Yet whatever fate it deserved, the novel did not meet with bad fortune, though there was at least one person who qualified it as garbage and the worst book of all time, which is surely not without some merit. It has, in any case, been translated into nine languages, and must have sold about 140,000 copies by now, in its various editions and languages, and this publisher has — grudgingly, no doubt, and just in case — collected his very succulent, advantageous percentage on the sale of each one of those copies, with some recent exceptions (the figures are his, of course; what other figures do I have access to?). But one can learn from great masters like Herman Melville even in their darkest, most resentful hours, and it’s not worth the risk of farther spoiling a text by having someone figure in it at length who doesn’t deserve even to have his full name stated here. However greatly my books and I may suffer from his deeds and omissions and wiles, it makes no sense to dedicate any more space to this businessman than to the Harper brothers, who were, when all is said and done, real publishers, capable of literary equanimity. The mere mention of that other H darkens these pages, making them somewhat sordid, while making me somber and rancorous and prone to committing verbal outrages, and, after all, between him and the nineteenth century brothers H there lies at least the same distance as between the poor Mr. M of those days and the other M who speaks here.
Even in sordid matters there is always, despite everything, some comical element that can be put to use, and if I’ve used the adjective “vinegary” it was purely out of love for precision and strict adherence to the truth. I learned not long ago, from some occasional visitors to the publishing house (but maybe they were joking), that in all of its rooms there was, on at least two successive days, a strong, persistent and extremely unpleasant smell. When the firm’s employees were questioned as to its origin, it seems that they, with no apparent embarrassment, told the stunned visitors (one of whom may have been a foreigner, for even greater dumbfounded-ness) that the boss and his wife, his chatty wife, had, on the advice of some shaman, unholy madman, or witch doctor, which they followed to the letter, placed, half-hidden beneath the furniture and bookshelves, saucers of salt and vinegar to neutralize and ward off by this mixture the voodoo hexes I’m supposed to have cast on their company — apparently any success or prize I receive is experienced there as a curse, a disaster, and a cause for gnashing of teeth; if they only knew — or perhaps it was my poor dead grandmother from Havana who did it, a goodhearted and cheerful woman such as I’ve hardly known since. However, if all this really is in earnest, I haven’t managed to find out whether the dishes contained a kind of off-white pasty substance or a urine-like liquid with the salt dissolved and invisible, or perhaps, if they used rock salt, with granules floating in it. Be that as it may, and in either case: a stench and a vile thing. Very rational people indeed, healthy and argumentative, in no way primitive or totemic or prone to fits. I don’t know whether the witches’ brew has been removed by now — to the relief of staff, visitors and authors — in view of its total ineffectiveness in recent times, which have been far more sour and vinegary than piquantly salty, to the point that the company is beginning to be known by a pun that may be too unfortunate. Though to tell the truth, I don’t think it is.
18
Other, more gracious, honorable and mentally stable publishers welcomed the novel hospitably outside of Spain, though there was always some small obstacle or minor change, which was either accepted or avoided by a stroke of luck. Gilles Barbedette, of Rivages, a magnificent and enthusiastic editor who knew everything about Nabokov and whom I miss enormously six years after his death at the unjust age of thirty-six from the slow and murderous virus, felt that the title, translated literally into French—Toutes les âmes—did not work well in that language, in which, true enough, there do not exist two different words like the Spanish “ánima” and “alma,” with the worst of the less secular connotations reserved for “ánima.” Without giving it much thought (finding a new title for a book that already has one involves doing oneself a small violence), I decided it would be called Le Roman d’Oxford, which he approved of and which had been my way of referring to the novel while I wrote it, in letters or conversations with Eric Southworth and Daniella Pittarello, the only two people who were abreast of my designs from the beginning (in fact, it was in Daniella P.’s house in Venice, facing the back of the Scuola de San Rocco and the canal or rio delle Muneghette, that I wrote a good part of the book). That was what I was still calling it, “la novela de Oxford,” when I came down from the second floor and said to Daniella, day after day, in a grave voice and with a half-smile on my lips, “Non so come continuare,” and she would answer, “Dai, dai.” And I went on calling it that for a while still, even after it was finished, to the point that when I finally turned the manuscript over to Vinegar & Salt, Inc. for their consideration and final (retrospective) disdain, on the first page, as a working title, was simply N de O, and it didn’t receive the title it has until the poet Álvaro Pombo informed me one night in an authoritarian manner, and without having read it: “A novel that takes place in Oxford must necessarily be entitled Todas las almas, no matter what it’s about,” and I listened to him. Back then we saw each other often, we almost never do now.
In Germany, as well, the title didn’t seem very convincing to Piper, the Munich publishing house that brought it out, and they added an innocent subtitle whose cheapening effect I was unable to gauge at the time since I don’t know German. Alle Seelen oder die Irren von Oxford, they called it, which apparently means All Souls or The Madmen of Oxford (I want to believe that the equivalent word is not even more odious, something abominable like “screwballs” or “nuts”; I was speaking inaccurately when I said I accepted all the changes). Fortunately, in a more recent edition from the Stuttgart-based firm of Klett-Cotta, the book recovered its more sedate and less screwball name.
As for England, the problems there were of another order. After a firm decision to buy the novel was made by the daring and resolute Christopher MacLehose of Harvill — then part of the gigantic Collins group, but now independent again and going by its former name, The Harvill Press — the corresponding contract took far too long, disturbingly long, to arrive. Finally I made so bold as to inquire after it, rather nervously, since it takes no effort to imagine my excitement at the prospect of seeing, for the first time, a book of mine in the language from which I had translated a number of very difficult books since that first rural-descriptive (but fortunately not gallinaceous) one, and I received the odd response that Harvill was awaiting “legal authorization” from the corporation’s lawyers, who were studying the text very thoroughly before giving the go-ahead to its definitive acquisition, “since it is a roman à clef,” and the publishing house could not risk some future lawsuit. In the words of MacLehose himself, whom I hadn’t yet met, they had to make certain that my book did not contain any “intentional or involuntary” crime. Once again I watched as reality struggled to incorporate my novel into its sphere, and I felt obliged to communicate to Harvill, in a letter of February 23, 1990, that All Souls was not at all a roman à clef or an autobiographical account, but simply a novel tout court, and a work of fiction; that there was no accurate portrayal in it of any member of the Sub-Faculty of Spanish at Oxford University or of any other real person, living or dead, with the exception of John Gawsworth, who, once again, had been taken for the most fictitious and least worrisome element in the book; that “certain characters have, at most, a mixture of traits taken from more than one real person and — primarily — from my own inventive faculty or imagination”; that “the situations and events described in the novel are not real and, moreover, very few things in it are presented as real. To give an example, the scene in which the character named Alex Dewar questions a Russian ballet dancer is only a product of the narrator’s imagination and is presented as such. Much of the book is only supposition or conjecture on the part of the narrator with whom, incidentally, the author cannot possibly be identified, since I am, for example, unwed and childless. Of course,” I added, “all of this does not necessarily prevent readers from believing that they recognize or can identify some of the book’s characters with real people, but I don’t see how that can be avoided. As you know, people tend to think there is much more autobiography in novels than there normally is.” Then I went so far as to contribute a (weak) argument against the possibility of a lawsuit: “Finally, it is, in my opinion, improbable that any member of the Sub-Faculty of Spanish would attempt to sue me or Collins (Harvill) over this novel. It would be ridiculous, not to say scandalous, for Hispanists (that is, people who have dedicated their lives to the study and promotion of Spanish literature) to attack a Spanish book or prevent its publication in English.” And I suggested that they consult with Ian Michael, who in a private letter to me had expressly maintained that there was no reason to speak of it as a roman à clef, something that, in his capacity as chair of the department, he was well-positioned to see and know. (I avoided mentioning his little joke, in that same letter, of calling his colleagues by the names of the characters.) Christopher MacLehose responded by thanking me for my explanations and clarifications, which would undoubtedly help to smooth the way, though they did not alter “the legal situation,” and therefore he preferred to wait for Ian Michael’s response to the inquiry that had indeed been made of him.