It was not, of course, his gallinaceous publications — though they did earn him good money in his earliest youth — that aroused the enthusiasm of readers, critics and illustrious colleagues, but his novel, Way of Revelation, in the conception and planning of which Stephen Graham had his part, according to Graham himself, and which Ewart humbly intended as the English War and Peace of his time, a feat attempted by so many novelists in so many different countries since Tolstoy. This novel of five-hundred-odd pages, which generated glowing praise and considerable sales, especially for a debut, is a little hard to take today, and even then its story was a clichéd, sensationalistic melodrama (close, we must suppose, to autobiography), about a young man and his circle of friends between war and peace. In the end it remains unclear which of the two (for in peace there are love affairs, and corruptors) brings him greater sorrow. The characters are flat, none too credible and even less clever, as often happens when figures are taken too directly from reality, without sleeping a while in the imagination; the best parts aren’t the war scenes, bogged down by their irrelevant characters, but, predictably, the rural-descriptive ones, in which the human element is lacking. This is Cecil’s opinion anyway, and he’s not wrong. The story that gave rise to my interest in Ewart, “The Flats,” which I published in Cuentos únicos, in an excellent Spanish version by Alejandro García Reyes, is a good and misleading example of his artistic talent: there we can see a writer of poetic prose with considerable technical skill and a good eye for the inanimate world, but in Way of Revelation we can also perceive the author’s rather run-of-the-mill vision of life and death and his scanty imagination for telling a story, even the story of what has really happened and need not be invented (but to tell what has happened you have to have imagined it as well). It’s not so strange, then, that despite the enthusiasm of his contemporaries and his tragic, much-lamented death, Ewart’s name has disappeared from almost all the unjust tomes that register not people or their lives and deaths but only the titles and dates of texts that are more or less worthy of being remembered, though almost no one ever remembers them. Still, his book contained a high enough dosage of wartime horrors, morbid civilian dread, disillusioned sentimental hindsight and the ultimate optimism of compensateci losses to attract the public of its time, which it did.
Wilfrid Ewart didn’t manage to hold out very long against success. At the age of twenty-nine, with combat and one or two amorous embitterments behind him, he enjoyed it without reservations or precautions and with touching innocence: he carried a sheaf of clippings (his reviews) everywhere, showing them to everyone without being asked, until there were too many to fit in his pockets and he had to make do with a selection. Suddenly transformed into a “literary lion,” as they say in England, he was surprised — with pleasure rather than vengeful triumph — that anyone he had ever been introduced to even once now claimed to be a friend of his, and that anyone who had ever gotten a good look at him bragged of having predicted that he would do great things. He went to parties and gatherings, teas and coffees and dances, enlightening the ladies and one or another gullible gentleman about his writing process, rubbing elbows with editors who were far more lion-like and saw him only as raw meat, and with veteran writers who tolerated him, no doubt for reasons of autobiographical curiosity and nostalgia, and as a way of fuelling their own resentment, for they knew that, as the historian Froude once said, if anyone does anything noteworthy in London, London will make sure he never does anything noteworthy again. He answered all his letters, dined out every night, wrote all the short stories and articles that the newspapers and magazines commissioned. He expressed many opinions, on literary and non-literary matters; he never missed a soccer match, a horse race or an important boxing match. He lived a charmed life, and he broke down.
Suffering from a bad cold, he went to Liverpool by train, during a storm, to attend the 1922 Grand National, the last time he would ever watch or learn the outcome of that race. As usual, he picked the winning horse, which should only have heightened his charmed state. But when Stephen Graham went to visit him the next afternoon, Ewart told him that he couldn’t write, his hand did not obey him, it wouldn’t work. He said it slowly and with difficulty because his breakdown had also affected his speech, and he couldn’t be sure that the words ordained by his brain would emerge from his mouth rather than some treacherous, spectral diction. He was frightened, but took it calmly and quietly. He saw a doctor, spent several days in a clinic, and was then sent to the country. He lost weight and grew pale and scrawny, his clothes hung loosely. He spent his time watching birds (his former passion), as a form of therapy.
By June he was somewhat better and able to write to Graham, who had left for America with his wife, whose maiden name, I believe, was Rose Savory. The handwriting was a scrawl, but a more or less legible one that indicated some degree of recovery, as did his mention of medium-term literary projects, once he had been cured, among them the history of the Scots Guards, which he had very willingly promised to write in the ever-modest aim of emulating his maternal great-grandfather Napier and describing the campaigns of the War of ’14 just as, a century earlier, his ancestor had described those of the Peninsular War, our War of Independence against Napoleon. Graham answered, encouraging Ewart to travel to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he and his wife were staying, and there set forth the daring deeds of his beloved regiment: he offered him a house, a horse and absolute freedom, confident that Ewart wouldn’t be well enough to accept them. However, one day he received a cable naming the ship, the Berengaria, and the date in September when the presumed invalid would disembark.
During the crossing, with New York already close at hand, a man, a third-class steward, fell into the water and could not be saved. The worst part was realizing that the ship, despite its shudderings and grindings, had moved away from the place where the loss had occurred within only a few seconds, enveloped in the wail of its siren which already sounded more like a first lament than a cry of alarm. By the time the ship reversed it was too late, there wasn’t even a place to go back to. That was the worst, for the living, the ship’s unstoppable wake, “like a white scar,” voracious upon the ocean, the all-too-visible manifestation of time that never waits and goes more quickly than any human will — for truce or salvation or hope — and so forces everything to remain unfinished; that, and the unceasing awareness that the only way to disrupt time is to die and emerge from it.
Ewart spent a few days in New York with Graham, who had come to pick him up, and the American poet Vachel Lindsay, who was the oldest of the three and was always fearful that the younger and less-travelled of the two Englishmen would be mugged or run over by a car or get into some sort of trouble with his exaggeratedly British mannerisms, his vacillating speech (transformed by illness into a real defect), his way, when paying for anything, of holding his money in his hand and laboriously counting it out, his inordinate capacity for surprise, which he couldn’t conceal, and his stiffness. Though he had known the suffering of the trenches, Ewart still felt his world to be intact and consequently was amazed that no change took place when he left his boots outside the door of his room at night. “How do men get their boots blacked in this country?” he asked Graham, seriously intrigued. “In the country, I mean, where there are no shoeshine parlours.” “Clean them themselves,” Graham answered, and Ewart is known to have been unable to do more than mutter, “Extraordinary thing!”