William Gerhardie
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William Alexander Gerhardie
Life and career
Gerhardie (or Gerhardi – he added the "e" in later years) was born at
In 1915, during the
During the
Gerhardie was one of the most critically acclaimed English novelists of the 1920s (
He collaborated with Hugh Kingsmill on the biography The Casanova Fable, his friendship with Kingsmill being both a source of conflict over women and a great intellectual stimulus.
In the
After that war Gerhardie's star waned, and he became unfashionable. Although he continued to write, he published no new work after 1939. After a period of poverty-stricken oblivion, he lived to see two "definitive collected works" published by Macdonald in 1947–49, revised in 1970–74 with prefaces by Michael Holroyd who consistently championed his work. He was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 1975.[4] After his death, an idiosyncratic study of world history between 1890 and 1940 was discovered among his papers, which was edited by Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky and published as God's Fifth Column. More recently, both Prion and New Directions Press have been reissuing his works.
Gerhardie lived the last 37 years of his life in the West End of London in increasing seclusion. He died at the Middlesex Hospital in June 1977 aged 81. After cremation his ashes were scattered in Regent's Park, at a gathering that included the writers Olivia Manning and J. G. Farrell.[4]
Asked how to say his name, he told the
The contemporary British novelist William Boyd has identified Gerhardie, along with Cyril Connolly, as key inspirations for the central character (the writer Logan Mountstuart) in his 2002 novel Any Human Heart.[6] A television adaptation was released in the UK in 2010, and in the US in 2011.
Selected works
- Futility (1922, 2012) Cobden Sanderson
- The Polyglots (1925, 2013) Cobden Sanderson
- Doom (1928) Duckworth. Also published as Jazz and Jasper, Eva's Apples, My Sinful Earth
- Memoirs of a Polyglot: The Autobiography of William Gerhardie (1931)
- The Memoirs of Satan (1932) with Brian Lunn
- Resurrection (1934) Cassell
- Of Mortal Love (1936), Revised and Republished by Macdonald & Co. (1970)
- My Wife's the Least of It (1938) Faber
- God's Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age 1890–1940 (1981) Simon and Schuster
References
- ^ BookRags
- ^ ISBN 0-19-861371-7.Article by Michael Holroyd.
- ^ ISBN 0-7136-2176-1.
- ^ a b Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Volume 21. p. 955.
- ^ Charles Earle Funk, What's the Name, Please?, Funk and Wagnalls, 1936.
- ^ Bookbrowse [1].
Further reading
- Dido Davies. (1991) William Gerhardie: A Biography (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press) ISBN 0-19-282852-5