Sleeping Ill
William Gerhardie’s tragic irony
Futility, Anton Chehov, The Polyglots, Pretty Creatures, Doom, Pending Heaven and Memoirs of a Polyglot by William Gerhardie
William Gerhardie was not like other men. When I studied Gerhardie’s life and work at university, my dissertation supervisor wanted my opinion on an urgent question that popped into his head.
Might this man, this author, have been autistic? I said I did not know — because I’m not a doctor, and Gerhardie was not then before me. And he seems, upon reading his books, well socialised and smooth enough in the way that men capable of producing very polished, very acute language often are. And emotionally malleable enough to write about emotions in others, people who were not like himself.
And then, of course, I read the recollections of the author’s contemporaries. Some of Gerhardie’s university colleagues described his behaviour as odd; some of his friends in later life described his actions as bizarre.
His retreat from public life, from social life, from almost all forms of life, after the 1940 appearance of his final complete work, The Romanovs, appears to indicate something uncommon about the man. Most authors don’t just disappear into a furnished flat for many years without reason.
Gerhardie’s memoir, Memoirs of a Polyglot, is self-effacing in some ways, arrogant in others, depicts a man oblique from his surroundings, detached — almost dissociating — at some times; painfully shy and anxious at others. Of course we have all experienced some manner of these feelings. They are not uncommon. Is their histrionic combination uncommon? And was Gerhardie autistic? No doubt some today would say so.
But that is not necessarily what I wish to discuss today. Gerhardie’s work is occasionally rediscovered by someone looking for a literary hot tip, and he is just as swiftly forgotten again by a mainstream that has other neglected artists (with better demographic credentials) to unearth and to worship. It’s worth occasionally sounding the trumpets for authors the world has made its mind up repeatedly to forget.
I would like to talk a little about books, if I may.
Futility was, when I read it in my teens, a very important book. A true to life portrait, with additional comic curlicues, of the fall of the old order in Russia, the two revolutions, the degeneracy and failures of all that followed. Chehov, of course, the first study to appear on Chekhov in any language bar Russian — a monument in criticism, but quite a technical analysis, quite airy at times, hard to follow. The Polyglots a big and ambitious novel, sprawling, plot increasingly vanishing as the narrative moves on into a kind of willed obscurantism.
And Pretty Creatures a fine collection of novellas — ‘The Vanity Bag’ a seeming attack on flippant, heart-breaking society; ‘The Bad End’ a really excellent digression into the practicality of executing a man and all the cliches that swarm, buzzard-like, around events of that kind. Doom a book of overwrought satire — an apocalypse as end of the world and as revelation. So much of it in plain and bold satire of men now forgotten. Pending Heaven a strange movement from the deeply material and materialistic — a vain and money-minded writer travels from place to place to find room for his art, his philandering, for his pursuit of a life — into the metaphysical (the latter leaving me a little cold).
Memoirs of a Polyglot being a performance — a great wedding cake of half-truth, mistruth and honest-to-goodness truth. The most affecting scenes being those which surround the death of the author’s father; the most significant — historically, at least — being the time spent in Russia during the war, before the final revolution. The most interesting to me being the tales of literary London, of movie offers but no movies made, of correspondence with, and trips to the homes and boats of, the rich and influential. Beaverbrook and H. G. Wells. Those people. The whole lot of it not all that interesting to anyone not already a carrier of the Gerhardie appreciation disease — or an excessive over-enjoyment of last century’s literary scene.
Some have written — and others have told me — that the more they study Gerhardie the man, the less they like him. He was not necessarily cruel; he did not hope to hurt people. Although the memoirs of his contemporaries say that he was sometimes callous as well as callow, not a man who thought much about the thoughts of others, in his own way. A user of people who was used himself.
I cannot say I know one way or other if this judgement is true.
Sir Michael Holroyd called Gerhardie the ‘Tragic Ironist.’ There is tragedy throughout his life; he felt things deeply. Is it too much to ask that those attuned to tragedy behave with great gallantry and honour? Everyone else lives on a cushion of denialism and believe (for their brief survival) in comforting lies. If someone sees life squarely, is it impossible for him to be a nice man, conventionally speaking?
I can’t say I know. Not with certainty. After all, to read the letters of the long dead is to take on a mantle of terrifying power.
Woodrow Wilson wrote in The Atlantic a widely quoted judgement on historians as a breed.
The historian, he wrote, ‘is dangerously cool in dealing with questions of passion; too much informed about questions which had, in fact, to be settled upon a momentary and first impression; scrupulous in view of things which happened afterward, as well as of things which happened before the acts upon which he is sitting in judgment. It is a wonder that historians who take their business seriously can sleep at night.’
Wilson was talking about the Reconstruction of the American South after the Civil War. Do such statements extend to the judgement on human lives now gone?
I do on occasion sleep badly. Is this because I cannot stand the burden of historical enquiry? Does standing in provisional judgement of the dead disturb my rest?