A Short Anecdote: Welcome to Yugoslavia

As I mentioned in my post The Love of Literature, I’m reading Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.  When West and her husband arrive in Zagreb, their first stop in Yugoslavia, they are met by three friends of West’s.  They are Constantine, a Jew and a Serb, Valetta, a Dalmatian and a Slav, and Gregorievitch, a Croat and Slav, who West refers to as Pluto because his physical appearance reminds her of the Disney character in the Mickey Mouse films.  All three belong to the Literati of the newly formed Yugoslavia, and each is political and at each other’s throat.  West tells the following story about Gregorievitch, who she refers to as Pluto.

It appeared that one day some years before, Pluto had rung up Y. [an editor of a certain newspaper] and reminded him that next week was the centenary of a certain Croat poet, and asked him if he would like an article on him.  Y. said that he would, and Pluto sent an article four columns long, including two quotations concerning liberty. But the article had to be submitted to the censor, who at that particular place happened to be Pluto.  He sent it back to Y. cut by a column and a half, including both quotations.  Then, if we would believe it, Y. had rung up Pluto, “Surely,” said Pluto, immensely tall and grey and wrinkled, “he must have seen that I had to do what I did.  To be true to myself as a critic I had to write the article as I did.  But to be true to myself as a censor, I had to cut it as I did.  In which capacity did he hope I would betray my ideals?

What a character Gregorievitch is.  From a distance he is one of life’s amusing oddballs, but up close and personal I think I would dislike him.  The editor is angry with Pluto (for good reason) and Pluto is angry at the editor for being angry at him.  He has his integrity to protect, he trumpets.  Pluto seems to forget that this is his idea, an absurd pretense of intellectual and literary honesty, and that he has every intention of ripping to shreds what he submits to the editor for publication.  By creating this charade Pluto manufactures fraudulent integrity and is therefore a phony.  But is the story true or a figment of West’s or Gnegorievitch's imaginations?  I ask this because in our time fictional memoirs and autobiographies seem all the rage.  Some authors offer fictional anecdotes to spice up a biography, and so long as the more boring parts of the memoir are factual they think they're producing nonfiction.  There is no way to know for sure here, and maybe West doesn’t know if the story is true either.  She calls Gregorievitch Pluto during the retelling of the story, and that is the only place she does so.  Everywhere else she refers to him by his name.  An odd thing to do, don’t you think?