William Gerhardie is an enigma. I’ve read most of his works and his only published biography, and have studied his life and his papers, kept in the depths of the University Library at Cambridge.
I have picked up his faint trail in the biographies of his better-remembered friends. He is the subject of my undergraduate dissertation in history.
I can’t claim to understand him, nor can anyone — even Michael Holroyd, one of England’s greatest biographers, a friend of Gerhardie’s in later life, someone who has possibly filled in more than any other the details of the circle which stood out in literary London between the wars, but never found permanent footing.
Readers of William Boyd will know Gerhardie as a spectre — rattling his chains and remonstrating about the transience of a reputation in literature. A man who demonstrably failed, who is forgotten, a minor character fitting as a model for a downwardly mobile, although charming, protagonist.
Not a fair portrait by any means, but one that millions have seen.
Gerhardie was caught between Russian and English — he had a cosmopolitan and slightly mysterious background, and late in life changed the spelling of his last name.
Holroyd considers Gerhardie a ‘tragic ironist‘. My supervisor at university wondered, on the basis of a long catalogue of social disasters attributed to his nature, if he might have been autistic.
His works offer little to go on aside from the room to make aesthetic judgements.
Like Gerhardie’s best known novels, Futility and Doom, the play Donna Quixote, first published as Perfectly Scandalous, is set abroad, in a Tyrolean pension. It features, like those books, an international ensemble cast.
Critics of Gerhardie’s wondered whether his polyglot internationalism was all put on, whether he was in fact a dull Englishman at heart larding up his observations about life with foreign furniture. Some of the clichés present in this play suggest they may have been onto something. National stereotypes abound, and the only youngish male character not to be an obvious cartoon foreign is clearly in the mould of the author.
And yet. there is something else, too.
Gerhardie is often very funny. In Futility, there is a scene in which the luckless protagonist attempts to rent a bed for the night in some filthy hostelry.
“Is this sheet clean?” I asked.
“Yes,” said the boy attendant.
“Quite clean?”
“Quite.”
“Sure nobody slept on it?”
“Nobody. Only the boss.”
The same exchange, more or less, occurs in Donna Quixote — except that it’s about fresh towels, and has ultimately fatal consequences.
The author understands comedy, and how people can be almost reasonably made out to talk.
A Russian grand duke begins the play out of his mind, taking pot shots at everything that moves. (‘A stray bullet in your vitals from a Russian Grand Duke cracked in the head. The indignity of it!’) Before the end of the first act, he has topped himself, and left his pretty and avaricious wife, who doesn’t spend all that long in mourning, to begin brief and apparently unconsummated affairs with every man on- and off-stage.
Gerhardie is quite an effective satirist of not only the absurdity of hereditary power and dignity, but also the lengths people will go to accommodate flattery of their betters.
Otto the groom remembers the duke now dead: ‘He used to beat us every day when he came into the stable, with his riding crop. He had three horses, and at Easter he gave us each one English pound. He was a fine gentleman, a fine gentleman.’
But for all this fun — and there is fun: the grand duchess travels across Europe off-stage, leaving a trail of discarded lovers, all of it commented upon with supreme judgement by the middle-aged shrew Mrs Brandon, who invited herself along as an unasked-for chaperone (‘Perfectly scandalous!’) — there is misery too.
Some of the misery is comic. Simleton-Tomson, the most Gerhardie-like of all these characters, is a literary critic. People assert he is clever and important but have read nothing of his. He sleeps in late and accomplishes little. He pretends to know Bernard Shaw. When Mrs Brandon attempts to conscript him into her campaign against the immoralities of everyone else, she appeals to his stoic reason and judiciousness.
Yet he falls for the grand duchess, and when she makes it plain she is not interested, his ironic façade collapses, and he spends a few scenes interjecting into others’ conversations (‘Why am I punished so?’, and ‘addressing the universe’, ‘Shall I jump from the hill into the river? or from the river on to the hill? or hang myself from the balcony? or wait until I perish of sunstroke?’). During these breaches of stoicism, no one takes any notice.
More absurd developments follow. Simleton-Tomson is later revealed to be the bastard son of Mrs Brandon herself, who comes into more and more criticism as time passes.
Even the grand duchess is able to attack her menopausal priggish judgmentalism: ‘And her high seriousness! Her moral indignation! An untiring worker for the Cause of Righteousness! … And somehow, all as though she were conducting a jazz band.'
With Gerhardie, humour is never an end. It exists to leaven tragedy. We have seen some of that tragedy up to now, with the grand duke’s suicide, but there are more deaths to come. First the pension-owner’s charming son Fritz, who is thrown from a horse whom the Mrs Brandon insists his colleague Otto was mistreating. And second, latterly, Mrs Brandon herself.
Her death is protracted and miserable, and something of a misstep. If performed as written, the play would not only be a downer, it would drag on interminably. She does at least remember the horse that killed Fritz in her bequests.
Gerhardie is almost parodic in his continual return, in the end, to the morbid. And trying to reach the end of his work without some death played less for laughs than for tears is like trying to read a Christina Rossetti with the same intention — the reader is doomed to failure, and to annoyance.
Given that Mrs Brandon is entirely a foil character — a campaigner for righteousness who trades on her baronet father’s name, the mother of a bastard carping at the promiscuous grand duchess — the pain and misery her death is not just no fun; it’s tonally misplaced.
Which makes one wonder about the point of the play as printed. Because in the version I have, Gerhardie saw fit to append a better ending, for lowerbrow theatres and impresarios less interested in art than leaving the audience laughing.
‘The state of the theatre is low, as we all know, is low’, he writes. ‘[N]ot as low as before the war; yet low. Ever anxious to oblige the managers, I have prepared an alternative, low-brow and perhaps more pleasing, ending.’
‘As we know, the lady in the play is dying. There is a long, anxious pause.’
‘Suddenly:
Mrs Brandon jumps out of bed and, to the quick, whirling strains of Chopin’s Waltz (Op. 64 No. 2. Più Mosso), executes a dance solo. They stand aback — not unnaturally — while she whirls on to a standstill.
A pause.
The orchestra on the premises now sets in with the mighty rhythms of the famous “Danube Waltz”. Grand finale and apotheosis. All join and spin around to the large, deliberate strains …
The curtain falls.
The music completes itself with a flourish.
‘Not unnaturally’ assures me that this is a joke, and a rather funny one. The play possibly exists in sum just to set up that punchline in hardback.
Gerhardie’s women may be ‘pretty creatures’, the title for a later novel which which appears also in this play. But his characters are silly creatures, and in this play they whirl and suffer wholly for our amusement.