Dark Back of Time

by Javier Marías

  Ewart’s mother belonged to a family that was crawling with titles, both original and absorbed through a series of marriages. According to Hugh Cecil’s book The Flower of Battle, on the British novelists of the First World War, which dedicates a chapter to Ewart with abundant information that I’m gratefully making use of here, Lady Mary or Molly was the youngest daughter of the fourth Earl of Arran; her sister Caroline married the eighth Lord Ruthven; her older brother, Arthur, became the fifth Earl of Arran in 1884; one of his daughters married the heir of the Marquis of Salisbury, another the Viscount Hambleden and a third the Earl of Airlie. Nothing very healthy could come of all this and Ewart’s mother seems to have oscillated between eccentric grace and hopeless imbalance. Cecil tells us that she once received visitors while sitting on the carpet, unheard of at the time but not excessively disturbing except for the explanation she gave of her unwonted position: “Forgive my sitting on the floor,” she said, “I always do it now, I find it less far to fall.” In the worst of her fits, she ordered the butler to throw a respectable pair of newlyweds—the Viscount and Viscountess Hambleden, no less—out of the house, claiming that they were living “in open sin,” and on occasion she would also violently attack her husband; it was therefore deemed that Wilfrid and his younger sisters Angela and Betty could, without detriment and even to their benefit, spend long periods away from the paternal home.

  Little is known about Betty, except that as an adult she took to drugs and drink and—as is canonically ordained for the female black sheep of fragile families that suffer any unforeseen event as a setback or drama—married the chauffeur. Angela, however, was always very much attached to her brother, whom she resembled both physically and emotionally. In the First World War, which Wilfrid Ewart survived, she lost her husband, Jack Farmer, two months after the birth of their daughter, whom Farmer never saw. A few years later, Angela married a Mr. Waddington, and unlike her brother had a long life which continued past the age of ninety. Her brother accompanied her to Longueval, near the Bois de Delville, after the war was over, in 1919, to try to locate the hasty, belated grave of Farmer, an officer in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps. On the battlefield, still strewn with helmets, muddy boots, shaving brushes and other gear from the year 1916, night fell and it started to rain, and they still hadn’t found the grave. Angela had brought a cross made of laurel leaves and she left it at the foot of an apple tree near where Jack fell.

  It was unthinkable, it was a crime, that Wilfrid Ewart should have spent almost four years engaged in trench warfare, with only the brief respites won by his wounds and his nerves. Like his mother, with whom he had much in common, he had a left eye—a direct inheritance—that was blind; and his myopic right eye had great difficulties with distance, though up close it was infallible, or, as Stephen Graham, his friend and impromptu biographer of 1924, wrote, “microscopic in quality.” The visionless eye was physically perfect but was not connected to the brain and registered no images. All in all, he was not a tremendously healthy young man, and it must be concluded that either the requirements for participating in that conflict were not strict or Ewart enjoyed some sort of favoritism—those of his class and time having an eccentric concept of privilege. Apparently, his relative Ruthven, then commander of the First Battalion, the Scots Guards, invited him to join his regiment after learning that he intended to enlist. “Why, he must come to us,” he told Ewart’s father, who had gone to consult him with an inadequate degree of apprehension. “But his eyesight?” Ewart’s father objected. “That will be all right. Ask him to come along.” He took the physical exam, and the doctor did what was expected: found him fit for service and thereby gave him every lottery number but one so that he would be sure to win himself a futile and unheroic death in the Continental quagmires.

  And the number that was drawn was the only one blind Ewart didn’t have. He fought in the Second Scots Guards, a corps of great distinction, class, and hauteur, at Sailly-Saillisel and against the Moulin du Piètre and at Neuve Chapelle, where a bullet lodged in his leg, at Gouzeaucourt and in the Somme offensive and the second battle of Ypres, at the Bois de Bourlon and the Yser Canal and the frightful third battle of Ypres, and near Cambrai and at Arras, and in all those places of muck, shrapnel, and bayonets he saw, with his one eye, hundreds of more qualified and able men than he falling around him, his best friends and most warlike relatives. It is entirely implausible that this nearsighted, one-eyed man failed to perish in what was perhaps the cruelest war of the century on our continent. Yet he not only came out alive but attained the rank of captain which obliged him to give orders and look after many people, including, in the war’s final months, Stephen Graham, who became his orderly though Graham was eight years older and had published a dozen books as a travel writer and an expert on Russia.

  Very early on, however, Ewart was sickened by the war, as most people were; during his years as a combatant or convalescent he implored Ruthven and Sir John Spencer Ewart, persistently and without shame, to get him out of the trenches and post him to some staff duty, his notion of privilege having been transformed by the first bloodbath, but this time his pleas fell on deaf ears. Despite these requests, he did his duty on the battlefield and, as his colonel testified, though not precisely brave, he was unacquainted with fear, and so could be sent anywhere. (Perhaps fear is unknown to someone who gives himself up for dead from the start.) On the front he wrote numerous letters, thus unintentionally laying the groundwork for the battle and landscape descriptions of his first novel, the only one published during his lifetime, Way of Revelation (1921), which drew great acclaim from Lawrence of Arabia and Conan Doyle and quickly sold fifty thousand copies.

  The most devastating experience, however, may have been the brief truce of Christmas Day, 1915, a spontaneous, non-negotiated ceasefire between his Second Batallion of the Scots Guard and the 95th Bavarian Reserve Infantry Regiment. At dawn—say Cecil and Graham and Ewart himself—those on both sides began watching each other from under cover in their foxholes, and even calling out greetings. At ten minutes to eight in the morning, a German stuck his head out over his parapet and another stood up and waved his arms. Two more followed in their caps and long field-grey overcoats, without knowing for a few moments whether they would be greeted with handshakes or shots. Then “as by simultaneous infection,” all the British troops and the rest of the Germans began coming out into the open, despite the two High Commands’ great dislike of these unexpected truces not negotiated by headquarters. Even taking prisoners was frowned upon, and according to their superiors, “killing Huns” was the lone cheerful task of the British soldiers. The enemies began laughing, cracking jokes and shaking hands. They met at the willow-lined stream that separated them, and only the sentries and officers, Ewart among them, stayed back in the trenches. The troops communicated by signs, slapped each other’s backs, exchanged cigarettes, cookies, tinned beef, and tobacco, for sausages, sauerkraut, concentrated coffee, and cigars. In the midst of all this confraternization a Bavarian sniper brought down an Englishman, Sergeant Oliver, apparently a very popular man, who no sooner stuck his head out than he fell back into the trench where his corpse lay for the rest of the day, the face covered with half a sandbag or a blanket. But that wasn’t enough to dissuade his comrades-in-arms and his adversaries, who paid scant attention to the misfortune. “It makes no difference, it must be an accident,” wrote Ewart, as if one man’s decision to do his duty and shoot the sergeant lacked the force to invalidate the decision of so many men to neglect theirs and not open fire that day. From where he was, Ewart could hear very clearly the shouts and bursts of laughter from the intermingling grey and khaki uniforms. They were delighted to say hello to each other, meet each other, and see faces at last: faces are not feared, only distant figures are feared, or those that advance ferociously with their imagined features. The episode lasted no longer than ten minutes according to some sources, twenty, according to others, after which time, however long it was, says Cecil, two German o
fficers with shiny boots, who had been denied permission to take photographs of the “Tommies,” or privates, warned the Englishmen to go back to their trenches immediately: their artillery would open fire in five minutes. Some sources say that a few Scots Guardsmen were hit as they were heading back towards their own lines, but that even so not a single shot rang out from those lines over the next twenty-four hours. Other sources, closer in time, say that all the weapons immediately began churning up the mud again and “the war took control once more.” It makes no difference, it doesn’t matter, as Ewart wrote: even if only for the space of ten minutes, the war lost its control and was disobeyed, and he was there and saw it. To say that it was vanquished would be false and pretentious, but it was sidestepped and even mocked for a moment, and the mockery was maintained even after the harsh reminder—or revenge—of all-out warfare (whose primary aim is to exclude and negate whatever it does not enclose or taint) against the poor, trusting figure of a sergeant named Oliver whose fate it was to stop a stray bullet sent by that malevolent war into the untimely, unauthorized truce between a batallion and a regiment on Christmas morning of the year 1915, seven years and seven days before Ewart’s own turn would come in Mexico City. “Blaw for Blaw” or “blow for blow,” it happens everywhere.

  He was a tall, slender man, more than six feet in height, with a calm, dignified look about him, grey eyes, a fair complexion and brown hair. Despite his frail health, he looked vigorous and athletic, and there was usually color in his cheeks. He walked with a very upright carriage, and the uniform suited him, he instinctively wore it with the proper degree of ceremony. His character was quite restrained, as was his demeanor. He recoiled from any excessive familiarity, and was averse to any hint of bad manners. In society he could sometimes appear supercilious or even stupid. Among friends, with champagne or wine at hand, he lost his poker face and showed his jollier side. He never swore; according to Graham, “blasphemies and obscenities passed him by, and he had no interest in them.” His handshake was both stiff and limp, and the people he met in America couldn’t believe that his haughty exactitude was natural and of long standing; they looked at his face and attributed his abstraction to shellshock. Like most of his generation, he wore a precisely trimmed moustache, and he was always well dressed even when, after the war, he took up with a bohemian crowd and began frequenting the most nefarious Soho dives, fascinated by criminality, drug-taking and the murky places of the soul, as well as by the masses, which, at the same time, he could barely stomach. He spent hours studying their infinite variety while trying to keep a certain distance, in night clubs or the select Café Royal or the more plebeian café-salon of the Regent Palace Hotel, where he enjoyed listening to the band and was ashamed of the pleasure he took in the place’s vulgarity. Mornings, he frequented the motley sessions of the criminal courts, passing himself off as a law student and taking conscientious notes on all the cases. His short life did not allow him the time to lose this penchant, and during his stay in New York, before going to Mexico, he spent part of his evenings watching the night courts deal out their summary justice. He was allowed to visit Sing-Sing, where he was given a demonstration of the electric chair. He wanted to give a message to a certain Jim Larkin, imprisoned there and likely to be sitting in that chair shortly, but the prison authorities forbade it. He took notes everywhere, and went on doing so during his brief time in Mexico: he even took them at a bullfight in Juárez (“The bull kneels to die”; “The crowd burns their programs as a sign of their displeasure”), where he may have seen Rodolfo Gaón, known as “El Califa,” fight, and the Spaniard Marcial Lalanda. He had always liked boxing and horse races; he never missed Ascot. All of this is recounted by Hugh Cecil, who never saw him, and Stephen Graham, who saw all too much of him right up to his last day.

  He had been writing since he was very young, but not fiction. He made his debut at sixteen in some journals devoted to poultry farming, a science in which he was already, at that age, an expert: the best methods of fattening chickens were no mystery to him, nor were the fowl races of Central Europe, a rather astonishing area of specialized knowledge. In fact, at the age of eighteen, he was considered one of his country’s leading authorities on hens. Since childhood he had attracted birds with a strange magnetism, and perhaps that fact contributes (if only slightly) to an understanding of this original facet of his character. His passion for the countryside and life in the open air was so boundless and constant that it came to exert an influence on his literary development, to dubious or even detrimental effect on the lasting interest of his work, though who can tell anything about ill-fated writers who leave very little work behind. We do know that Thomas Hardy was almost his only model, more for his rural-descriptive dimension than for his undeniable poetic and narrative virtues; meanwhile, Ewart never read Milton or Shakespeare which, particularly in an English writer, does not bode well at all. He met Hardy after the war, in 1920, and though both of them were shy and the conversation was not brilliant or free-flowing, they did hit it off; one of the last things Ewart did before leaving for America was to return to the Dorset countryside and say farewell to the old master. On his first visit there, as he told it, he became so nervous upon finding himself in the presence of his idol that he didn’t manage to ask a single question about his novels, though he wanted to know everything about them. Had I been in his place, I would have consulted Hardy about certain doubts of my own, as one of his books—of excellent, cruel stories, The Withered Arm—was the first I ever translated, with great rural-descriptive difficulties, at the age of twenty-two, the age when Ewart was already at the front, witnessing the killing, as well as that unconsented and castigated and marred truce of 1915.

  It was not, of course, his gallinaceous publications—though they did earn him good money in his earliest youth—that aroused the enthusiasm of readers, critics and illustrious colleagues, but his novel, Way of Revelation, in the conception and planning of which Stephen Graham had his part, according to Graham himself, and which Ewart humbly intended as the English War and Peace of his time, a feat attempted by so many novelists in so many different countries since Tolstoy. This novel of five-hundred-odd pages, which generated glowing praise and considerable sales, especially for a debut, is a little hard to take today, and even then its story was a clichéd, sensationalistic melodrama (close, we must suppose, to autobiography), about a young man and his circle of friends between war and peace. In the end it remains unclear which of the two (for in peace there are love affairs, and corruptors) brings him greater sorrow. The characters are flat, none too credible and even less clever, as often happens when figures are taken too directly from reality, without sleeping a while in the imagination; the best parts aren’t the war scenes, bogged down by their irrelevant characters, but, predictably, the rural-descriptive ones, in which the human element is lacking. This is Cecil’s opinion anyway, and he’s not wrong. The story that gave rise to my interest in Ewart, “The Flats,” which I published in Cuentos únicos, in an excellent Spanish version by Alejandro García Reyes, is a good and misleading example of his artistic talent: there we can see a writer of poetic prose with considerable technical skill and a good eye for the inanimate world, but in Way of Revelation we can also perceive the author’s rather run-of-the-mill vision of life and death and his scanty imagination for telling a story, even the story of what has really happened and need not be invented (but to tell what has happened you have to have imagined it as well). It’s not so strange, then, that despite the enthusiasm of his contemporaries and his tragic, much-lamented death, Ewart’s name has disappeared from almost all the unjust tomes that register not people or their lives and deaths but only the titles and dates of texts that are more or less worthy of being remembered, though almost no one ever remembers them. Still, his book contained a high enough dosage of wartime horrors, morbid civilian dread, disillusioned sentimental hindsight and the ultimate optimism of compensateci losses to attract the public of its time, which it did.

&n
bsp; Wilfrid Ewart didn’t manage to hold out very long against success. At the age of twenty-nine, with combat and one or two amorous embitterments behind him, he enjoyed it without reservations or precautions and with touching innocence: he carried a sheaf of clippings (his reviews) everywhere, showing them to everyone without being asked, until there were too many to fit in his pockets and he had to make do with a selection. Suddenly transformed into a “literary lion,” as they say in England, he was surprised—with pleasure rather than vengeful triumph—that anyone he had ever been introduced to even once now claimed to be a friend of his, and that anyone who had ever gotten a good look at him bragged of having predicted that he would do great things. He went to parties and gatherings, teas and coffees and dances, enlightening the ladies and one or another gullible gentleman about his writing process, rubbing elbows with editors who were far more lion-like and saw him only as raw meat, and with veteran writers who tolerated him, no doubt for reasons of autobiographical curiosity and nostalgia, and as a way of fuelling their own resentment, for they knew that, as the historian Froude once said, if anyone does anything noteworthy in London, London will make sure he never does anything noteworthy again. He answered all his letters, dined out every night, wrote all the short stories and articles that the newspapers and magazines commissioned. He expressed many opinions, on literary and non-literary matters; he never missed a soccer match, a horse race or an important boxing match. He lived a charmed life, and he broke down.