William Gerhardie - The Polyglots

WILLIAM GERHARDIE(1895–1977) was born Gerhardi — he added the final “e” late in life — in St. Petersburg, Russia, the son of British parents who owned a cotton mill there. At 17 they sent him to a British vocational college to prepare him for joining the family business. However, Gerhardie disliked school and, at the outbreak of World War I, enlisted instead. His language skills led to assignment to the British Mission in Siberia, to work on a propaganda campaign aimed at disrupting the Bolshevik take-over of the country after the Russian Revolution (which had ruined his family and forced them to flee the country). Gerhardie’s work earned him an Order of the British Empire at age 24. Upon his return to England, he enrolled at Oxford and soon produced his first novel, Futility , based on his recent experience in Russia. The book won praise from Evelyn Waugh, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Edith Wharton, Graham Greene and others — yet did not sell well. While still at school he wrote a critical biography of Chekhov, the first such appreciation of the writer in English, and still cited by scholars as one of the most perceptive. Several critically praised novels followed, including The Polyglots, Doom , and Pending Heaven , and he became the toast of literary London. He was especially doted upon by press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, who tried, unsuccessfully, to increase Gerhardie’s sales by serializing his books in his newspapers. In 1939 Gerhardie stopped publishing, although for the rest of his life he told friends he was working on a novel called This Present Breath , a tetralogy in one volume. Falling into poverty, he rarely left his London apartment, and when he died there in 1977, no trace of This Present Breath was found.

MICHAEL HOLROYDis the author of biographies of Lytton Strachey, Augustus John, and George Bernard Shaw. He has long been a champion of Gerhardie’s work, and he edited his posthumous book, God’s Fifth Column .

I was by no means the only reader of books on board the Neversink. Several other sailors were diligent readers, though their studies did not lie in the way of belles-lettres. Their favourite authors were such as you may find at the book-stalls around Fulton Market; they were slightly physiological in their nature. My book experiences on board of the frigate proved an example of a fact which every book-lover must have experienced before me, namely, that though public libraries have an imposing air, and doubtless contain invaluable volumes, yet, somehow, the books that prove most agreeable, grateful, and companionable, are those we pick up by chance here and there; those which seem put into our hands by Providence; those which pretend to little, but abound in much . — HERMAN MELVILLE, WHITE JACKET

William Gerhardie was twenty-nine when The Polyglots was first published in 1925. Like his first novel Futility , it draws largely on personal experiences. The son of a successful British industrialist living in St Petersburg, and his Yorkshire wife, Gerhardie had been considered the dunce of the family and was sent to England in his late teens to be trained for what was loosely called ‘a commercial career’—that is, to acquire some financial acumen or, in default, marry a rich bride. But he detested commerce and dreamed only of the dramatic triumphs with which he hoped to take the London theatres by storm. To improve his English style he was studying Wilde; and an elegant cane, long locks and a languid expression were parts of his literary makeup at this time.

During the war he was posted to the staff of the British Military Attaché at Petrograd and, arriving there with an enormous sword bought second-hand in the Charing Cross Road (‘ le sabre de mon pèrc —a long clumsy thing in a leather scabbard’ that makes a momentary appearance in Uncle Lucy’s funeral procession in The Polyglots ), he was welcomed as an old campaigner. The Russian Revolution (which ruined his father who owed his life to having been mistaken for the British socialist Keir Hardie) sent Gerhardie back to England. But in 1918 he set out again, and after crossing America and Japan reached Vladivostok, where the British Military Mission had established itself. After two years in Siberia, mostly in the company of generals, he left the army with an OBE and two foreign decorations, sailing home by way of Singapore, Colombo and Port Said — a journey that forms the closing chapters of The Polyglots .

The Polyglots is the narrative of a high-spirited egocentric young officer who comes across a Belgian family, rich in eccentrics, to whom he is related and with whom he lives while on a military mission to the Far East. There are obvious parallels here with Gerhardie’s own life. His impressions of the First and Second Revolution in Petrograd and the Allied Intervention in Russia of 1918–20, of the whole business of interfering on an international scale in other people’s affairs, are recorded here and in Futility . He draws, too, upon his own family. His aunt Mary is the prototype for the extraordinary Aunt Teresa; his uncle Willy was the model for Uncle Lucy, that unfortunate gentleman who hangs himself in his sister’s knickers; while the beautiful nincompoop Sylvia is based on a girl Gerhardie met in Westbourne Grove. Gerhardie makes them not into comic Russian stereotypes but universal characters, each in his or her way a corrective to the other. They are ourselves and the people we meet every day. ‘There, but for the grace of God, goes H. G. Wells,’ remarked H. G. Wells of that amorous knight of the bedchamber, Uncle Emmanuel.

On returning to England, Gerhardie went to Worcester College, Oxford. Though he was responsive to the beauty of Oxford, his opinion of academic life was not high and is probably reflected in the Johnsonian statement of the narrator in this novel: ‘There are as many fools at a university as elsewhere … but their folly, I admit, has a certain stamp — the stamp of university training, if you like. It is trained folly.’

On leaving Oxford, Gerhardie wrote much of The Polyglots at Innsbruck. He completed it under difficult conditions while his father was dying. His mother would read out pages from the manuscript to the old man ‘to kill time’, and for the most part he listened uncomplainingly and without comment, though occasionally pronouncing some passage to be ‘instructive’. But when she came to the sea-burial of Natàsha, she began to cry, and this bothered him. ‘Don’t cry,’ he urged. ‘It’s not real. Willy has invented it.’

The narrator in The Polyglots has by the end of the novel decided to write the novel we are reading. ‘I have already written the title-page,’ he announces in answer to his Aunt Teresa’s query as to what they are going to do for money. “ ‘Is it going to sell well?” ’ she demands; and the narrator notes, ‘I was silent.’

On The Polyglots were pinned the family’s hopes of remaking the family fortune, but Gerhardie’s father died a few months before publication. The book did make Gerhardie’s name as a novelist; but as to fortune, he later calculated that, contrary to expectation, it had brought in ‘something equivalent, in terms of royalties, to nothing’.

In later years Gerhardie was to adopt as his colophon the ampersand. None of his novels display with more dazzling skill and vitality than The Polyglots the peculiar inclusiveness of his philosophy, and no happier narrator ever adopted the first person singular. Captain Georges Hamlet Alexander Diabologh is a young man with literary aspirations. He labours intermittently at a work whose title, Record of the Stages in the Evolution of an Attitude , suggests the theme (‘the central thing round which the world revolved’) of The Polyglots . Our attitude to life, Gerhardie implies, is the same as our attitude to fiction which is born of our experience of life. When Sylvia, on board the Rhinoceros as it moves through the Red Sea, wants to know what will happen after they get back to Europe, the narrator replies that he has noticed, with regret, ‘the same morbid and unhealthy appetite in the readers of novels’. And later, now the author of this novel, he asks us to co-operate with him — financially (by buying several copies to help the fortunes of the characters about whom we have been reading) and imaginatively ‘in a spirit of good will’. The book stands, the readers evolve.