Also appearing in these anthologies of the 1930s were a number of stories by Wilfrid Ewart, under that name or under the name Herbert Gore, which was no less his own, and I included one of them, “The Flats,” in the anthology of rare tales of fear titled Cuentos únicos or Singular Stories that I collected and published in 1989, the same year as All Souls, and for which I rescued a few texts Gawsworth had included in the Thrills series, texts that have been completely forgotten today. In my anthology I also included a macabre tale by Gawsworth himself (the first work of his ever translated into any language and, for now, I fear, the last); the only story of the kind written by Durrell, the only one written by Sir Winston Churchill, an excellent story by the bilious Middleton, and also a story of my own — the temptation was irresistible — under the pseudonym of James Denham, whom, in the corresponding biographical notice, I described as having been born in London in 1911 and having died in 1943, fallen in combat in North Africa at the age of thirty-two, yet another ill-fated writer, even if this one was apocryphal. (Incidentally, little could I have imagined then that in 1996, when at last the film made by Querejeta Sr. and Querejeta Jr. and not based on All Souls was made, one of the character actors would be the very man whose last name I took for my occasional nom de plume, the Englishman Maurice Denham, today a venerable octogenarian whose performance is undoubtedly the best thing in the film. Small wonder that I sometimes have the feeling I draw things and events and even people to myself, but I try not to concede much importance to these coincidences — the perpetual activity of chance — or take them for exceptional occurrences unique to the “elect”; in the hands of a certain North American colleague they would have been good for a great deal of unconcealed fascination with one’s own life and several books, or at least notebooks.)
Almost all the authors of the Cuentos únicos were and continue to be so obscure, to Spanish readers especially, that it seemed appropriate to preface each story with a brief biographical note, which is why I had to invent one in the case of poor James Ryan Denham … But about certain very vagabond or obscure authors, I could learn almost nothing; I remember, for example, that in one case, that of Nugent Barker, I was unable to find even the date of his almost certain death, given that he was born in 1888, though who knows if he isn’t still alive; everything is possible. Another mysterious case, which was also striking and invited farther inquiry, was that of Wilfrid Ewart, in whose note I could write no more than:
“Wilfrid Herbert Gore Ewart (1892–1922) died, as his dates show, at the age of thirty, and Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, opined sadly on learning of his death, ‘He would have gone right to the top.’ For his part, T.E. Lawrence, better known as Lawrence of Arabia, said of him on one occasion, ‘He needs no introduction to the reading public.’ And the inevitable John Gawsworth, who seems to have been friend to the entire world, wrote, at the beginning of his introductory note to Ewart’s posthumous book When Armaggedon Came (1933): ‘Wilfrid Ewart died a fraction over ten years ago; upon Old Year’s Night, 1922, to be precise, in the sultry darkness of Mexico City. The story is too widely known to require further amplification here and too tragic to allow casual comment to dwell upon it. Another of England’s great novelists lay dead and Literature was the poorer for his loss. Beside the Tree of Dreadful Night … they buried him.’
“The odd thing about the case,” I continued, “is that currently there is no way (or I haven’t found a way) of learning anything more about this thirty-year-old man who would have gone right to the top, who needed no introduction and whose death was too well known to require further amplification. Ewart’s name does not appear in any dictionary or history of English literature or in any contemporary anthology. However, MacMillan Publishers have announced a new edition of his most famous novel, Way of Revelation (1921), about the First World War, in which the author was a combatant, so perhaps we will soon know how and why Ewart died in Mexico City.
“For the moment I can say only that before dying he also published A Journey in Ireland (1921), and that after his death, in addition to the aforementioned title of 1933, Scots Guard (1934), Love and Strive (1936) and Aspects of England (1937) were published. Under his own name or under the pseudonym of Herbert Gore, several of his stories appeared in the Thrills series and other anthologies of the 1930s. The present tale, ‘The Flats,’ written in a prose so pure that we may well decide Conan Doyle was right, comes from John Rowland’s 1937 anthology Path and Pavement.”
It’s not at all strange, given the far-fetched, novelistic sound of this and other biographical notes in the anthology, that the one dedicated to the nonexistent Denham failed to arouse any suspicion or attract undue attention; either none of them was believed and doubt was cast on the authenticity of all the stories, or each and every one was accepted without a quibble. Some readers were inclined towards the first stance and surmised that the nineteen stories were, without exception, all mine under different names. Would that it were true, because at least eighteen of them were well worth laying claim to. (Though really, it would have been quite foolhardy and naive of me to attribute apocryphal stories to the famous and much studied author of The Alexandria Quartet or to a very well known former Prime Minister of Her Majesty the Queen.) Other more prudent readers thought that “only” three or four were mine, among them no doubt the one by Gawsworth, whom not a few of my readers still took for a fictional character. And I recall that some friends, whom I let in on the game and challenged to unmask me, failed shamefully and didn’t hit on my story even at the fifth guess; my estimable father, who has known me for some time but not as well as he thinks, hesitated between crediting me for the story by Middleton, the suicide — which was a little disturbing, though more to me or to him I don’t know — or the one by Denham; Don Juan Benet didn’t waver for an instant and tore off my mask at the first try.