Search Results

“... genius’? Evelyn Waugh had been reading Futility, which first came out in 1922, but his favourite Gerhardie novel was to be Jazz and Jasper. This almost forgotten work appeared in 1927, two years earlier than Vile Bodies. Its author wanted to call it Doom, a title not adopted until the 1974 edition. In 1947 it made a brief appearance as My Sinful Earth, and ...”

“... Gerhardie is one of those writers who are periodically rescued from near-oblivion. In 1947, a temporary revival of interest was brought about by the publication of a ‘Uniform Edition’ of his novels, and there was another in 1970, when the same edition was republished with prefaces by Michael Holroyd. Gerhardie himself prefixed to the reissue of his first book, Futility, an important essay called ‘My Literary Credo’, which is unfortunately omitted from the new Penguin Modern Classics reprint ...”

“... but here the truth sounds very like fiction. Hugh Kingsmill was his other model and with him and William Gerhardie he established friendships that made up for some of the deficiencies of family. These writers left their mark on his style, and Gerhardie himself was a splendidly eccentric subject. For the rest, Holroyd ...”

“... is a limitation also in the depiction of people, one that perhaps springs from her admiration for William Gerhardie. It is the Gerhardie of Futility and The Polyglots (Gerhardi, rather, since he had not then added an ‘e’ to his name) of whom one is often reminded. A preference for glancing rather than direct ...”

“... escape, Friar Balbi, but wins over the reader by buttonholing him directly. In The Casanova Fable William Gerhardie and Hugh Kingsmill throw away all these possibilities by transposing the story into the third person, and furthermore adopt a disapproving narrative voice; their odd little book is eventually going to turn into a mock-judicial arraignment ...”

“... first fascinating thing about Beaverbrook is his origins, the second his rise. He was the son of William Aitken, a scholarly, but plodding minister who migrated to Canada from Torphichen in Fife. Young Max’s New Brunswick upbringing was one of paternal ineffectiveness and physical retribution from his mother. A classic non-adapter to school, he was the ...”

“... if helpfully complaisant, philanderer. Among other men she was attracted to, the novelist William Gerhardie proved to have sadistic tendencies which she didn’t enjoy, while the theatre and film director Tony Richardson was so nervous of her that when lodging with the Smiths in St John’s Wood he hardly dared to take a bath. Manning’s ...”

“... of this book, anywhere. They do not appear in the biography of Arthur Machen by Aidan Reynolds and William Charlton, though Peterley Harvest has some vivid pages on Machen. From this biography, published three years after Peterley Harvest, the facts of Peterley’s narrative may be verified. There was, for example, a dinner held in Machen’s honour at the ...”