Feverish Country, This
I’ve slipped here, you’ll note, from speaking of Kersh as a short-story writer to speaking of him as a novelist. There’s a considerable divorce between the two, and for all his facility as a story writer, for all his touches of the grotesque and fantastic therein, it’s in the novel, and as a realist, that his specific genius found full force and strength. Stories often seem to have been taken up rather light-heartedly, perhaps chiefly as a means to pay rent or provide passage for yet another relocation, turned out quickly, one suspects, and sent off virtually as the last page emerged from the typewriter. The novels he appears to have taken more seriously. Again, it is 19th-century models, Kipling early on, Dickens a bit later, to which they invite comparison.
While publication of his third novel, Night and the City, in 1938 brought major attention, it was as a war novelist that Kersh first began earning significant money from his writing and became well known. In these novels he showed a naturalist, almost taxidermic slant quite in contrast to the exoticism and fantastic elements of his short stories.
- They Died With Their Boots Clean (1942)
- The Nine Lives of Bill Nelson (1942)
- The Dead Look On (1943)
- A Brain and Ten Fingers (1943)
- Faces in a Dusty Picture (1944)
Of the last a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement noted: “Once more Mr Kersh’s specialty is the plain, coarse, lively, everyday speeches of the troops, and again there is much to admire in the vigour and skill of his dialogue and in the assurance with which he draws from it an impression of English character or of English idiosyncracies.” Telling dialogue, the manner in which Kersh caught up the usages and rhythms of those about him and in recreating them used them to illuminate caste, milieu and character, was forever his greatest strength. For Kersh, it’s not character, but the way in which one uses language, that is fate.
Like birds that never stray over a mile past their birth tree, some writers pass their entire professional lives working the same territory, circling central themes again and again, grinding the meal down ever finer. Others, generally not to their benefit in this ever-increasingly specialized world (for most publishers, booksellers and readers want to be able to say just what kind of sausage it is they are buying), are all over the place. Beginning with Night and the City, a mystery novel in the American vein unlike any other written before, and with a firm reputation for war books, Kersh went on to turn out Prelude to a Certain Midnight, a mystery novel unlike any other written before or since, before going on to produce intense psychological portraits (The Thousand Deaths of Mr. Small), masculine fiction in the Hemingway mold (The Weak and the Strong), Huxleyian satire (An Ape, a Dog and a Serpent), pulp science fiction (The Great Wash, in the U.S. The Secret Masters), an outstanding historical novel about Saul’s conversion (The Implacable Hunter), and demotic, Dickensian comedies (Fowler’s End).
“I’m sorry, sir, it’s just not done that way,” British bureaucrats and clerks will tell you when you fail to follow form. And so publishers must have said something of the sort to Gerald Kersh; certainly reviewers said it of him. A general, progressive shrinking of literary boundaries was taking place at the time, a kind of degentrification of the profession. The writer could no longer hope to have it all, to be all things to all men, to write across borders; he was expected to settle down at home and cultivate his garden. He must, to start with, for instance, be either a serious writer or a commercial one.
Kersh, like many of us since, failed to see or admit the distinction.
But surely one did not sit down to write a mystery novel and instead stock it with such darting, solid characters as, in a kind of gentle mutiny, to take over the book entirely? And (as if that were not enough) why on earth or in heaven should one choose to employ with great care all the traditional forms of the genre to the express purpose of calling into question the very meaning and significances of that genre? (Care for a game of tennis? But first, let’s have these nets down…)
Observed from afar, Kersh’s career indeed might be seen as one long careen from genre to genre, each shelter in turn blown over by high winds. I’ve used the word facility above. And I wonder if that, with the changing role of the writer, is not another key on the chain.
