“Nevertheless,” the text continued, “although his work was no more than conventional and rare, which made its total neglect and the lack of any reprint quite understandable, as I went on ascertaining various facts (no book existed on Gawsworth, not even, it seemed, an article, and he barely received a mention in the most voluminous and exhaustive literary dictionaries and encyclopedias) my interest went on growing, not so much because of the rather average work as because of the far from average man. I first found out the dates of his birth and death—1912 and 1970—and then, on a page of mute bibliography, that several of his works had been published (sometimes under other pseudonyms, each more absurd than others) in places as extravagant and improbable for a London writer as Tunis, Cairo, Sétif (Algeria), Calcutta and Vasto (Italy). His poetical works were collected between 1943 and 1945 in six volumes — most of them printed in India — but, peculiarly, the fourth volume appears never to have been published, though it has a title (Farewell to Youth). It simply does not exist. His prose work, mostly short literary essays and tales of horror, is scattered across obscure, strange anthologies of the 1930s, or saw the light — a figure of speech — in private or limited editions.
“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 the 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: