Stephen Graham lived to the age of ninety or ninety-one: he died in 1975, fifty-two or fifty-three years later than his unfortunate friend and former captain on the front lines, depending on how one dates Ewart’s borderline death. Given that he was eight years older than Ewart, he enjoyed a total of seventy or seventy-one years more in the world. He didn’t waste it, made good use of it, and over the course of his very prolonged life wrote and published more than fifty books, all between 1911 and 1964, of which twelve were novels and the majority travel accounts or studies of Russian subjects, including ambitious biographies of Peter the Great, Ivan the Terrible, Alexander II, Boris Godunof and Stalin. None of them, however, have enabled the old man he finally become to be any less mortal or forgotten today than the young man of thirty whose life and work were cut short one murderous Saint Sylvester’s night in Mexico City. Graham’s first wife, the silent or perhaps invisible Rose Savory, truly and definitively became both silent and invisible in 1956, and her husband remarried.
The Hotel Isabel still exists at the same spot, that is, the corner of República del Salvador and Isabel la Católica. Apparently the lay-out and decor of the rooms has not changed over the years. I’ll have to go and see it when I finally travel to Mexico some day, though my curiosity will not extend to taking a room there, still less room 53 on the fifth floor. Both Sergio González Rodríguez and Rafael Muñoz Saldaña, who went to so much trouble and enjoyed it all so much, and to whom I owe many leads and much guidance, told me something extremely disturbing, but which, by this point, may not come as a surprise: the fateful Hotel Isabel has balconies only on the second and third floors; there are none on the fifth. Perhaps they existed at some point and were later torn down, or perhaps there never were any.
The feeling that books seek me out has stayed with me, and all that has emerged into real life from All Souls’ fictional pages has finally materialized in that form, as well: in the form of a book, a document, a photo, a letter, a title. So much has sprung from that novel into my life that I no longer know how many volumes I’ll need to tell it all, this book won’t be enough and its planned sequel may not be either, because eight years have passed since I published the novel and all of it continues to invade my days, stealing into them, and my nights, too, now more than ever, when I have become what Shiel and Gawsworth once were, or so it appears, and it seems incredible that I wasn’t afraid of this and accepted it, after having felt and written what I’ve cited before: “I asked and still ask myself all these questions not out of pity for Gawsworth but out of a curiosity tinged with superstition, convinced as I came to be that, in the end, I would meet the same fate he did.” It’s hard to resist the chance to perpetuate a legend, all the more so if you’ve contributed to extending it. And it would be mean-spirited to refuse to play along.
Several books that are directly or indirectly related to Wilfrid Ewart have sought me out, the first one right away, I had it already in 1989 and must have mentioned something about it to my Mexican correspondents, since in a letter dated in November of that year, Sergio G. R. congratulates me and envies it. It is a translation from Russian to English titled Three Pairs of Silk Stockings, published by Ernest Benn Limited of London in 1931, and bearing the subtitle, A Novel of the Life of the Educated Class Under the Soviet; the author is listed as Panteleimon Romanof and though that name appears to be an obvious pseudonym, he did indeed exist (1884–1938); Leonide Zarine is credited as translator and Stephen Graham, author of the slipshod prologue, as editor. The extraordinary thing about my copy is that the title page is signed by Graham himself, who, in addition, has written, “Comrades conserve your energy USE THE LIFT,” and, lower down, “Notice: The Lift is Out of Order.” But before this, on one of the book’s endpapers, also appears, implausibly, the signature of John Gawsworth, beneath the phrase “Arnold Ovenden’s copy of my second anonymous edition.” And below his name, another note, “Now it is properly befouled and blasted by the unholy editors,” all of which indicates not only that Graham and Gawsworth—Ewart’s witness and posthumous champion, respectively—knew and were in touch with each other (not a very strange thing given Gawsworth’s perpetual, frenetic personal and literary activity before he gave himself over in earnest to drink and withdrew from many things) but that they collaborated on the capricious publication of this Russian novel, also known as Comrade Kisliakof, when Graham was forty-seven and Gawsworth, with his proverbial precocity, was only nineteen. “What strikes me as the pinnacle of literary fortune,” González Rodríguez exclaimed in his letter, “is the fact that you possess a book signed by both Gawsworth and Graham. Immediately I looked in Graham’s autobiography for some reference to Gawsworth, but there is nothing in the index of proper names, though Graham makes mention of a wide variety of figures.” And that absence is indeed curious, since I now also know that according to certain not entirely trustworthy sources Graham formed part of the “intellectual aristocracy” of Redonda. I’ve grown quite accustomed to these strokes of luck, literary or not, which for some time now have formed part of my daily life and even of my habits, but it’s nothing to wonder at that the coincidence struck my correspondent in far-off Mexico as astonishing, since he had concluded his article by saying: “For now, let’s agree to admit that the person to be blamed—if anyone is to be blamed—for this entire web of ambiguities, misinterpretations and conjectures, is Gawsworth himself, who launches the legend of the unfinished work and tragic death of Wilfrid Ewart with a paragraph written in 1933 which Marías includes in his Cuentos únicos. It’s worth re-reading.”
Much later, in 1996, I acquired another book that does not silence its past, a first edition of Way of Revelation, the novel that was wept over in its day and whose author is now no longer remembered, published in November of 1921, barely thirteen months before the murderous, weary trajectory of the spent bullet, and barely five before its author’s breakdown—and his hand and tongue began to disobey him—after having travelled to Liverpool in a storm to see Music Hall, out of Clifton Hall, ridden by Bilbie Rees, win the Grand National against thirty-one other horses, a triumph on which Ewart had placed a bet that paid off handsomely at odds of 100 to 9, as I’m informed by that authority on all matters related to the turf, Fernando Savater. What makes this copy truly singular is the dedication penned in it by an author who couldn’t have written very many since he published so little and died so soon. It says: “Angela M.C. Waddington, from her brother (the author) in friendship and mutual recollections—Nov. 15th, 1921.” It isn’t signed, but this is Ewart’s hand, before his breakdown, or rather at the moment of his highest hopes (it’s a nervous hand, and particularly striking is the e of the word recollections, which looks Greek, as does the d, always, like a delta). By 1921, we may therefore deduce, she was already remarried to Waddington, whoever he was. Stephen Graham wrote, “Angela and Wilfred were closer than most brothers and sisters. It could almost be said that she was a feminine Wilfrid, he a masculine Angela.” If that was true, perhaps Angela was the person who felt the greatest despair and wept most over the premature death in Mexico City. And perhaps this was the first copy the novelist gave away of his literary debut, published seventy-seven years ago this November. The book retains two other traces of its now lengthy past: the program of the funeral or response held for Ewart at Holy Trinity on Sloane Street in London (only hymns and psalms inside, not even a date), and the ex libris of some intermediary owner between Angela Ewart (then Farmer, then Waddington) and myself, one B.D. Maurer who marked his books with the figure of soldier with bowed head, leaning on a rifle—perhaps during a truce—probably during the First World War, judging by the uniform, under the motto, in red letters: Always We Remember, just what I’ve been doing for so many pages, if one can remember memories that are not one’s own.
There’s something a little incongruous and ironic—and perhaps much that is unjust—about the continued existence of this volume or of any of the objects that survive us, that surround and accompany and serve us,
feigning insignificance. It is unsettling that today, November 8, 1997, the ink Wilfrid Ewart traced without much thought, or perhaps very solemnly, across an endpaper of the newly printed and bound book he gave his sister on November 15, 1921, is here in Madrid; and it is a bit grotesque and almost an affront that we can read what that ink says without hearing the voice of its master, the voice that hasn’t been heard anywhere for almost seventy-five years, not since he almost certainly wished the concierge on night duty at the Hotel Isabel “Buenas Noches” or “Feliz Año,” before going up to room 53 in Mexico City. Nor does it make much sense that I was able to carry off this book—like a spoil of war—last year for two hundred pounds, when in the ordinary course of things Angela Ewart Farmer Waddington would never have wanted to lose possession of it in her lifetime: “Dedicated by the author to his favorite sister,” so it was described in the catalogue of works on the Great War where I saw it, with this further information: “Angela, recently married for the second time but still weeping for her first husband, helped her brother correct the page proofs and took care of him while he worked on Way of Revelation.” When Hugh Cecil visited her in the course of his research for The Flower of Battle, she was already more than ninety years old and he was moved to hear her “ardent and beautifully enunciated pre-1914 voice,” so he says, still ardent in speaking of past and lost time. Yet even more incongruous is the fact that between Angela—who may have died by now—and me there was another owner, this B.D. Maurer whose ex libris is not of recent vintage; the volume must have been his already during Angela’s lifetime, and he may have been a veteran as well, perhaps of Neuve Chapelle and Ypres and Cambrai and Arras, perhaps she gave it to him herself and it was after the death of Maurer, the soldier, that the copy was placed on sale for me to buy. Objects live on after our deaths, they go on living without yearning for us, and belong to others who treasure them or disdain and sell them, taking up space on their shelves or gleaming on their lapels like the tiepin I acquired at auction not long ago, which belonged to the actor Robert Donat, protagonist of The 39 Steps and Countess Alexandra and Goodbye Mr. Chips, for which he won an Oscar; I got the long silver cigarette case engraved with his initials, too, and these usurpations or false legacies create ghostly linkages I hadn’t expected: I can no longer see Donat in the same casual way when he appears in his old movies that are sometimes shown on television—in fact, I stop to watch him as if I were now in his debt: two months ago it was The Adventures of Tartu, and the other day The Citadel, I saw him moving and speaking in his own voice and alive, despite his death in 1958 at the age of fifty-three, only seven years older than I am now. I watch him as if he had some kinship with me, and when he lights a cigarette on the screen I wonder if he made the identical gesture after taking one out of the silent object now at home in my hand, the same object, carefully preserved all this time in its original pale green box from Asprey in Bond Street, London—or not so silent: “R D” it says, I should give it to Roger Dobson—and whether that wasn’t extremely bad for his life-long asthma, which may have had something to do with his death; I also wonder if, after that day’s shoot, he wore the tiepin with its enamelled likeness of Shakespeare at dinner, the pin I sometimes wear in my lapel (I rarely wear a tie). Perhaps it’s for the best, or the lesser among evils, that I have these relics of the actor Robert Donat, since it is a simple fact that our intentions and traces and exhalations do not disappear at the same time we do; at least I know who he was, and am well provided with videos of his good films. And I can’t help knowing that these acquisitions, like all my other objects old and new, will pass on to someone else in the future and pursue their course or go on existing without missing me, and some things will be thrown out because they’re useful to no one, tempt no one, and have become encumbrances. The old table on which I’m writing will end up in some other house, and perhaps the pen with which I cross out and make corrections will go to another hand that won’t be a left hand or a hand of shadow; the table lamp from the 1920s and my silver match box from 1917, which once belonged to someone else named Muir; my little toy soldiers made of lead, my letter openers, one of which was carved by an anonymous soldier in the Great War who engraved on it “15 Yser 16,” the bloody river along which he must have fought and the years he waited, Ewart passed through there, too, and who knows if B.D. Maurer didn’t, as well; the books in my library will go back on the market, bearing my name on the first page, and the city and year when I bought them, so that any idiot with money can then buy them again, or a soulless bureaucrat from the Biblioteca Nacional if fortune frowns, and perhaps someone will want to preserve these scribblings of mine on blank pages, traces so remote they’ll become like the dedication of the forgotten Ewart and the bantering annotations of his still more forgotten rememberers, Gawsworth and Graham, who tried to rescue the dead young writer from oblivion and leave a record, mementos are fragile and tend to break, the thread of continuity is a slender one that is never pulled taut without some effort, and it must be taut in order to resist and persevere.
What meaning is there in the silent passage through the world of those who don’t even have the time to grow used to the air, even Ewart wrote and fought and lived for thirty years, and what would have become of him later? I doubt he would have gone right to the top. What would have become of my friend Aliocha Coil’s son, who died as a newborn a few years before Aliocha took his own life, and whom he and his wife Lysiane had given a name, he told me; and what about Juan Benet’s first daughter, who died at six months and whose yellowing photo I saw at his house many times, now that her parents have died there must no longer be anyone who remembers her, Eva. What would have become of my brother who died at the age of three and a half, Julianin was his name, or that was what my parents called him during his brief lifetime; it’s understandable that my first thought wasn’t to say “his parents” or “our parents” because I never knew him and his reality is not mine, I have only stories of him but no memory, and he never knew anything about me. I think of him at times, always as a child because he could never be anything else, he’s remained ensconced at the most advanced age granted him, as he’s painted in his portrait, yet he was six years older than me and would have just turned fifty-two now, almost the age that Donat was allotted. It’s strange to think that there was someone so close, a brother, whom I never met; if he had lived he would always have been with us during our childhood, he would have been the eldest of us and I wouldn’t have been third but fourth, and nothing would mediate my perception of him as nothing mediates between me and my other brothers, Miguel, Fernando and Alvaro, who are just that, Miguel, Fernando and Alvaro, I don’t have much opinion or consciousness of them, they are like the air, or were then. I can’t know what Julianin would have been like or how I would have gotten along with this unknown brother, prior to my birth, whether he would have protected me or bossed me around from the greater strength and skill of his six-year advantage, and I can’t even visualize him because the only image that remains is that of a very small boy who both was and never was older than me and who doesn’t appear capable of protecting or bossing around anyone. His portrait has always hung in my father’s house, and I realize that my first thought wasn’t to say “my parents’ house” because my mother, Lolita, died twenty years ago, and so my father, Julián, has lived there much longer, and still does. This portrait was looked upon with a certain reverence, at least by we children, who felt, in its presence, as if we were to some degree usurpers or intruders, and my mother sometimes gazed at the painting, not in pain but as if she were reliving it all and had something to say to him (she must have spoken to him many times in dreams, when both the living and the dead seem so present), it was a natural impulse, and I suppose she took refuge sometimes in that impulse and that memory when she was sad; she was at peace with that little boy who couldn’t misbehave or upset her. (Or perhaps she felt unreasonably indebted, because she hadn’t been able to save him.) Chin raised, she would look at the portrait for long momen
ts and hum, my mother hummed quite a lot, distractedly, especially when she was preparing to go out. The women I know now dance a little in front of the mirror while they fix themselves up, if I put music on for them from another room. All women dance nowadays, at the least opportunity, as soon as they can, I’ve verified this.
My brother looks like a thoughtful child in the painting, with serene, wide-open eyes that look out of the picture as if he understood more of the world than his years would warrant. The numbers in the lower right corner are hard to make out, it’s possible that the oil painting was done from a photograph when Julianin was no longer alive. I could ask my father, who certainly knows, but I hesitate to call him up and force him to remember and make him sad with all this, he must be serenely occupied with some visitor right now, or typing out an article, or re-reading Simenon or Dumas or Conan Doyle, whom he always re-reads, or Colin Dexter, the detective novelist from Oxford, in fact, the latest one who, with his Inspector Morse, amuses my father. Elderly people shouldn’t be made any sadder, they generally are a little sad already, naturally. But I’m also convinced that my father hasn’t let a day go by since 1977 without thinking of his lost wife, or, since 1949, of his lost son. Perhaps I’ve heard him speak more about the child than my mother did, and he wrote something in his memoirs a few years ago, with composure. It may be that the boy did understand more about the world than his years would warrant and perhaps he died for that; he appears to have been a singular boy, though you never know to what extent someone who no longer exists and never did any harm is idealized. And though my parents were careful, we brothers always had the feeling that Julianin would have been better than the four of us were, and we accepted this unproblematically, only the most despicable people are jealous of the dead. In any case, he was not ordinary, to judge by his first comment on seeing our brother Miguel, who had just been born, and over whom he had the benefit of two long years’ experience. He leaned over the basket, looked at him, and said with a child’s gravity, “He doesn’t know how to talk, he has no memory and he has no teeth,” and he said it in that order. He appears to have treated Miguel affectionately during the year and a half they shared the world in the house that was later mine; he must have been patient and peaceable because when the littler one took away his toys and broke them, the older brother laughed and said to my mother: “Let him break them. He’s a little foolish, but he’s good. I love him.” That’s what they told us.