier. Then we sing (twice) the chorus of Rule Britannia. Reid has been put on the staff, so I have to do everything.’ This went on for eight days with heavy rain and careless visitors making the grounds increasingly muddy. ‘There is nothing lacking except tidiness. Things are left about here in the most appalling way. An army of men goes about sweeping up paper and candy boxes in the grounds.’27
After a sightseeing trip across Canada, the cadets returned to Montreal and embarked on the voyage back home. Wiser through experience, Charles and his fellow officers insisted on taking the return trip comfortably in first class – and they avoided any form of dancing exercise.
Family life, his degree and the army were absorbing enough, but Charles also continued trying to publish his poetry. He managed it sporadically in the Wykehamist and the Academy, and sent poems to competitions run in the Westminster Gazette and the Saturday Westminster. Two years older than Charles, Rupert Brooke entered his first poems in these competitions and won twice in 1908 for poems under the name of Mnemon. Charles won once that year for a sonnet called ‘The Grammairian’s Wedding’28 and twice got a commended. Famed both for his looks and his talent, Brooke published his first collection of poems in 1911. Charles was well aware of new poetry through his visits to and continuing friendship with Robert Ross. London was the hub of the serious poets and in January 1913, the poet Harold Monro opened the Poetry Bookshop in a narrow slum street near the British Museum. The tiny room was crowded with poets for the first reading. Monro published anthologies, often at his own expense, with the assistance of the civil servant and patron of the arts, Edward Marsh, and was responsible for the first anthology of Georgian Poetry. These poets saw themselves as modern, moving beyond Victorian poetry and its accepted form. The ‘Georgians’ included Robert Graves, Walter De la Mare, D. H. Lawrence, James E. Flecker, Walter Turner, J. C. Squire, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfrid Gibson, Robert Nichols and Rupert Brooke. Five volumes of Georgian Poetry appeared between 1911 and 1922. Had Charles lived in London, or had more confidence in his own poetry, he would certainly have been involved.
In Edinburgh, he decided to compile an edition of poetry by the sixteenth-century Scots poet Gavin Douglas, with the hope of finding a publisher. Douglas, who was also a bishop and a translator, had written his dream allegory The Palice of Honour in 1501. There were no surviving manuscript copies. It had been published twice, once in London in 1553 and once in Edinburgh in 1579: concessions had obviously been made for anglicisation in the London edition and it palpably lost some of its humour. Charles typed out both versions and put them in parallel text, with a view to proving that the later text, with more Scots, was probably nearer to the original.29
Not finding a publisher, Charles was prompted by the experience to apply for the Patterson Bursary in Anglo-Saxon from Edinburgh University. He sat an exam on the grammar and literary history of Anglo Saxon and translated both verse and prose.
That evening he travelled overnight to London where his old friend Richard Ball, now living near King’s Cross, gave him breakfast in his rooms and then accompanied him to Winchester for a few days with friends. They had dinner with Rendall, now headmaster, and were entertained afterwards by singing from a former schoolfriend, the choirboy James Steuart Wilson, with whom Charles had once been in love. He wrote restrainedly to his mother, ‘His voice is very much improved in quality, while it has lost none of its character.’30 Wilson went on to a successful music-hall career. A few days after his visit an article in The Wykehamist explained the difficulty of the Patterson Bursary examination and its distinction, and announced Charles as recipient. Suddenly the Dons at Winchester looked on him with more respect – as no longer an undistinguished scholar.
Back in Edinburgh, meanwhile, he was also seen as a useful family member. Aunt Kate, Meg’s youngest sister, whom she had funded through university, was very engaged in the burgeoning women’s suffrage movement. She invited her sisters and nephews and nieces in Edinburgh to suffragette meetings to hear speakers from London and Glasgow – as well as to hear Kate herself. (Meg noted proudly that Kate spoke effectively to well-attended meetings.) At the seaside at Elie in 1912, they had held a family debate proposing the motion ‘Do women need further liberation?’31 which concluded that the Scott Moncrieff family was overwhelmingly run by its women; they took all the major decisions, and the men were only necessary to provide the money. From his personal experience, women were quite powerful enough. In 1913, Kate, delighted that Charles was living nearby, enlisted her nephew’s help with her fundraising. He wrote home, ‘I helped at the Suffragette Jumble Sale in Nicolson Street – it was horrible.’32
If politics were a chore, there was one activity at university that he enjoyed enormously: acting. He took part in a production of The Merchant of Venice and here met Henry R. Pyatt and his wife Fanny who became lifelong friends. Pyatt was a master at Fettes School; he was an amiable optimist who played the cello, wrote light verse and was a genial host. Fanny, the only daughter of the bishop of Edinburgh, was a woman of exquisite taste in clothes, furniture and friendship. Charles spent many evenings with them and they corresponded thoughout his life. Pyatt later wrote of Charles during this period, ‘He gave me the impression of being aristocratic by nature in the sense of loving and doing and emulating the best things.’ At this point in his life Charles was at his most handsome: heads would turn as he entered a room. He was manly, strong and physically active, with a distinction about his bearing; dark blue eyes, pale skin and a serious expression. His voice was also arresting – soft, clear and deep and he delivered his own witty epigrams using excited, eccentric gestures. There was something tantalisingly elusive about him, remembered Henry Pyatt.
Impishness is not the word, for that suggests a want of dignity which was never observable in him. I saw him once in his student days at a fancy dress ball attired as a faun, with a leopard skin flapping round bronzed limbs and vine leaves in his hair and said to myself, ‘Faun-like, that is it.’ … Scott Moncrieff was undoubtedly satirical. This attitude was due in fact to his extreme sensitiveness, which tempted him instinctively to whirl a rapier of glittering wit around him to prevent others from getting under his guard, and penetrating to his secret, a thing that few succeeded in doing.33
If Pyatt meant by Charles’s ‘secret’, his homosexuality, then it was safe; few save his closest friends discovered it, though others may have suspected. University had been a mixed time, very different from the continuation of school that Oxford would have provided. He came away with two degrees, one in law and one with distinction and a prize in English literature, as well as the experience of having excelled at his cadet training and been chosen to help to lead the group in Canada. The law degree would set him up as an army officer, while the First Class Honours in English would foster his future career in literature. He was aware that he was at his zenith and had a photograph of his profile taken, keeping copies that he gave to friends later in life. All this lent him a certain amount of self-assurance, which could be mistaken for arrogance by some but perhaps was rather an instinct that his life and looks would never be better.