12
He was a tall, slender man, more than six feet in height, with a calm, dignified look about him, grey eyes, a fair complexion and brown hair. Despite his frail health, he looked vigorous and athletic, and there was usually color in his cheeks. He walked with a very upright carriage, and the uniform suited him, he instinctively wore it with the proper degree of ceremony. His character was quite restrained, as was his demeanor. He recoiled from any excessive familiarity, and was averse to any hint of bad manners. In society he could sometimes appear supercilious or even stupid. Among friends, with champagne or wine at hand, he lost his poker face and showed his jollier side. He never swore; according to Graham, “blasphemies and obscenities passed him by, and he had no interest in them.” His handshake was both stiff and limp, and the people he met in America couldn’t believe that his haughty exactitude was natural and of long standing; they looked at his face and attributed his abstraction to shellshock. Like most of his generation, he wore a precisely trimmed moustache, and he was always well dressed even when, after the war, he took up with a bohemian crowd and began frequenting the most nefarious Soho dives, fascinated by criminality, drug-taking and the murky places of the soul, as well as by the masses, which, at the same time, he could barely stomach. He spent hours studying their infinite variety while trying to keep a certain distance, in night clubs or the select Café Royal or the more plebeian café-salon of the Regent Palace Hotel, where he enjoyed listening to the band and was ashamed of the pleasure he took in the place’s vulgarity. Mornings, he frequented the motley sessions of the criminal courts, passing himself off as a law student and taking conscientious notes on all the cases. His short life did not allow him the time to lose this penchant, and during his stay in New York, before going to Mexico, he spent part of his evenings watching the night courts deal out their summary justice. He was allowed to visit Sing-Sing, where he was given a demonstration of the electric chair. He wanted to give a message to a certain Jim Larkin, imprisoned there and likely to be sitting in that chair shortly, but the prison authorities forbade it. He took notes everywhere, and went on doing so during his brief time in Mexico: he even took them at a bullfight in Juárez (“The bull kneels to die”; “The crowd burns their programs as a sign of their displeasure”), where he may have seen Rodolfo Gaón, known as “El Califa,” fight, and the Spaniard Marcial Lalanda. He had always liked boxing and horse races; he never missed Ascot. All of this is recounted by Hugh Cecil, who never saw him, and Stephen Graham, who saw all too much of him right up to his last day.
He had been writing since he was very young, but not fiction. He made his debut at sixteen in some journals devoted to poultry farming, a science in which he was already, at that age, an expert: the best methods of fattening chickens were no mystery to him, nor were the fowl races of Central Europe, a rather astonishing area of specialized knowledge. In fact, at the age of eighteen, he was considered one of his country’s leading authorities on hens. Since childhood he had attracted birds with a strange magnetism, and perhaps that fact contributes (if only slightly) to an understanding of this original facet of his character. His passion for the countryside and life in the open air was so boundless and constant that it came to exert an influence on his literary development, to dubious or even detrimental effect on the lasting interest of his work, though who can tell anything about ill-fated writers who leave very little work behind. We do know that Thomas Hardy was almost his only model, more for his rural-descriptive dimension than for his undeniable poetic and narrative virtues; meanwhile, Ewart never read Milton or Shakespeare which, particularly in an English writer, does not bode well at all. He met Hardy after the war, in 1920, and though both of them were shy and the conversation was not brilliant or free-flowing, they did hit it off; one of the last things Ewart did before leaving for America was to return to the Dorset countryside and say farewell to the old master. On his first visit there, as he told it, he became so nervous upon finding himself in the presence of his idol that he didn’t manage to ask a single question about his novels, though he wanted to know everything about them. Had I been in his place, I would have consulted Hardy about certain doubts of my own, as one of his books — of excellent, cruel stories, The Withered Arm—was the first I ever translated, with great rural-descriptive difficulties, at the age of twenty-two, the age when Ewart was already at the front, witnessing the killing, as well as that unconsented and castigated and marred truce of 1915.