BOOKS
The polyglot of Hallam Street
William Trevor
WILLIAM GERHARDIE by Dido Davies OUP, £25, pp. 432 ho is William Gerhardie?', I re- member enquiring in a London pub some time in the late 1950s. Some old fusty, came the reply, who had incarcerated himself in a flat behind Broadcasting House because no one read his novels any more. 'A genius', was another suggestion, put forward without much conviction.
William Gerhardie was born in 1895 in what was then St Petersburg. The Gerhar- die family, of German origin, had settled in England and later made their way to Russia, where they had established a suc- cessful cotton business. The Polyglots is the title of Gerhardie's best known novel; Memoirs of a Polyglot that of his auto- biography. The repetition of the word reflects the cosmopolitan flavour of the Gerhardie family life, and the odd blend of commerce and culture that often surfaced in Gerhardie himself. He once attempted to patent a disposable self-pasting tooth- brush.
Literary biographers often make the mistake of choosing the wrong subject. A novelist — or any artist — admired for what he produces, may not necessarily have lived anything but the most mundane of lives. As Proust pointed out, to prefer the person to his books is to prefer the second-best. Yet in choosing to write the life of William Gerhardie, Dido Davies did well. His story is a good one, not because of what he wrote but because of what he was. When young, he was preco- cious. Still in his teens, he was dispatched to England to learn something of the business world, but he decided he did not care for it and in 1915 enlisted instead. Although inept as a soldier, when the war ended he found himself a valued member of the British Military Mission in Siberia, which was currently meddling in post- Revolution Russia. To warn the rest of the world of the dangers of Bolshevism he was sent on a far-ranging propaganda exercise, and ended by being awarded the OBE. He was 24.
The family were now living in Bolton, the considerable wealth of the St Peters- burg days all gone. Encouraged by his mother, as he was in all his endeavours, Gerhardie decided he was a young man destined not to go unnoticed. If an intellec- tual with a foreign name could make his way in the British army he could surely make it anywhere. He began with Oxford, and settled down to write a novel. For the rest of his life the lure of the limelight nagged him. It was his inspiration and his tormentor; it nourished the seeds of his destruction. Gerhardie was vain to an almost painful degree, egocentric to an absurd one. He was ravenous for praise, fearful of even a hint of criticism. Other writers of the time, sensing the consider- able promise of his novels as soon as they appeared, were generous. But this gener- osity is noticeably most lavish when Gerhardie himself reports it. 'What do I hear? Gerhardie? The very man I always wanted to meet', cooed H. G. Wells. 'You're a genius', pronounced Shaw. Arnold Bennett raved, as did D. H. Lawrence and Katherine Mansfield. Gerhardie maintained he'd heard that Evelyn Waugh was envious, and went on to quote Waugh as declaring: 'I know I have great talent, but he has genius.'
If Gerhardie gilded this particular lily, he certainly did not need to. He was hugely admired, a writer's writer if ever there was one, his voice as individual as any of those that drew attention to his wit and his invention. But more and more he was being hampered by his obsession with self-promotion. Nor was he helped by the fact that Lord Beaverbrook became his PR man. That Gerhardie fell into the news- paper magnate's clutches is typical of both men. Beaverbrook could offer the adrena- lin of publicity, and was himself on the lookout for the new and the different. Having decided to make Gerhardie his boy, he spread him around the Establish- ment and plastered him all over his news- papers. 'A splendid failure', he grandi- loquently designated him when, eventual- ly, he decided his protege could not be rammed down the throats of the British novel-reading public. From fawning appre- ciatively on the great man, Gerhardie turned to begging for tit-bits, but Beaver- brook's cupboard had a way of being cruelly empty when he realised he had made a mistake.
The pursuit of fame was very nearly matched by the pursuit of women. Their bodies interested Gerhardie rather more than their minds, and he made no bones about it. Yet they bent over backwards for him (or forwards when the occasion called for their chastisement, as regularly it did). Briefly pondering the notion of marriage to the widow of an American razor-blade king, he confided to his mother that the thought of having 'to go slow where other women are concerned is too dishearten- ing for a man of my versatility'. His mother quite agreed.
Besides being a womaniser, Gerhardie is good value for his biographer because once he'd stopped falling on his feet his mis- adventures. were increasingly comic. Lec- turing in America on 'Love and Litera- ture', his failure to move his audiences turned the experience into a nightmare. On one occasion, 'I suddenly felt it was very cruel, very unjust of these red-faced men in ill-fitting clothes to recline in their chairs . . . while I had to stand and apparently speak. I wanted to cry.' The situation worsened when the same ill-clad men declared his 'Love and Literature' dreary and demanded that he lecture them on the Boy Scout Movement instead.
As suddenly as he had once decided that he intended to be noticed, Gerhardie gave up. He retired to his flat in Hallam Street, abandoning the dream of occupying a privileged position in a 'small harem' in his middle age. Having exhausted the roles of Brilliant Young Novelist and Anglo- Russian Eccentric, he settled now for that of Author with Work in Progress. He was not a recluse. Long telephone conversa- tions, sometimes of five or six hours, were conducted. Women arrived from time to time to tidy up, and heard about the masterpiece that was under way, a great tetralogy entitled The Present Breath.
But essentially his life in Hallam Street was solitary. He washed his own clothes, studied the Exchange & Mart for bargains, wrote to film stars to inform them of their suitability for various parts in his novels, contacted publishers with suggestions for reprints, and theatre managers about dra- matisations. He was cold and impover- ished. The LEB supplied him with a new electric cooker free of charge because his existing one was so old it was dangerous. In readiness for the limelight that would return one day to claim him, he touched up photographs in which his, thinning hair was noticeable. Hoping to jog people's memor- ies, he inserted a notice in the Times stating that he had decided to add a final 'e' to his name.
Gerhardie grumbled out a finicky, can- tankerous existence until he was 81, unwill- ing to permit visitors to use his lavatory, disinfecting the coins he received in change. When he died there was no tetral- ogy, just cardboard cartons full of jottings, and a collection of essays which were later edited by Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky, and have now been reissued by the Hogarth Press under the title God's Fifth Column. They are all that Gerhardie himself was: lively, illuminating, incisive, funny. His novels tend to meander, the essays do not.
Nor does this excellent biography. Although affectionately disposed to her subject, Dido Davies is too professional a dissector to permit sentiment to cloud her findings or irrelevancy to clutter them. Her sad chronicle of a confused life is as engrossing as a well-packed novel. I en- joyed every page of it.
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