This is an old reader's report on Gerhardie from my long ago publishing days....I'm sure Sonny never got past the first paragraph. So glad to see Melville House has pursued! July 19, 1990Sonny, I have now read three William Gerhardie books, Futility, The Polyglots, and Memoirs of A Polyglot. On the assumption that you have no idea why I am telling you this, I will remind you that over a month ago I showed you a review in the TLS by Julian Symons of a biography of Gerhardie written by Dido Davies (Oxford University Press) which incorporated a critical essay of the author's oeuvre. (I have attached the article). I said something about Vintage or even Pantheon and you said pursue it, remember. Two novels and a memoir by a thirty-five year old polyglot later, I am utterly convinced that these novels deserve to be in print in the USA. Of course deserve is a tricky word. Gerhardie's voice is unique because it is wholly his own while not at all his own in the sense that he is a mimic of every author that ever impressed him. He is a literary polyglot. Feeling the necessity to be more succinct in my description however, I will say that Gerhardie's prose did, at times, bring to mind a mingling of two distinct styles--on the one hand, a Chechovian dedication to detail, to the particular and the intimate, to that which appears to have no bearing on things significant yet when all taken together reveal entire worlds. And, on the other hand, Gerhardie's tone is infused with the romantic irony, the barely concealed contempt for the establishment--for politics, philosophy, religion--and the deceiving self-knowledgable voice of an F. Scott Fitzgerald (who was writing at the exact same time as Gerhardie. This Side of Paradise was published two years before Futility). But Gerhardie also has the absurd, slapstick humor of Gogol at the same time as the highly sophisticated wit of Evelyn Waugh (who, says Symons, was most assuredly influenced by Gerhardie). All three of these books are laugh out loud funny. In one of the fine moments, and the book is a string of fine moments, in the middle of Memoirs of a Polyglot Gerhardie describes in his wonderfully suspect and egocentric voice something of what I'm trying to describe: Just as every political party considers itself a "centre-party" threatened by revolutionaries on the left and reactionaries on the right, so every young writer tends to think his talent is compounded from the choicest ingredients. One hopes--and on what little ground!--that one incorporates the lucid sanity of a Bertrand Russell, without any of his liberal smugness; the bitter incisiveness of Bernard Shaw, without his sterility; the rich humanity of H. G. Wells, without his splashing over; the analytical profundity of Proust, whithout his mawkish snobbism; the elemental sweep of D. H. Lawrence, without his gawky bitterness; the miraculous naturalness of Tchehov without that sorry echo of the consumptive's cough; the supreme poetic moments of Goethe unimbedded in the suet-pudding of his common day; the intimations without the imbecility of William Wordsworth; the lyrical imagery of Shakespeare, without his rhetoric; the pathological insight of Dostoevski, without his extravagent suspiciousness; the life-imparting breath of Tolstoy, without his foolishness; Turgenev's purity in reproducing nature without his sentimentalism; the lyrical power of Pushkin without his paganism; the elegiac qualtiy of Lermontov with out his "Byronism"; the humour and epic language of Gogol without his provincialism; the spirit of Voltaire, without his tinniness; the human understanding of Dr. Johnson, without his overbearingness; the dash of Byron with out vanity; the faithful portraiture of Flaubert without his tortuous fastidiousness. The list could be prolonged. He pronounces upon, makes fun of, and is humbled by his literary forbears all in one breath. But then again, Gerhardie pronounces on everyone and everything. He makes an art of being offensive, slurring race, class, nationality, and the female sex as if such naive and egotistical proclamations were a necessary stage in the development of the artist. The first person narrator of both Futility and The Polyglots is the same as that of Memoirs of a Polyglot--a purported autobiography--which could lead one to deduce that all of these works are autobiographical. Yes and no. The material--characters and circumstances--may well be but the writing, the stuff, is pure artifice. Our narrator is one of the most elusive, untrustworthy, manipulative and repulsively endearing fictional charaters I have ever come across. (Futility, Gerhardie's first novel, begins "[The 'I' of this book is not me]"). The author and his narrator persistantly design to draw the reader into a fiction only to shove him violently out again by means of an aside or an observation or humor or satire and catapult him into a whole other "reality" which in turn is another fiction and so on. Reading these novels (for I would say Memoirs of a Polyglot classifies as such as much as the others do) is like being in a house of mirrors, your pleasure deriving from a constant, and rather discomforting, blurring of the conventions of the real and the fantastic, of life and art. I, as a reader, am a great believer in plot and yet while reading these novels I never reflected on the virtual absence of plot until now. Things happen, characters cross continents, people die, there are wars, marriages, governments fall, fortunes are lost and yet all of this is too real to be considered part of a plot but nevertheless too artfully rendered to ever be considered a straight reflection of the real. All three of these early novels are set against a fascinating political and cultural backdrop--Russia and England during and immediately after World War I. And all three have for a protagonist a young man whose history and education match that of Gerhardie quite remarkably. In Memoirs of a Polyglot Gerhardie gives us the "real" story which Symons outlines in his review. Though Gerhardie's life story is rich and fascinating--he particapated in one of the most intriguing literary and political periods of our century--Memoirs is really a series of impressions, digressions, humoristic sketches, philosophical musings, and political condemnations (Gerhardie was adamently anti-military). It is an enormously playful book. And it is in this work that Gerhardie reveals most readily that the notion of ardent play is at the heart of his artistic vision. Futility is the story of Andrei Andreiech a Russian born Englishman who grows up in St. Petersburg, goes to Oxford and is recruited by the British Army's special services when the war breaks out because of his fluency in several languages, especially Russian (essentially Gerhardie's biography). He is sent to St. Petersburg and while stationed there becomes involved with the Bursanov sisters and their rather bizarre family. The narrator's focus is apparently on Nina, the second sister as it is on Sylvia in The Polyglots, but these love affairs are the means through which our hero can more closely scrutinize that which holds so much fascination for him and for us--the cast of characters who comprise her "family". Almost immediately we are led from what appears to be something akin to a drawing room comedy into what is actually a literary carnival. Nina's family is thoroughly Bourgeois by any Bolshevik's definition and the wealthy family gradually loses all financial security. Of course, as the story unfolds we see that they really had none in the first place. It is merely a question of semantics: credit, during the war, takes on new definitions. And so does the word family. Nina's father Nikolai Vasielevich becomes the ring master as lovers, and lover's entire families, distant cousins, friends, ex-wives and their new husbands all join the troupe. Toward the end of the novel, when Andrei Andreiech arranges through the British foreign office for Nikolai Vasielevich and himself to go to Siberia to discover the fate of some mines he owns but has never earned a penny off of, the entire lot (no one can bear to be left behind) goes with them. On the train ride Uncle Kostia, Nina's father's sixteen year old lover's uncle (a writer who has never written a word) and one great character, has an exchange with Andrei Andreiech which expresses the magnificent tension that pervades Gerhardie's work. "When I am at home--I mean anywhere at a standstill--I am wretched intolerably. I write and I think--" He stopped. "What?" "What am I writing for: what on earth am I thinking for?" "So you have doubts?" "Yes, at moments I am seized by misgivings: what is it all for? I ask." "I see." "Now it is different. We are moving, apparently doing something, going somewhere. One has a sense of accomplishing something. I lie here in my coupe and I think: It is good. At last I am doing somehting. Living, not recording. Living! Living! I look out of the window, and my heart cries out: Life! Life! and so living, living vividly, I lapse into my accustomed sphere of meditation, and then before I know exactly where I am I begin to meditate: Where are we all going to? Isn't our journey the kernel of absurdity? And so, by contrast, as it were, I gain a sense of the importance of meditation.--That is how we decieve ourselves Andrei Andreiech. The Polyglots is again the portrait of a young polyglot, Georges Diabologh, who is an Englishman born on Japanese soil but who grew up in Russia before going to school in England. He is stationed in Japan during the war and makes forays into Russia. His Aunt Teresa who left Belgium with her husband and daughter at the war's outbreak also live in Japan. Aunt Teresa, in a different manner but not unlike Nina's father, collects people and it is they that form the pigment that Gerhardie spreads across his canvass. His love affair with his cousin Sylvia, whom he adores for her simple beauty and for being beautifully simple, is the centerpiece around which the rest of the novel is layed. And it is Sylvia's more or less deaf ear and meaningfully meaningless patter that gives rise to the narrators various and sundry pontifications. The juxtapositions are often glorious. Gerhardie never lets himself, nor his reader, assume or trust anything: "You want to laugh at me then?" "No, that is not humour. Humour is when I laugh at you and laugh at myself in the doing (for laughing at you), and laugh at myself for laughing at myself, and thus to the tenth degree. It's unbiased, free like a bird. The inestimable advantage of comedy over any other literary method of depicting life is that here you rise superior, unobtrusively, to every notion, attitude, and situation so depicted. We laugh--we laugh because we cannot be destroyed, because we do not recognize our destiny in any one achievemnt, because we are immortal, because there is not this or that world; but endless worlds: eternally we pass from one into another. In this lies the hilarity, futility, the insurmountalby greatness of all life." I felt jolly, having gained my balance with one coup. "The Polyglots", says Julian Symons, "is certainly Gerhardie's finest book, richer and more humane than anything else he wrote, and more deeply serious in its comedy. It is one of the classic novels of the twentieth century." I can think of no better way to describe Gerhardie's work than as deeply serious comedy. I found myself laughing out loud often while reading these novels, but it was a laughter that more often than not reverberated in the soul. With each of them, I developed a bizarre relationship which I can only describe as pleasurably disturbing. I couldn't wait to finish so that I could have a sense of the whole picture and yet I was reluctant to read on knowing that all these marvelous parts could never add up to any one whole. Olivia Manning, in an article in The Times wrote, "The humour of life, the poetry of death and the release of the spirit--these things William Gerhardie describes as no prose writer has done before him....How did he become lost to view? How can we resurrect him? Anthony Powell, Evelyn Waugh, C. P. Snow, Kingsley Amis, William Cooper--all acknowledge his influence. He is one of the immortals. He is our Gogol's Overcoat. We all come out of him." Twenty years later, I couldn't agree more.FAX - 44-71-872-0332DATE - May 16, 1990Michael ShawThe Curtis Brown Agency162-168 Regent StreetLondon W1GREAT BRITIANDear Mr. Shaw, We would like to consider for publication the books Futility and Memoirs of a Polyglot by William Gerhardie and would appreciate a review copy of each. I gather you control the U.S. rights. I would also appreciate your letting me know what the current situation is concerning the rights. Our fax # is 212-572-2593. Thank you for your attention. Regards, Jenny McPhee Assistant Editor
Amusing summary of and homage to Russian literature and Russian life, set right at the turning point of 1917 - feels like a translation, until you realize it was written in English, by an Englishman, though one who was raised in Russia (and is probably of German descent). Despite his assertion that "the 'I' of this book is not me", it seems likely he shared the sensation of being divided between cultures that the narrator describes. His view of Russian life is not that of an outsider, but that of someone who is free to escape when the 'futility' of post-revolutionary bourgeois hanging on becomes too much. As you can tell from this rambling summary, hard to describe.Everything that is remotely related to Russian literature that I read at this point feels like a clinamen, a deliberate swerving away from the unread Brothers Karamazov and all of Gogol - "soon come, mon" as the Jamaican slang goes.
Do You like book Futility (1991)?
Satire and observations on Russia during the revolution by an Englishman who was stationed there with the British Military Mission. Early humor involving an assortment of characters who all depend on a man waiting for his mine to come in gives way to darker reporting on waves of Russian Army disasters around Vladivostok. Intermittently very funny, but not as satisfying in the last third, where his never-resolved love story mimics the never-resolved story of the patriarch waiting for someone to solves his problems.
—Caroline
Nothing worthwhile seems to have been written about the Russian character that was not funny. One of the interesting things about this novel is how well the comic vignettes and the lyrical passages fit together - perhaps because there is no real flow to the narrative and no sense of composition. In some ways, Futility reads like an amateurish work. I have always suspected that Waugh's ubiquitous quote about Gerhardie was spurious (for one thing, one can't imagine Waugh being so pompous). On the strength of this first novel, Waugh is much the greater artist, but Gerhardie is refreshing to read for breaking so much old ground in a completely new way. Another interesting thing is the striking difference in the characterisation of male and female characters. The former are, in a word, ineffectual (including the British narrator); the latter, alluring and ineffectual. The characters have no inner dimension: all that we know of them is revealed through dialogue. This is something that Waugh may have learned from Gerhardie (and polished its use to perfection). Except that, of course, the Russian characters always speak of their feelings - but only male characters. The three sisters (yes, Chekhov is a major influence) are much more elusive - essentially unknowable, as the narrator all but admits. Their characterisation is romantic with some pleasingly kinky touches, like in this particularly striking passage: The snow in the yard was pink from the sun as we jumped about on the sofa. She took water in her mouth and blew it out into my face, whereupon I got her into a corner and slapped her hard, while the others looked on in amusement. She was trying to bite my hands; and then as we went out she would insist on fastening my overcoat. There are such marvellously and instantly recognisable details of character and situation scattered throughout the book. An interesting question is to what extent the sisters' behaviour - particularly Nina's - is influenced by a negative animus. Nabokov probably read Futility and may have noted its circle structure for future use. Aickman's Russia in The Model is almost certainly lifted out of Gerhardie.
—N N
