Between Eternities: And Other Writings Read online

  When you have become accustomed to thinking of someone not so much as a flesh-and-blood person, but more as a fictitious character, it is a somewhat unreal experience to hear them speak and see them move – and in colour too. I, of course, knew that Gawsworth really did exist, but had incorporated him into my novels as one of my characters, and his story, of which for a long time I knew only snippets, seemed more like a Kipling tale than real life. In the DVD, Gawsworth is nearing the end. According to Barry Humphries’s commentary at the beginning, ‘John Gawsworth has been, as a literary personality, corroded by something which has afflicted many other artists, greater and lesser than himself. He has, more than anyone else I know, espoused failure – with perhaps too much affection.’ On the day of filming, though, Gawsworth had clearly taken special pains over his appearance, insofar as he could. Dressed in double-breasted suit and tie and raincoat (and looking rather like an unemployed civil servant), we see him striding along the streets of his native London with his walking stick, which he doubtless needs as a support, but with which he is also capable of making the occasional graceful flourish, reminiscent of his days as a skilled swordsman. His brown shoes are not too old and shabby, and he has clearly polished them for the occasion. Somewhat on the plump side, he is still pretty quick on his feet, and although his face is rather puffy – possibly due to the alcohol that was his ruin and the cause of his various ills – his bright eyes and large nose give him an alert, almost foxlike air, an impression accentuated by his gingerish moustache, much lighter in colour than his hair; who knows, perhaps it was dyed. His nose is quite remarkable. Describing it as large could give rise to confusion, because although it was indeed large, as well as having a strange kink in it, it was long rather than broad.

  His friends look slightly uncomfortable, but seem perfectly happy to talk about him. Durrell, who, after his Alexandria Quartet, had espoused success with perhaps too much affection, speaks of him with a mixture of genuine esteem and unwitting condescension, and is at his most unconvincing when he greets Gawsworth in a pub with a cry of ‘Hail, O King! Hail, O King!’ as if he were fulfilling some kind of melancholy duty. The novelist Kate O’Brien receives him in her house, which is the scene of the one humorous episode in the whole documentary, when Gawsworth struggles manfully to extract the cork from a small bottle of sparkling wine, before passing it to the lady for her to have a go, with an equal lack of success (‘We’ve never been defeated by a bottle, Kate, you or I,’ Gawsworth says); she returns it to him and, after considerable effort, he finally manages to uncork it. On a visit to a publisher’s where he worked years before, he is greeted by an executive, who chats with him stiffly and is clearly anxious for him to leave. Shortly before the end, the poet’s voice off-screen is heard describing his painful situation: ‘Now I haven’t an address, you see … Until I have an address, I can’t collect my books, papers or anything.’ And that is that. The final image shows him walking through a snow-covered park, his walking stick in his right hand and his left hand casually thrust in the pocket, not of his raincoat, which he wears jauntily unbuttoned, but of his jacket, as if he were Cary Grant. When he reaches a bench, he sits down on it and places both hands on the head of his walking stick. The image freezes, and one only hopes that he did not have to spend the night there when the production team and the camera crew left – not with all that snow around.

  (2006)

  The Much-Persecuted Spirit of Joseph Conrad

  A few weeks ago, I received from a second-hand bookseller a pamphlet written by Joseph Conrad’s widow and published by the Mark Twain Society in 1932. Conrad married late, when he was thirty-eight and Jessie was just twenty-three. This fact (plus Conrad’s grey beard) doubtless explains why, day after day, during their honeymoon on the French coast, a fellow guest at the hotel where they were staying, a young man who sat next to the young bride during meals at the long, communal table, proved rather too attentive, arousing the suspicions of the writer and causing great embarrassment to his wife. Finally, the Frenchman went up to Conrad and asked with a bow: ‘Sir, may I have the honour of paying my attentions to your daughter?’ This was the first time that Jessie Conrad had to restrain her husband from fighting a duel on the spot. Judging by the two books she wrote about him after his death, it is clear that she was a sensible woman with a sense of humour and that she loved him very much.

  In this rare pamphlet, she explains her great admiration for Sir Conan Doyle, but says that it would have been far greater had the creator of Sherlock Holmes not sent her a troubling letter in 1929. (It is well known, and a great shame, that in his latter years – he died in 1930 – this fine writer embraced occultism and spiritualism and, as can be seen from what follows, must have become a real bore.) Despite never having had any previous contact with Mrs Conrad, Conan Doyle wrote to tell her that he was convinced that her late husband – Conrad died in 1924 – wanted to get in touch with her, warning that this was not easy for the dead without the help of the living, since the dead remain as subject to laws as we are. According to him, Conrad had ‘got his chance at Mrs Dean’s’ (presumably a medium) and ‘put his face upon the plate’, which, it must be said, sounds rather ghoulish. Later, Sir Arthur went on, he had a sitting ‘with Van Reuter and his mother’, who knew nothing about Conrad. The latter, through the medium (it’s not clear whether this was Van Reuter or his mother), had expressed his wish that Conan Doyle should complete a book ‘about French history’ which he himself had left unfinished: ‘None of us knew that there was such a book. On inquiry I found that it was so, but apparently it had been finished by someone else. So I did no more.’ According to Jessie, Sir Arthur was misinformed; not only had Conrad never thought of writing on such a vague topic, he would certainly never have asked someone else to complete a book that he had begun, not even a famous colleague. The worst came last: ‘It is your duty to go to a good medium and give him a chance,’ he said and proceeded to give her a number of addresses of gifted mediums.

  Jessie Conrad adds that, later, another three people tried to pass on ‘messages’ from her husband, all of which she flatly declined to receive. More than that, Lord Northcliffe’s secretary published a statement that the author of Heart of Darkness was helping his late boss with some newspaper work and that both men were wearing grey flannel suits and red bow ties. ‘My husband,’ comments Jessie, ‘was blessed with sufficient personal vanity to have realized that he could not venture to copy his lordship’s style of dress, in this particular, at least!’ And a niece of the American writer Stephen Crane, who died in 1900, declared that her uncle and Conrad had met in mid-ocean only a few hours after Conrad had died.

  The most that Jessie Conrad will admit, as regards such ‘phenomena’, is that sometimes, alone in her room, she spent many an hour with her mind concentrated upon the memory of her husband, with her eyes fixed upon his favourite chair, and that during those moments of intense concentration, his form in complete contour occupied that chair. ‘The long familiar pose, the play of the well known features, the clasped hands were exactly as I so well remember them. This vision has lasted several seconds. I cannot explain it, and I don’t think I would try, except that such a manifestation was for me alone.’ I would say that there is nothing so very unusual about this; memories can sometimes be very vivid. And at the end of the pamphlet, she concludes very sensibly: ‘I would so much rather be left to my original belief that those whom we love and have lost are at rest and in peace, untroubled by any law … and without being called upon to suffer by their knowledge of the pain and trouble of us still in the land of the living.’

  (2006)

  The Improbable Ghost of Juan Benet

  A few days after receiving the strange pamphlet in which Joseph Conrad’s widow described how Conan Doyle had pestered her about her husband’s supposed attempts to get in touch, I received a letter from Puerto Rico sent by a kind reader and teacher whom I had met a few months earlier in Madrid. This sensible and highly educated lady apologized
in advance for what she was about to tell me (‘I am less concerned about what you might think of me than I am about troubling or inconveniencing you in any way’). She was not, she said, a religious person, but a rationalist and something of a sceptic, although she confessed that in recent years she had felt a certain curiosity about ‘spiritual matters’, and so, once a month, she met up with a female Cuban psychologist ‘who seems to have spiritual powers’. Anyway, when she mentioned our meeting to this psychologist, the latter immediately ‘closed her eyes, apparently went into some kind of trance and announced that someone you had loved very much was there, that the spirit’s name was Benet and had chosen to appear in order to get in touch with you. She added that she could see Benet “tousling the long hair of a young man” and that you were that young man. She said that this was something Benet would do whenever you were feeling sad or pessimistic.’ (I should perhaps say that between 1970 and 1974, the first years of my friendship with the writer Juan Benet, I did wear my hair long, Apache style, if you like, as certain photographs can testify.)

  My correspondent was left speechless and went away ‘feeling stunned’. She couldn’t stop thinking about this incident and so decided to talk to a woman friend of hers, who was also a psychologist and who also ‘appears to have spiritual powers, although it is something she resists’. They met and, as soon as they began talking, her friend told her that Benet was there and was asking her to intercede in order to help my ‘incarnate soul’; and she heard the words ‘There is no need to speak, no need to do’ and ‘To do without doing.’ Then she added that ‘Benet was a wise man, endowed, it would seem, with a great sense of humour because, before leaving, he genuflected.’ The teacher was astonished, and at her second meeting with the psychologist, the latter told her that ‘Benet was there and wished you to know that he had appeared and wanted to help you. He added that he had been very sad to die because he was leaving you, a person he had greatly loved and who had been very important in his life.’ My correspondent apologized again (‘I am sending you this letter anyway, in the belief that this is what I should do’) and signed off. Her letter, of course, bears no resemblance to the almost impertinent insistence of the great Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in his letter to the grieving Jessie Conrad.

  On 5 January 2007, it will be fourteen years since the death of Juan Benet, from whom I learned many things, not only in the field of literature, and with whom I was friends for more than two decades. Oddly enough, it has been his detractors who have ensured that he has not been forgotten as a writer. During all this time, many of his colleagues and mine have continued and continue to rail against him. Idiocy and temerity often go hand in hand, and these critics are themselves, funnily enough, risible as writers, people like Ussía or Sánchez Dragó, or, like some of the newer coarse arrivals on the scene, hypocritical and cowardly, and who, I can only assume, hide their renowned ‘wit’ where the sun don’t shine, because it’s very hard to spot. Since they’re not bright enough to understand Benet, they have decided that he counted for nothing and that no one has read him. In that case, why are they so angry with him, when he hasn’t published a line or trodden this earth for nearly fifteen years now? His shadow must make them feel terribly inadequate. His books aren’t easy and I wouldn’t criticize anyone who found them daunting. However, given that the dim and the dull-witted continue to bark at him, those books must still be alive and kicking, and they are the only way in which he is still ‘in touch’, at least the only way worth mentioning.

  What I do not believe is that his spirit has appeared to a couple of female psychologists in Puerto Rico. Like Conrad’s sensible widow, I believe that ‘those whom we love and have lost are at rest and in peace, untroubled by any law’. And I don’t believe in the improbable either. Jessie Conrad could not imagine her husband asking Conan Doyle to complete a book he himself had left unfinished or wearing a red bow tie in imitation of Lord Northcliffe, and while I can imagine Benet jokily genuflecting, I certainly cannot imagine him making such twee or sentimental remarks, far less declaring how important I had been in his life. As I wrote to my correspondent, he was important in my life, but I wasn’t important in his at all. I don’t believe in apparitions or messages from beyond the grave (apart from in ghost stories and in dreams, which are, just that, pleasant dreams and stories), but if someone comes to me with the tale that some celebrated dead person is out there stalking me, the very least I would ask is that he continue to speak as he did when alive and not go around uttering the kind of portentous nonsense that would never have sullied his lips in life.

  (2006)

  THOSE WHO ARE STILL HERE

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  The Hero’s Dreadful Fate

  However much certain optimists may talk about the survival or possible resurrection of the Western, I fear – much to my regret – that, as a genre, it is pretty much dead and buried, a relic of a more credulous, more innocent, more emotional age, an age less crushed or suffocated by the ghastly plague of political correctness. Nonetheless, whenever a new Western comes out, I dutifully go and see it, albeit with little expectation that it will be any good. In the last decade, I can recall three pointless remakes, vastly inferior to the films on which they were modelled and which weren’t exactly masterpieces themselves: 3:10 to Yuma by James Mangold, The Alamo by John Lee Hancock, and True Grit by the Coen brothers, all of them uninspired and unconvincing, and far less inspired than the distinctly uneven originals made, respectively, by Delmer Daves, John Wayne and Henry Hathaway. I recall, too, Andrew Dominik’s interesting but dull The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Ed Harris’s bland, soulless Appaloosa, David Von Ancken’s unbearable Seraphim Falls, and the Australian John Hillcoat’s The Proposition, of which my memory has retained not a single image. The only recent Westerns that have managed to arouse my enthusiasm have been those made for TV: Walter Hill’s Broken Trail and Deadwood; and the fact that no one has even bothered to bring out the third and final season of the latter on DVD in Spain will give you some idea of how unsuccessful the magnificent first two series must have been. In my view, Kevin Costner’s Open Range, which came out slightly earlier, was the last decent Western to be made for the big screen, even though it has long been fashionable to denigrate anything this admirable actor and director does.

  What has happened to bring about the sad demise of a genre that produced many masterpieces in the past, as well as other fine or worthy films? Nowadays, the few who take up the genre do so either on a whim or out of affectation or in a pompous or archaeological spirit, and the films they make lack naturalness, freshness and that very necessary touch of ingenuousness. In other words, they don’t believe in the story they’re telling and showing us, they don’t dare to; the epic strikes them as old-fashioned, ridiculous, even embarrassing, and, absurdly enough, they seem uncomfortable with the potential complexity of their characters and their stories. I say ‘absurdly’ because the Western has given us some of the most complex characters and stories in the history of cinema. John Ford is just as ‘deep’ as Orson Welles – who greatly admired Ford – or Anthony Mann or Bergman, or, of course, Peckinpah, and certainly as deep as those two overrated charlatans Lars von Trier and Alejandro González Iñárritu.

  Perhaps it’s because the Western, as a genre, has traditionally embodied attitudes and behaviour – which it always took seriously, without ever falling into caricature – that now seem shocking to the hypocritical mass of entrenched goody-goodies, who desperately want to dissociate themselves from a whole range of passions that have been common to humanity throughout the ages. For example, in the Western, nobody looks askance at hatred, ambition, the desire for revenge, the determined pursuit of an enemy, the wish to hurt or kill that enemy, the search for redress and sometimes justice for a wrong committed. Take the character played by James Stewart in the Anthony Mann films Winchester ’73 and The Man from Laramie (purely as examples and because neither film is particularly violent or heartless): he is capable of g
iving up everything and dedicating himself body and soul to hunting down those who killed his father (in the first film) and his younger brother (in the latter). In the first film, Lin McAdam’s sole occupation is the relentless pursuit – across half of the West – of an individual named Dutch Henry Brown, who shot McAdam’s father in the back and who turns out, in the end, to be McAdam’s own brother. The second character, Will Lockhart, stays on in the remote, unfriendly town of Coronado precisely because he has been insulted, lassoed and dragged through the dust and because he suspects that someone from the town was responsible for selling the repeating rifles with which the Apaches ambushed and killed his younger brother, a soldier in the cavalry. That is all that matters to McAdam and Lockhart; what remains of their life – if there is anything – is put on hold by the one goal they care about. Characters in Westerns never have a future; indeed, they fear that, once their mission has been accomplished, they will be confronted by that uncomfortable notion: the future, a notion without which most people nowadays cannot live and to which we are all indebted and enslaved. Perhaps that is why Westerns tend to avoid or conceal that phase, ending when the protagonist has done what he feels he had to do, thus sparing us that horrible moment when he raises his head, looks around him and, as if emerging from a dream, asks himself: ‘Now what? I didn’t die in the attempt, so what shall I do with the rest of my life?’