Stephen McKenna

“ Max Beerbohm’s caricature of Teixeira, discovered later—to the subject’s delight—in the waiting-room of an eminent gynaecologist, emphasizes the most strongly marked natural and acquired characteristics of his appearance: a big nose and a liking for the fantastic in dress. There is hardly space, in the drawing, even for the tiny hat of the music-hall comedian, so devastating is the sweep of that nose, outward from the lips, up and round, annihilating forehead and cranium until it merges in the nape of the neck. ”

“ For a man who must surely have divined that his calibre was unique, Teixeira was engagingly free from touchiness. In translating a book, as in organizing a department, he was magnificently grateful for the word that had eluded him and for the criticism which he had not foreseen. A purist in language and a precisian in everything, he realized that a living style is throttled by too great obedience to rules ”

“ Teixeira the day before.
As an explorer, he remained, to his last hour, at the age when a boy lingers rapturously before one shop after another, enjoying all impartially, sharing his enjoyment with every passer-by, confident that life is an unending vista of glittering shop-windows and that the day must somehow be long enough for him to take them all in. ”

“ This time there may be no diary; perhaps the only letters will be those already written; he may seem not to hear all that he once loved hearing; but, wherever he has gone, his personality remains behind.
It was an old-standing bond that the survivor should write of the other. I have tried to make Teixeira paint his own portrait. If his letters have failed to reveal him, what can I add? His literary position is unchallenged; those who knew him how slightly soever knew his humour and wit, his whimsical charm, his understanding and toleration. ”

“ I had contemplated spending the winter in a voyage up the Amazon, but abandoned it in favour of one down the east coast of South America. Teixeira comments, 29.10.20:
Your new voyage is the more sensible and interesting by far. What’s Amazon to you or you to Amazon? I pictured you and trembled for you, steaming slowly up that mighty river between alligators taking pot-shots at you with poisoned pea-shooters from one bank and hummingbirds yapping split infinitives at you from the other. You will be much better off on board your goodish coasting tramp.... ”

“ Not content with mastering five foreign languages, Teixeira created a new literary English for every new kind of book that he translated. His versions of Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, Couperus’ Old People and The Things That Pass, Fabre’s Hunting Wasps and Ewald’s My Little Boy have nothing in common but their exquisite sympathy and scholarship; four different men might have produced them if four men could be found with the same taste, knowledge and diligence. Fabre’s ingenuous air of perpetual discovery demanded the style of a grave, grown-up child ”

“ Let me warn you, a llama would spit in your eye as soon as look at you. And you not knowing a word of the language! How’s it to be done, Stephen, how’s it to be done? There are bits of the Andes where you cross a crevasse, llama and all, in a basket slung on a rope which stretches from precipice to precipice. ”

“ Sympathy, help, experience and advice were at hand for whosoever would take them: he had too long lived precariously to forget the tragedy of those who failed and failed again; he knew life too well to grow impatient with those who failed through no one’s fault but their own. ”

“ By 1914 Teixeira stood in the forefront of English translators; and, through his labours, translation had won a place in the forefront of English literature. Almost simultaneously with the outbreak of war, he was attacked by the heart-affection that ultimately killed him; and the record of this period is the record of an invalid. Ill-health notwithstanding, he offered his energy and ability to the country of his adoption; and, in an emergency war-department largely staffed by men of letters, the most retiring of them all became enmeshed in the machinery of government. ”

“ For this criticism Teixeira took me to task in his letter of 14.7.20.
And now, Stephen, tremble. How often have I not called you “the wise youth!” How constantly have I not believed you to be filled with knowledge, either acquired or instinctive and intuitive, of most things! And now your letter ... has disappointed me almost to tears.
[110]
Your only excuse would be that you took Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw to be and practically alone to be the men of the nineties. That is not so. ”

“ Those who met Teixeira only in his later years must have felt that he was born a master of his instrument; it is not to be imagined that there could ever have been a time when he was ignorant of the grace, the urbanity, the consideration and the gusto that mark off the artist in life from his fellows. ”

“ His only child—a boy—died within a few hours of birth; Teixeira was troubled for years by ill-health; he was never rich and seldom even assured of a comfortable income. Nevertheless his temper or faith gave him power to extract more amusement from his sufferings than most men derive from the plentitude of health and fortune. Of a malady new even to his experience he writes: “Is death imminent? Why do I always have the rarer disorders?” ”

“ It may be hoped that, after the battles which he fought, important foreign authors will not again be sacrificed to illiterate hacks at five-shillings a thousand words: it may even be expected that competent scholars will no longer disdain the task of translating contemporary works. All literary predictions are rash; but there seems little risk in prophesying that Teixeira’s renderings of Fabre, Couperus and Maeterlinck will be read as long as the originals. ”

“ Arthur Symns has worked on steadily, but, though he is getting on for sixty, you cannot say that his output is immense or contains anything that was not worth doing.
Immensely advertised! Where? And by whom?
Beardsley’s output was immense, for his years. Ought not the world to be grateful for it? He told me once that he had an itch for work; and it looked afterwards as if he knew that he was doomed to die at 24 or 26 and wanted to throw off all he could before. When he worked no one knew: no one ever saw him at work and he was always about and always accessible. ”

“ Underlying the whimsical humour of his letters and peeping through the mock solemnity of his speech was a young child’s concern for the welfare of his friends: himself never growing up, he never outgrew his generous delight in any success that came to them ”

“ Now don’t be a British snob but answer like a little Irish gentleman, as I should answer if you asked me what “acht-en-tachtig Achtergracht” mean in Dutch. Of course, working it out in the light of my own intelligence, I feel that, if “House” is an Oxford sobriquet for Christ Church and “gaudy” Oxford slang for a merrymaking of sorts, you ought to have suppressed that capital G and written “the House gaudy,” in distinction from the Balliol gaudy, the Magdalen gaudy, etc.
You are not a Hottentot (Loud cheers) , but you are as fond of capital letters as a Hottentot is of glass beads. ”

“ In conversation Teixeira took little pleasure in discussing himself; in correspondence he could not help giving himself away. The reader will deduce, from his slow surrender of intimacy, the shyness that ever conflicted with his sociability; the absence of all allusions to his literary work, save when he fancied that a second opinion might help him, is evidence of a personal modesty that amounted almost to unconsciousness of his position in letters. Diffidence and sociability, first conflicting, then joining forces, led him in his departmental work to discuss every problem with a friend ”

“ Next morning, having slept eight hours and fifteen minutes, I went to the manageress and:
“People,” I said, “are far too proud of their children and too fond of displaying them in public.... There is nothing wonderful about parentage and nothing clever. Most people are parents. I have been one myself.... Children should be seen and not heard.... If they raise their voices in the public rooms, they should be sent to their bedrooms. ”

“ Once set in the midst of appreciative friends, this sham recluse found himself entertaining and being entertained, joining new clubs, indulging his old inscrutable sociability and almost overcoming his former shyness.
For three-and-a-half out of these last seven years, one of Teixeira’s colleagues worked [6] with him almost daily at the same table in the same room of the same department. The rare separations due to leave or illness were countered by an almost daily correspondence, conducted in the spirit of an intimate and elaborate game ”

“ In reply, Teixeira wrote, 11.8.20:
... Don’t slay the suggestions of the big political novel off-hand or outright. I mean a bigger thing than you do; a thing that not Wells nor Barker nor Harwood ... could write, whereas you, I think, could; a thing as big as Coningsby; a thing called The Secretary of State or The First Lord of the Treasury, or some such frank affair as that.
You have kept up a “very average” logical position in life. You know a number of statesmen, but you know only those whom you like and you like only those whom you esteem. ”

“ When publishers have been convinced that translations need not be unprofitable and when a conservative public has discovered [26] that they need not be unreadable, a future generation may be privileged to have prompt access to every noteworthy book in whatsoever language it has been written, without waiting as the present generation has had to wait for an English rendering of Tolstoi, Turgenieff, Dostoieffski and Tchehov. ”

“ Maeterlinck’s mystical essays invited a hint of preciosity and aloofness, to suggest that omniscience was expounding infinity through symbols older than time; and the atmospheric sixth-sense of Couperus had to be communicated by a sensitiveness of language that could create pictures and conjure up intangible clouds of discontent, guilty [23] terror, suppressed antagonism or universal boredom. In reading the original, Teixeira seemed to steep himself in the personality of his author until he could pass, like a repertory actor, from one mood and expression to another ”

“ A week later I went again to Cornwall on leave.
Do devote yourself, wrote Teixeira, 25.8.17, at any rate for the first ten days of your absence, to becoming very well and strong. I have never seen you quite so ill as yesterday and I was infinitely distressed about it. Treat yourself as though you were an exceedingly old man like me. Then when you have entered upon your rejuvenescence you can begin to play pranks with yourself again....
Later he added:
Be careful not to honour the Atlantic with more than one immersion a day.... ”

“ On my pointing out that I could not be interested in an animal of which I had hitherto not heard, Teixeira wrote, 4.6.20:
... It must have been my morbid delicacy that prevented me, knowing your dislike of dogs, from mentioning the brown dog before. As a man gains strength, he loses delicacy: that explains though it does not excuse my late reference to him. He is an Irish terrier, endowed with a vast sense of humour, who runs about on three legs (which is one more than I, who am eighteen times his age, can boast) and plays with me from ten till half-past six (when I go to bed) . ”

“ Remember that we live in an age of reprisals. The privilege of screaming and yelling is not confined to children. Adults enjoy equal rights. Next time a child raises its voice in my presence, I shall in quick succession bellow [157] like a bull, roar like a lion, howl like a jackal, laugh like a hyena. If you drive me to it, I shall copy all the shriller domestic animals.... ”

“ Can death ever be farcical? We know that the epithet is wholly inapposite in the present instance. But can death ever be farcical? I told you, I think, of Major Johnson, who, throwing hot coppers from the balcony of the Grand Hôtel in Paris at the crowd cheering Kruger, overbalanced himself, fell to the pavement and was killed. ”

“ Those who knew the translator of Fabre and Ewald, of Maeterlinck and Couperus only by his awe-inspiring name must detect in this a hint that Alexander Teixeira de Mattos had a lighter side to his nature; the suspicion can best be established or laid by the evidence of his own letters.
The present volume is an attempt to sketch the man in outline for those readers who have recognized his talent in scholarship without guessing his genius for friendship. “The apostles are not all dead,” he wrote, in criticism of the legends that were growing up around the men of the nineties ”

“ My father’s theory was that no gentleman should have fewer than eighty shirts to his name. Times have changed; and we are a petty and pettyfogging generation of mankind. On the other hand, I have 33 ties, exclusive of white ties. ”

“ But what is all right in a majestic review (or was it magazine, by the way?) like the Burlington may look ultraprecious in a novel. Therefore I concede French, German, etc. Only remember that it is a concession, a concession to Anglo-American vulgarity. A Frenchman writes (and that not invariably: I mean, not every Frenchman) . “Un Français les Anglais,” but (invariably) “L’elan français, le rosbif anglais”. The Germans and Danes begin all nouns with a capital (as the English did, in some centuries) , but [99] no adjectives whatever. ”

“ The interest of the period lies in the astounding success achieved by this noisy and self-sufficient coterie in imposing itself on the easily startled, and easily shocked and still more easily impressed middle and upper classes of London society. But that is a thing that so many people can do and a thing that is so seldom worth doing.
In a later letter, I added, 15.6.20:
I believe that the great bubble of the nineties has been pricked for the present generation. ”

“ Leisure, when at last it came to him, was not to be long enjoyed: early in 1920, a further break in health compelled him to undertake a rest-cure, first at Crowborough and then in the Isle of Wight. He returned to Chelsea in the spring of 1921 and spent the summer and autumn working in London or staying with friends in the country, to all appearances better than he had been for some years, though in play and work alike he had now to walk circumspectly. Towards the end of the year he went to Cornwall for the winter and collapsed from angina pectoris on 5 December 1921. ”

“ At any rate, I prefer to think of you as a Christian brother rather than as a Corsican brother. As I said, I shall probably take that after-cure, but take it at Harrogate, [57] which is about as bracing a spot as any in the three kingdoms. To go straight to the sea might set up my rheumatism again, if indeed it is suppressed; there is no sign yet of that desiderandum....
It is necessary to insert my letter of 30.7.17 in order to explain Teixeira’s reply to it.
I went home for the week-end, I wrote, and travelled up this morning with C. H. C. has a new and most amusing game. ”

“ I want a Catholic Dictionary
or
Drummond’s Life of Erasmus
or
a second-hand copy of either will be quite acceptable: the second is an old book and probably out of print.
five fumable cigars “from stock”; but a present I must have because I am working a stunt about the immense number of birthday gifts which I am sure of receiving. The Cleveland Club is being canvassed with this intent and the members urged to make canvass-backed ducks and drakes of their money: oh, how like nothing on earth I feel after being brought to bed of this joke! ”

“ The first quality that distinguishes Teixeira from most of the translators whose work and methods of work have swelled the controversial literature of translation is that he confined himself to modern authors. Unacquainted with Greek and little versed in Latin, he was never faced with the difficulty of having to imagine how an original work affected its natural hearers. Maeterlinck and Couperus were his personal friends; Fabre and Ewald, who predeceased him, were older contemporaries ”

“ I do not however understand the thing: in every novel treating of [69] antiquity the classical word sometimes gives a nuance to the untranslatable local colour. And every novelist feels this: See Quo Vadis, in Jeremiah Curtius’ translation. However, do as you think proper.
“Yours,
“L. C.”
He has us on the hip with his Jeremiah Curtius. And I feel more than ever that you were too drastic in your views and I too weak in yielding to them....
We should always guard ourselves against the bees in our bonnets. ”