Grove Koger

M. P. Shiel was born on the West Indian island of Montserrat in 1865. He would later claim that, on his fifteenth birthday, he was taken by his father to visit the nearby (and unclaimed) islet of Redonda and there anointed King Felipe. We have only Shiel’s account of the incident, but, over time, the story took on a life of its own, eventually involving a disparate cast of characters, including such literary figures as poet John Gawsworth and novelists Lawrence Durrell and Javier Marías.

Shiel (whose portrait you see above) emigrated to England in 1885, after being admonished by his father, “Try not to be strange.” For better or worse, the young man ignored the admonition. He went on to lead a peripatetic and largely unedifying life, producing some of the most bizarre stories and novels in the English language before descending into hackdom. But along the way, Shiel met Gawsworth and subsequently named him the kingdom’s Poet Laureate and his own heir apparent.

Gawsworth himself led an irregular life and cultivated a host of lost causes, including that of Charles I of England, who had been executed for high treason … in 1649. He wrote poetry that fluctuated erratically between pretty good and pretty bad; assembled anthologies of avowedly old-fashioned Georgian verse; bought rare books cheaply and sold them dearly; selflessly championed other writers such as Shiel and Arthur Machen who were down on their luck; and, with ever-increasing frequency and enthusiasm, drank.

In other words, the Kingdom of Redonda was a realm that might well have been created with Gawsworth in mind, and when Shiel died in 1947, Gawsworth became King Juan 1. He never bothered, much less had the wherewithal, to visit his tiny New World kingdom (seen in a photograph by Invertzoo at the top of today’s post ), instead holding court in whatever London pub he happened to be patronizing at the moment. 

I’d like to be able to write at this point that Lawrence Durrell (above) met Gawsworth in just such an establishment, but in fact the meeting took place in one of the city’s cafés, the Windmill, at about 3:00 o’clock one morning in 1932. As the future author of The Alexandria Quartet would remember, “I was a complete literary novice and a provincial and the meeting was an important one for me, for in John I found someone who burned with a hard gem-like flame—the very thing I wished to do myself.” Sometime later, Gawsworth obligingly named Durrell Duke of Cervantes Pequeña.

During his lifetime, in fact, King Juan I ennobled a host of peers, the only trouble being that he named several of these undoubtedly deserving individuals his heir apparent. To make a very long and vexingly involved story short, Spanish novelist Javier Marías eventually became King Xavier in 1997, and reigned until his death last year. Who may now have ascended to the throne isn’t clear.

If you’d like to know more (make that a lot more) about Redonda, Canadian writer Michael Hingston has recently and obligingly published Try Not to Be Strange; The Curious History of the Kingdom of Redonda (Biblioasis). Among many other pieces of that curious history, Hingston writes that after Shiel’s death and cremation in 1947, Gawsworth kept the late king’s ashes in a tin on his mantelpiece. “For years afterwards,” it seems, “whenever a noteworthy guest would drop by his home for dinner,” Gawsworth would carry the tin to the table and season their food “with a pinch of Shiel.”

Sic transit gloria.

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