William Gerhardie is one of our immortals. He is our Gogol's Overcoat. We all came out of him.' - Olivia Manning
'He is a comic writer of genius? but his art is profoundly serious.' - C.P. Snow
First published in 1925, this is perhaps the most acclaimed of William Gerhardie's novels and was celebrated by Anthony Powell as 'a classic'. Like his first novel, Futility, The Polyglots draws largely on personal experience. It is the story of an eccentric Belgian family living in the Far East in the uncertain years after World War I and the Russian Revolution. The tale is recounted by their dryly conceited young English relative, Captain Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, who comes to stay with them during a military mission. Teeming with bizarre characters - depressives, obsessives, paranoiacs, hypochondriacs, and sex maniacs - Gerhardie paints a brilliantly absurd world where the comic and the tragic are profoundly and irrevocably entwined.
The Anglo-Russian author William Gerhardie was hailed by writers including Graham Greene, Edith Wharton, Evelyn Waugh and others as a “genius,” and this, his long-out-of-print second novel, is generally acclaimed as his comic masterpiece — not to mention “the most influential English novel of the twentieth century,” according to William Boyd.
It tells the unforgettable tale of an eccentric Belgian family living in the Far East during the turbulent years just after the First World War, which displaced them, and the Russian Revolution, which impoverished them.
Recounted by a conceited young English cousin who visits during a military mission, the story is filled with a host of fascinatingly idiosyncratic characters — depressives, obsessives, sex maniacs, and hypochondriacs — often forced to choose between absurdity and tragedy. Yet Gerhardie depicts them as both charming and poignant, as they each struggle for love and safety in tumultuous times . . . and the protagonist finds his conceit shredded as he falls head over heels in love with one of them.
Gerhardie’s portraits of Europeans in exile, attempting to escape from the era’s upheavals, draws on his own experiences as an officer in the British Mission. He has summoned up a world adrift, where war and revolution have broken up the old order, but nothing has come to replace it. And he does it with unforgettable humor and a sharp eye for the absurd.
Hilarious, poignant, panoramic in scope, The Polyglots redeems, from the Babel of the interwar period, a stirring vision of love and human sympathy. - Melville House
“The most influential English novel of the twentieth century.” —William Boyd
“To my generation Gerhardie was the most important new novelist to appear in our young life.” – Graham Greene
“One of the funniest writers of the century.” – Philip Toynbee
“A comic writer of genius … but his art is profoundly serious: underneath the shamelessness and farce, his themes are the great ones, love greif and death, of intimations of joy and our imprisonment in the world of flesh and time.” – The Sunday Times
William Gerhardie, Futility, Faber and Faber, 2008. [1922.]
read it at Google Books This is the first novel by William Gerhardie, first published in 1922, and it was made famous by H. G. Wells, who described it as 'true, devastating - a wonderful book'. Based on Gerhardie's own experiences as a member of the British Military Mission to Siberia shortly after the October Revolution, Futility paints a picture of contemporary Russian society which deserves comparison with the writing of Chekhov. At the centre of the story is Nicolai Vasilievich, who trails across Russia in the wake of the British Mission in the perpetual and unrealistic hope of seeing his fortunes improve, even though they steadily deteriorate. In counterpoint to Nicolai's comic progression, Gerhardie tells the story of his narrator's hopeless love for Nina, the second of Nicolai's three bewitching adolescent daughters. 'William Gerhardie is one of our immortals. He is our Gogol's Overcoat. We all came out of him.' Olivia Manning 'He is a comic writer of genius ... but his art is profoundly serious.' C. P. Snow
Futility is an astounding, funny, and enchanting novel which mixes eccentric Russian sensibilities with eccentric British brains, both richly possessed by its author William Gerhardie (1895-1977). The novel's narrator, Andrei Andreiech, an Englishman of Russian upbringing, recounts his entanglements with the Bursanov family and his love for Nina, the second of three beautiful sisters. The Revolution destroys the family fortunes, but Nina's father still pins his hopes on his Northern goldmines, gathering dependents who trail him even to Siberia. Andrei also waits, hoping his love for Nina will bring happiness. It is Gerhardie's vivacity and lightness of tone in conducting these meaningful yet ludicrous tragedies of disappointment that marks Futility as one of the great neglected novels of the twentieth century. - ndbooks.com/book/
William Gerhardie’s “Futility” must stand with Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” and Hubert Crackanthorpe’s “Wreckage” high among English fiction’s best single-word book titles. Written while its author was still an undergraduate at Oxford and first published in 1922, “Futility” is precisely what the subtitle announces: “A Novel on Russian Themes.” Its overall tone is distinctly Chekhovian, a mixture of comedy and pathos, suffused with low-key irony. When the American edition appeared, it bore a preface by no less an eminence than Edith Wharton, praising “the laughter, the tears, the strong beat of life in it.”
That description sounds off-puttingly Edwardian and old-fashioned, yet Gerhardie’s novel and its successors — especially “The Polyglots” and “Jazz and Jasper” (called “Eva’s Apples” in the United States before gaining its definitive title, “Doom”) — won a chorus of praise from Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Katherine Mansfield, Evelyn Waugh (“I have talent, but he has genius”), Graham Greene and many others. In short order, Gerhardie’s oeuvre embraced satirical novels, an important early study of Chekhov, short stories collected as “Pretty Creatures,” a play titled “Donna Quixote” and even an early autobiography. Nonetheless, after much acclaim, he fell silent in 1939, though he was still only in his mid-40s. When Gerhardie died in 1977, he had been largely forgotten by all but a coterie of admirers.
“Futility” itself is obviously highly autobiographical, in that it is narrated by a young Englishman who has been brought up in Russia, which was just Gerhardie’s case. Called Andrei Andreiech in the book, our hero finds himself caught up in the operatic Sturm und Drang of the Bursanov family. Initially attracted to the daughters of the house — “the three sisters,” he calls them (echoing Chekhov’s play) — he soon discovers that the home life of Sonia, Nina and Vera is exceptionally tangled. The woman he takes to be their mother isn’t, Fanny Ivanova being, in fact, a former German actress who has been living in sin with their father, Nikolai Vasilievich, for 11 years. Their actual mother ran away with an incompetent dentist, but has resolutely refused to divorce her husband. Hangers-on in the household include, among others, a rather suspicious Baron Wunderhausen who is pursuing Sonia, and a so-called prince nicknamed Kniaz, who simply sponges on the father’s wealth.
Unfortunately, it turns out that Nikolai Vasilievich has been borrowing heavily for years, constantly expecting a gold mine in Siberia to pay off. Moreover, when the novel opens, this middle-aged man has fallen in love with a 17-year-old girl named Zina, to the disgust of his daughters and the distress of the long-devoted Fanny. Naturally, Zina’s family is penniless, so Nikolai Vasilievich is soon supporting her “aunts and uncles, sisters-in-law, second cousins” and a pair of doddering grandfathers, as well as a rather Oblomov-like writer named Uncle Kostia who talks constantly of his work but never puts pen to paper. -
The same quality that makes Russian novels so distinctive in world literature can also transform even sensitive Anglophone readers into the boy at the back of English class who keeps asking why Hamlet doesn’t just make up his mind already. It comes down to a certain implausibility in the characters. They tend to oscillate between Dostoevskyan melodrama and inexplicable Chekhovian paralysis, both of which are frustrating to Anglo-Saxon readers for whom pragmatism and emotional continence rank among the four cardinal virtues. I confess that I have sometimes fantasized about jumping through the page and giving Ivan and Nikolai and Mitya and Katya a good shake. So has Woody Allen, if you remember Love and Death.
This frustration is shared by the narrator of Futility, William Gerhardie’s 1922 novel about a very Russian family and their very Russian problems. Our level-headed, kind-hearted English protagonist tries very hard to make the Bursanovs behave sensibly. It would be hard to say which side ends up looking more absurd, the Russian archetypes or the English meddler, which makes the book, among other things, an interesting act of literary criticism from a British novelist. It is also extremely funny—as funny as anything Evelyn Waugh ever wrote, by Waugh’s own admission. He said of Gerhardie, “I have talent, but he has genius.”
Our narrator, probably named Andrew but called “Andrei Andreiech” by everyone, first becomes involved with the Bursanovs when he falls in love with the middle daughter, Nina, while living in St. Petersburg. This quickly entangles him in her complicated family. Patriarch Nikolai is juggling three different women: his wife Magda, the girls’ mother, who lives in Moscow and whom he would like to divorce but doesn’t; his common-law wife Fanny, who would like to marry him legally but can’t; and passionate teenager Zina, whom he would prefer to marry but would be content to have just as a mistress. At the periphery of the family circle are such familiar-seeming characters as Baron Wunderhausen, the dashing German aristocrat who wants to marry the eldest Bursanov daughter, and little Zina’s Uncle Kostia, who is reputed to be a philosopher but never actually publishes anything. None of these people has any money. Everyone lives on hand-outs from patriarch Nikolai, who himself is only borrowing against a far-off Siberian gold mine that he fervently hopes will one day produce gold.
Andrei can’t marry Nina until all this gets sorted out, so during one particularly agonizing night he decides to take action:
I switched on the light over my writing-table and began to write. I wrote down their names in two columns. Then I perceived that the two columns did not serve my purpose; so I drew arrows and circles round the names and endeavored to arrange them in sets and groups according to my own ideas as to how they should be mated. I began by mating Nina with myself. This was easy enough: it was obvious. I consented to make Baron Wunderhausen a present of Sonia. . . . Nikolai must be prevailed upon to marry Fanny. This step would do much to relieve the tension and prevent bad blood between the two. It would secure Fanny’s prestige in her own eyes and would consolidate her position in regard to her relatives in Germany. Now, Fanny having been granted this very liberal concession, which after all was nothing short of her one real great ambition in life, she on her part should not be allowed to impede Zina’s passionate desire to live with Nikolai: a gratification, as a matter of fact, demanded by the overpowering love of two human beings; and Zina, who had always been prepared for anything from suicide upward, would not begrudge Fanny the formal and somewhat hollow superiority of wedlock.
He proceeds from romantic arrangements to financial ones (“Uncle Kostia’s manuscripts would have to be examined, and possibly some of his deeper thoughts might be published with advantage”), and then lifts his head from his work with everyone’s fate adequately sorted. “I felt as President Wilson must have felt years later when he was laying down the principles of a future League of Nations.” His plan doesn’t work. Apparently the idea of progress, even on such a small scale, is antithetical to the Slavic mind, and Andrei is almost relieved when the Bolshevik Revolution intrudes halfway through the novel and the British government dispatches him east to assist the counterrevolution. The British army officers he meets out there are frankly as ineffectual as the Bursanovs, though in a different way. (This is probably the section that resonated with Evelyn Waugh.) At one point a messenger bursts into British headquarters to warn of enemy fire approaching, only to find the naval commander “writing to a Czech colonel of his acquaintance to apologize for misspelling the colonel’s name in a recent letter.” This same officer, when briefed on the Bursanov saga, “looked as if he thought it was a case of damned bad staff work.”
In all of Andrei’s periodic dealings with the Bursanov family, he tries desperately to bring matters to a head, or at least get a straight answer from Nina on his proposal of marriage. But by the end—without giving too much away—he comes around to their fatalistic view of things. “When you have made up your mind what you want, you might as well, for the difference it makes to you, have never had a mind to make up. For the consequences have a way of getting out of hand and laying out the motives indiscriminately. And you with your intent and will seem rather in the way.”I referred to Gerhardie as a British novelist, but he was born in St. Petersburg and lived there until he was 18, and he spoke with a Russian accent all his life. Growing up an Englishman in St. Petersburg, he must have had a keen sense of how ridiculous British mores seem to Russians, and as a member of the London literary set of the Twenties, he would have learned how ridiculous Russians seem to the British. He seems to have concluded from this that life is absurd wherever you are, which may be why Futility, for all its satirical flourishes, takes a forgiving attitude to Russian absurdity. Life may be an inept play, Andrei suggests, but in the exaggerated world of the Russian sensibility, “our life was an inept play with some disproportionately good acting in it.” - Helen Rittelmeyer
Here's how it begins:
And then it struck me that the only thing to do was to fit all this into a book. It is the classic way of treating life. For my ineffectual return to Vladivostok is the effectual conclusion of my theme. And the harbour has been strangely, knowingly responsive. It has sounded the note of departure, and the tall stone houses of the port seem to brood as I walk below, and 'set the tone'. And because of this and the sense that I am marking time till the big steamer comes and bears me home to England I am eagerly retrospective....What confidence! What dash! What deftness of touch! No wonder the literary world - from Edith Wharton to H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh and the young Graham Greene - was bowled over.
In Gerhardie's own description, Futility is 'a novel on Russian themes, depicting a father gathering dependants as his hopes rise and his fortunes sink through four succeeding stages of the Russian social scene; the narrator, an Englishman of Russian upbringing [as was Gerhardie], revealing, against this humorously and geographically changing but tragically unchanging background, the pathos of his growing love for the second of three bewitching daughters.'
Gerhardie followed Futility with the first critical study in English of Chekhov, and the Chekhovian spirit looms large over his novel, the first section of which is even titled The Three Sisters and includes a visit to the the theatre to see that very play. Like Chekhov - though more self-consciously and self-mockingly - Gerhardie inhabits the territory where comedy and tragedy mingle. He is essentially a comic writer, with a startlingly clear-sighted view of the futility of life - in particular Russian life, about which he has no illusions.
The action (or inaction) of Futility is set against the chaos and civil war that ended in the victory of the Bolsheviks over the shambolic White Russians and their various long-suffering alllies. Revolution breaks out, coups and countercoups alternate, cities change hands repeatedly - and all the while the central situation of the father (Nicolai Vasilievich), his complex family and his army of hangers-on remains unchanged, as he and they wait for that elusive turn of events that will restore his fortunes, while the narrator, Andrei Andreiech, nurses his hopeless longing for the beautiful, infurating middle daughter, Nina.
In one remarkable chapter, the narrator gives a cool, unflinching description of the slaughter attendant on a city changing hands following a coup, before shifting the subject of the conversation (he is talking, as he usually is, to Fanny Ivanovna, Nicolai's common-law wife) to the uselessness of the military in general and of one officer in particular...
'It is a consolation,' said she, 'to think that there are other useless people in the world beside ourselves.'
The snow still fell in heaps as I walked home, and it grew markedly colder, and one felt the onset of winter; while prisoners, it was said, were being killed in prison - noiselessly - out of consideration for the Allies in the city.In a later conversation, near the end of the book, Fanny Ivanovna sums up:
'Life drags on: a series of compromises. And we drag along, and try to patch it up - but it won't. And it won't break. And nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. Nothing happens...'
'When I was very young,' I said, 'I thought that life must have a plot, like a novel. But life is most unlike a novel; more ludicrous than a novel. Perhaps it is a good thing that it is. I don't want to be a novel. I don't want to be a story or a plot. I want to live my life as a life, not as a story.'
'Yes,' she said, pursuing her own thought, 'nothing happens. Nothing...'
The black night gazed through the window. The samovar produced melancholy notes. Tea was getting cold on the table.
Futility is a novel that more than earns its title - all of the action it portrays, on the large and the small scale, is in the end futile. But there is no existential angst here, and the Russian gloom is, as in Chekhov, used largely for comic effect. The futility of life is comic not tragic, and Futility is a novel that lightens the heart and is a joy to read. It sparkles as brilliantly now as it did on its first appearance - though there is a poignancy to reading it now, for Futility was less the beginning of a dazzling career than a precocious flash of brilliance before a slow slide into obscurity. Though some of Gerhardie's later novels were much admired - especially The Polyglots and Doom (also, confusingly, published as My Sinful Earth and Jazz And Jasper) - his reputation was in steep decline by the Thirties and he published no more fiction after 1939's intriguingly titled My Wife's The Least Of It. Gerhardie lived on until 1977, his works were republished, but he remained a nearly forgotten 'cult' writer who had outlived his time and, probably, his talent. But in Futility that talent - Evelyn Waugh called it genius - is shining bright. It is, as H.G. Wells said, 'a wonderful book'.- - nigeness.blogspot.com/
William Gerhardie, Doom, Faber and Faber, 2009. [1928.].
Despite its bleak title, Doom is William Gerhardie¹s most wildly funny novel. It is the story of Frank Dickin, an impoverished young novelist, and his involvement, on the one hand, with an eccentric family of Russian émigrés ‹ in particular, their beautiful daughter Eva ‹ and, on the other, with an all-powerful newspaper magnate, Lord Ottercove, who takes Dickin on as a lost cause. This irrepressible comic potpourri also involves a mad English lord who is bent on destroying the world ‹ and, with an outrageous sleight of hand that only Gerhardie could manage, the novel slowly slips from social comedy toward apocalypse
First published under the title Jazz and Jasper in 1928, Doom was praised by Arnold Bennett for its 'wild and brilliant originality' and is remembered as William Gerhardie's wittiest and strangest novel. It is the story of Frank Dickin, an impoverished young novelist, and his involvement with an eccentric family of Russian emigres - in particular, their beautiful daughter Eva - and with an all-powerful newspaper magnate, Lord Ottercove (based on Gerhardie's friend Lord Beaverbrook), who takes Dickin on as a lost cause. This irrepressible comic mixture also involves a mad English lord who is bent on destroying the world - and, with an outrageous sleight of hand that only Gerhardie could manage, the novel slowly slips from social comedy toward apocalypse. 'A master of the ridiculous ... Doom seems like nothing else in the language.' Michael Holroyd 'I have talent, but he has genius.' Evelyn Waugh 'He is a comic writer of genius ... but his art is profoundly serious.' C. P. Snow
William Gerhardie, Of Mortal Love, Faber and Faber, 2008. [1936.]
Of Mortal Love contains, for many critics and readers, the essence of all that is best in Gerhardie’s writing, and Michael Holroyd, in his 'Preface', voices the suspicion that it is the author’s own favourite among his books.First published in 1936, Of Mortal Love is a simple love story, in the author’s own words ‘containing fresh love-lore and treating of the succeeding stages of transmutation of love erotic into love imaginative; of love entrancing into love unselfish; of love tender into love transfigured’. It is the story of Dinah, who was not born to live alone, and of Walter, Jim and Eric who loved, but proved unequal to her love. According to C. P. Snow, it is ‘one of the most wonderful books of a generation’
William Gerhardie, Pending Heaven, Faber and Faber, 2009.
To quote William Gerhardie's own synopsis this work is 'a novel about two men treading the donkey-round of paradise deferred, their literary friendship strained to breaking-point by rivalry in love'. The two men are Max Fisher (Hugh Kingsmill) and Victor Thurbon (William Gerhardie himself).
In her biography of William Gerhardie (to be reissued in Faber Finds) Dido Davies describes it as being 'unquestionably amongst the most entertaining and comic of Gerhardie's novels'.
'The tale is extremely funny ... It is bitter, capricious, occasionally incoherent and without any feeling for the existence of organized society. But extremely funny it is, and extremely original. No sentence in it can be foreseen. The man has genius.' Arnold Bennett, Evening Standard
In her biography of William Gerhardie (to be reissued in Faber Finds) Dido Davies describes it as being 'unquestionably amongst the most entertaining and comic of Gerhardie's novels'.
'The tale is extremely funny ... It is bitter, capricious, occasionally incoherent and without any feeling for the existence of organized society. But extremely funny it is, and extremely original. No sentence in it can be foreseen. The man has genius.' Arnold Bennett, Evening Standard
William Gerhardie, Resurrection, Faber and Faber, 2009.
William Gerhardie himself described Resurrection as 'an autobiographical novel recording a true experience out of the body, followed that night by a London ball at which, against a background of social comedy, the theme is taken up and developed into a passionate argument for the immortality of the soul, illustrated by the spontaneous recollection of a year rich in travel and having the power to evoke a vanished lifetime in a day.'Some consider this to be Gerhardie's masterpiece. Hugh Kingsmill said 'Tristram Shandy is accepted as a permanent masterpiece, and Resurrection is worth ten of it'. Edwin Muir considered the book 'easily the best' of Gerhardie's work 'and also, I think, one of the most remarkable that have appeared in our time. Michael Holroyd has the same high opinion of it as did Philip Toynbee who wrote, 'an astonishing Proustian masterpiece ... which embraces more of Gerhardie, more of his attitudes, personality and literary achievement than any other'.
William Gerhardie, God's Fifth Column, Faber and Faber, 2009.
God’s Fifth Column is the last book of William Gerhardie. Well known in the 1920s and 1930s chiefly as a novelist (whose books were admired by Arnold Bennett, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and others), Gerhardie fell mysteriously silent at the beginning of the Second World War and did not publish another book during the remaining thirty-seven years of his life. After his death the manuscript of this ambitious and unusual book was discovered among his papers and was skilfully edited for publication by Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidedlsky.
The novel itself is a biography of the age, 1890-1940, through which Gerhardie lived. For Gerhardie, it was the artists rather than orthodox historians, the men of imagination rather than of will, who were the true spokesmen for mankind; and it is through the artist’s vision and the writer’s use of language that he tries to bring the age into moral perspective. God’s Fifth Column is one of the most remarkable works of this gifted writer.
I first met William Gerhardie in the early Thirties, before he had added an “e” to his name. Hugh Kingsmill, a friend of his and mine, took me to see him in his flat in Hallam Street, just behind Broadcasting House. I remember thinking that it was more like a suite in a second-class hotel than a residence, though he was to live there, becoming ever more of a recluse, until his death in 1977. The furniture struck me as being Continental, the lighting was dim, the curtains heavy, and, in the last two decades of his life, kept permanently drawn. One way and another I had heard a lot about him from Kingsmill and his brother Brian Lunn, both of whom were to collaborate in writing books with him—Kingsmill’s being The Casanova Fable and Brian Lunn’s The Memoirs of Satan. As the rebellious sons of a Methodist father, Sir Henry Lunn, they found Gerhardie’s bohemian ways and unashamed hedonism exciting. The impression he gave was of being a foreigner, though in fact his father was English—a north-countryman who settled in Petersburg as a cotton merchant. Gerhardie was born there, and spoke always with a Russian accent, which somehow added to a certain mysteriousness in his bearing and disposition—deliberately cultivated, I daresay. One of his better jokes was that, when the 1917 revolution broke out, he found himself in the middle of a hostile crowd, and shouted out: “I’m Gerhardie!” whereupon they let him go, thinking he had said he was Keir Hardie, one of the founders of the British Labour Party.
By the time I met him he had already published two successful novels, Futility and The Polyglots, and an autobiography, Memoirs of a Polyglot, and been taken up socially, becoming, as Arnold Bennett put it, “the pet of the intelligentsia and the darling of Mayfair.” Also he had got to know Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian millionaire and newspaper proprietor, and appeared occasionally in his little court of sycophants. As a novelist he may be compared with Michael Arlen, a gifted Armenian whose novels for a while—The Green Hat was the best known—brought him great esteem among smart people. Arlen wisely married an aristocratic Greek lady, and moved to New York where he continued to thrive; Gerhardie unwisely remained a bachelor and lingered on in London where his vogue soon waned, so that quite early in life he became something of a ghost figure whose only asset was that various people—Arnold Bennett and C.P. Snow among others—had said he was a genius.
For anyone wanting to write, paint, compose music, anything like that, “genius” (defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “native intellectual power of an exalted type”) is about the most dangerous word in the language. The notion that certain individuals are uniquely gifted, and that this finds expression in all kinds of eccentricity—of dress, behavior, and, most disastrously of all, in the exercise of …-Malcolm Muggeridge
William Gerhardie, Pretty Creatures, Faber and Faber, 2008.
William Gerhardie, The Memoirs of Satan, Faber and Faber, 2008.
William Gerhardie, My Wife's the Least of It, Faber and Faber, 2008.
The story of My Wife’s the Least of It centres on Mr Baldridge, a one-time novelist married to a mad millionairess. He becomes a respected figure and, by his 61st birthday, can congratulate himself on reaching a disciplined, discreet maturity. Then an early novel of his - Dixie - is recognized as a possibility for a film ... and Mr Baldridge’s hard-won philosophical calm is threatened by the endless vicissitudes and absurdities of the film industry. Who said of whom: ‘I have talent but he has genius’? Evelyn Waugh had been reading Futility, which first came out in 1922, but his favourite Gerhardie novel was to be Jazz and Jasper. This almost forgotten work appeared in 1927, two years earlier than Vile Bodies. Its author wanted to call it Doom, a title not adopted until the 1974 edition. In 1947 it made a brief appearance as My Sinful Earth, and the 1928 American edition was called Eve’s Apples, the American publisher having decided, no doubt wisely, that the word ‘jazz’ had been ‘worn threadbare’ in crossing the Atlantic.
This mirage of various titles, all perfectly suitable, seems proper for a writer more famous in his day for being a genius than for any specific work of art. Even his own name had variations: the family name was Gerhardi, to which he sometimes but not always preferred to add an ‘e’, and which he pronounced soft, as in George. Its distant origins, not unlike those of the Beerbohms, were sober Protestant German, with a talent for sticking to business. On a commercial foray in the cosmopolitan capitalist world of the 1850s the author’s grandfather married a Flemish girl, came back to England, and then tried Russia, where the cotton business was booming. Industrious colonies from Yorkshire and Lancashire were settling in beside the Neva and Moskva rivers, and Gerhardi’s mother was named Clara Wadsworth. His father prospered and owned a large mansion and warehouse in St Petersburg. A solid family, despite their later forced exiles and polyglot adventures, and William’s brother Victor, who was to settle down in business in Finland, sounds rather boringly British. William, too, was English in his own way, which may have been one of the things about him that Evelyn Waugh admired.
He borrowed from him too. In this highly fascinating and erudite biography Dido Davies notes some of the echoes of Jazz and Jasper in Vile Bodies. Gerhardie’s Lord Ottercove, based on the ubiquitous literary model of Beaverbrook, shouts ‘Faster! Faster!’ like Agatha Runcible. Beaverbrook seems to have genuinely and deeply admired Gerhardie and made a kind of mascot of him, dragging him off to night-clubs and grooming him in every possible way for publicity. Waugh was never so much petted and encouraged by the news tycoon: he had the good sense to keep his distance, and the kind of secret dedicated independence Gerhardie lacked. Gerhardie’s lack of balance and centre was part linguistic, part social: Russian came easier to him than English, in the use of which he never seems to have obtained an instinctive confidence. All things Russian were madly fashionable in the early Twenties, and Gerhardie found himself lionised and invited everywhere, but on a basis of mild but permanent misunderstanding. Bernard Shaw, he noticed, had a red nose and he wondered whether the famous abstinence was really as severe as claimed. Shaw said to him: ‘If you’re English you’re a genius, but if you’re Russian ... well then ... of course ...’ ‘I am English,’ cut in Gerhardie. - John Bayley
Gerhardie, born and raised in St. Petersburg, is an English novelist and autobiographer. At the age of seventy-five he published the four-volume novel This Present Breath, upon which he had worked for twenty-five years. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 25-28.)
To date [1971], My Wife's the Least of It is the last, the most extensive and not the least of William Gerhardie's novels. It also represents his first and only foray into the hilarious Pickwickian tradition of novel writing. Its structure is episodic, for it's an offshoot of the picaresque novel and relies on a high proportion of dialogue. Since people do not behave logically in life, neither should they do so in fiction. But in Gerhardie's books they attempt to do so. What he shows us is the lunacy of logic, and the illogical quagmires into which the straight and narrow path of logic unerringly leads us. His dialogue catches this illogical paradox, or paradox of logic, marvellously well, and his meticulously odd speech rhythms, repetitive yet with intricate variations, are like a musical refrain serving to orchestrate the idiosyncratic behaviour of his characters.
Like much of Gerhardie's fiction, the literary value of My Wife's the Least of It does not depend upon suspense or dense plot construction. It is a sane study of general insanity, and the technique which Gerhardie employs to heighten this insanity is one that he had first put to use 16 years earlier in Futility: perpetual deferment. Ostensibly this novel is the expanded version of an original manuscript written by Mr Baldridge, a one-time novelist who, following his marriage to a mad millionairess, rises to a position of unprecedented public esteem in the administration of charities. This device enables Gerhardie to portray Mr Baldridge's inside history … without identifying himself with his central character….
[This] is a sad book—not depressing, for it is wonderfully fertilised by humour, but remorseless, like a Chinese torture. The unfortunate Baldridge is never the pessimist: it is his continual optimism that exhausts him. As the lost opportunities multiply and the absurdity rises almost to a screaming pitch, we may protest, 'Surely this is enough.' But we are not to be spared. The pointless unavailing activity spins us round faster and faster; the switchback of anticipation and disappointment jolts us ever more mercilessly up and down until we cry out in desperation—and still we are not heeded, but ingeniously carried, without regard to our feelings, on and on.
Gerhardie does not tell us that all hope is vain. He shows us that hope, if harnessed exclusively to the external world, must take us nowhere in the end. The intimations in My Wife's the Least of It are of money, not immortality; and the paradise that is so tantalisingly deferred is of this world alone. He has not written a social satire…; he has given us an illustration, detail by dire detail, minute by minute, of our life in time…. Through My Wife's the Least of It, hidden to closed hearts, there runs the whole gamut of the Word from the Garden of Eden to the Garden of Gethsemane—the malaise, only recently apparent, about an undue anthropocentrism of pervading human theology.
My Wife's the Least of It is remarkable for the number of characters from Gerhardie's other novels who, as in some final curtain call, reappear…. This trick of reintroducing his own characters in slightly altered connotations was one subsequently employed by Evelyn Waugh. But Waugh's tone is less gentle than Gerhardie's and in its component parts (as opposed to its cumulative effect) more exaggerated. During the Coronation of George VI, Gerhardie's Aunt Minnie, who originally appeared in Of Mortal Love and whose enthusiasm for the ceremony is second to no one's, drops off to sleep on the balcony where, hours later, having dreamt of the procession but not actually seen it passing below her, she is found in the drizzling rain, happily waving a miniature Union Jack. The way Evelyn Waugh would have treated this scene … is to send her toppling over the rails, and possibly not content with this, he would have had a parrot overbalance her to her death….
Among his novels of the 1930s My Wife's the Least of It occupies a place similar to that of Doom in the previous decade. Both are prophetic, concerned with the future, but the limited future. Of the possibilities beyond time, which Gerhardie revealed in Resurrection, there is no hint—unless it is in Gerhardie's clairvoyant humour which implies another dimension and provides a detached, but not unfeeling, appraisal of Baldridge's predicament. For Baldridge himself, such clairvoyance is more difficult to achieve, for indignation threatens him with loss of humour.
After the desolation in Of Mortal Love,… the hilarity of My Wife's the Least of It was welcome, and the book was generously received by almost the entire London press when it was first published in 1938. It was, as John Davenport commented, 'a tardy tribute'. But at last nothing (barring a war) seemed able to prevent Gerhardie's novels receiving the general acclaim they had for so long been on the very point of receiving.
Michael Holroyd, "Lost Opportunities," in New Statesman (© 1971 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), July 23, 1971, p. 120.I don't consider myself at all well read…. However, I do make a point of knowing which authors I should have read. That much at least I owe to literature. When these three novels [Futility, The Polyglots, and Of Mortal Love] by William Gerhardie arrived, I was taken aback. Review excerpts didn't come from the Placebo, Arkansas Bee-Examiner. They came from C. P. Snow, H. G. Wells, G. B. Shaw, Edith Wharton, that sort…. I had never read William Gerhardie. I had never even heard of him before.
I should have. And so should you. Gerhardie is one of the most important and most rewarding novelists to have written in this English century….
His first two novels, Futility (1922) and The Polyglots (1925), are quite similar: eyewitness accounts of the huggermugger intervention [of the Allies, during the Russian Revolution] exalted to marvelous comic fiction by a sensitive absurdist eye. A British eye. Red areas on the globe circa 1910 indicated nations where detached observation was going on. Asides to the audience: understated, elegant of style, somewhat separate, always somewhat privileged. You know, Waugh, Greene, and the others; they are Gerhardie's heirs. It was part of British colonialism and commerce that the foreign was exploited in fiction. There are other rapes than the one Lord Elgin pulled off.
But a gentle human tension pervades Futility and The Polyglots that, say, the author of Black Mischief would not even deign to RSVP. Gerhardie's subject is double: the nation and the family. The nation is huge, quite mad, divided against itself, disintegrating. The family is huge, quite mad, divided against itself, and yet obdurately cohesive—perhaps because of inertia and selfishness, perhaps because of love (which is often, in aspect, selfish and inertial).
British fiction has invented better, more engaging eccentrics than any other literature. Gerhardie's two families—Russian in Futility, English-Belgian in The Polyglots—endure chaos extra- and intramural. Their insane quirks are comic but also defensive, even therapeutic. Monomania confronting the polymania of generals and bureaucrats and terrorists. It is these family groups, set against an ancient world's catastrophic end, that give Gerhardie's first two novels the high strain of resilient social tissue and loyalty, which, no matter how absurd at its surface, stands for human magnificence. He may be pardoned for using such an extraordinary theme twice. Novelists are seldom so fortunate in their biographies. Futility is a fine novel. The Polyglots, which refines it, must rank with Waugh's very best, with Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier, amongst the three or four most superb examples of that peculiar and significant British fictional vision.
Futility announces a proviso. "The 'I' of this book is not me." But, as far as any first person can be the author in fiction, Gerhardie's first person is Gerhardie. The Polyglots has no proviso. It/they are a young first person, both charming and honest. Though perceptive, they do not judge. Their detachment, moreover, has been pleasantly flawed. They are in love. As Britain discovered excuses to intervene in Russia, these young British officers intervene in families for love. Each family has one beautiful, perverse, silly, self-interested young lady. Love fascinates Gerhardie. In its insane vagaries and destructiveness it parallels war. But young ladies are Gerhardie's problem both as first person and as novelist.
In Of Mortal Love (1936) Gerhardie faced the ultimate fictional challenge at ten paces: to create a loveworthy woman. Perfect eyes or that special uptilted profile have no legal tender on the page. Men can be loved for their professions: artist, hero, citizen of the world. Women, 1930s women anyway, can be loved only for what they are. It comes down to dialogue and the odd action. Dinah has been given a boost over her capricious predecessors, but not enough of one. Gerhardie put governors on his comic sense, so that she should not be tainted by it. Yet Dinah is vain, fickle, overpassionate, full of childish inconsequence. At her tragic death, face powder is delivered from the chemist just too late. Dinah doesn't seem worth Gerhardie's time. Not so much of it at least.
And Gerhardie seems uncomfortable at home. Of Mortal Love is first rate, but the novel has only England in peacetime as a counterpoint. Perhaps he sensed this. Many chapter headings designate their subject matter by a place name; ordinary British folk make abortive cameo appearances in trams, in streets. It's as though these devices were intended to give the novel greater geographical and social breadth. Dinah has a St. Petersburg history and a large staff of relatives, but they are peripheral, they serve rather as live flashbacks. Gerhardie's other young women, less well conceived than Dinah, comic figures, were justified by both family and nation. Which all means: The Polyglots does tend to spoil one. (pp. 403, 405)
A novelist of this stature deserves more than twenty years' determined silence. (p. 405) - Source: Contemporary Literary Criticism, ©1976
William Gerhardie, the "rediscovered" author, and the "cult" novel
Posted by Seamus Sweeney
"Cult fiction" is, as I have observed previously, a marketing term with vague connotations of youthfulness, of eccentricity. It is also meaningless, or rather only meaningful when applied to works which have inspired a genuine cult-like devotion (such as the novels of Ayn Rand) for reasons unconnected with their literary merit (putting it mildly). It is applied to novels such as Catch 22 and To Kill a Mockingbird which are high in the list of all-time best sellers. It is applied to novels about drug dealers and serial killers. It is applied to any book which is turned into an artificially "edgy" Hollywood film. "Cult" and "mass market" are interchangeable, really.
William Gerhardie is established so firmly as a "lost writer" that, in fact, it seems churlish to encourage his rediscovery by a wider readership, and I recoil at the prospect of labelling him a "cult" writer. Part of the pleasure in reading Gerhardie is the sense of ownership, and thus it would be somehow disturbing if Gerhardie became as well known as, for instance, Evelyn Waugh. Even the loyal if somewhat obsessive devotion shown by admirers of Anthony Powell would seem excessive if Gerhardie were its subject.
Gerhardie, today, has a knot of literary champions – William Boyd and Michael Holroyd seem to feature on the blurbs of most reissues of his books – and, in his own time, was seemingly marked out by the Waugh-Greene-Powell generation as the real genius of the age. Waugh said of Gerhardie:
I have talent, but he has genius.Greene said:
to those of my generation he was the most important new novelist to appear in our young life. We were proud of his early and immediate success, like men who have spotted the right horse.Those of an earlier generation were also admirers; Katherine Mansfield described his debut, Futility, as a:
living book … one can put it down and it goes on breathing.Edith Wharton provided a preface for Futility, saying:
Mr Gerhardie's novel is extremely modern; but it has bulk and form, a recognisable orbit, and that promise of more to come that one always feel latent in the beginnings of the born novelist.Perhaps part of the enjoyment of discovering Gerhardie is the Ozymandias effect; encountering a writer whose reputation once threatened to be vast and who ended up dying in obscurity and penury. To a certain temperament, sic transit gloria mundi is a beautiful lament. Born in St. Petersburg in 1895, Gerhardie's father was English. During the 1905 Revolution Gerhardie senior was thrown into a sack and taken to the dock to be drowned. A revolutionary asked who was inside the sack, and misheard the name as that of Keir Hardie, thus sparing Gerhardie to be ruined by the 1917 Revolution. After a Russian education, Gerhardie junior - marked out as "the dunce of the family" - was sent to England to begin a vague commercial career. Gerhardie preferred to affect a languid expression and a Wildean demeanour, dressing dandyishly while lounging around dreaming of theatrical triumphs.
During the First World War he was posted to the British Military Attaché in what was now Petrograd, where he witnessed the 1917 Revolution. Later he would serve in the British Military Mission to Siberia, taking a part in the attempted intervention by the Western Powers. This would feature in Futility, and his long return journey from the East – via Singapore, Colombo and Port Said, and bearing the Order of the British Empire for services rendered during the expedition – would feature in his second novel, The Polyglots. On his return he began study in Worcester College, Oxford.
Oxford would feature in much of his work; as he wrote in The Polyglots:
Oxford is best in retrospect … There are as many fools in a university as elsewhere … but their folly, I admit, has a certain stamp – the stamp of university training, if you like. It is trained folly.He was very glad to have gone there, because otherwise he would have had an exaggerated respect for an Oxbridge man. His time at Oxford was not entirely wasted, for while there he wrote the first book in English about Chekhov and Futility. Erotic longing – as well as awareness of the absurdity of erotic longing – dominates the novels. All through his life Gerhardie craved female company – as an officer in Russia, he attracted the disapproval of his fellows for regarding:
the bodies of [lovers or wives of other men] as his own.The novels feature a cavalcade of beautiful, teasing sisters, with interchangeable names like Nina and Zina. These ladies are, inevitably enough, accompanied by platoons of eccentric relatives. For this reason, reading two novels of Gerhardie in one consecutive sitting can be somewhat disorientating. One expects the characters of one to wander into another. One reason advanced for his relative lack of success compared to Waugh is the tighter plotting of Waugh's work; one can drift in and out of a typical Gerhardie novel, beginning at the end or the middle seems to make little difference. Futility is, however, more accessible in this regard than other Gerhardie novels.
The title of the first section, "The Three Sisters", is an obvious nod to Chekhov. The Anglo-Russian narrator, Andrei Andreiech, is adrift in the dizzyingly complex family life of Nikolai Vasilevich, his three young daughters, and his longtime live-in lover who he has now abandoned for a young woman, Zina, who brings her own retinue of eager dependants. Nikolai Vasilevich is seen by all as a man of considerable means, based on what turn out to be utterly worthless mines in Siberia.
The eager dependants are exemplified by Uncle Kostia. Uncle Kostia is a writer, who has of course never published a word or given any indication of writing anything, but is nevertheless allowed to live as he wishes by the family out of respect for his apparent vocation:
one was never never sorry to give him all he wanted since the man is clever, you understand, and writes.Eventually, when Revolution and Intervention make generosity even more expensive, Andrei Andreiech is prevailed upon to try and persuade Uncle Kostia to publish something:
"What have you been thinking about, Uncle Kostia?" I asked. "That's just the trouble," he said. "I can't tell you."Thus the eternal preoccupation in Russian culture with the proper role and duty of the intellectual is reduced to absurdity. Rather than the habit of some authors of attempting to create "character" by piling on detail, Gerhardie gives each character a recurrent phrase which manages to pinpoint them in the mind - the perpetually drunk Russian general who repeatedly mourns the "damrotten game" that is politics and greets any halfway attractive women with the words:
I waited.
"I don't know myself," he explained.
I still waited.
"I have been thinking of this and that and the other, in fact, of one thing and another – precious but elusive thoughts, Andrei Andreiech. Beautiful emotions. A kaleidoscope of the most subtle colours, if I may so express myself. And, Andrei Andreiech, it has taught me a great truth. It has taught me the futility of writing."
What eyes! What calves! What ankles!There is Sir Hugo of the Admiralty whose response to most situations is an enthusiastic "Splendid! Splendid!", and the hero of Gerhardie's second novel, George Hamlet Alexander Diabologh, who is forever insisting to other characters and to the reader that he is:
good-looking… you think I'm conceited? I think not.Intervention, for Andrei Andreiech, consists largely of an eternal train journey with Sir Hugo, an increasingly splenetic Admiral who is ultimately reduced to unhappily complaining, when finally worn down by the obscurantism and incompetence of the various White Russian factions, and the whole menage of Nikolai Vasilevich:
Some people think snow beautiful. I think it idiotic.The expectations of the Admiralty are confounded by Russian incomprehension of such concepts as organisation and efficiency. It is no surprise, having read Gerhardie, that Trotsky's Red Army won the civil war easily enough in the end. In the final sequence, Andrei throws in life in Oxford to travel back to Vladivostok and proclaim his love to Nina, the loveliest of the three sisters:
No more novels! Life, I thought, was worth all the novels in the world. And life was Nina. And Nina was life. And, by contrast, the people I encountered seemed pretentious and insincere. The women in particular were unreal. They talked of things that did not interest them with an affected geniality. They pretended a silly superiority or else an unconvincing inferiority. They said "Really?" and "Indeed?" and "How fascinating!" and "How perfectly delightful!" Nina was not like that. My three sisters were not like that. They were real. … Oxford with its sham clubs and sham societies appeared a doll's house, a thing stationary and extinct of life, while the world, the Outside World, was going by. And I asked myself: What am I waiting for?In Vladivostok, however, it turns out that Nina is disappointed to see him. She never loved him, she says. Andrei is just in time to see the sisters depart for Shanghai, and brood miserably on the quaside Now it is Oxford that seems to be a hub of pulsating life. Romantic longings, the whole idea that life is elsewhere, the "faraway hills" delusion – all are exercises in futility too. Doom, Waugh's favourite Gerhardie novel, was, confusingly, also published as My Sinful Earth in 1947 and Jazz and Jasper in 1927. It begins with a postmodern avant la lettre touch - the narrator, Dickin, reads an account of his involvement with two beautiful sisters to Lord Ottercove, the Beaverbrook-based press baron, and afterwards walks into a taxi with one of the sisters who has featured in the narrative. Dickin, constantly assumed by other characters to be a relative of Charles Dickens, is drawn into Ottercove's orbit. Playing an increasingly large part in events is Lord de Jones, major proponent of an scheme to increase global food production by sealing volcanoes, thus increasing the Earth's heat, and thus increasing the growth rate of crops. De Jones, it emerges, is more interested in apocalypse than in agricultural improvements.
Ottercove takes liftboys and gives them important branches of his empire to run – if they succeed he has discovered a genius, while if they fail they can always go back to being liftboys. He repeatedly promises Dickin an evening newspaper to edit as a wedding present. The restless extravagance of extreme wealth – an extravagance that is casual, without regard for power or even pleasure – is the keynote of Ottercove's personality. Despite Ottercove's apparent absurdity, A. J. P. Taylor – who wrote a biography of Beaverbrook - described Doom as the most convincing portrait of the press baron in print.
Ottercove is an extraordinarily vivid and dynamic creation, and his end – a literal disappearance into thin air – exemplifies the giddy, disturbing spirit of the book. It moves from romantic fantasy to evocation of what could be called High Media Mogulry to the bizarre apocalyptic coda set on a Swiss hillside. This finale – based on an idea of Gerhardie that the world might end piecemeal, in stages – was inspired by a suggestion of D. H. Lawrence that the world might end in the same way as a stocking ladders. Gerhardie also canvassed H. G. Wells for ideas on how to accomplish this bit-by-bit apocalypse, which stumped the father of science fiction.
In real life, Beaverbrook had made contact with Gerhardie, with a peremptory summons to London from Vienna to hear the tycoon discourse on the excellence of The Polyglots. Gerhardie fell into the Beaverbrook orbit just as Dickin fell into Ottercove's. Beaverbrook would also toy with giving Gerhardie a newspaper to edit as a wedding present, although Gerhardie preferred to see himself as an artist rather than journalist. Beaverbrook's attempts to turn Gerhardie into a best seller failed, though not for want of trying. Thus, despite the praise of his peers and the might of Beaverbrook, Gerhardie continued on the path to his later obscurity. It seems clear he lacked a certain industriousness – a literary virtue rarely celebrated in all the mystic blather about "inspiration" – and a seriousness that would have perhaps anchored his books.
In the Thirties he wrote, with Prince Leopold of Loewenstein, Meet Yourself as You Really Are, which has been described as an early example of hypertext. Loewenstein would sit around talking about psychological types, while Gerhardie rendered the whole into witty, elegant English. The reader would choose which option to take at the end of each paragraph, something in the manner of those Fighting Fantasy gamebooks that were so popular in my childhood. A future of broken relationships, alcohol and relative penury loomed. Gerhardie would never achieve the glittering reputation his early praise seemed to merit.
In a 1990 biography of Gerhardie, Dido Davies discusses Malcolm Bradbury's concept of different approaches to novelistic comedy. One is based is on extraordinary, eccentric characters and incidents – Don Quixote, the Pickwick Papers, or Tristram Shandy – and the other on a comedy of more everyday life and experience –Jane Austen, or Kingsley Amis. Gerhardie, in Davies' view, exemplifies both types – the eccentric relatives and absurd political and military adventures revolve round a core of universal erotic longing, of the banality of everyday existence, or boredom and gaiety. Futility is Gerhardie at his simplest and most effective, as well as a book which saddens with the vastness of the promise not wholly fulfilled. His other available works are looser and more obviously flawed, with moments of tremendous wit and brio. If only "cult" has not acquired its irritating implications, it would be the perfect description of his writing.
Forget Waugh, Powell, Greene and Co. When it comes to the twentieth century English comic novel, William Gerhardie is the main man. The aforementioned Waugh said of him I have talent, but he has genius. Waugh's talent is debatable. Gerhardie's talent and genius are not. Yet, despite the fact that many critics have supported his claims, that his publishers have republished his works on several occasions and that many writers have recognised him as an influence, his works go in and out of print, the only biography of him sold badly and is also out of print and he is not generally recognised as one of the English lit greats. Standard literary histories give him short shrift. Malcolm Bradbury's The Modern British Novel mentions him only in passing, as does the Pelican Guide to English Literature, calling his novels exquisitely poised and amusing, if slightly inane (this is written by a man whose main writing is about Shakespeare, Blake and the Victorians and therefore would not know a comic novel if it hit him in the face).
So what is the problem with William Gerhardie? Part of the problem was Gerhardie himself. He was very much an elegant man about town, talked about, having numerous love affairs and was friend to the famous. Lord Beaverbrook was his patron (and appears in several of the novels as the thinly disguised Lord Ottercove). He knew most of the major British writers of his day. Though the writers valued him as a writer, for many others he was mere gossip column fodder. It didn't help that, in 1940, he suddenly disappeared from society and publishing, apparently writing his great novel. But the great novel never appeared and, when he died in 1977, a mishmash of notes was found which, though edited into a book published as God's Fifth Column, was really no more than a collection of ideas. Another part of the problem is that his books do seem, if not inane, at least light-hearted and frivolous - at least on casual reading. They are often plotless - the critic Gorley Putt said of his work You can just as easily read a Gerhardie novel backwards as forwards. Gerhardie himself said Critics feel uneasy when a writer is not solemn. Who is he laughing at? Who with?
And he has written some odd things. Meet Yourself As You Really Are, written with Prince Leopold Loewenstein, is a sort of pop psychology book with a sort of mirror on the spine so that you can meet yourself as you really are. The Memoirs of Satan is just that. Fun but... However, his best work is something else. The Polyglots is the best comic novel in English, bar none, and most of his other comic novels are well worth reading. Finally, Gerhardie is an English writer but is often said to be a Russian writer - the English Chekhov - so that his novels somehow seem irrelevant to the great realist mainstream of English literature.
William Gerhardie (he was actually born Gerhardi but added the e later) was born in St. Petersburg in 1895, the fifth of a family of six. His father owned a factory there. Gerhardie was brought up like his almost contemporary, Vladimir Nabokov, speaking four languages - English, French, German and Russian, of which English was probably the least used. Gerhardie and his siblings were brought up in the elitist atmosphere of the rich. When he was eighteen, he was sent to England for commercial training. His English did not improve much but then he discovered Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray and was hooked. He took up writing, determined to write in both English and Russian. When war broke out, he joined up and was eventually recruited to learn Bulgarian. But he was eventually transferred to the British Embassy in what was then Petrograd, for the Russian Revolution had broken out. Gerhardie's father's factory was having problems before the Revolution but, once revolution broke out, there was little hope of getting any money out. The British Embassy was evacuated and the Gerhardie family left Russia. His family's adventures - considerably embellished - are described in The Polyglots.
In London, Gerhardie briefly met Vladimir Nabokov - he looks such a rascal - but he was to be sent on a secret mission to Vladivostok with General Sir Alfred Knox. They travelled across the USA and set up a mission in Vladivostok but by early 1920 it was apparent that they were doing no good and returned to England. With his savings, Gerhardie decided to get an education and applied to and was accepted at Oxford University, where he studied English literature. While at Oxford, he wrote and had published his first novel - Futility - which had considerable critical success. This was followed almost immediately by his work on Chekhov, the first book on Chekhov not written in Russian. At this time he was concerned about finding somewhere for his parents to live and, on the suggestion from friends, moved them to Austria, where he himself stayed some time and wrote, among other things, The Polyglots. While successful, it did not have the same success as its predecessor.
It was at this time that he made the acquaintance of Lord Beaverbrook, who was to become Gerhardie's patron. Gerhardie would write for The Daily Express, Beaverbrook's newspaper, would be helped by Beaverbrook and would satirize their relationship in Jazz and Jasper. Gerhardie continued to produce a series of interesting books - novels, short stories, plays, biography - but none seemed to have the brilliance of his first two. Despite a succession of love affairs, he never married though he seriously contemplated marriage to Josephine Kaufman, widow of the Ever-Ready Razor King. It never happened. One of his reasons for marrying her were his perpetual financial problems, which were not helped by his extensive and generally impecunious family. He continued to write and publish - he considered Of Mortal Love his best work. He hoped to break into film but was unable to do so but did manage to make a meagre living from journalism. The last work he published during his lifetime was his historical work The Romanovs, published nearly forty years before his death. It was not a success but is well worth reading.
During the war, he worked for the BBC but also started work on what was to be a series of novels called Present Breath. At this time he was to become a recluse, limiting his contacts to the telephone. The death of his mother was just one of the many reasons he shunned society. He lived in his solitude till 1977 - Most people imagine I have died long ago, he said. He was not completely forgotten as his works were republished but Present Breath never happened, appearing only as God's Fifth Column.- www.themodernnovel.com/
The inspirational William Gerhardie
by richardtkellyFinds has been pleased to bring back a great swathe of Gerhardie’s titles – Futility, Doom, The Polyglots, Resurrection, Of Mortal Love, Pretty Creatures, My Wife’s the Least of It, Pending Heaven, Memoirs of Satan (written with Brian Lunn), God’s Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age 1890-1940, and Memoirs of a Polyglot (his autobiography). You can find them all listed and available for order here.
Michael Holroyd wrote the following handsome appreciation for the Guardian at the time of Finds’ launch in 2008:
William Gerhardie was a writer of great talent and originality whose books need to be rediscovered by each new generation of readers. “For those of my generation,” wrote Graham Greene, “Gerhardie was the most important new novelist to appear in our young life.” Greene’s contemporaries were reading the brilliant Futility, a novel on Russian themes first published in 1922, which draws on Gerhardie’s own wartime experiences. This, his first novel, was taken up in England by Katherine Mansfield (who found a publisher for Gerhardie) and also by Edith Wharton, who wrote an enthusiastic preface to the American edition. The book was a hugh critical success in both countries and Gerhardie was hailed as “the English Chekhov”.I have recently and happily been reading Memoirs of Satan, a work in which any sane man or woman should delight, and I would like to draw your attention to this wonderful little appreciation from the Futurian War Digest, a sci-fi/fantasy fanzine published in Leeds during the Second World War by J. Michael Rosenblum, who evidently kept a certain community of readers going during exceptionally difficult circumstances. All numbers of the ‘zine are available online for perusal, I only draw your attention to this from Issue 13 (Vol. 2, Number 1), dated October 1941:
Many readers, however, were to consider his masterpiece to be his second novel, The Polyglots (1925), which contains a multitude of tragicomic characters who are encountered by a young man while travelling on a military mission in the Far East. “The humour of life, the poetry of death, the release of the spirit – these things Gerhardie describes as no prose writer has done before him,” wrote the novelist Olivia Manning.
Perhaps his oddest, most extraordinary novel was Doom (1928). Part satire, part social comedy, part science fiction, and containing an unforgettable portrait of the newspaper magnate Lord Beaverbrook under the name Lord Ottercove, it is a novel of the 20s that foreshadows the atomic age. It became Evelyn Waugh’s favourite Gerhardie novel. “I had talent,” Waugh wrote, “he had genius”…
‘The Memoirs of Satan’ collated by William Gerhardie and Brian Lunn, (Cassell & Co 1932) is a surprising sort of book altogether. According to this, Satan was a collaborator of God, chosen to look after this earth because of his free and independent spirit. Mankind is due to an infatuation of his for a primitive she-ape, and he continually bemoans the fact that he did not choose a more sensible animal, such as the whale, to half endow with his divine nature. Due to his failure with this planet, Satan is finally punished by the All-Highest with the withdrawal of his immortality, and he dies, leaving the notes of his eon-long existence in a Bloomsbury hotel…
Dido Davies, William Gerhardie:a biography
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