7
Yes, it was Ian David Lewis Michael who spoke of “the cause,” in the least probable — but not impossible — sense in which Othello may have been using the word. And that was how my former, humorously-inclined boss lived the life of All Souls, as a small cause of his own, which was rather touching to me and for which I will always be grateful to him (he was more concerned about the book than its own boorish and disbelieving publisher who was making a profit from it: quite a contrast). Not only did he become an ardent defender of the novel, but he followed each of the unexpected phases of its still unfinished career with enthusiasm and delight, gathering opinions and reactions wherever he could, he and Eric Southworth; I never thought that in a city like Oxford, about which so much literature, good and bad, has been written for centuries, my own book could create the slightest stir; on the contrary, I expected indifference, even if it were feigned. Perhaps I wasn’t taking sufficient account of the fact that it’s a very cloistered place, feeding entirely on itself, at once learned, lordly, and provincial, like Venice, the other city I lived in during those years, to which I flew in terror whenever I could, in a state of febrile expectation and permanent anxiety, it’s where perhaps the best and worst things in my life have happened to me — leaving aside, among the worst, the deaths of those I loved who died in other places. It isn’t necessary to be as specific as I’ve just been, but sometimes one has to guard against jokes, in an area where one doesn’t allow them, and one always knows where that is. Sometimes one must take precautions, so as not to to be forced, later, to kill with words.
Indifference was indeed feigned by some, as I was to learn, but the dissemblers, such as Alec Dewar, should have been more careful and kept more fully in mind that in Oxford everything and everyone is found out and tattled on. Not only did Ian see Dewar leafing through the copy that the well-built student clad in a shirt imprudently light for that time of year had brought him, but other people also came upon him, carefully and furtively reading when he thought he was alone in the Senior Common Room or invisible in a corner of the library. Nevertheless, around his colleagues in the department he continued to insist on playing the man without a clue (“Oh really? A novel by Javier, set in Oxford? Oh yes, I vaguely recall someone telling me something about it. No, I haven’t read it, I’m spending all my time on the Inca Garcilaso de la Vega these days”), probably to avoid having to express an opinion, or in order to let everyone see that no contemporary work, whatever it might be, could possibly interest him. A colleague at his college — whose knowledge was absolutely first-hand — informed me that he did indeed boast to whoever happened to sit next to him in the refectory or at the high tables of having become a novelistic character in Europe — what he said was not “in a novel,” but “novelistic,” my mole emphasized. Deliberately severe and involuntarily shy, the good Alec Dewar was at last in possession of a topic that was original and his alone: now he was the one to announce the news, answer the questions that courtesy obliged, enlighten his interlocutors and set the course of the conversation, rather than waiting for his dinner companions to take an interest in him and throw a word or two in his direction, which, fearful of his apparently severe and even blustering character, they did not always do. “If you must know, my friend,” he said with undisguised self-importance to my informant from Trinity or Christ Church or Corpus Christi, “I have been the subject and central motif of a roman à clef, which, as you know, is a French expression meaning ‘novel with a key,’ one of those books in which the astonished reader never stops wondering whether, or to what incredible degree, it can all be true — all that the author writes about characters who aren’t really characters, you understand, but recognizable or somewhat recognizable representations of real persons: recognizable to those who know them, it must be said. There is a very good Spanish word for this, of course you won’t know it and it isn’t easy to translate or explain, like all the best terms. A very interesting word: tra-sun-to,” he concluded after taking a breath, bending forward and even changing expression to pronounce it, solemnly spacing out the syllables and speaking in a much higher — evidently even strident — tone of voice that almost caused a cataclysm at the table and of course did cause half a dozen startled jumps (spoons let fly through the air) and another half dozen bouts of choking. My mole was a chemist, and at Oxford there is a not entirely unfounded tendency to believe that every professor or don is an eminent luminary in his own field but lives in the most absolute ignorance of anything beyond it, lacking even the most elementary notions that are well within the grasp of any child. The chemist was fully aware of the meaning of roman à clef, and rather irritated at having it explained to him, but not of trasunto, and I had to improvise the definition Dewar was at great pains to keep from providing. It is my suspicion that he had probably just rediscovered this deeply interesting word in the work of the Inca Garcilaso or in the dictionary. “Yes? And what does this foreign novel have to say about you, Doctor Dewar? Something we mustn’t know? Some compromising piece of information? Some roguery?” my chemist asked him. And Dewar answered complacently, or rather with triumphal delectation — the skin of his pate stretched tighter than usual, his glasses slipping down, “The most fantastic things, I assure you, the most fantastic things. And the fanny thing is that some of them are true, no one would ever think it. Well, well, so it goes in this day and age.” It’s a pity he didn’t say exactly which things he would admit to the truth of, because I would have liked, as with Rylands, to know what I had hit on without wanting or trying to. But it is possible — or at least to be hoped, and this alone would justify my book — that the real replica or trasunto of the fictional Butcher or Hammer subsequently awoke greater interest among his colleagues and dinner companions, or, better still, greater appreciation, at least until the appearance of the novel in French, the first language into which it was translated, and which all curious dons know, even chemists.
Neither Fred Hodcroft nor John Rutherford had much to say about All Souls, and perhaps in their cases the indifference was authentic; anyway, no one was ever tempted to recognize either of them in any of the characters or to see them replicated on any page, which may serve to reinforce the preceding conjecture. I trust that one of Toby Rylands’ predictions was, nevertheless, not entirely correct and that neither Hodcroft nor Rutherford, for whom I have great respect and greater liking, were ever bothered or offended because, in their regard, the mistake was not made which was made with regard to Ian, Toby, Eric, Philip Lloyd-Bostock, Alec Dewar, Leigh-Peele, the boozing Lord Rymer, Tom the porter, and even the belle inconnue adulteress, or perhaps connue, or perhaps not even belle, and certainly not an adulteress, or, then again, who knows. And with regard not only to these people, who are all related to the University, but also to certain other Oxonians who had last set foot in a classroom in their extreme youth, decades ago, and who certainly had only been there as impatient students. But I’ll speak of them later. I don’t imagine that either Fred or John considers himself harmed or deprived of a literary immortality that seems a bit ephemeral and perhaps already sepulchral.