Stephen Graham lived to the age of ninety or ninety-one: he died in 1975, fifty-two or fifty-three years later than his unfortunate friend and former captain on the front lines, depending on how one dates Ewart’s borderline death. Given that he was eight years older than Ewart, he enjoyed a total of seventy or seventy-one years more in the world. He didn’t waste it, made good use of it, and over the course of his very prolonged life wrote and published more than fifty books, all between 1911 and 1964, of which twelve were novels and the majority travel accounts or studies of Russian subjects, including ambitious biographies of Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander II, Boris Godunof and Stalin. None of them, however, have enabled the old man he finally become to be any less mortal or forgotten today than the young man of thirty whose life and work were cut short one murderous Saint Sylvester’s night in Mexico City. Graham’s first wife, the silent or perhaps invisible Rose Savory, truly and definitively became both silent and invisible in 1956, and her husband remarried.
The Hotel Isabel still exists at the same spot, that is, the corner of República del Salvador and Isabel la Católica. Apparently the lay-out and decor of the rooms has not changed over the years. I’ll have to go and see it when I finally travel to Mexico some day, though my curiosity will not extend to taking a room there, still less room 53 on the fifth floor. Both Sergio González Rodríguez and Rafael Muñoz Saldaña, who went to so much trouble and enjoyed it all so much, and to whom I owe many leads and much guidance, told me something extremely disturbing, but which, by this point, may not come as a surprise: the fateful Hotel Isabel has balconies only on the second and third floors; there are none on the fifth. Perhaps they existed at some point and were later torn down, or perhaps there never were any.
15
The feeling that books seek me out has stayed with me, and all that has emerged into real life from All Souls’ fictional pages has finally materialized in that form, as welclass="underline" in the form of a book, a document, a photo, a letter, a title. So much has sprung from that novel into my life that I no longer know how many volumes I’ll need to tell it all, this book won’t be enough and its planned sequel may not be either, because eight years have passed since I published the novel and all of it continues to invade my days, stealing into them, and my nights, too, now more than ever, when I have become what Shiel and Gawsworth once were, or so it appears, and it seems incredible that I wasn’t afraid of this and accepted it, after having felt and written what I’ve cited before: “I asked and still ask myself all these questions not out of pity for Gawsworth but out of a curiosity tinged with superstition, convinced as I came to be that, in the end, I would meet the same fate he did.” It’s hard to resist the chance to perpetuate a legend, all the more so if you’ve contributed to extending it. And it would be mean-spirited to refuse to play along.
Several books that are directly or indirectly related to Wilfrid Ewart have sought me out, the first one right away, I had it already in 1989 and must have mentioned something about it to my Mexican correspondents, since in a letter dated in November of that year, Sergio G. R. congratulates me and envies it. It is a translation from Russian to English titled Three Pairs of Silk Stockings, published by Ernest Benn Limited of London in 1931, and bearing the subtitle, A Novel of the Life of the Educated Class Under the Soviet; the author is listed as Panteleimon Romanof and though that name appears to be an obvious pseudonym, he did indeed exist (1884–1938); Leonide Zarine is credited as translator and Stephen Graham, author of the slipshod prologue, as editor. The extraordinary thing about my copy is that the title page is signed by Graham himself, who, in addition, has written, “Comrades conserve your energy USE THE LIFT,” and, lower down, “Notice: The Lift is Out of Order.” But before this, on one of the book’s endpapers, also appears, implausibly, the signature of John Gawsworth, beneath the phrase “Arnold Ovenden’s copy of my second anonymous edition.” And below his name, another note, “Now it is properly befouled and blasted by the unholy editors,” all of which indicates not only that Graham and Gawsworth — Ewart’s witness and posthumous champion, respectively — knew and were in touch with each other (not a very strange thing given Gawsworth’s perpetual, frenetic personal and literary activity before he gave himself over in earnest to drink and withdrew from many things) but that they collaborated on the capricious publication of this Russian novel, also known as Comrade Kisliakof, when Graham was forty-seven and Gawsworth, with his proverbial precocity, was only nineteen. “What strikes me as the pinnacle of literary fortune,” González Rodríguez exclaimed in his letter, “is the fact that you possess a book signed by both Gawsworth and Graham. Immediately I looked in Graham’s autobiography for some reference to Gawsworth, but there is nothing in the index of proper names, though Graham makes mention of a wide variety of figures.” And that absence is indeed curious, since I now also know that according to certain not entirely trustworthy sources Graham formed part of the “intellectual aristocracy” of Redonda. I’ve grown quite accustomed to these strokes of luck, literary or not, which for some time now have formed part of my daily life and even of my habits, but it’s nothing to wonder at that the coincidence struck my correspondent in far-off Mexico as astonishing, since he had concluded his article by saying: “For now, let’s agree to admit that the person to be blamed — if anyone is to be blamed — for this entire web of ambiguities, misinterpretations and conjectures, is Gawsworth himself, who launches the legend of the unfinished work and tragic death of Wilfrid Ewart with a paragraph written in 1933 which Marías includes in his Cuentos únicos. It’s worth re-reading.”
Much later, in 1996, I acquired another book that does not silence its past, a first edition of Way of Revelation, the novel that was wept over in its day and whose author is now no longer remembered, published in November of 1921, barely thirteen months before the murderous, weary trajectory of the spent bullet, and barely five before its author’s breakdown — and his hand and tongue began to disobey him — after having travelled to Liverpool in a storm to see Music Hall, out of Clifton Hall, ridden by Bilbie Rees, win the Grand National against thirty-one other horses, a triumph on which Ewart had placed a bet that paid off handsomely at odds of 100 to 9, as I’m informed by that authority on all matters related to the turf, Fernando Savater. What makes this copy truly singular is the dedication penned in it by an author who couldn’t have written very many since he published so little and died so soon. It says: “Angela M.C. Waddington, from her brother (the author) in friendship and mutual recollections — Nov. 15th, 1921.” It isn’t signed, but this is Ewart’s hand, before his breakdown, or rather at the moment of his highest hopes (it’s a nervous hand, and particularly striking is the e of the word recollections, which looks Greek, as does the d, always, like a delta). By 1921, we may therefore deduce, she was already remarried to Waddington, whoever he was. Stephen Graham wrote, “Angela and Wilfred were closer than most brothers and sisters. It could almost be said that she was a feminine Wilfrid, he a masculine Angela.” If that was true, perhaps Angela was the person who felt the greatest despair and wept most over the premature death in Mexico City. And perhaps this was the first copy the novelist gave away of his literary debut, published seventy-seven years ago this November. The book retains two other traces of its now lengthy past: the program of the funeral or response held for Ewart at Holy Trinity on Sloane Street in London (only hymns and psalms inside, not even a date), and the ex libris of some intermediary owner between Angela Ewart (then Farmer, then Waddington) and myself, one B.D. Maurer who marked his books with the figure of soldier with bowed head, leaning on a rifle — perhaps during a truce — probably during the First World War, judging by the uniform, under the motto, in red letters: Always We Remember, just what I’ve been doing for so many pages, if one can remember memories that are not one’s own.