Feverish Country, This
Someone said of singer George Jones that it all came too easy to him, that distinctive sound, the phrasing, song interpretation. What others had to work to develop and achieve, he had at his fingertips. Something of the same might be said of Gerald Kersh. Kersh had from the first a terrible facility. He could do anything, it seemed: bring characters to life with one quick phrase, open up their hearts to our view with what they said or avoided saying to one another, show the pettiness, cruelty and wayward kindness aswarm in the anthills of each of us. He could write beautifully, in ways that all but stopped the reader’s breath. And he could write knowingly—he was, after all, a soldier—of true ugliness, real horror, of despair that has no past, no future.
Kersh was also a writer of great energy and ambition. Paul Duncan tells us that he often worked night and day with only a couple of hours of sleep, and that eventually this took its toll in regular collapses. One suspects that as time went on Kersh may have leaned a bit heavily on both that energy and on his native facility, expecting them to carry him. “Abundant energy,” “exhuberance,” “imaginative intensity,” “pounding creative energy”—these are the sort of phrases one encounters again in contemporary reviews of Kersh’s work, just as one encounters, invariably, mention of his prolificacy. And in fact critical opinion seems rather early on to have cast itself and hardened about those notions.
“Just why is Mr. Kersh such an infuriating writer?” the Sunday Times asked upon publication of Kersh’s collection Men Without Bones.
Because… we have all been charmed or surprised or shocked at one time or another… by Mr Kersh’s energy and expertness; but with each book there has been less of the writer whose promise we hallooed and more of the casually professional huckster of trinkets and tricks… There was a time when he looked to have the chance of becoming a Kipling or a Huxley; all we have now is a kind of poor man’s Orson Welles of the short story.
Phrases such as “ingenuous and tortuous brilliance” or “a brilliant mess” appear ever more frequently. Anthony Boucher spoke for many, critics as well as readers, in his review of Kersh’s effort at a science fiction thriller (The Secret Masters):
The relatively quiet but incisive and suspenseful opening portions of the book are first-rate Kersh, richly peopled with the odd bit roles he sketches so well and written with style and individuality. The large scale melodrama which develops later is as banal and dated as it is overwritten and incredible.
One of the most thoughful assessments, speaking to Kersh’s many strengths as to his weaknesses, came via the Times Literary Supplement upon publication of The Song of a Flea in 1948.
Mr. Kersh is at once the delight and despair of his admirers. He is their delight because he is one of the comparatively few living novelists in this country who write with energy and originality and whose ideas are not drawn from a residuum of novels that have been written before; he is their despair because the lack of restraint which makes him such a welcome relief in one direction leads him to all sorts of imperfections in another.
Anthony Burgess, however, rather famously in his 1961 review of The Implacable Hunter, took to task the sad and arbitrary state of Kersh’s reputation.
Too many critics affect to mourn a dead talent in Gerald Kersh, a gift that died with his boots clean; there has been a tendency to ignore or disparage his later work, patronise, sigh, and pretend to nostalgia for the tremendous Nelson.
I can’t see why. I read Fowler’s End in darkest Borneo, at a time when it was hard to laugh, and considered it to be one of the best comic novels of the century, with Sam Yudenow as superb a creation (almost) as Falstaff.
Many total and partial rereadings have strengthened this conviction. We may adjudge Mr. Kersh, after reading The Implacable Hunter, to be now at the height of his powers.
