“Yet Gawsworth had been quite a personality and promising literary figure in the 1930s. A tireless promoter of neo-Elizabethan poetic movements in reaction against Eliot, Auden and other innovators, he had, while still little more than a teenager, frequented and become friends with many of the most notable writers of the decade: he wrote about the work of the famous avant-gardist and painter Wyndham Lewis, and of the hugely famous T.E. Lawrence or Lawrence of Arabia; he was awarded literary honors and in his day was the youngest elected member of the Royal Society of Literature; he met Yeats as an old man and Hardy while he was dying; he was the protegé and later the protector of Machen, as well as of the famous sexologist Havelock Ellis, the three Powys brothers, and the then (and now again somewhat) famous novelist and short-story writer M. P. Shiel. I couldn’t dig up much more than that, until finally, in a dictionary specializing in the literature of horror and fantasy, I did: in 1947, at the death of his mentor Shiel, Gawsworth was named not only his literary executor but also heir to the kingdom of Redonda, a minuscule island in the Antilles of which, at the age of fifteen, Shiel himself (a native of the neighboring and much larger island of Montserrat) had been crowned king in a festive naval ceremony in 1880, at the express desire of the previous monarch, his father, a local Methodist preacher who was also a shipowner and had bought the island years before, though no one knows from whom, given that its only inhabitants at the time were the boobies that populated it and a dozen men who gathered the birds’ excrement to make guano.” I fear that at present only the boobies are left; and I later learned that the elder Shiel or Shiell, the preacher and shipowner, was not a monarch as I said: he only had his firstborn son crowned. “Gawsworth was never able to take possession of his kingdom because the British government—with whose Colonial Office both the two Shiels and he were eternally in dispute—attracted by the phosphate of alumina on the island, had decided to annex it in order to keep the United States from doing so. Nevertheless, Gawsworth signed some of his writings as Juan I, King of Redonda (king in exile, evidently), and made dukes or admirals of various writers who were his friends or whom he admired, among them his mentor Machen (whose title he simply confirmed), Dylan Thomas (Duke of Gweno), Henry Miller (Duke of Thuana), Rebecca West and Lawrence Durrell (Duke of Cervantes Pequeña). The entry in that dictionary, after not explaining any of this—I discovered it some time later—concluded: ‘Despite his wide circle of friends, Gawsworth became something of an anachronism. He lived his last years in Italy, returning to London to live on charity, sleeping on park benches and dying forgotten and penniless in a hospital.” I also later learned that there were a number of detective novelists among the peers of Redonda, such as Dorothy L. Sayers, Julian Symons and “Ellery Queen,” as well as some editors such as Gollancz, Knopf and Secker, and perhaps even a few artistes such as Dirk Bogarde and the exuberantly platinumesque Diana Dors.
“That this exalted man who could be king and who, one day in 1932, with unmistakable enthusiasm and juvenile pride had signed the copy of Backwaters now in my possession should have ended his life in this way inevitably made quite an impression on me—even more of an impression than the stories of the violinist Mollineux and the papal theologist Mew—though so many other writers and better men than he have met the same fate.” The violinist and theologian had both ended up, against all expectation, as beggars, and in Oxford you see a great many of those, the city is full of them, they make you think and make you fear, for yourself, too. “I couldn’t help wondering what must have happened in between, between his precocious and frenetic literary and social initiation and his anachronistic and tattered ending; what must have happened to him, perhaps during those residences and travels of his across half the world, always publishing, always writing, wherever he happened to find himself. Why Tunis, Cairo, Algeria, Calcutta, Italy? Was it because of the war? Because of some obscure and unrecorded diplomatic activity? And why did he publish nothing more after 1954—sixteen years before his wretched death—having previously managed to do so in places and at times when getting hold of a printing press must have been a heroic or suicidal feat? What had become of the—at least—two women to whom he had been married? Why, at the age of 58, this outcome as a useless old man, this death as an Oxford beggar?
“The Alabasters, with their boundless but prudent knowledge, hadn’t managed to do much to help me find texts by him and didn’t know any more about him, but they did know of the existence of an individual in Nashville, Tennessee, who, thousands of miles away, knew almost all there was to know about Gawsworth. This individual, whom I held off writing to for a long time because of a strange and unreasoning fear, referred me (when I finally did write) to a brief text by Lawrence Durrell about the man who turned out to have been his literary initiator and the great friend of his youth, and also gave me some other facts: Gawsworth had had three wives, at least two of whom were dead; his problem was alcohol; his great love—I read with apprehension and a flinch of horror—was the morbid quest for and collection of books. ‘Morbid,’ was how the individual from Nashville unhesitatingly qualified it.” The man is named Steve Eng and in the spring of 1988 he published an article titled “A Profile of John Gawsworth,” in a recondite periodical with a minimal print run. Though I finished All Souls in December of that same year, I didn’t learn of that article until much later. The narrator goes on to say:
“Durrell’s text presents Gawsworth or Armstrong as an expert and highly gifted hunter of unattainable gems with a magnificent bibliophile’s eye and an even better bibliographic memory, who, early in his career, would often start the day by buying for three pence some rare and valuable edition that his eye had lit on and recognized among the dross in the threepenny boxes set out in Charing Cross Road, and reselling it immediately for several pounds, a few yards from where he had found it, to Rota of Covent Garden or some other swank bookseller in Cecil Court. In addition to his exquisite volumes (he kept and treasured many of them), he possessed manuscripts and autograph letters by admired or renowned authors and all sorts of objects that had belonged to illustrious figures, purchased (with what money no one knew) at the auctions he frequented: a skull-cap worn by Dickens, a pen of Thackeray’s, a ring that once belonged to Lady Hamilton, and the ashes of Shiel himself. A large part of his energy was expended on attempts to persuade the Royal Society of Literature and other institutions, whose maturer members he tormented with persistent, discomfiting literary and monetary comparisons, to give pensions and financial assistance to elderly writers who, their successful days long over, were insolvent or simply destitute: his mentors Machen and Shiel were two of his beneficiaries. But Durrell also says that the last time he saw Gawsworth, about six years earlier (the text dates from 1962, when Gawsworth was fifty and still alive, so Durrell had seen him at the age of forty-four; but curiously, Durrell, who was the same age, speaks of him as one speaks of those who are already gone, or who are on their way out), he was walking down Shaftesbury Avenue, wheeling a pram. A Victorian pram of enormous dimensions, Durrell adds. Seeing it, he concluded that life had finally closed in on and shackled down the mad bohemian, the Real Writer who once bedazzled Durrell, freshly arrived from Bournemouth, with his knowledge and introduced him to London’s literary scene and nocturnal haunts, and that he now had children, three sets of twins at the very least, to judge by the extraordinary vehicle (‘life has caught up with you as well,’ is what Durrell writes). But as he approached to have a look at the little Gawsworth or Armstrong or young prince of Redonda, he discovered to his relief that the pram contained only a mountain of empty beer bottles which Gawsworth was on his way to return, collect the deposit on, and replace with full ones. The Duke of Cervantes Pequeña (this was Durrell’s title) accompanied his exiled king, who never once saw his kingdom, watched him fill the pram with new bottles and, after drinking one of them with him to the shade of Browne or Marlowe or some other classic whose birthday it was that day, watched him disappear, placidly pushing his alcoholic pram into th
e darkness, perhaps as I now push mine while evening falls over the Retiro, except mine has my child inside—this new child—and I don’t yet know him very well, and he will survive us.” No reminder is needed that this final comment of the narrator’s is one I cannot share in. Durrell’s article is titled “Some Notes on My Friend John Gawsworth” and was published in 1969 as part of his book of “Mediterranean texts,” Spirit of Place; it was written as a contribution to a volume in homage to Gawsworth on his fiftieth birthday, but that celebratory volume, so solidly fixed to its date, had yet to see the light in 1969, that is, when the honoree had already passed the age of fifty-seven, a year before his death. One more frustrated project, the friend unhonored. At the age of forty-four, when the encounter in Shaftesbury Avenue took place, Gawsworth had been married for a year to his third and final wife, Doreen Emily Ada Downie, known as “Anna,” a widow who was four years his senior and already had a grown-up daughter named Josephine and was the grandmother of the blonde Englishwoman named Maria who, not long ago, gave me copies of the marriage and death certificates of Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, pseudonyms are fatile on such occasions. What follows, in All Souls, is a commentary on the two photographs I reproduced earlier, which in the novel appear among the pages I’ll now cite:
“Later, I saw a photograph of Gawsworth that more or less—as far as can be told—coincides with the physical description of him given by Durrell: ‘… of medium height and somewhat pale and lean; he had a broken nose that gave his face a touch of Villonesque foxiness. His eyes were brown and bright, his sense of humour unimpaired by his literary privations.’ In the one photo I’ve seen, he wears the RAF uniform and has a cigarette, still unlit, between his lips. His collar is a little loose and the knot of his tie seems too tight, though it was an era of tightly knotted ties. He sports a medal. There are neat, horizontal furrows on his forehead and small folds, rather than circles, beneath his eyes, which gaze with a mixture of roguishness and amusement, dreaminess and nostalgia. It’s a generous face. The gaze is clear. The ear is striking; he may be listening. He must be in Cairo, undoubtedly in the Middle East, or perhaps not there but in North Africa, in French Barbary, and the year is 1941 or 1942 or 1943, perhaps not long before he was transferred from the Spitfire Squadron to the Eighth Army’s Desert Air Force. That cigarette can’t have lasted much longer. He must be about thirty, though he looks older, a bit older. Because I know he is dead, I see the face of a dead man in this picture. He reminds me a little of Cromer-Blake, though Cromer-Blake’s hair was prematurely white and the moustache he would allow to grow in for several weeks only to shave it off and not wear it for the next several weeks was also greying or at least had threads of silver, while Gawsworth’s hair and moustache are dark. Their gazes are similarly ironic, but Gawsworth’s is more affable, not a trace of sarcasm or anger in it, no forewarning or even possibility of such a thing. The uniform needs pressing.” Now that I’m the one talking and not the narrator, I can say that he reminds me a little of Juan Benet, and a little of Eduardo Mendoza, too, to name only writers, though the first could be irascible and sarcastic as well as very affable, while the second seems to be all affability, with a touch of irony. Two people he doesn’t at all remind me of are Eric Southworth and Philip Lloyd-Bostock, the supposed real models, living and dead, for Cromer-Blake.
“I’ve also seen a photo of his death mask. He had just taken leave of age and the passage of time itself when the mask was made, but immediately before that he had been a man of fifty-eight. It was made by Hugh Olaff de Wet on September 23, 1970, the day of or the day after Gawsworth’s death in London, in the Borough of Kensington where he was born. His old friend from Cairo, Sir John Waller, donated it to the Poetry Society, but these kind attentions came posthumously and too late. The man who was John Gawsworth and Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong and Orpheus Scrannel and Juan I, King of Redonda, and also, at times, just Fytton Armstrong or J.G. or even simply G. now has his eyes closed and no kind of gaze at all. The folds are definite bags now, the wrinkles in the forehead aren’t as distinct (the skull has bulged) and the eyelashes look thicker, which could be a side-effect of the sealed eyelids. The hair would appear to be white—but maybe because the mask is made of plaster—and the hairline has receded since the 1940s, the outer limit of his youth, the war against the Afrika Korps. The moustache seems thicker but also limper, it both bristles and droops, the moustache of an old soldier who’s grown weary of combing it. The nose is longer and broader, the cheeks are very flaccid, the whole face is swollen as if with false fleshiness and despair. He’s grown jowly. There can be no doubt that he is dead.” I now suspect that they shaved him while he was in the hospital or when he was already a corpse, because I’ve seen a photograph of him in his final days that shows him with an ugly, long, scraggly beard as befitted the beggar he then was. I also know that the correct name of the mask maker, about whom I knew nothing else when I wrote those pages, was Hugh Oloff de Wet; I also know that De Wet was in Madrid the year I was born in Madrid, and that twice long before then he almost faced a firing squad, once in Valencia and the second time in Berlin. And that in Spain he had lost an eye (or said he had) and had killed, there and in other places, before and after Spain. The novel’s gentleman narrator went on:
“But with this final face he must have wandered the London streets, wearing the kind of raincoat or jacket that tramps always manage to get hold of. He brandished bottles and pointed out to his incredulous cohorts his own books, lying in the bargain boxes in Charing Cross Road, which he was unable to buy. He must have told them about Tunis and Algeria, Italy, Egypt, and India. In the face of their laughter, he would declare himself the King of Redonda. With this face, he must have slept on park benches and entered the hospital, as the dictionary specializing in the literature of horror and the fantastic said, and with this face he may have been incapable of reaching out the hand that had once held a pen and piloted airplanes. Perhaps he was proud and ferocious, as British beggars often are, brutal and aloof, threatening and haughty; he may not have known how to beg for himself. He was undoubtedly drunk, and at the end of his life he didn’t spend years in Italy, only a few weeks in the Abruzzi, in Vasto, for a final binge about which I know nothing. ‘A final binge,’ was what the individual from Nashville, with whom I have had no farther contact, said in his letter. There was no Gawsworth to save Gawsworth, no promising and enthusiastic writer to try to make him see reason and force him to write again (perhaps because his work is not admirable and no one wanted him to go on), or to request and obtain a pension for him from the Royal Society of Literature, of which he was once an elected Fellow, the youngest. Neither was there any woman, among the numerous women he had had, to check his drift or accompany him in it. Or so I believe. Where are they now, where do they lie, those women, British and colonial? Where are his books, the books he could pick out at a glance amid labyrinths of chaotic, dusty shelves, as I could from the Alabasters’ shelves and those of many other booksellers in Oxford and London? (I, too, with my gloved and agile fingers that barely graze the spines which they skip across more quickly than my eyes, like a pianist playing a glissando, I, too, can always pick out what I’m looking for, to the point that I’ve often felt it was the books that were looking for me, and found me. They’ve probably gone back to the world where all or most of them always return, the patient, hushed world of old books, which they leave only temporarily. Perhaps other books that I own, in addition to Backwaters, also passed through Gawsworth’s hands, bought and sold immediately to pay for breakfast or a bottle, or remained, perhaps for years, among the select volumes of his library, or went with him to Algeria and Egypt, Tunis and Italy and even India, and saw combat. Perhaps one or another of the baleful beggars had owned books, those beggars I walked past every day in Oxford, again and again, and was afraid of and identified with and in whom a slight, passing delirium made me see myself in anticipatory (or not so anticipatory) reflection. Perhaps one of them had written books, or taught at Ox
ford, or had a mistress-mother who clung to him at first but then became evasive and unscrupulous (when she was more of a mother); or perhaps he had come from a country to the south—with a hand organ that was lost upon arrival and that determined his destiny, perhaps when he disembarked at the port of Liverpool—a country to which, he still had not forgotten, it isn’t always possible to return.” (Death does not know how to walk slowly there.)
Thus closed that chapter of All Souls which, in the end, I’ve reprinted in its entirety here except for the first paragraph—and, as feared, with additional notes and comments. Three lines from those pages gave rise to the short story “An Oath of Fealty” that same year, 1989, a few months after the novel came out, with Gawsworth in his final phase as the main character. But the first time I spoke of him in writing was in a piece of non-fiction, an article I published in the newspaper El País on May 23, 1985, twelve years ago now, when I was still living in Oxford and feeling something quite similar to what the narrator called his “slight, passing delirium,” with respect to the beggars of that city and the writer who ended up as one in London. The article was entitled “El hombre que pudo ser rey” or “The Man Who Could Be King,” in obvious allusion to the famous story by Rudyard Kipling, “The Man Who Would Be King,” also known in my language as “El hombre que pudo reinar” or “The Man Who Could Reign,” since that was the Spanish title of the John Huston film based on that fantastical story—the favorite of both Faulkner and Proust—which featured the British actors Sean Connery and Michael Caine. Both pieces were later reprinted, the story in my collection Mientras ellas duermen (While the Women Sleep) and the article in Pasiones pasadas (Past Passions), a collection of my non-fiction. The final sentences cited above refer to two circumstances or facts related only to the narrator; two others that are shared by narrator and author (teaching at Oxford and the possession of books), or perhaps three; and one which, improperly, belongs only to the author, since at no moment in the novel is it stated or hinted that the Spanish gentleman who’s telling the story and digressing from it has ever written books, even if, in fact he is writing one now as he digresses and tells. It wasn’t a mistake or an oversight, a thoughtless intrusion or moment of forgetfulness, it was deliberate, for, as I said before, these are the most autobiographical pages in the novel and it seemed honorable to tacitly confess that by means of this apparent slip which, as was to be hoped and expected, passed unnoticed by those who read it. (I also did it for the risk, one is always tempted to throw in some blots and smudges, for love of transgression and to betray oneself, and to see if they can pass for unblemished text.)
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