For those who may have read either or both of my novels All Souls and Dark Back of Time, or even just my short story “An Epigram of Loyalty”, this will not be their first encounter with the legendary, both real and fictitious Realm of Redonda. They will doubtless remember something of its founding ant ever-exiled Kings, Felipe I and Juan I, that a recondite literature knew respectively as M P Shiel and John Gawsworth, although the latter was in its turn a false name, chosen, when was very young, by Terence Ian Fytton Armstrong, who was born in London in 1912 and who also died a beggar there in 1970.

I am not, therefore, going to retell the story now. A reader with sufficient curiosity may fortunately still satisfy it without great difficulty. And in the second of the novels I have mentioned I related the circumstances that are relevant here, although not the why or the how of them, which will be told some other day: although based on the tiny but real Caribbean island that Christopher Columbus personally christened as Redonda on his second voyage, this phantasmagorical and eminently literary Realm passed in 1997 to me, following the voluntary abdication of its charming and now septuagenarian King Juan II, or Jon Wynne-Tyson in the world of letters, who had reigned with great reluctance and some irritation since Gawsworth’s death. My reasons for accepting this eccentric legacy are sketched in that second novel. Suffice it here to say that I would have thought myself unworthy of the name of novelist had I rejected what in principle seemed an almost supernatural invasion of reality by fiction – and it seems a bit that way to me still. Or, shall we say, since it was in my hand to preserve (with due irony) and to perpetuate the pleasant, somewhat Kipling-esque legend that I had helped make betterknown in All Souls, I would have thought it treacherous, mean-spirited and timorous of me to hold back and refuse to make a contribution.

I might add that, as a republican by conviction and by instinct, I could have never borne to acquire ‘subjects’, either imaginary or real. Fortunately, the island of Redonda, unlike its neighbour Montserrat, is and has almost always been uninhabited, apart from its boobies, its lizards, its seagulls, its goats and its rats. However, in the Caribbean it is said to play a similar role to that played by Transylvania in Europe, and it has a not inconsiderable reputation as the abode of monsters and beasties of every sort, as a setting for strange tales of many inexplicable events, a spot where several wayward mariners were lost and never seen again. It certainly did serve as a temporary hideaway or haven for many smugglers of hard 1iquor. Whatever else, though, all these possible inhabitants are such stuff as ghosts and dreams are made on, or are travellers through the uncertain territory of any tale, or perhaps, indeed, the dark back of time.

When I received the wearied Juan II’s generous offer of abdication, I had to ask what ‘duties’ might become mine. ‘To keep green the memory of Redonda, its legend and its former Kings’, was the reply. ‘And to inherit the copyright to Shiel’s and Gawsworth’s works, and to act as their literary executor.’ This second obligation turned out to be so important that, according to certain Redondologists, the sole true King of this fairy Kingdom is the one who, in addition to meeting the indispensable condition of being a ‘Real Writer’ (as Lawrence Durrell called Gawsworth when he first met him), is also the holder of those rights. And so, I have already several times found myself in the unusual position of giving permission for the republication in English of some of the tales or novels of Shiel, an author now somewhat neglected, although less so than his successor John Gawsworth, for whose work still no-one has shewn any interest following his death, apart from his own successors: Jon WynneTyson, who in 1990 and in his own Centaur Press published a volume of forgotten poems with the perhaps premonitory or prophetic title of Toreros; and myself, who in 1989 included and translated an obscure tale of his (‘How It Happened’) in my anthology Cuentos únicos or Unique Tales, which will soon see the light of day once more by Redonda’s ever-hazy light.

Shiel’s work is scarcely known in Spain, despite his having in his day married a daughter of this ungrateful country, Carolina Gómez. To the best of my knowledge, and apart from some stories in some anthologies, only his most famous novel La nube púrpura or The Purple Cloud has been published here, in the 1980s (there was a previous edition in the 1960s, that I have never seen), doubtless following its slightly earlier appearance in Italy, where it enjoyed a greater measure of success, and six or seven reprintings. I recently saw an excerpt from this book included (without my permission, but I am kind to smugglers) in the volume devoted to Istambul in a collection of travel writing. And I am told a rescue-attempt is being mounted in France. Even so, in his own lifetime Shiel was not only a writer with some success and several followers, but was greatly admired by some of his best-known contemporaries, among them Dashiell Hammett, H G Wells, Arnold Bennett, Rebecca West and Arthur Machen, as can be seen from the book-mark that the reader ought to find –if no-one else has taken it already– inside his copy of this volume. So I thought the best way of carrying out my ‘duties’, at least at first, was to offer a chance, in one of the two official languages of the Realm, to read a selection of tales by the forger of the legend and founder of the dynasty.

This book ends with some appendices. One is ‘Of Myself’, a text by Matthew Phipps Shiel or Felipe I (who was born in Montserrat in 1865 and who died in Chichester in 1947), which will serve as an unbetterable presentation of him, by his own hand. Another is more to do with John Gawsworth or Juan I, the most active and most miserable of the Kings or petty monarchs to date –I touch wood. A man doubtless as delightful as he was grandiloquent, as amusing as he was solemn, he decided, while still in his more sober days, to create a Redondan ‘intellectual aristocracy’ or ‘literary nobility’, and in 1947, on the death of his predecessor Shiel –whose ashes he long kept in his own house, apparently mingled with ash of a more accidental sort–, he marked his first birthday after his ‘accession’ by making ‘Dukes’ or ‘Duques’ a number of men and women from the world of the arts and letters (well yes, alright, the latter were ‘Duchesses’ or ‘Duquesas’), and he also created holders of other royal appointments. In later years he somewhat extended this list, and on account of his irredeemable and irrevocable alcoholism, he extended it to such an extent, bestowing ‘titles’ (or sometimes openly selling them) mainly on threatening landlords, bartenders and publicans who had nothing to do with literature or any other art and who in return provided credit for his interminable but always insufficient drinking, that neither Redondologists nor his successors recognize such venal ennoblings as valid in the least, having for the most part been conferred on angry creditors and other unworthy recipients. The last three appendices of this book, therefore, consist of as complete as possible a list of the valid and legitimate titles, offices and appointments created or made by Gawsworth, that of the ‘peers’ of the reluctant reign of Juan II or Wynne-Tyson, and then finally, the most recent one, issued by me, his successor of almost three years ago, which is here made public and official for the first time. If I was ready to carry on the legend, I also had to carry on the joke that it involved. But since every joke conceals an element of past, or perhaps future, seriousness, none of my ‘Dukes’ or ‘Duques’, ‘Duchesses’ or ‘Duquesas’, appears in the list without his or her previous agreement and entire consent. Some in fact have chosen their own titles –others have respected the ones I offered them–, all in keeping with the tradition begun by Gawsworth: the rank is always in English (‘Duke of’), whereas the corresponding title has to be in Spanish, or in a Spanish so macaronic as to even become Italian. Such a combination of languages is wholly appropriate in a Kingdom bilingual out of respect for its first three monarchs, and which additionally holds translators in the highest regard; and so this Prefatory Note and the appendices appear twice, in Marlowe’s tongue and Bernal Díaz del Castillo’s (so as not always to employ a better-known if humdrum formula).

Needless to say –but it is almost always necessary to say everything in this ungrateful country– my titles are not hereditary, are void of real content, and impose no duties whatsoever –not even that of loyalty– on those who hold them from now on. This is above all a humorous tribute to their holders from the present writer; and belonging to this reign and Realm is more than anything like belonging to a club in exile, whose members never meet.

And so, with this volume bearing the title of one of the stories it contains, are born the Publications of the Reino de Redonda or Realm of Redonda, which in time will become part of the Royal Archives or Archivos Reales. This, then, is not the birth of a new publishing house, but rather, simply, that of the printed matter issued and to be issued by this Realm at no set intervals and at no preordained rate, and without regard to whether any texts it offers find a readership or not. I know the fate that usually awaits all royal or republican documents or papers: that of being placed in store, almost never read or exhibited to view. These of this Realm aspire to nothing more. Redonda has too long been only air and smoke and dust for one to seek for it a different destiny.

Javier Marías

16 November 1999

Translated by Eric Southworth (St Peter’s College, Oxford)