All Souls Read online

  And yet in his day Gawsworth had been a personality, a literary golden boy. An indefatigable promoter of neo-Elizabethan poetic movements in reaction against Eliot and Auden and other innovators, when he was still little more than an adolescent, he knew and was friendly with many of the most important writers of the time; he took an interest in the work of the famous avant-garde writer and painter Wyndham Lewis and of that of the even more famous T. E. Lawrence, he of Arabia; he received literary honours and in his day was the youngest elected member to the Royal Society of Literature; he knew Yeats as an old man as well as the then dying Hardy; he was the protege and later the protector of Machen, of the famous sexologist Havelock Ellis, of the three Powys brothers, of the formerly (and once more to some extent) well-known novelist and short-story writer M. P. Shiel. I could discover little more until, at last, in a dictionary specialising in the literature of horror and the fantastic, I found out something else. In 1947, on the death of his mentor, Shiel, Gawsworth was named not only literary executor but also heir to the kingdom of Redonda, a tiny island in the Antilles of which, in 1880, in a colourful naval ceremony, Shiel himself (a native of the neighbouring and much larger island of Montserrat) had been crowned king at the age of fifteen at the express wish of the previous monarch, his father a local Methodist preacher and shipowner, who had bought the island years before, although no one knows exactly from whom since the only inhabitants at the time were the boobies who populated it and a handful of men who spent their lives collecting the birds' excrement in order to make guano. Gawsworth was never able to take possession of his kingdom, for the British government - with whose Colonial Office both the two Shiels and he remained in tireless dispute - were attracted by the aluminium phosphate the island produced and decided to annex his territory in order to prevent the United States from making it theirs. Despite that, Gawsworth signed some of his writings as Juan I, King of Redonda (king in exile, one supposes) and bestowed dukedoms on or named as admirals several admired writers or friends, amongst them Machen (whose title he confirmed), Dylan Thomas, Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell. The entry in that dictionary, after failing to explain all this (I only learned the details some time later), ended thus: "Despite his large circle of friends, Gawsworth became something of an anachronism. He lived his last years in Italy, returning to London to live on charity, sleeping on park benches and dying forgotten and penniless in a hospital."

  That this man, garlanded with honours, who could have been king, and who, one day in 1932, in an access of undoubted enthusiasm and youthful pride, signed the copy of Backwaters I have in my possession should end his life like that could not but shock me — even more than the stories of the violinist and the theologian — even though many other writers and better men than he have suffered a similar fate. I could not help but wonder what had happened in between, betwixt his precocious, frenetic literary and social beginnings and that anachronistic, tattered end; what could have happened during (perhaps) those visits and journeys of his to half the world, always publishing, always writing, wherever he was? Why Tunis, Cairo, Algeria, Calcutta, Italy? Just because of the war? Just because of some obscure and never recorded diplomatic activity? And why did he publish nothing after 1954 - sixteen years before his pathetic end - a man who had done so in places and at times when finding a publisher must have verged on the heroic or the suicidal? What became of the - at least - two women whom he married? Why, at the age of fifty-eight, that denouement more fitting in a burnt-out old man, why that Oxford beggar's death?

  The Alabasters, with their vast but prudent fund of learning, had been unable to find anything by him and knew nothing about him, although they did know of the existence of a man in Nashville (Tennessee) who, all those thousands of miles away, had almost all the information available on Gawsworth. Troubled by some baseless fear, I delayed putting pen to paper but, when I finally did so, this individual referred me to a short text by Lawrence Durrell on the man who had been both his first literary mentor and his great boyhood friend, providing me also with some supplementary facts: Gawsworth had had three wives, of whom two were known to be dead; his downfall had been alcohol; his hobby - I read with apprehension and a touch of horror - was the morbid searching out and collecting of books. "Morbid", that was the term the man from Nashville unhesitatingly plumped for.

  Durrell's text presents Gawsworth or Armstrong as an expert and highly gifted hunter of unobtainable literary gems, with an extraordinarily fine eye as a bibliophile and an even finer bibliographical memory, who, when he was just beginning, used to start the day buying for three pence some rare and expensive edition his eye picked out and recognised amongst all the dross in the bargain boxes set out in Charing Cross Road, only to resell it straight away for several pounds a few yards from where he'd found it, to Rota in Covent Garden or to some classy dealer in Cecil Court. As well as his collection of exquisite books (many of which he kept and treasured), he owned manuscripts and autograph letters from admired or renowned authors and all kinds of objects that had once belonged to illustrious personages, bought at the auctions he frequented with money acquired who knows how: a hat worn by Dickens, a pen of Thackeray's, a ring that had belonged to Lady Hamilton, Shiel's ashes. A large part of his energies went into pestering the Royal Society of Literature and other institutions, whose most elderly members he plagued with persistent and vexatious literary and monetary comparisons, trying to wheedle out of them pensions and other financial aid for old, once-successful writers with money problems or quite simply living in penury: Machen and Shiel were two such beneficiaries. But Durrell also recounts that some six years before (since the text dates from 1962, when Gawsworth was still alive and a man of fifty, he must have seen him when he was forty-four yet, curiously, Durrell, who was the same age, talks of him as one would of those who have already departed this life or who are, at any rate, on their way out) he saw him for the last time in Shaftesbury Avenue, pushing a pram. A Victorian pram of vast proportions, notes Durrell. On seeing the eccentric Bohemian, the "Real Writer", who had astonished the young Durrell (fresh up from Bournemouth) with how much he knew, and had introduced him to the literary world and to London's night haunts, Durrell thought that life must finally have closed in on Gawsworth (that, as Durrell says, life had caught up with him at last) and he now had children, three sets of twins to judge by the vast perambulator. But when he approached to view the infant Gawsworth or Armstrong or Prince of Redonda he was expecting to find beneath the hood, he discovered to his relief that it contained only a pile of empty beer bottles that Gawsworth was on his way to return, get his money back and replace with full bottles. The Duque de Cervantes Pequefia (that was Durrell's title) accompanied his exiled king, who never once visited his kingdom, watched him refill the pram with new bottles and, after drinking one with him to the memory of Browne or Marlowe or some other classical author whose birthday it was that day, saw him disappear, calmly pushing his alcoholic pram, into the dark, perhaps just as I sometimes do as evening falls on the Retiro Park in Madrid, except that my pram contains my son - this new son — whom I still barely know and who is sure to survive his parents.

  Later, I saw a photo of Gawsworth which, as far as one can tell, more or less coincides with the physical description Durrell gives of him: ". .. of medium height and somewhat pale and lean; he had a broken nose which gave his face a touch of Villonesque foxiness. His eyes were brown and bright, his sense of humour unimpaired by his literary privations." [Lawrence Durrell: Spirit of Place (Faber & Faber).] In that one photo I've seen he's wearing his RAF uniform and has an unlit cigarette in his mouth. The collar of his shirt is a bit loose and the knot of his tie seems rather too tight, although that was the fashion at the time. He's wearing some kind of insignia. His forehead is marked by clear, horizontal lines and beneath his eyes he has, not bags, but small folds of skin, and his eyes look out with a mixture of mischief or fun, dreaminess or nostalgia. It's a generous face. His gaze is clear. His ear striking. He looks as if he mig
ht be listening to someone or something. He's probably in Cairo, doubtless in the Middle East, or perhaps not, perhaps he's in North Africa, in French Barbary and it's 1941 or 42 or 43, possibly not long before being transferred from the Spitfire Squadron to the Desert Air Force of the Eighth Army. That cigarette would not last long. He must be about thirty, although he looks older, a bit older. Because I know he's dead, I see in the photo the face of a dead man. He reminds me a little of Cromer-Blake, although the latter's hair was prematurely grey and the moustache he allowed to grow for a few weeks before shaving it off again and remaining moustacheless for a further few weeks was also grey or at least threaded with silver, while Gawsworth's (his moustache and hair) are dark. The ironic look in the eyes is very similar, but Gawsworth's eyes are more affable, there's no trace in them of sarcasm or anger, nor even a glimmer or a hint. His uniform needs pressing.

  I've also seen a photo of his death mask. When they made it, he had just renounced both age and the passage of time but only the moment before he had been a man of fifty-eight. The mask was made by Hugh Olaff de Wet on 23 September 1970, the same day or the day after Gawsworth died in London, in the Borough of Kensington where he was born. His old friend from Cairo, Sir John Waller, donated it to the Poetry Society, but such courtesies came posthumously or simply too late. The man who was John Gawsworth and Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong and Orpheus Scrannel and Juan I, King of Redonda and

  also at times plain Fytton Armstrong or J.G. or even just G, has his eyes closed now, with no expression visible in them. The folds of skin beneath them are now unmistakably bags, the lines across his forehead are muddled (his cranium grown convex) and he looks as though he had thicker eyelashes now, perhaps just the effect of those sealed shut eyelids. His hair appears white — but that might just be because the mask is of white plaster — and his hairline has receded a little since the 1940s, the boundary of his youth, since the war against the Afrika Korps. The

  moustache looks thicker but more flaccid, it's simultaneously bristling and limp, that of a retired soldier grown weary now of grooming it. His nose has grown larger and broader, his cheeks flabby, the whole face is puffy, with a false plumpness, with despair. He has a double chin. There's not the slightest doubt that he is dead.

  But it was with this final face that he must have wandered the streets of London, wearing one of those coats or jackets that beggars always manage to obtain. He would have brandished bottles and, to the incredulity of his peers, pointed out in the bargain boxes of Charing Cross Road books he had written but that he could not now afford to buy. He would tell them about Tunis and Algeria, about Italy and Egypt and about India. Much to their amusement, he would declare himself to be the King of Redonda. It was with that face that he slept on benches in parks or went into hospital, as that dictionary specialising in the literature of horror and the fantastic said, and with that face he would perhaps have been incapable of holding out the hand that had wielded a pen and piloted aircraft. Perhaps, as British beggars tend to be, he was proud and fierce, brutal and shy, menacing and arrogant, and would not have known how to beg for himself. He was doubtless a drunk and at the end of his life he did not spend years in Italy but only a few weeks in the Abruzzi, in Vasto, for one final drunken binge of which I know nothing. "One final drunken binge", that's what it said in the letter from the man in Nashville with whom I've had no further contact. There was no Gawsworth to save Gawsworth, no promising, enthusiastic young writer to try to bring him to his senses and make him write again (perhaps because there's nothing very admirable about his work and no one wanted him to continue), to go and beg and wheedle a pension out of the Royal Society of Literature, of which he was once an elected member, the youngest ever. There was no woman, of the many he had known, to curb his wanderings or accompany him on them. That's what I believe, anyway. Where do those British-born or colonial women live? Where did they find their last resting place? Where are the books he collected, the books he could identify at a glance in the midst of the labyrinths of chaotic, dusty shelves, as I could on the shelves in the Alabasters' shop and in all those other booksellers in Oxford and London? (With my gloved hands and agile fingers that barely brushed the spines they ran over more quickly than my own eyes, like a pianist playing glissando, I too always found what I was looking for, to the point where I often had the feeling that it was the books themselves that looked for and found me.) They had probably returned to that world where all or at least the vast majority of books return, to the patient, silent world of second-hand books, which they leave only temporarily. Perhaps one of the books I own, besides Backwaters, also passed through Gawsworth's hands, was bought and immediately sold again to buy breakfast or a drink or — as one of the elect few - remained for years perhaps in his library or accompanied him to Algeria and Egypt, to Tunis and Italy and even India, and was even a witness to battles. Perhaps one of the sinister beggars whom I passed and repassed daily in Oxford, those I could identify and those I feared and those in whom my insubstantial, temporary wandering state made me see myself as if in some (possibly not so distant) future reflection, had once owned books. Perhaps one of them had actually written books or taught at Oxford or had a mistress-mother who was at first clinging and then (when she was more mother than mistress) evasive and unscrupulous, or perhaps he came from a country in the south — with a barrel organ that decided his fate when he lost it, perhaps on disembarking in the port of Liverpool - a country to which he had not yet forgotten that one cannot always go back.

  I REPEATEDLY ASKED and ask myself these questions not out of compassion for Gawsworth, who was after all nothing but a man with a false name whom I never met and whose writings - which are all the visible remains I have of him, that and the photographs of him alive and dead - mean little to me, but out of a curiosity tinged with superstition, convinced as I came to be on certain endless evenings in that spring or Trinity term, that ultimately I would meet the same fate.

  The English spring is a peculiarly distressing season to those already in distress for, as everyone knows, it is then that the days grow inordinately long but not in the way they can and do in Madrid or Barcelona at the approach and arrival of summer. Here in Madrid, as the days grow endless, the light undergoes continuous subtle changes and thus communicates the fact that time is moving on, whilst in England — and further north - for hours on end absolutely nothing changes. In Oxford the light remains the same from half past five, when the shops close and teachers and students return home and when the cessation of all visible activity first obliges you to notice it, until gone nine o'clock when the sun sets - as suddenly, apart from a lingering distant, ghostly glow, as if turned off by a switch — the signal for those who have determined on going out that night to rush impatiently into the streets. That same unchanging light, that accentuation of the static quality or stability of the place, makes you feel as if you yourself were at a standstill and even less a part of the world and the passing of time than, as I have explained before, one normally feels there. If, as was of course my own case, dining in daylight hours was out of the question, then there is simply nothing to do during those motionless hours. And so you wait. And wait. Shut up in your house, watching television or listening to the radio, deprived even of the possibility of visiting bookshops where you could feel active, useful and safe, you wait for the longed-for night to fall, for that warm, suspended light to fade, for the weak wheel of the world to start rolling again and for the stillness to end. While the sun hangs paralysed in the sky, the dons are resting in their rooms at college or dining at high table and the students have closeted themselves at home in order to prepare for exams or to go out on the town as soon as they're sure night has come. During the long, fixed hours of those spring evenings in Oxford, the city belongs more than ever to the Gawsworths of the day. The city is theirs for the duration of that long, false, endless twilight, intruded upon only by the town's innumerable bells (the city's religious past) loudly calling the faithful to Evensong. The beggars hav
e no homes to go to, no colleges to return to, nor are they ever guests at high table. I doubt if they rush to the churches either, when these latter call them. They continue to roam the streets, though finding them empty of passers-by in broad daylight so bewilders them that they slacken their pace and even stop for a moment to kick a can, stamp on a newspaper caught up by the breeze and thereby kill a little more of the time they've been killing ever since they woke.

  I used to hide at home to wait for night to come, on Wednesdays trying to find a Spanish radio station that might be re-broadcasting an international match involving Real Madrid, constantly tempted to pick up the phone and call Clare Bayes at home, where she would be seated at the foot of the child Eric's bed to give him his supper, watching children's television with him or distracting him with some new game. I was sorely tempted every evening but in order not to succumb and in order to withstand the hours of sameness and inertia - the flat hours and flat days — I would sometimes shave for a second time and get ready to go out into the streets, just like the livelier and more dissolute undergraduates and lecturers, to mingle with other people as night fell. Sometimes I dined at that pleasant restaurant Brown's, close by my pyramid house, with its attractive mini-skirted waitresses, and at others, just to recapture the feeling of being back on the Continent and not marooned on the islands, at one of the French restaurants in which the town abounds, or I would even force myself to make frequent appearances at the ghastly high tables I had not attended since the first months of my stay in Oxford, a year and a half ago now. I tried those of various colleges, some already known to me, others as yet unvisited, in the faint hope, too, of once more finding Clare Bayes amongst the hosts (at All Souls or Exeter, her husband's college) or amongst the guests (at Keble, Oriel, Balliol, Pembroke, Christ Church, each more tedious than the last: the high table at Christ Church being at once the most sumptuous and the most boring). But it was too much of an effort and did not suffice to banish the sense of numbness, or to escape my obsession with Gawsworth and his fate.