So only the scenery was real, and not even that: it was a skewed Oxford, a replica seen from my imaginary or false perspective, the fabulizing viewpoint of someone who spends a single night in a legendary hotel that will not record his insignificant, pretentious presence alongside that of the famous people who once slept or lived there, or perhaps killed themselves or were killed, lending the establishment that distinction: the room is closed off, and now tourists will only look in. Just incidental things, I said, when it is so difficult to know what will turn out to be incidental or fundamental once our book or story or life is over and has become known or past time which cannot be reproduced. Or maybe the book can, each time it’s read, but no, each reading changes it, though none of them rewrites it.
Real, too, was the aspect of the novel that struck many readers as the most novelistic and fictitious, pure Kiplingesque invention, pure make-believe on my part: the story, told tentatively then, of the ill-fated, calamitous and jovial writer John Gawsworth, the incredible king of Redonda who never saw his kingdom but sold it several times and had himself called Juan I, and whose real name was Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, two photographs of whom I printed and described in that book and print here once again to jog the memories of those who have read that novel and introduce them to those who haven’t and so will need to familiarize themselves with his face and his various names if they are going to stay in touch with these pages and go on turning them. For of that man I shall have to speak, and quite a lot, since I now, in a manner of speaking, have him in my home. Or rather, though he’s dead — and the second photo isn’t of him, exactly, but of the death mask that Hugh Oloff de Wet made immediately in incongruous homage to one who left the world a beggar — he lives on in me a little, if that can be said of someone who died twenty-six years ago without ever having had the faintest notion of my existence.