The Polyglots (2 page)

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.

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.

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.

I STOOD ON BOARD THE LINER HALTED IN MIDSTREAM and looked upon Japan, my native land. But let me say at once that I am not a Japanese. I am very much a European. Yet when I woke that morning, and, looking through the porthole, found the boat had halted in midstream, and Japan, a coral reef, lay glittering in the morning sun before me, I was touched and spellbound, and my thoughts went back to my birth, twenty-one years before, in the land of the cherry blossoms. I dressed quickly and ran up on deck. A faint breeze ruffled my hair and rippled the water. Like a dream, Japan loomed before me.

All last night I had watched for the approach of the enchanted island. Like sea-shells, islets began to bob up to right and left of us as we stood watching, heedless of time, as in a trance, the liner stealing her way on in the warm nocturnal breeze of July. They came and swam by and were like queer apparitions in the charmed light, and the boat, lulled to sleep, seemed to have yielded to dreams. And waking in the morning I looked and saw the cliffs—and gladness filled my heart.

Even as we stood on board at Yokohama, waiting to be taken alongside, we saw two little statuettes standing in the middle of the road, it would seem with no conceivable object in their heads, each holding a parasol and fanning herself gently. The colours of the fans and parasols seemed too marvellous to be real.

AND HERE WE LOLLED IN MIDSTREAM. HOW NICE, and for the most part how strange. Barely four weeks ago we had left England, crossed the Atlantic in the
Aquitania
, and spending
only a day in New York, hurried across the United States to Vancouver. Yes, I had watched for that ‘advent of New York,’ that ‘magnificent crescendo of approach’ of which I had read in one of H. G. Wells’s novels, and true, New York ‘rode out of the sea’. The day was one of the brightest kind; the sky was full of buzzing aircraft; troop-laden transports and warships big and small steamed steadily out of the harbour, passing us as, with ineffable splendour and majesty, in steamed the
Aquitania
. The approach of New York indeed had been heralded earlier by a crescendo of amiability on the part of the stewards. For days the Atlantic had been severe, defiant, and the stewards harsh, indifferent. Now they had changed, as if with the weather. We just missed the famous Statue of Liberty, going through an elaborate passport formality in the saloon, pledging on a printed form that we were verily neither anarchists nor atheists nor believers in bigamy nor yet in leading a double life. The War Office agent who was to meet us at the docks and arrange our passage to Vancouver no sooner came on board than he began drinking—prohibition had just then been proclaimed in the United States—and was not seen again.

Then followed a small disappointment. I had expected some sort of super-automobile, seeing that it was New York, to convey us, in a flash, to our hotel. Instead, there was a clumsy ‘growler’ of the oldest pattern with an antique coachman with a red nose and an ancient-looking horse—straight out of Dickens. ‘Well, how are things across the water?’ he enquired in a nasal intonation as a preliminary to discussing the fare. And in a flash the Dickens illusion was shattered to the ground. I drove through the warm, brightly lit streets of New York, wondrous, incurring as I did a curious sensation. ‘Me in America!’ I seemed to be saying to myself. ‘Me in New York!’ For up to the present the United States had been to me an inanimate idea connected with the map of the new hemisphere. Now the towering buildings and the teeming streets were a living reality. And the midsummer aspect of Broadway, in all its newness, juvenility, and brightness, probed to the springs of life.