“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 Oxford, 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.)
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.”
11
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.”