Feverish Country, This
If Kersh’s approach at times could be indirect or sidling (“I had this curious story from a gentlemen in the Paradise Bar…”), his engagement with the material was not. One early critic termed his stories “frontal assaults.” Not uncommonly do we come upon such arresting descriptions as that of the wasted, drunken beauty whose eyes have become like “a couple of cockroaches desperately swimming in two saucers of boiled rhubarb,” or of the divan whose springs protrude “like the entrails of a disembowelled horse.” Nor are Kersh’s people often of the nicest sort; he himself spoke of them as having been “quarried” rather than born.
Yet Burgess proclaimed Sam Yudenow from Fowler’s End a comic character on the order of Falstaff. In The Thousand Deaths of Mr. Small, another reviewer asserted, Kersh had created ” a character capable of standing on its own feet beside Wilkins Micawber.” Harry Fabian of Night and the City intrigues us still, sixty years after he first swam into our ken, as do the va-et-vients and divagations of Busto’s rooming-house in The Song of a Flea. And if at first we read for the outrageous stories and sometimes still more outrageous characters, we reread (and Kersh readers one and all, I have found, are veteran rereaders) for quite different reasons: marvelous evocations of down-and-out London; discursions that springboard off some passing observation and continue on marvelously for page after page, pushing all else for the moment aside; startling felicities of language that seem to appear fullblown from nowhere, as though the sentences themselves had burst into flame.
Harlan Ellison, in his introduction to Nightshades and Damnations, offered up a few notes from Kersh’s Greatest Hits.
We hang about the necks of our tomorrows like hungry harlots about the necks of penniless sailors.
A storm broke, and at every clap of thunder the whole black sky splintered like a window struck by a bullet—starred and cracked in ten thousand directions letting in flashes of dazzling light…
...there are men whom one hates until a certain moment when one sees, through a chink in their armor, the writhing of something nailed down and in torment.
Harlan and I alike admire Kersh’s description of a man so characterless as to be all but nonexistent, whose tie is “patterned with dots like confetti trodden into the dust” and whose “oddment of limp brownish mustache resembled a cigarette-butt, disintegrating shred by shred in a tea-saucer.”
Kersh is a master of metaphor in a manner rare among novelists, lashing whole chapters, the creation of entire characters and vibrant scenes, to the scaffolding of what are essentially extended metaphors. Here, for example, is his stunning portrait of a married couple in Fowler’s End, that sinkhole purlieu of London you find by “going northward, step by step, into the neighborhoods that most strongly repel you.”
He was a quick, hideously ugly little man, cold and viscous about the hands, with a gecko’s knack of sticking to plane surfaces. Once, when I went into his shop to buy a handkerchief, Godbolt, telling me that he didn’t have much call for that kind of thing nowadays but thought he had a few in stock, went to get one from a high shelf. It may have been the effect of the fog but I will swear I saw him run up the wall. He had a black-cotton fly of a wife who was always buzzing at him from a distance; she never came within less than five feet of him—for fear, presumably, that he might thrust out a glutinous green tongue and catch her. He was always watching her out of the corners of his horny-lidded, protruberant eyes.
