And so Todas las almas at last came out in England in 1992, under the natural title of All Souls and with the incidental character of Dr. Leigh-Peele transformed into “Dr. Leigh-Justice” in vague memory of the English supporting actor of my childhood, James Robertson Justice; there’s been too much deeply resented censorship for a Spanish author to be prepared, today, to eliminate passages from a book, and for the same reason I refused to pay attention to a discreet suggestion about a couple of minimal pontifical wisecracks — it particularly pains me to renounce a joke. As for the protectory preface, I did no more than add, at the beginning, an “Author’s Note” similar to the one that appears in the final credits of movies, though I fear that, if read closely, it incorporated an ironic internal contradiction and therefore said something different than what was and is initially understood. It went like this, “Given that both the author and the narrator of this novel spent two years in the same post at Oxford University, it may not be out of order for the former to take the floor a moment before yielding it, until the end, to the latter, to say that any resemblance between any of the characters in All Souls (including the narrator, excluding ‘John Gawsworth’) and any person living or dead (including the author, excluding Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong) is pure coincidence, and the same can be said with respect to the story, the anecdotes and the action. The Author.” The English wording was slightly different, but I believe that neither the translator nor the publishers noticed the contradiction, which went tranquilly to the presses. Amid the growing confusion between reality and invention, the translator, Margaret Jull Costa, to whom I owe so much, noticed the lines from Lawrence Durrell that I cited in All Souls and have also cited here, about the dazzling friend of his youth, John Gawsworth, and they struck her as so implausible or overly ben trovate that she thought they were apocryphal and coined by me; fortunately a residual trace of doubt led her to consult me, and thus she was able to cite verbatim from Durrell’s Spirit of Place instead of laboriously translating from Spanish to English the sentences I had previously translated from that language to my own.
It was after the book’s publication in England that the tempo of events and coincidences and confirmations I hadn’t sought began to accelerate, and it hasn’t yet slowed and may never stop, and I sometimes have the feeling that you must be careful about what you make up and write down in books because occasionally it comes true. And if this rhythm never stops, as I foresee, it’s very possible that one part of my life — but only one part — will forever be determined and ruled by a fiction, or by what this novel has brought me so far and what it has yet to bring.
Before that, however, something quite remarkable — though more so for the man who wrote to me than for me — had already happened. A few days after November n, 1991, when it was dated, I received a letter from one Anthony Edkins who lived on Deronda Road in London. The letter said we had seen each other once in Madrid at the home of Alvaro Pombo, but very much in passing and I might not remember it (and indeed, I hardly remembered it, though my memory isn’t generally that bad). Now he had read — in Spanish, clearly—Todas las almas, and was stunned when he reached the chapter on John Gawsworth. “Gawsworth, whom I never met in person,” he wrote, “was the first editor who accepted one of my poems (just, it so happens, as I was about to set out on my first trip to Spain in 1951). At that time, he was editor-in-chief of the Poetry Review: he wrote me, by hand, a five-page letter. (I’ve just located and reread that letter, dated 13–3–51, from Shepperton in Middlesex, and I see that we appear to have had a phone conversation.)” While this was undeniably a great and almost an excessive coincidence, there was really nothing too extraordinary about it up to this point, given that Gawsworth, in the course of the tireless activities he engaged in before becoming vagrant and passive, must have known an infinity of people related to literature, novices and acclaimed authors alike. But the following paragraph of Edkins’ letter made his perplexity and even his fear (or mine on reading it) more understandable, that bearable, brief fear that comes over us when we see things fitting together unexpectedly and with too much precision, the fear that the world is more orderly than we like to believe, or that we are better at ordering it. “Subsequently you mention and reproduce,” Edkins went on, “Gawsworth’s death mask made by Oloff de Wet, someone I met that same summer in the Café Gijón in Madrid. I was having a rough time of it, and he kept me in ham sandwiches and Pernod for a week or more, in exchange for which I had to listen to his fantastical but fascinating stories.” And the letter ended amid exclamations: “So, there I was, last week, reading a novel by someone I knew — though very slightly — which presented me with two people who, though I’ve never in my life run across them again, were of great importance to me forty years ago!”
I had no doubts as to the authenticity of the letter or Edkins’ veracity, though anyone who had wanted to play a trick on me couldn’t have come up with a better one. In addition to the incredible coincidence, there were certain ironic details that might have induced some suspicion in a less trusting individuaclass="underline" not only had my correspondent had dealings with Gawsworth and with De Wet, but he had known them separately and had never established any link whatsoever between the two men, who were nevertheless united at Gawsworth’s death; his contact with both Gawsworth and De Wet had taken place in the same year, 1951, which was also the year when his lasting relationship with Spain began and when, as it happens, I was born in Madrid, not far from the Café Gijón, the place where De Wet protected and fed him for a week or more; finally, Edkins lived on an implausible street named Deronda, and though I know and knew then that Daniel Deronda is the title of a famous nineteenth-century English novel, the truth is that the name, in this context, seemed a mocking and facile anagram for Redonda, the Antillean island of which Gawsworth was king.
I answered him immediately, asking for a copy of the letter from the king without a kingdom, if he would be so kind as to send me one; I told him that until then the only thing I had known about Oloff de Wet was his name, which appears as “Hugh Olaff de Wet” in the commemorative pamphlet on Gawsworth’s death from which I took the photograph of his plaster death mask. “And if you have the time and don’t mind remembering out loud,” I added, “I’d like to know more about De Wet, what kind of man he was, what sort of work he did, what type of ‘fantastical but fascinating stories’ he used to tell, how old he was and what it was that had set him adrift in Madrid at that point.” Since the publication of All Souls, I told him, a few more diverse facts about Gawsworth had reached me, but this was the first time I had received word from someone who had been in more or less direct contact with him. When I think of that observation, I can’t suppress a quick internal laugh, given all the things that have changed in that respect in the little more than six years since I read Edkins’ letter, and having in my house, as I now do, what I’ve grown used to calling “Gawsworth’s room.”