From Beaverbrook to Ottercove

Michael Holroyd

" Dear Sir, — If it would be convenient for you to call on me here 123 St Bride Street] I should like to see you," William Gerhardie was in Vienna when this urgent summons from Lord Beaverbrook arrived, and, in other circumstances, he might have remained there several years. However, stopping only to collect his father's urn (which he deposited on his way back at a station cloakroom in Paris), he hastned to London to hear Beaverbrook extol the excellence of his recent novel The Polyglots "He had," remembers Gerhardie, "very fine judgement." From this meeting in 1925 there grew a warm friendship, and from this friendship came Doom.

Over the next months Beaverbrook enter-, tamed Gerhardie very grandly, introducing him to all the smart set in London, the great and the beautiful. "You must meet him. He's nice," D. H. Lawrence wrote to Middleton Murry — elsewhere adding: "He came for an hour and stayed seven." Such heady attentions are unusual for a writer, and Gerhardie confesses that he felt flattered. If only, he sometimes. reflected, he had had less genius, how Lord Beaverbrook might have helped him! After all, he seemed prepared to do almost anything for him as a journalist: he had even promised him, by way of a wedding present, the Evening Standard. Only Gernarale, who never married, was not a journalist. " I am," he insisted, "an artist. Probably a great artist. It pleases me when you treat me as an artist." So that was how Beaverbrook did treat him, tenderly, with affection, but without commercial profit. In vain he had at'tempted to convert The Polyglots into a bestseller (though not, Gerhardie noted, with quite the zeal he put into his Empire Campaign); but his real gift lay in the material he was giving Gerhardie for his next novel. The whirl of Beaverbrook's hospitality — the yachts, the weekends, the night clubs — grew so absorbing that it precluded any actual work and before the end of 1925 Gerhardie fled abroad. By New Year's Day 1926 he had set up temporary headquarters in the South of France where, he assured Beaverbrook, "the Muse is visiting me every morning" Like Dickens with Household Words, he had agreed to write a serialised novel for the Daily Express and, in a burst of optimism, was soon confiding that " I am getting lots of fun, and a fair amount of happiness, out of writing this serial, now that I am free from interruption, and 1 do not think you will be disappointed. Ah, if I could persuade you to become a novelist! To experience that rare feeling of walking a little outside and beside life ... on the roof of No 23 St Bride Street."

Gerhardie's correspondence with Beaverbrook at this time gives a fascinating account of the novel's development, the author's personality and his friendship with the chief character in the book. Already, by February 1926, he is admitting that his serial "is in a bad way." His imagination was not that of a science fiction writer, and by placing the narrative in the future he felt that he risked giving it an air of unreality. He wanted, for example, a handful of people left on a mountain top with the rest of the world disintegrated to nothing. The problem had defeated the trained scientific mind of H. G. Wells (who suggested it would have to be a dream) and it was D. H. Lawrence who, breaking out into

ripples of girlish laughter at the ingenuity of his solution, gave him the metaphor of a laddered stocking, so that the world disintegrated piecemeal. It is not every day that a world vanishes so plausibly, or with so much delicacy and charm.

But the reality which at first seemed so elusive on paper was presenting itself elsewhere in the most inconvenient ways. His house in the South of France, on which he had spent much time and whitewash, had let him down. "The hens won't lay, the doors won't lock, the stoves won't heat," he complained to Beaverbrook; and the maid, "a slender girl of six-teen summers," had become, in place of his novel, the centre of all his thoughts and actions — though mainly because she suffered from constant toothache and "wants attend-, ing to." However, he promised, " I will see to it that literature does not suffer,"

A further threat to the book was supplied by Rebecca West whom Gerhardie met at Antibes and who "curiously enough is also writing a book about you," he wrote accusingly to Beaverbrook. (September 14, 1926). His dismay was shortlived. "My sense of dissatisfaction with myself," he explained, "completely left me when I learnt that she had been at it for three years." He himself had been at work now a mere year or so and was returning to the task "with renewed, interest. The fact of the matter was that when I started writing I was too close to the experiences (in London) which inspired it, I can only write in retrospect, when the irrelevant had filtered through and the essential remains in my memory; and I am now approaching this condition of mind and soul."

During this period he received almost Obtrusive encouragement from Beaverbrook. "Will you go on with your novel now?" he was asked. " ... Why don't you come and see me again? You should settle in this country here for a few months. I will pay your expenses." Wisely Gerhardie resisted the temptation. "As for my settling down in England, your offer to ' pay my expenses is characteristically generous," he replied, "but I'd hate to come empty-handed. I think if I stay here I will produce the novel." His confidence seemed justified, and by October he was reporting that "the old plot has been reinforced by a new one and the newspaper proprietor is involved in a story, for which you won't thank me. I am really glad that I postponed it, for it is stronger and better and madder than before."

"If Doom is Gerhardie's maddest novel, this was partly due to the element of comic fantasy that he had by now successfully introduced into his relationship with Beaverbrook. Connoisseurs of Gerhardie have always admired the manner in which he eclipses what is actual with what is fantastic to produce his own subtle light of reality. The newspaper world was an ideal arena in which to practise this art. It was not long before he was promising, indeed threatening, with "a flourish of the pen," to take over all policy decisions on behalf of the Beaverbrook Press. For a start, on the literary side, why should they not publish plays — he happened to have just completed one himself. Then there was the question of foreign policy. Luckily Gerhardie had a brother domiciled in Helsingfors, so there was no difficulty there. " He is not a journalist," Gerhardie reassured Bea verbrook, adding by way of endorsement, Helsingfors is not Rome."

On artistic matters generally, Gerhardie entertained -far-ranging plans. "What I really Meant to ask you," he explained to Beaverbrook(December 27, 1926), "was whether you would care to collaborate with me in writing a musical comedy. .. . I have a good plot, and a number of unexpectedly promising melodies have occurred to me. I have a certain difficulty in writing them down as my musical education IS sadly inadequate. But I could overcome this hY humming them into a recording phonograph; and no doubt you could produce others, and we could get some old hack to set them down in writing and to orchestrate the thing in

accordance with our wishes. You once told me that you had a great gift for jazz music, and having received could no doubt emit a fair suPPly of it! And you are full of stimulating Ideas as I remember when discussing my novel With you." Under the continuous pressure of such advice, Lord Beaverbrook absconded for some time to the Upper Nile, but a stream of fantasY pursued him even to the seat of his holiday. Gerhardie himself had descended into Algeria where "a beautiful new mistress . . comes to see me three times a week and costs me 50 francs a time, and so 1 can't afford to neglect a chance of selling my article ..."

These Algerian adveritures, Which were eventually to enrich his novel Resurrection, could, so Gerhardie judged, be put to immediate use in the columns in the Daily Express for the moral benefit of its readers. "I've been round to a number of houses of ill-fame for which Algiers is ill-famed," he explained "but my in

stinct for self-preservation causes me, in this Place, to multiply precautions so that I feel I might be in a padded overcoat. There is more

comedy than lust about these places. Sex is a problem — for the Daily Express to solve.

Very simple. Birth control, on the one hand; the elimination of disease on the other; and free love after that. There is no danger of

overstepping the mark as some Puritans imagine; for when people have had enough they stop," Such commonsense fantasies were parried by Beaverbrook (the son of a rector) unsatis

factorily, until Gerhardie felt obliged to inform him (January 16, 1927): "1 am very disappointed in you. I think newspaper proprietors ought to be altogether abolished and all control seized by the authors!" That summer, the sun slowly drove Gerhardie north — but he was no longer empty handed. From Paris he announced (June 21,

1927) the conditions for his invasion of London: " should like to come and show you my

serial. But if you are cruising in the Mediter ranean or shooting birds in remote corners of the country or otherwise not in the mood to attend to my particular literature I will stay in Paris, which city, but for your absence from It, appeals to me more than London, which, conversely, appeals to me mainly on account

of your presence there." A few days later Beaverbrook (who had just written an Express

article about Gerhardie as a Splended Failure ") picked him up at Ostend in a yacht full of girls. So the extraordinary friendship continued to prosper and to fertilise Gerhardie's boom.

Gerhardie was now at the height of his literary fame and this new novel, like the ac couchement of a political Duchess, was await ed with considerable speculation. When it appeared in April 1928 it sold better than any of the previous books and he was acknow ledged, almost everywhere, to be a master of the ridiculous. The looseness of the book's structure enabled Gerhardie to combine an extravagant fantasia with a Fleet Street satire, fusing them together with poetry and wit. Yet amid the potpourri of comedy and manners, there is an underlying melancholy which culminates in the atomic disintegration of all but a few refugees in a hotel on a rounded mountain top isolated from the earth and now circling the sun — a token world for the vanished planet.

It is a confusing book. Evelyn Waugh, whose favourite Gerhardie novel it always re mained, compared the writing to that of Ivy Compton-Burnett, and elsewhere critics likened it to, among others, Beerbohm, Girau doux, Huxley and "the cool irresponsible dexterity of Paul Norand." Re-reading it today, Doom seems like nothing else in the language, and the best contemporary critic was probably Arnold Bennett who wrote of it " wild and brilliant originality."

In his autobiography, Memoirs of a Poly glot, Gerhardie portrayed Beaver

brook as "a potential great man without a mission." It was, in the judgement of Beaverbrook's biographer A. J. P. Taylor, "the only book known to me which gives anything like a convincing picture of Beaverbrook in middle age." Doom, in many ways, is a vehicle for explaining the sensations felt within the orbit of Beaverbrook who, as Lord Otter cove the newspaper Napoleon, is described as "the big drum in the jazz band of our civilisation," and whose saving grace was that he "suffered from an inferiority complex in the presence of Lord Beaverbrook." Before get ting to know him, Gerhardie had regarded Beaverbrook as "less of a personality than a power," though he soon found his force and charm to be "quite irresistible." Yet in Doom Ottercov e retains his power, even in deshabille. In his vest and pants he is "still

looking the part, still the unchallenged proprietor of the Daily Runner." Gerhardie

handles him with great subtlety, and with a ruthlessness which yet somehow shows both appreciation and affection. Whenever Otter cove appears on the scene the other chcirac ters take their lead from him. At one point someone suggests a celebration. " Lord Otter cove did not reply: Lord Ottercove hated to act on other peoples' suggestions . . If he approved of a suggestion he said nothing; then, a few moments later, made it himself. 'I'm taking you out tonight, all of you."

For all its absurdities the book works and is largely held together by Ottercove's power which does not dominate the other characters but draws reactions from them. His immense energy carries along a huge entourage that includes several people Gerhardie had met through Beaverbrook — Lord Castlerosse who appears as Lord de Jones, and Arnold Bennett who, in the guise of Vernon Sprott, is described as "a writer of talent but a merchant of genius." Then, in the young novelist Frank Dickin, we catch an amusing glimpse of the William Gerhardie of that time, in turn anxious, elated, dismayed but always observant with a quiet authority.

Some extra confusion has been shed on this confusing novel by the multiplicity of its titles. Gerhardie has wanted to call it Doom.

but his British publishers vetoed this on the ground that such reverberations of gloom would at once kill all sales. In America, even

his second choice Jazz and Jasper (a title which hinted at the two values, social and

spiritual, that in collision provide the theme of the novel) was also unacceptable. The Jazz Age, which according to Scott Fitzgerald had begun with the May Day riots of 1919, was

already almost over, and Gerhardie was obliged to rename his book Eva's Apples. When, in 1947, the novel was republished its title was improved to My Sinful Earth and the title page bore an explanatory epigraph from Shakespeare's sonnet CXLVI: Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth, Fool'd by these rebel powers that thee array, Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth, Painting thy outward s-alls so costly gay?

Only now, some forty-five years after its first appearance, has this novel of the 'twenties, that foreshadows the coming of our own era, reverted to its original title Doom which