Dark Back of Time

by Javier Marías

  And I still must reproduce the first paragraph of the following chapter, which, perhaps, I could have espoused more than any other and which gives a clear and complete idea of the nature of that slight, passing delirium loaned by the author who breathes and speaks, Javier Marías—or Xavier Márias, he was then—to the nameless narrator who saves his breath and only writes, but for that reason has the more persuasive voice. The paragraph says:

  “I asked and still ask myself all these questions not out of pity for Gawsworth, who is, after all, only the false name of a man I never met, whose books—which are the only part of him I can still see, besides the photographs of him alive and dead—don’t say much to me, but out of a curiosity tinged with superstition, convinced as I came to be, on certain interminable afternoons of that spring or Trinity term, that in the end I would meet the same fate.”

  Now that Gawsworth has been introduced to those not previously acquainted with him and recalled to those who met him already in All Souls, I shall return to young Wilfrid Ewart of whose light put out suddenly and without forewarning or testament in Mexico City I was preparing to speak earlier.

  In his practice of frequently looking after ill-fated writers whom he tried with scant or ephemeral success to salvage from oblivion, John Gawsworth seems to have been assimilating his life to theirs, or foreseeing or perhaps defining himself. In the thirties he collected and edited several anthologies of tales of mystery and terror, I know of at least seven or eight, whose respective titles were Strange Assembly; Full Score; New Tales of Horror by Eminent Authors; Thrills (just Thrills); Thrills, Crimes and Mysteries; Crimes, Creeps and Thrills; Masterpiece of Thrills; and perhaps Path and Pavement—the first published in 1932, the last in 1937, which is to say that all of them were published when the hyperactive and extremely precocious Gawsworth was between twenty and twenty-five years of age. They almost always include stories by the elderly and eminent masters Shiel and Machen—respectively King Felipe I and Archduke of Redonda—as well as by their disciple and crown prince, under his various names. There is one by his pal Lawrence Durrell and many by other future members of the kingdom’s “intellectual aristocracy.” But there are also many stories by writers who could never receive any dukedom or office or title from King Felipe or King Juan because they were truly, completely ill-fated, like the young suicides Richard Middleton and Hubert Crackanthorpe. Middleton was a man of great and recalcitrant talent who killed himself with chloroform in 1911 at the age of twenty-nine, at number 10, rue de Joncker, Brussels, without yet having published a single book (that began in 1912). Archduke Machen wrote of him: “He was impatient, he would not wait. He could not relax … I don’t remember hearing him laugh; not openly and largely, with a relish in the deed. His humour was usually tinged with bitterness.” And according to a contemporary who saw quite a bit of him, Middleton put an end to his days out of mere “hatred of life”, which he used to call “the woe.” Next to the chloroform bottle he left a card with this sentence written across it: “A broken and a contrite spirit Thou wilt not despise.” Crackanthorpe, who had a lesser and more realistic talent and a more peaceable temperament, nevertheless threw himself into the Seine in 1896 at the age of twenty-six, for reasons of circumstance rather than of principle, after his wife ran away with another man. It took months to find his corpse, which was apparently so disfigured that his brother was able to identify it only by the cufflinks. Both men were Francophiles: Middleton a strict follower of Baudelaire, Crackanthorpe of Maupassant. An English magazine went so far as to claim that Crackanthorpe’s Parisian death was “God’s punishment for the worship of French idols.”

  Also appearing in these anthologies of the 1930s were a number of stories by Wilfrid Ewart, under that name or under the name Herbert Gore, which was no less his own, and I included one of them, “The Flats,” in the anthology of rare tales of fear titled Cuentos únicos or Singular Stories that I collected and published in 1989, the same year as All Souls, and for which I rescued a few texts Gawsworth had included in the Thrills series, texts that have been completely forgotten today. In my anthology I also included a macabre tale by Gawsworth himself (the first work of his ever translated into any language and, for now, I fear, the last); the only story of the kind written by Durrell, the only one written by Sir Winston Churchill, an excellent story by the bilious Middleton, and also a story of my own—the temptation was irresistible—under the pseudonym of James Denham, whom, in the corresponding biographical notice, I described as having been born in London in 1911 and having died in 1943, fallen in combat in North Africa at the age of thirty-two, yet another ill-fated writer, even if this one was apocryphal. (Incidentally, little could I have imagined then that in 1996, when at last the film made by Querejeta Sr. and Querejeta Jr. and not based on All Souls was made, one of the character actors would be the very man whose last name I took for my occasional nom de plume, the Englishman Maurice Denham, today a venerable octogenarian whose performance is undoubtedly the best thing in the film. Small wonder that I sometimes have the feeling I draw things and events and even people to myself, but I try not to concede much importance to these coincidences—the perpetual activity of chance—or take them for exceptional occurrences unique to the “elect”; in the hands of a certain North American colleague they would have been good for a great deal of unconcealed fascination with one’s own life and several books, or at least notebooks.)

  Almost all the authors of the Cuentos únicos were and continue to be so obscure, to Spanish readers especially, that it seemed appropriate to preface each story with a brief biographical note, which is why I had to invent one in the case of poor James Ryan Denham … But about certain very vagabond or obscure authors, I could learn almost nothing; I remember, for example, that in one case, that of Nugent Barker, I was unable to find even the date of his almost certain death, given that he was born in 1888, though who knows if he isn’t still alive; everything is possible. Another mysterious case, which was also striking and invited farther inquiry, was that of Wilfrid Ewart, in whose note I could write no more than:

  “Wilfrid Herbert Gore Ewart (1892-1922) died, as his dates show, at the age of thirty, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, opined sadly on learning of his death, ‘He would have gone right to the top.’ For his part, T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, said of him on one occasion, ‘He needs no introduction to the reading public.’ And the inevitable John Gawsworth, who seems to have been friend to the entire world, wrote, at the beginning of his introductory note to Ewart’s posthumous book When Armaggedon Came (1933): ‘Wilfrid Ewart died a fraction over ten years ago; upon Old Year’s Night, 1922, to be precise, in the sultry darkness of Mexico City. The story is too widely known to require further amplification here and too tragic to allow casual comment to dwell upon it. Another of England’s great novelists lay dead and Literature was the poorer for his loss. Beside the Tree of Dreadful Night … they buried him.’

  “The odd thing about the case,” I continued, “is that currently there is no way (or I haven’t found a way) of learning anything more about this thirty-year-old man who would have gone right to the top, who needed no introduction and whose death was too well known to require further amplification. Ewart’s name does not appear in any dictionary or history of English literature or in any contemporary anthology. However, MacMillan Publishers have announced a new edition of his most famous novel, Way of Revelation (1921), about the First World War, in which the author was a combatant, so perhaps we will soon know how and why Ewart died in Mexico City.

  “For the moment I can say only that before dying he also published A Journey in Ireland (1921), and that after his death, in addition to the aforementioned title of 1933, Scots Guard (1934), Love and Strive (1936) and Aspects of England (1937) were published. Under his own name or under the pseudonym of Herbert Gore, several of his stories appeared in the Thrills series and other anthologies of the 1930s. The present tale, ‘The Flats,’ written in a pros
e so pure that we may well decide Conan Doyle was right, comes from John Rowland’s 1937 anthology Path and Pavement.”

  It’s not at all strange, given the far-fetched, novelistic sound of this and other biographical notes in the anthology, that the one dedicated to the nonexistent Denham failed to arouse any suspicion or attract undue attention; either none of them was believed and doubt was cast on the authenticity of all the stories, or each and every one was accepted without a quibble. Some readers were inclined towards the first stance and surmised that the nineteen stories were, without exception, all mine under different names. Would that it were true, because at least eighteen of them were well worth laying claim to. (Though really, it would have been quite foolhardy and naive of me to attribute apocryphal stories to the famous and much studied author of The Alexandria Quartet or to a very well known former Prime Minister of Her Majesty the Queen.) Other more prudent readers thought that “only” three or four were mine, among them no doubt the one by Gawsworth, whom not a few of my readers still took for a fictional character. And I recall that some friends, whom I let in on the game and challenged to unmask me, failed shamefully and didn’t hit on my story even at the fifth guess; my estimable father, who has known me for some time but not as well as he thinks, hesitated between crediting me for the story by Middleton, the suicide—which was a little disturbing, though more to me or to him I don’t know—or the one by Denham; Don Juan Benet didn’t waver for an instant and tore off my mask at the first try.

  Getting back to Ewart and his mysterious death, I was indeed unable to find out anything about it before the anthology’s publication, and though I am lazy and passive, I don’t think I’m all that bad at researching obscure figures and dates. But after my first efforts I didn’t persist, or I postponed farther investigation. A few months later, however, I received two letters, almost in succession, from Mexico: apparently there is great curiosity (and hence exhaustive documentation) about the foreign writers who have passed through. Of Wilfrid Ewart, forever buried in its violent soil, there was, nevertheless, no information on record, which had made an investigation of the matter a challenge, according to my two correspondents, who each undertook to alleviate the ignorance I had confessed to in the biographical notice that set the whole thing off.

  The first letter was from a writer, Sergio González Rodríguez, an essayist, and was accompanied by a lengthy article of his, already published in the magazine Nexos in December 1989, under the title, “El misterio de Wilfrid Ewart.” The second, dated in March of 1990, came from a young man named Rafael Muñoz Saldaña, who, with fewer journalistic resources and bibliographical means at his disposal, told me he proposed to “solve the enigma” that I “had left open.” He announced that the “fieldwork” he had carried out had led him “down unexpected paths,” but in the end had “born fruit in concrete results.” “Though I now have a general idea,” he said, “of the circumstances under which Ewart died, there remain many unresolved issues to which I must still respond.” The young man in question—he owned up to being twenty-three, which makes him thirty now—took the news that his older compatriot, Sergio G.R., had scooped him like a good sport. I sent him a copy of S.G.R.’s article, and he answered regretfully, and with a note of pride, that the information the article provided was “exactly the same as that I had obtained.” But he added with fine resignation: “What I did to explain this mystery to myself is perhaps more interesting than the mystery itself; I met many unusual people, among them an elderly woman who has been racked by nausea for fifteen years, and a priest who restricts access to the church where he officiates, for fear of attacks. Someday I’ll tell you all about my adventures in full detail.” And, clearly disappointed nonetheless, he added, “If, in the beginning, my intention—which was not without a certain theatricality—was to make a spectacular revelation of the circumstances of Ewart’s demise, now I have a more sensible project,” which project, incidentally, was not the least bit sensible and I immediately dissuaded him from wasting his time on something that wasn’t even theatrical or spectacular. He also had a few comments for me about All Souls, which he had just read: “On page 89,” he wrote, “he begins speaking about visiting some used book stores; at that moment I stopped reading and thought, ‘What would I look for if I were there? Books by Arthur Machen,’ I answered myself, and on turning the page I was quite surprised that the protagonist of the novel did the same … For some time now I’ve been a devotee of Arthur Machen, though unfortunately I know very few of his books …” It came as no surprise when, a few lines further down, the young man asked me about the “Machen Company,” a supposed association of enthusiasts of the work of the Welsh writer and Archduke of Redonda that was mentioned several times in All Souls and of which the narrator became a member at the prompting of the character named Alan Marriott. Muñoz Saldaña wished “to contact it” if it actually existed. Given that this “Company” was invented, and I didn’t want to disappoint the youthful Mexican Machenian even more, I sidestepped this disillusionment by writing back, “I fear that for the moment I’m not authorized to answer you on that point. Perhaps later,” as if it were a secret and mysterious sect that one couldn’t simply contact just like that, with oceans in between, without first having evinced a certain merit or passed certain tests. Finally, and after I had let him in on the joke about Denham, he answered, very generously, that “your charade amused me quite a bit … I adore these kinds of games, above all when they are carried out well, as in the case of John Bendham,’ falsifying—involuntarily, I believe—even more, and so quickly, my third false name, since previously I had used two others for very minor or shady writings. I liked the part about the “charade.”

  Though we’ve gone on writing each other from time to time over the years, I’m still hoping Muñoz Saldaña will someday tell me about the woman who’d been nauseous for fifteen years, and who was, in fact, the thing that most interested me in his early letters. “What do you mean, nauseous?” I remember asking him. “What’s wrong with her? How can she know that she’s nauseous? If she’s been that way for so long, you’d think by now it would have become her natural state. The phrase you used was enigmatic indeed.”

  What comes next has already partially been told in an article called “Remember You Are Mortal,” included in my 1993 book Literatura y fantasma or Literature and Ghosts (I have to admire my own honorable conduct, duly notifying the reader of every antecedent), and a lot of material both there and here is owed, with thanks, to my two Mexican correspondents, who in any case pointed me on my way to finding out more about the short life and sudden death, without testament, of Wilfrid Ewart. Sergio González Rodríguez, in fact, went beyond the facts reported in his article, “The Mystery of Wilfrid Ewart,” and ventured certain hypotheses which, though improbable, were amusing and, of necessity, Borgesian, in order to farther clarify the mystery, and he generously called on me to develop them (“Only a writer like Javier Marías could indulge without stigma in this type of lucubration …”: I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint him, and not only because of my tendency to throw in blots and smudges). To him I owe the profusion of citations from the Mexican newspapers that in the early days of 1923 reported the news of a foreigner’s death on New Year’s Eve, and, as gratuitous and absurd as the story was (and it was that in the extreme), made it even more sarcastic towards the dead man and distressing to those closest to him.

  Ewart was born on May 19, 1892, the son of Herbert Brisbane Ewart and Lady Mary Ewart, known as “Molly,” who resided at number 8, West Eaton Place, in Belgravia, one of the most distinguished areas of London. His father, who was neither poor nor at all rich, came from a very notable family of military men, a type that wasn’t lacking in his mother’s family, either: Wilfrid’s maternal great-grandfather was General Sir William Napier, author of the monumental History of the War in the Peninsula, which we know in Spain as the War of Independence, and in which, of course, he had a conspicuous role; the six hefty volumes of this work
were one of several items Don Juan Benet asked me to find for him during my stay in Oxford, with an eye to taking some inspiration from that Peninsular War—when salt rained and skulls scattered—for the bellicose maneuverings of the third and fourth volumes of his novel Herrumbrosas lanzas. (I managed to find them for him, but his novel remained unfinished. As if there has ever been anything that doesn’t remain unfinished.) Wilfrid’s paternal grandfather was General Charles Ewart, a hero of the Crimean War, though a dubious one, I imagine, like all the heroes of that war; a great-uncle of his, Sir Henry Ewart, led the famous charge of Kassassin; another great-uncle, Sir John Alexander Ewart, participated in Balaclava, Inkerman and Sebastopol; and that great-uncle’s son, Sir John Spencer Ewart, was at the taking of Khartoum with Lord Kitchener in 1898, and then in the Boer War in South Africa, again accompanied by the legendary Kitchener. Despite all these warlike relatives and his distant kinship with William Ewart Gladstone, Queen Victoria’s celebrated Prime Minister, Wilfrid’s father worked peacefully and modestly—though under the rather showy rubric of “comptroller”—as secretary to Princess Dolgorouki, the exiled widow of a Russian nobleman who lived in an unusual white neoclassical mansion built by Lutyens and later duly Russified, in a forested spot near Taplow, Windsor.