William Gerhardie: Futility

I've been reading William Gerhardie's Futility. His first novel, published in 1922, it was a dazzling debut.
Here's how it begins:

And then it struck me that the only thing to do was to fit all this into a book. It is the classic way of treating life. For my ineffectual return to Vladivostok is the effectual conclusion of my theme. And the harbour has been strangely, knowingly responsive. It has sounded the note of departure, and the tall stone houses of the port seem to brood as I walk below, and 'set the tone'. And because of this and the sense that I am marking time till the big steamer comes and bears me home to England I am eagerly retrospective....

What confidence! What dash! What deftness of touch! No wonder the literary world - from Edith Wharton to H.G. Wells, Evelyn Waugh and the young Graham Greene - was bowled over.
In Gerhardie's own description, Futility is 'a novel on Russian themes, depicting a father gathering dependants as his hopes rise and his fortunes sink through four succeeding stages of the Russian social scene; the narrator, an Englishman of Russian upbringing [as was Gerhardie], revealing, against this humorously and geographically changing but tragically unchanging background, the pathos of his growing love for the second of three bewitching daughters.'
Gerhardie followed Futility with the first critical study in English of Chekhov, and the Chekhovian spirit looms large over his novel, the first section of which is even titled The Three Sisters and includes a visit to the the theatre to see that very play. Like Chekhov - though more self-consciously and self-mockingly - Gerhardie inhabits the territory where comedy and tragedy mingle. He is essentially a comic writer, with a startlingly clear-sighted view of the futility of life - in particular Russian life, about which he has no illusions.
The action (or inaction) of Futility is set against the chaos and civil war that ended in the victory of the Bolsheviks over the shambolic White Russians and their various long-suffering alllies. Revolution breaks out, coups and countercoups alternate, cities change hands repeatedly - and all the while the central situation of the father (Nicolai Vasilievich), his complex family and his army of hangers-on remains unchanged, as he and they wait for that elusive turn of events that will restore his fortunes, while the narrator, Andrei Andreiech, nurses his hopeless longing for the beautiful, infurating middle daughter, Nina.
In one remarkable chapter, the narrator gives a cool, unflinching description of the slaughter attendant on a city changing hands following a coup, before shifting the subject of the conversation (he is talking, as he usually is, to Fanny Ivanovna, Nicolai's common-law wife) to the uselessness of the military in general and of one officer in particular...

'It is a consolation,' said she, 'to think that there are other useless people in the world beside ourselves.'
The snow still fell in heaps as I walked home, and it grew markedly colder, and one felt the onset of winter; while prisoners, it was said, were being killed in prison - noiselessly - out of consideration for the Allies in the city.

In a later conversation, near the end of the book, Fanny Ivanovna sums up:

'Life drags on: a series of compromises. And we drag along, and try to patch it up - but it won't. And it won't break. And nothing happens. Nothing ever happens. Nothing happens...'
'When I was very young,' I said, 'I thought that life must have a plot, like a novel. But life is most unlike a novel; more ludicrous than a novel. Perhaps it is a good thing that it is. I don't want to be a novel. I don't want to be a story or a plot. I want to live my life as a life, not as a story.'
'Yes,' she said, pursuing her own thought, 'nothing happens. Nothing...'
The black night gazed through the window. The samovar produced melancholy notes. Tea was getting cold on the table.

Futility is a novel that more than earns its title - all of the action it portrays, on the large and the small scale, is in the end futile. But there is no existential angst here, and the Russian gloom is, as in Chekhov, used largely for comic effect. The futility of life is comic not tragic, and Futility is a novel that lightens the heart and is a joy to read. It sparkles as brilliantly now as it did on its first appearance - though there is a poignancy to reading it now, for Futility was less the beginning of a dazzling career than a precocious flash of brilliance before a slow slide into obscurity. Though some of Gerhardie's later novels were much admired - especially The Polyglots and Doom (also, confusingly, published as My Sinful Earth and Jazz And Jasper) - his reputation was in steep decline by the Thirties and he published no more fiction after 1939's intriguingly titled My Wife's The Least Of It. Gerhardie lived on until 1977, his works were republished, but he remained a nearly forgotten 'cult' writer who had outlived his time and, probably, his talent. But in Futility that talent - Evelyn Waugh called it genius - is shining bright. It is, as H.G. Wells said, 'a wonderful book'.

Treed

Over in Dabbler Country, I am up a tree.

Sorry...

I've been laid low with what is laughingly referred to as a 'cold'. This has drained my vital spirits something shocking and left me in no fit state to blog. However, I am represented historically in the super soaraway Dabbler with a post which might ring a bell with regular readers...

Life, The Universe and Everything

This notion strikes me as rather attractive, perhaps because it's a thoroughly humanising scientific account of the origins of the universe - and it seems to chime with the feeling we all get from time to time (or is it just me?) that perhaps the whole thing is a set-up, someone's idea of a joke. Of course, it begs the question of where these intelligent beings and their original starter universe came from - who made that one? Meanwhile, everyone's favourite genius scientist Stephen Hawking has made up his mind that there's no need for a God to be involved in creating the universe. I don't know quite what he means by 'because there is a law such as gravity' - is gravity a law, and how does its existence mean that the universe can create itself from nothing? He seems to have a strange idea of a 'personal God' too - 'a personal God that you could meet, and ask questions.' I doubt that many believers in a personal God would expect to meet Him and ask Him questions - in fact that God sounds more like the kind of intelligent entity envisaged in the other theory, the 'designer universe' one. And to the question 'Why?' the answer would apparently be 'Because we could'.

'Relationship'

The William Hague imbroglio is sad and faintly nauseating (as against the full-on nauseating Blair memoirs imbroglio) and I've no comment to make on any of it. However, one thing that struck me was Hague's firm statement that he has 'never been involved in a relationship with any man'. Yes, it's come to that - the useful if overworked word 'relationship' has now been so thoroughly sexualised that it no longer needs a qualifier. That too is sad. Those of us - i.e. all of us - in relationships of all kinds with all manner of people that don't involve sex now need other words or qualifiers. Surely this is the wrong way round, as very often sex does not involve any real relationship, whereas real and deep relationships very often - indeed usually - don't involve sex. Strange how mealy-mouthed we can be in these supposedly sexually liberated times.

Singaglonga Kazuo

As I might well have remarked before, in our day all art aspires to the condition of the musical. Or rather almost anything is liable to end up being turned into a musical. Take, for example, Kazuo Ishiguro's fastidious tale of emotional repression below stairs, The Remains of the Day. This, I learnt on the Today programme this morning - though the story's been out there for months - is the latest novel to be adapted for the musical stage (and Ishiguro's more than happy about it). The mind initially boggles at the prospect, but then musicals aren't what they were (more's the pity) in terms of either story or music. With modern 'serious' musicals (yes I mean you, Stephen 'no tunes' Sondheim) nothing happens, and you're likely to leave the theatre humming the programme notes rather than the dreary up-and-down-the-scale recitative that passes for song (naturally I speak from a position of near total ignorance here - c'est mon metier). So, as neither happy-ending storyline nor singalong tunes nor showstoppers are required, almost anything could be grist to the musical mill. Ishiguro's own The Unconsoled could make a terrific night out at the theatre, don't you think? And mining the back catalogue, there must be rich pickings in Samuel Beckett's novels, late Henry James, Proust of course, Virginia Woolf... Any thoughts?

The Perfect Gift

On a bookstall at a local event yesterday, a publication by the National Trust For Scotland caught my eye. It was The Culloden Birthday Book, no less, presumably intended as a souvenir to take home from the battlefield. What better way to commemorate the famous massacre than with a pretty little birthday book? And what better gift for all your Scottish chums? Oddly enough, I didn't buy it. Coming soon - the Ypres Birthday Book? The Somme Birthday Book...?