Feverish Country, This
In I Got References, the collection of stories, sketches and autobiographical snippets that Paul Duncan says may be the closest we’ll ever come as readers to sitting down for a chat with its author, Gerald Kersh writes of his devil-take-the-hindmost childhood. “I achieved notoriety on account of my destructive tendencies. Once, when a tramcar fell over near Acton, I was seized and chastised, as it were absent-mindedly, as soon as the crash was heard.”
This shows, I think, something both of the man’s intense egoism and of his native skill as raconteur. In many ways Kersh continued all his life to be the bad boy of literature. Born early into the new century, some eight years before (as Virginia Woolf has it) human nature changed utterly, he rode in on the last hurrahs of several grand British literary traditions, freelancing articles and sketches to the Daily Mirror and London Evening Standard in Fleet Street, publishing short stories in the many newspapers and magazines for which they were then a mainstay.
This was the heyday of the short story, in fact, and high-circulation, high-profile magazines like Collier’s and the Saturday Evening Post and their counterparts in the UK could provide a fine living. Demand, both there and at lower-paying markets such as John O’London’s Weekly or the pulps that specialized in various forms of romance and adventure, was high; many writers specialized, turning out stories by the dozen and little else. Modernism might have been busily kicking over the traces elsewhere, but here standards remained deeply rooted in nineteenth-century notions of popular literature and the well-made story. Nor, again as in 19th-century writing, had “unnatural” elements been purged, as shortly they would be, in favor of a thoroughgoing realism. Magazines offered up heady blends of exoticism, sea adventures, Wellsian science fiction and moral tales, ghost stories, crime stories.
Here in the States, it’s mostly for his stories, of which he wrote several hundred, that Kersh is remembered when he is known at all. Many of these, though generally given his distinctive stamp, were staple fare for magazine writers of the time: ventriloquist’s dummy stories (“The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy”), Siamese twins stories (“The Sympathetic Souse”), cursed-jewel stories (“Seed of Destruction”), circus- or carnival-folk stories (“The Queen of Pig Island”), stories of possession (“The Eye” and, again, “The Extraordinarily Horrible Dummy”). These might in fact more properly be called tales. The majority have elements of the fantastic; if not of the fantastic, then of the grotesque. Many are built around some central gimmick—what if one Siamese twin were a drunk, the other a teetotaler, for instance—and have a trick or reverse ending, some final revelation that snaps the tale into new focus.
They share, too, another strategy common to older work. Many are framed, i.e., presented to the reader as true stories garnered from obscure documents (the last days of Ambrose Bierce in “The Oxoxoco Bottle”), come upon in journals (a Japanese man thrown back in time by detonation of the bomb over Hiroshima in “The Brighton Monster”), or overheard from others (the truly nightmarish creatures of “Men Without Bones”). Kersh from time to time even steps directly into the doorway of the story, presenting himself under his own name as interlocutor. This convention has the dual purpose of lending formal credibility to a story’s events and, by placing fantastical or highly-charged events at a remove, of softening and safening them—taming the story’s savage heart.
History, the shadow of great events, also looms over Kersh’s stories—Hiroshima in “The Brighton Monster,” the Cold War in “Prophet Without Honor,” the Balkans in “Reflections in a Tablespoon,” slavery in “Fantasy of a Hunted Man”—perhaps as another way of cranking up wattage, raising the game’s stakes. Kersh was, after all, competing vigorously and continuously with hundreds of others for the reader’s (and editor’s) attention.
As a short story writer Kersh largely belongs to that group of writers Anthony Burgess characterized as making literature from the intrusion of fantasy or horror into a real world closely observed. Their tales more often suggest fable or a sort of grand guignol than the plodding naturalism of much modern work, Burgess notes. They are likely to ransack traditions but not to belong, themselves, to any tradition. And while themselves quite “literary,” they play no part in the development of literature: even the most comprehensive histories of English-language literature have no room at the inn for the likes of Saki, John Collier, Mervyn Peake, or Gerald Kersh. This is a type of writer rarely seen today—a type already fading during Kersh’s time.
