'He Is the Quintessence of It'

The English novelist William Gerhardie, author of Futility (published the same year as Ulysses) and The Polyglots (the same year as No More Parades), was born in St. Petersburg, Russia. There’s no use pretending one ought to sing his praises in hopes of reviving the reputation of a neglected writer. There will never be a Gerhardie Renaissance, a la Herman Melville. His fiction is too unexpected and pigeon hole-defying. It teeters uneasily between pre-Modernist and Modernist, English and Russian. These are precisely the reasons some of us admire him.

“The sense of living is a several-fold experience consisting, as it were, of several layers of perception. We recognise life when we sense it. And the reason that so often we do not recognize life in the books that we read is, apart from any question of skill on the part of the writer, because one or more of the ‘layers’ of perception having been omitted by him, our sense of life is incomplete, impaired—not representative of life’s flavour as we know it.”

We know what he means. Books written to formula, on spec, as though composed by a committee of algorithms, may be entertaining, good for killing time (hideous phrase), but life as we know it is absent between the covers. Gerhardie here is being a Modernist in his thinking, almost a Cubist in all this talk of perceptual “layers.”

“Such writing, whatever its other merits, is less rich, if not less true. ‘Romantic’ fiction, therefore, expressing the smooth dreamy side of life divorced from most material reality; the so-called ‘realistic’ fiction employing real material facts with the smooth directness only possible in a romance, and, while ignoring the irrational dreamy side of life, flattering itself  naively on being ‘true to life’ and ‘realistic’; and, lastly, ‘introspective’ fiction, ‘top-heavy’  in so far as  the detail of its means tends to exceed its own artistic end, are each necessarily poorer, thinner than the balanced combination of their elements.”

So, “life in the books that we read” is a rare quantity, and not particularly desirable to many readers. Most of us purport to be respectfully laissez faire when it comes to the reading tastes of others. But that’s a challenge, especially when critics hail the arrival of stillborn crap, which includes most titles published during any given period.

“And it is this balance of the three elements that gives his work the life-like touch, removes him altogether from the musty flavour of tradition which attaches to the sedate profession of letters. When we read Chehov [sic] we somehow forget all literary associations. It is as if, forsaking our various professions, we stepped aside to get a better view of life. And then it seems as if all other men of letters who lived on literature had done no more than step aside henceforth to walk outside and beside life. Chehov is indeed more than life in the sense that he is the quintessence of it.”

In 1923, Gerhardie published Anton Chehov: A Critical Study, the first book in English devoted to the Russian. More than half a century later, V.S. Pritchett lauded Gerhardie’s monograph in his own Chekhov: A Spirit Set Free. Chekhov was born on this date, Jan. 29, in 1860. Go here to read 201 of his stories in the Constance Garnett translation.