(3 of 5)
In spite of his name (he pronounces it Jer-HAR-di) he is an Englishman whose ancestors were first Italian, then German. He long spoke English with a Russian intonation, for Russian was his first language. He was born in St. Petersburg (Leningrad), because his father ran a cotton mill there. The Gerhardi children were naturally polyglottal; they learned Russian and German from their nurses, French in school, English from their parents. Their Fraulein "used to take the five of us for walks and she dressed us so warmly, tying woolen hoods over our heads, that by the time the fifth was dressed and ready for an airing the first was nearly swooning, and either screamed hoarsely with resentment or choked in his padded coat and fur collar raised over the hood. As a result of this we always caught chills."
Before William was ready to go to an English University, the War broke out. After long and useless attempts to make him into a cavalryman, he seems to have had a pretty good time as a staff officer in Petrograd and Siberia. He got along well with generals, and his poly-glottism came in handy. When the Russian Revolution ruined Gerhardi pere, the family stayed hard up for years; William went through Oxford on £1000. his demobilization bonus. There he looked about him with a quietly superior eye and wrote most of his first book, Futility, which, it was hoped, would retrieve the family fortunes. It was at Oxford that Gerhardi began to be unimpressed by the great ones of the earth. At the Oxford Union he heard Lord Birkenhead ("a bully of genius"), Winston Churchill ("poor stuff for a grown-up man").
Not only socially eligible but estimable, Gerhardi enjoyed meeting the Great, especially when they said nice things to him, which they often did. When potent Lord Beaverbrook took him up, Gerhardi met everybody he wanted to. His carefully loaded anecdotes about them (too long, often too delicate for quotation) rarely miss fire. In common with most rising writers, Gerhardi does not think highly of Author Hugh' Walpole: "It may be truly said that all there is in his books is his own: no divine spark has assisted him."
Candid to the point of indiscretion about his love affairs, Gerhardi, now 36. admits to many, describes his inamoratas but preserves their pseudonymity. One. whom he calls "Nina," he won by "telling the story of the man who cut off his nose while shaving, dropped the razor and cut off his big toe, and in the confusion which overtook him clapped his nose on the stump of his toe, and his toe on his face, so that whenever thereafter he happened to blow his nose, his boot came off. She laughed freely, and felt herself drawn toward me."
Whatever position posterity or his peers may allot him it will certainly be superior to that of Beverly Nichols (who wrote his autobiography at 25). An increasing body of readers have already found him a Most Amusing, if not Most Important, author.
Racketeer Perforce
THE SILVER EAGLE—W. R. Burnett—Dial ($2).*