Fantastic Metropolis

It’s impossible to say to what degree Kersh’s difficulties in later years were in fact precipitated by changing literary tides, to what degree by editorial preconceptions regarding his work and resistance to it on the part of American publishers, to what degree by his egoism and stubborn insistence upon doing things his way. We know, at any rate, from Paul’s biographical sketch, that Kersh had a hard time of it.

Some artists thrive on instability. Hemingway, it was said, required a new woman for each new novel. Others set themselves intricate emotional traps in order to fuel their work. Kersh, instability seems slowly, though progressively, to have undone. To the ever-present fault lines and uncertainties of the freelance life, to market changes and a general decline in the professional’s position within publishing, have to be adduced, first, Kersh’s failure of health, then a horrendously debilitating marriage, his spendthrift nature, a long series of financial setbacks and unrecoupable losses. It was not that Kersh ever stopped writing. Fowler’s End came out in 1957, when his problems were well underway, The Implacable Hunter in 1961. New stories tumbled from him. But fewer and fewer choices remained open. Profligate with his talents from the first, now he sensed their squander. With books such as The Great Wash and A Long Cool Day in Hell he was casting about for firm ground, any firm ground.

For me, “The Queen of Pig Island” will always be a central story in Kersh’s work. This tale of Lalouette, born without arms and legs, and of Gargantua the Horror who cares for her and of Tick and Tack the Tiny Twins, all of them shipwrecked on an island, manages to compress into just over a dozen pages everything that our civilization and our being human entails. “The Queen of Pig Island” is about love, about treachery, about what society is in its deepest heart and about what men choose to be in theirs. I wonder sometimes if in his final months Gerald Kersh might not have thought back to this story, thought again of Lalouette stranded there so far from the civilization she loved, Lalouette who on that island witnessed the worst and best of which her fellow men were capable, Lalouette arduously, painstakingly scratching on paper with the pencil held in her teeth, working to make a record, to get it all down in the last minutes before, forsaken and utterly alone, she dies.