One last push
Michael Wharton
God's Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age: 1890-1940. William Gerhardie. Edited and with an Introduction by Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky. (Hodder & Stoughton, pp 360, £11.95).
One day about the middle of the last War– I cannot remember when – I was examining the shelves of the meagre library in an officers' and gentlemen's club somewhere in the middle of India – I cannot remember where – hoping to find a book which might relieve the boredom of Army life at a time or rather a place where nothing in particular was happening. Among that collection of the unreadable I suddenly saw a book whose title rang a distant bell, blew the dust off it, took it to my quarters and read it almost at a sitting. It was My Wife's the Least of It by William Gerhardi. I found it hugely and most enjoyably funny.
I did not know then that this was the last novel Gerhardi ever wrote (it appeared in 1938). Nor have I ever been able to lay my hands on a copy of it again. Back in England after the war, I tried to read other novels by Gerhardi but could not finish any of them. Obviously, I felt, there was some mystery here. And so, of course, there was. Gerhardi (or Gerhardie, as he later decided to spell his name) is a true literary puzzle. His own life (as he must have been the first to realise) was an example of a fictional genre – the tragic comedy – which he seems to have thought he had himself invented.
He was born in St Petersburg in 1895 of English parentage (his father was a cloth merchant), grew up speaking four languages, went to England to learn about commerce just before the First World War, was commissioned in the Army, transferred to the British Embassy in what was now called Petrograd, witnessed the Russian Revolution, travelled round the world, then went up to Oxford, where he read English, wrote a novel and a book on his life-long hero Chehov. In the late Twenties and early Thirties we find him in London, a successful novelist and in the words of the literary arbiter of that time, Arnold Bennett, 'the pet of the intelligentsia and the darling of Mayfair'. He was taken up for a time by Lord Beaverbrook, not necessarily a good sign. He travelled a lot and looked at life through the eyes of an artist – a term it was then still permissible for him to use.
After a time, for some reason unexplained (could it have had something to do with the personal experience of immortality on which he based his novel Resurrection?), he seems to have changed his whole manner of life. In 1931 he had moved into a flat in London not far from Regent's Park and now lived there in growing isolation and in his later years poverty, until his death in 1977. He published little or nothing, but after the War was believed by his younger literary admirers to be working on a great tetralogy which was to be his masterpiece. But apart from a few unpromising fragments this never got written. What was found after his death was a mass of material for a work long before commissioned, which now appears, edited and abridged, as God's Fifth Column.
During Gerhardie's years of isolation several efforts were made to revive his literary reputation. Very big claims were made for him. The word 'genius' was freely used. He was even compared with Gogol. But these efforts came to little. Why? Was it because in spite of his long residence in England he somehow remained obstinately 'foreign' and cosmopolitan? Was it because his novels had dated? Was it because. for all their undoubted brilliance, they are simply not good enough? The fate of Gerhardie may throw some light on the fascinating question of literary reputations, their rise and fall. Suppose, instead of being the 'darling of Mayfair', he had been one of the Bloomsbury set! Would he now be a famous literary name, with every minute of his life written up and accounted for? There are some things which really do not bear finnking about.
'Here, at any rate, is what may prove to be the last big push for Gerhardie's reputation, his March 1918: a finely wrought volume of 350 pages in which he presents in short, variegated scenes, decade by decade, the 'biography' of 50 years which transformed the world and brought about the death of his Europe. What is 'God's Fifth Column'? It is a force which intervenes in human affairs to expose their futility or tragic irony, and show us that things are seldom, if ever, what they seem. It is, as Gerhardie himself says, something like Meredith's 'Comic Spirit' — an unfortunate analogy, for Meredith himself, subject of many attempts at resuscitation, is still surely England's Great Unreadable.
The book, in spite of its rag-bag quality, contains many fine and some magnificent passages. There are wonderful scenes of .Tolstoy's nightmare 'home life'; of the death of Chehov; and perhaps best of all, the death of Proust, a writer Gerhardie admired too much for his own good, in that his own reflections on life tend to get muddled up in a clumsy and inexpert version of Proust's sinuous but controlled style. The main part of the book ends, rather confusingly, somewhere about the time of Hitler's invasion of Russia. In a postscript Gerhardie explains his hopes for the post-war future. Strangely naive, they amount to little more than a refNction that if we (who are 'we' supposed to be in such statements'?) can only learn to behave sensibly and be kind to one another, all will be well under a World Government (he does not say who would run it).
So the big push grinds to a halt, bogged down in the commonplace. Is it all up, then, with Gerhardie's reputation? Not necessarily. God's Fifth Column certainly will not do. But why shouldn't some publisher try reprinting My Wife's the Least of It? Gerhardie may have been one of those writers who, too ambitious, do not know where their real strength lies. The last novel he wrote — for all I know he may have thought little of it himself—might yet secure his reputation as something more than a curiosity of literature.
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