Fred Hodcroft, a charming man, very tall and slim with a woodpecker profile and a feigned air of professorial absent-mindedness, used to set grammatical and syntactic traps for me to test the extent of my knowledge, acting as if he really did not know the answers he was trying to extract from me. He was continually pushing his glasses back into place, as if he knew that a fall from his great height was sure to be fatal to them. He was so congenial that you could never let your guard down with him; his Spanish was excellent. He didn’t appear to be a devotee of the institution but he probably was, one of those men who can be offended for their entire life without anyone every learning of it or suspecting it: they are all affability, even with those they find reprehensible or who have done them a bad turn.
Robert Pring-Mill, stubby, clerical, and cagey, a close friend of Ernesto Cardenal, the revolutionary Nicaraguan poet-priest, lacked any sense of humor, or rather, his did not coincide with mine, and wary and severe as he was he used to take everything literally to a tedious degree. I didn’t see much of him, I don’t think he liked me, I was too indifferent to what he venerated: his trans-oceanic friendship must have been more sacerdotal than insurrectionist. His Spanish was excellent, but he tended to avoid speaking it. He seemed permanently displeased — they said he’d been hoping for the position that went to Ian Michaels, who, to make matters worse, wasn’t even from Oxford, and perhaps that alone explained why his figure seemed evasive and halfhearted.
John Rutherford, who was at that time translating the nineteenth-century Spanish novel La Regenta, which had yet to be published in English, spoke Spanish with a strong Galician accent acquired from his Galician wife and his unvarying summers in Ribadeo: a quiet, patient and worthy man, a magnificent person, with perhaps a touch of unconfessed resentment that even he himself did not grasp. Seen from outside, his life — the whole family playing musical instruments, daughters he sang with at home — seemed idyllic. It was unlikely that anything would anger him, but there could be a certain danger in him: no one is ever entirely resigned, not even to what he chooses.
Then there was Philip Lloyd-Bostock, who died not long after I left Oxford; during my two years there he was often absent because of his illness, but not enough to keep us from seeing one another and giving a few classes together, shoulder to shoulder, as I had occasion to do, one term or another, with each of my colleagues in turn, classes in practical literary translation, in both directions, Gómez de la Serna and Valle-Inclán into English and Woolf and Hopkins into Spanish. Lloyd-Bostock gave the impression of belonging to another world and only passing through Oxford, quite against his will, in order to earn his salary; this set him apart from the others who were visibly assimilated, more or less, to the city and its life of placid valor, if one can put it that way. Some of them may not have had any other life, not when they went home to their houses or rooms at the end of the day nor even during the long summer vacation, though it surely afforded them sufficient time to become their opposites or Hydes — I’m sure Philip took advantage of the opportunity. Some of them must have waited impatiently for the beginning of each new school year in order to feel centered again, sustained, in harmony with their surroundings, justified. For Philip Lloyd-Bostock, however, this world seemed no more than a nuisance, something out of the past to which a certain amount of attention must still be paid, or to which we can turn without embarrassment in case of need because it will always be on our side — in reserve, like the family we come from, perhaps. But perhaps it’s only that I knew him when he was already very sick, to those who are dying, everything may start to appear superfluous and already past or gone. He had a carefully groomed moustache and watery blue eyes and exhibited a no doubt deceptive docility — that of a person so tortured he’s beyond arguing, or maybe nothing matters to him. Some people wanted to recognize him in the character I called Cromer-Blake, probably because of the double surname and because that character died at the end of the book. Of course Cromer-Blake was also identified with my living and single-surnamed friend Eric Southworth, so in this case, absurdly, two different men were identified with one character.
Eric Southworth: a person of fanatical nobility, so loyal and upright that most of those around him must find it irritating, there aren’t many people like that now, maybe a few women. And at the same time he was an easygoing man of extraordinary wit, one of those rare individuals capable of gravity and jest in the same paragraph, so to speak, and sincerely. I’ve seen him hooting with laughter like a wayward schoolboy over some piece of tomfoolery — an old-fashioned, grandfatherly word, but the right one — and I’ve also seen him adopt the grave and fearsome mien of a hero of the lecture hall. His Spanish was good, if a touch Renaissance-sounding because of its bookish origins; he couldn’t be bothered to speak it there, in the chambers and dining rooms and hallways of Oxford. He was a few years older than I am and his hair was already grey; he used it to inspire the students with respect, though not always successfully, his readily mirthful side betrayed him. He did panic them sometimes, though, when he donned his clerical cap for their oral exams, playing a malevolent character out of Dickens or imitating the exhortatory demeanor of old-fashioned Spanish ecclesiastics — index finger raised, eyes narrowed, voice muted — which amused him a great deal, Catholicism as folklore. Once he asked me to pick up a bishop’s or archbishop’s biretta for him on calle de Segovia, so I sent him two, one made of silk with a green tassel and the other of satin with a red tassel (or vice versa, I don’t know much about such vestments, perhaps they were meant only for a parish priest). He was very enthusiastic about these gifts, though I didn’t ask and don’t know why he wanted them, I imagine he’ll make some private use of them. He gave me no cause for concern with respect to the novel, nor did Ian Michael; both men were overflowing with sharp wit and devilry and had sound knowledge of fiction. Toby Rylands shared these characteristics, but he was more venerable and less predictable, and when I spoke to him about the book I was really confiding my fears as to his possible reaction.