William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

Our emotions in relation to time past, present and future are seen to guide our method of making the most of life — which itself, in ironic counterpoint, keeps interrupting the philosophical discussions which chart the evolution of the characters’ attitude to it. After listening to Wagner, the narrator reflects that music understands what words and thoughts cannot analyse. Inanimate Nature behaves as if we were not here and life exists irrespective of our reasoning about it. Therefore life is wiser than reason which, being only the partial discovery of life, is merely inquisitive. By the same token Gerhardie believed that no intellectual credo was demanded of the poet-novelist whose stereoscopic vision saw through everyday happenings to a world of dreams, mystery and immortality. Here the comic and the tragic are not alternative or successive attitudes but deeply intermingled, so that every event — Uncle Lucy’s suicide, Sylvia’s unexpected wedding night, the Russian Revolution itself with its consequences, after the cherry orchard has been cut down, on this miscellany of unwilling refugees moving westwards — contains both sadness and humour.

It is in the orchestration of contradictory moods and attitudes that The Polyglots excels. Though it owes something to Chekhov (about whom Gerhardie wrote a brilliant little book at Oxford), the tone is original and unmistakable: ‘personal, light and glancing, often lyrical but always self-deflating’ as Walter Allen described it. Believing that the invention of psychologically convincing characters and artful well-balanced plots was a mistaken ambition for the novelist in that it cut across the grain of his natural material and ignored the plots that already exist in life, Gerhardie introduces his people and lets them, as it were, carry the event-plot along for him. In Futility and The Polyglots he brought something new to fiction. The characters, or at least the social personalities they have developed, are suggested very simply with recurring patterns of words: Uncle Emmanuel’s ‘ Que voulez-vous? ’ ‘ C’est la vie ’ and ‘ Courage! Courage! ’; Gustave’s cough and adjustment of his Adam’s apple; Georges Diabologh’s repeated admission, unintelligible to the others, that ‘I’m good-looking … You think I’m conceited? I think not’; Sylvia’s quotations from the Daily Mail; the ‘stinks’ of Major Beastly, the insensitive man with the sensitive skin; Captain Negodyaev whose attitude to life was a dark smile; and overseeing them all the indomitable hypochondriac Aunt Teresa, who can stand anything except disagreement and whose presidential attitude to everyone successfully moves her family and its dependants round the world in the midst of ‘the greatest war the world has ever seen’. As Georges Diabologh comments: ‘All is in the Hands of God — and Aunt Teresa.’

Living alongside this amorphous agglutinated mass of helpless humanity that trails back and forth across Gerhardie’s pages, are the children. They are handled with extraordinary dexterity and in a manner for which it is difficult to find a parallel in other novels. They are observed with passion yet without sentimentality, accurately yet with the dimension of pathos in that they are surrounded by a ludicrous world into which they must grow up. Except Natàsha. Her burial at sea is an anguish of the heart, an involvement in grief chronicled with rigorous detachment. We see the yellow moustache of her father ceaselessly twitching; the curiosity of the passengers on the upper deck; the Captain’s awareness of his gala uniform and the ship’s inflexible routine; the obsolete Russian tricolour; the surgeon puffing at his cigarette; everywhere the atmosphere of unreality surrounding the blunt fact of death that must be faced yet may not be understood, Natàsha having gone unharmed through two revolutions, five sieges, two seasons of famine and pestilence to die in plenty and quietude on the tropical ocean.

‘It was a cloudless morning of extreme heat and stuffiness and damp, and the decks were crowded, noisy and indifferent, and I thought that suffering and death should be in the wind and cold of winter, in the slough and drowsiness of autumn, but not in summer — oh, not in summer … The sea went out in large ripples. The gulls flew screaming and wheeling above them … The ship had been brought to as near standstill as possible; barely perceptibly she slid along on the deep. deep, flapping sea. The plank was on ropes, like a swing: a seaman on each side — Uncle Tom and a young one. Below loomed the Indian Ocean, stretching out its white paws of froth — like a big cat … The mother was held up by her husband and Berthe. She looked pale, pasty, she looked awful. Swiftly the flag was pulled off. Then they swung it — once our way, once to the sea. Natàsha slid off, and describing a curve in the air splashed into the water. A few seconds — and she disappeared beneath the foam … the liner, stealthily, relentlessly, like life itself, went on.’

Gerhardie’s writing at its best is simple but suggests a widening circle of lyrical and ironic possibilities. He used increasingly the delaying phrase and clause within a sentence, measuring the length of procrastination while declaring the power of time regained. It is this tension that helps to hold in equilibrium the incongruity of lite as he presents it to us. ‘To maintain a position is to maintain a false position,’ he writes. In The Polyglots the search for an attitude excludes no attitude: the lies we tell ourselves are part of the truth we live. Gerhardie’s success, as in an artistic conjuring trick, is convincingly to maintain what is intellectually the untenable position.

Beneath the compulsory conviviality of wartime party-going runs a current of melancholy, and this, together with many farcical episodes and philosophical speculations, is interwoven with a number of powerful anti-war passages. ‘No one wanted the war,’ he writes; ‘no one with the exception of a score of imbeciles, and suddenly all those who did not want a war turned imbecile and obeyed the score of imbeciles who had made it …’ The eccentrics and lunatics who surround the narrator are, we see, no madder than those who run the world and make its wars. There is a strong parallel here, as Anthony Powell has pointed out, between The Polyglots and The Enormous Room , e. e. cummings’s account of being incarcerated for ‘careless talk’ by the French authorities, which was published in 1922.

Anthony Powell has written of The Polyglots as ‘a classic’, adding that he put off reading it for several years because so many people had recommended it. This was a trick in the English character that Gerhardie really never understood. Futility , he once said, which had stunned the world of letters, had left it silent with admiration. With The Polyglots he came to town. He was taken up by Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, and promoted by Lord Beaverbrook. At Oxford the book became the young man’s bible. Bernard Miles, Isaiah Berlin and Emlyn Williams proclaimed Gerhardie their literary hero; Evelyn Waugh wrote that he had ‘learned a great deal of my trade’ from it; Graham Greene, who was leaving Oxford when The Polyglots appeared, wrote that ‘to those of my generation he [Gerhardie] was the most important new novelist to appear in our young life’. As the narrator remarks in this novel: ‘Oxford is best in retrospect.’

The book reads as freshly now as it did nearly sixty years ago and has continued to influence a wide variety of novelists from C. P. Snow to Olivia Manning. ‘The humour of life, the poetry of death and the release of the spirit — these things William Gerhardie describes as no prose writer has done before him,’ wrote Olivia Manning. ‘… He is our Gogol’s Overcoat . We all come out of him.’ But if such recommendations deter you, ignore them. Gerhardie died in some poverty and without recognition: you may safely discover him now for yourselves.