William Gerhardie – författare

First published under the title Jazz and Jasper in 1928, Doom was praised by Arnold Bennett for its 'wild and brilliant originality' and is remembered as William Gerhardie's wittiest and strangest novel. It is the story of Frank Dickin, an impoverished young novelist, and his involvement with an eccentric family of Russian emigres - in particular, their beautiful daughter Eva - and with an all-powerful newspaper magnate, Lord Ottercove (based on Gerhardie's friend Lord Beaverbrook), who takes Dickin on as a lost cause. This irrepressible comic mixture also involves a mad English lord who is bent on destroying the world - and, with an outrageous sleight of hand that only Gerhardie could manage, the novel slowly slips from social comedy toward apocalypse.'A master of the ridiculous ... Doom seems like nothing else in the language.' Michael Holroyd'I have talent, but he has genius.' Evelyn Waugh'He is a comic writer of genius ... but his art is profoundly serious.' C. P. Snow

The story of My Wife's the Least of It centres on Mr Baldridge, a one-time novelist married to a mad millionairess. He becomes a respected figure and, by his 61st birthday, can congratulate himself on reaching a disciplined, discreet maturity. Then an early novel of his - Dixie - is recognized as a possibility for a film ... and Mr Baldridge's hard-won philosophical calm is threatened by the endless vicissitudes and absurdities of the film industry.

Of Mortal Love contains, for many critics and readers, the essence of all that is best in Gerhardie's writing, and Michael Holroyd, in his 'Preface', voices the suspicion that it is the author's own favourite among his books. First published in 1936, Of Mortal Love is a simple love story, in the author's own words 'containing fresh love-lore and treating of the succeeding stages of transmutation of love erotic into love imaginative; of love entrancing into love unselfish; of love tender into love transfigured'. It is the story of Dinah, who was not born to live alone, and of Walter, Jim and Eric who loved, but proved unequal to her love. According to C. P. Snow, it is 'one of the most wonderful books of a generation'.

Written with rare candour, this is William Gerhardie's enchanting and entertaining memoir of his early life.Gerhardie writes about his grandparents and parents, and about his childhood in St Petersburg where his father, a British cotton manufacturer, settled in the 1890s. He joined the Scots Greys in the First World War, and was commissioned and posted to the British Embassy at Petrograd, where he saw the Russian revolution in various stages. At Oxford, he wrote Futility, the first of his novels. In the 1920s and 1930s, Gerhardie was friends with many of the most interesting people of the era, from Lord Beaverbrook to the Sitwells, and he writes brilliantly and amusingly about the literary and political scene of that time. Michael Holroyd notes in his preface that 'The narrative, which contains so many percipient pen portraits, stops for no man, but merely seems to pick them up in its stride'.Memoirs of a Polyglot is illustrated with photographs, many of them from Gerhardie's family albums.'To those of my generation he was the most important new novelist to appear in our young life.' Graham Greene'William Gerhardie is our Gogol's Overcoat. We all came out of him.' Olivia Manning'In my opinion Gerhardie has genius.' Arnold Bennett'He is a comic writer of genius ... but his art is profoundly serious.' C. P. Snow

God's Fifth Column is the last book of William Gerhardie. Well known in the 1920s and 1930s chiefly as a novelist (whose books were admired by Arnold Bennett, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh and others), Gerhardie fell mysteriously silent at the beginning of the Second World War and did not publish another book during the remaining thirty-seven years of his life. After his death the manuscript of this ambitious and unusual book was discovered among his papers and was skilfully edited for publication by Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidedlsky.The novel itself is a biography of the age, 1890-1940, through which Gerhardie lived. For Gerhardie, it was the artists rather than orthodox historians, the men of imagination rather than of will, who were the true spokesmen for mankind; and it is through the artist's vision and the writer's use of language that he tries to bring the age into moral perspective. God's Fifth Column is one of the most remarkable works of this gifted writer.

William Gerhardie himself described Resurrection as 'an autobiographical novel recording a true experience out of the body, followed that night by a London ball at which, against a background of social comedy, the theme is taken up and developed into a passionate argument for the immortality of the soul, illustrated by the spontaneous recollection of a year rich in travel and having the power to evoke a vanished lifetime in a day.' Some consider this to be Gerhardie's masterpiece. Hugh Kingsmill said 'Tristram Shandy is accepted as a permanent masterpiece, and Resurrection is worth ten of it'. Edwin Muir considered the book 'easily the best' of Gerhardie's work 'and also, I think, one of the most remarkable that have appeared in our time. Michael Holroyd has the same high opinion of it as did Philip Toynbee who wrote, 'an astonishing Proustian masterpiece ... which embraces more of Gerhardie, more of his attitudes, personality and literary achievement than any other'.

To quote William Gerhardie's own synopsis this work is 'a novel about two men treading the donkey-round of paradise deferred, their literary friendship strained to breaking-point by rivalry in love'. The two men are Max Fisher (Hugh Kingsmill) and Victor Thurbon (William Gerhardie himself). In her biography of William Gerhardie (to be reissued in Faber Finds) Dido Davies describes it as being 'unquestionably amongst the most entertaining and comic of Gerhardie's novels'.'The tale is extremely funny ... It is bitter, capricious, occasionally incoherent and without any feeling for the existence of organized society. But extremely funny it is, and extremely original. No sentence in it can be foreseen. The man has genius.' Arnold Bennett, Evening Standard

William Gerhardie's first comic novel tells the story of a young Englishman who returns to St Petersburg where he was raised and falls in love with the daughter of a highly eccentric and dysfunctional family – a relationship which is played out with the armies of the Russian Revolution marching outside the parlour window. Part British romantic comedy, part Russian social realism, with Gerhardie's trademark large cast of wonderfully realised and highly memorable characters, this funny and poignant novel is the tale of persistance in love and hope in the face of what should be insurmountably difficult circumstances.