The Polyglots

“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 … Original and unmistakable.”

—
MICHAEL HOLROYD, AUTHOR OF
BERNARD SHAW

“The most influential English novel of the twentieth century … Wonderfully eccentric, funny and beguilingly melancholic. Gerhardie’s masterpiece.”

—
WILLIAM BOYD, AUTHOR OF
ANY HUMAN HEART

“On first reading,
The Polyglots
seemed immensely enjoyable. I have returned to it many times … and the book has lost none of its freshness. A classic.”

—
ANTHONY POWELL, AUTHOR OF
A DANCE TO THE MUSIC OF TIME

“Gerhardie deserves readers … maybe this time William Gerhardie will join Dawn Powell and Zora Neale Hurston in staying rediscovered.”

—
MICHAEL DIRDA,
WASHINGTON POST

“I have talent, but he has genius.”

—
EVELYN WAUGH

“Gerhardie’s work left an indelible impression … To those of my generation he was the most important new novelist to appear in our young life. We were proud of his early and immediate success, like men who have spotted the right horse.”

—
GRAHAM GREENE

“The humour of life, the poetry of death, the release of the spirit—these things Gerhardie describes as no prose writer has done before him … William Gerhardie is our Gogol’s ‘Overcoat.’ We all came out of him.”

—
OLIVIA MANNING, AUTHOR OF
FORTUNES OF WAR: THE BALKAN TRILOGY

“He is a comic writer of genius … but his art is profoundly serious: underneath the shamelessness and farce, his themes are the great ones, of love, grief and death, of intimations of joy and our imprisonment in the world of flesh and time.”

—
C.P. SNOW, AUTHOR OF
THE TWO CULTURES

“One of the funniest writers of the twentieth century.”

—
PHILIP TOYNBEE, AUTHOR OF
END OF A JOURNEY: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL JOURNAL

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 HOLROYD
is 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
.

THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY

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.