The two ‘Michaels’ were strange bedfellows, anxious to ‘talent spot’ as many young ladies as they could. Ivens published one of my poems  ‘The Ophelia Syndrome’  in ‘Twentieth Century’; and then gave me several books by Ivy Compton-Burnett and Wallace Stevens to review. I dutifully ploughed through Ivy’s work ( excellent discipline), and then Michael decided to educate me further by introducing me to the work of Thornton Wilder ( I read everything by him), and the incomparable Max Beerbohm.

I’m indebted to Michael for broadening my reading.

Hence, my meeting with William Gerhardie. All part of Michael’s intellectual ‘grooming’ of me, and much appreciated.

‘The furniture struck me as being Continental,  the lighting was dim,the curtains heavy,and in the last two decades of his life, kept permanently down’.

Post Scriptum:

I was introduced to Gerhardie by Michael Ivens, on of the editors of a magazine called ‘Twentieth Century’, which only lasted for a few issues. and was a strange hybrid – part literary ( think ‘The Listener’), part political samizdat, co-edited by another Michael – Wynn-Jones, who was to marry his no-nonsense girlfriend, the soon- to -be cookery writer, Delia Smith.  At this time, she was writing a daily recipe for the Evening Standard.

In fact, I remember eating one too many of her home-made profiteroles at a party round at MW-J’s flat in Elsworthy Street, NW3 on Wednesday, 17th September, 1969. It could well have been their engagement party.

Other guests at the party included : Dennis Hackett, Irma Kurtz,Gay Search and Rowan Ayres. A lot of the guests were part of the Nova  magazine team, where Wynn-Jones, now only twenty-eight, had been a sub-editor.

Nova was a trendy,ground-breaking women’s magazine of the time. Experimental, daring and outre. It tried to capture – or perhaps create – the zeitgeist  of the day. I kept my copies for decades, until they were thrown out.

Literary fashions and reputations come and go with great speed, and often well-known writers – famous in their own time – disappear into obscurity.  One such writer was William Gerhardie, an Anglo-Russian, and  friend of Cyril Connolly and Hugh Kingsmill.  This is a piece I wrote, shortly after meeting him him in 1969. I was introduced to him by Michael Ivens .

‘Just behind Broadcasting House, in Hallam Street, lived the ‘English Chekhov’ – William Gerhardie’.

We visited William in the autumn of 1969 in his grand, cold and faded flat, crammed with books and manuscripts piled  from floor to ceiling . Over the mantlepiece in his reception room, was a large, gilt mirror, which had probably graced a ballroom in Imperial Russia.  William alluded to this fact, and began reminiscing about a beautiful, young dancer who had once lived with him.

Born in St. Petersburg to English parents in 1895, Gerhardie had written several incredible novels in the 1920s. Evelyn Waugh had written with uncharacteristic praise:

‘I have talent, but he has genius’.

In his day, Gerhardie’s work had been massively popular, but he had ceased to write, and now his MSS resided in boxes all around him.  From 1940, he had published nothing, and was now a frail, elderly man.

Against the glowing velvet upholstery and threadbare carpet, William stood tall and erect. He had large, wild eyes, taking in everything. He talked animatedly to us both about other writers, and especially Cyril Connolly, whom he seemed to admire yet be irritated by at the same time.

When Gerhardie shook my hand, on arrival, I took notice of his thin, angular body, bony hands, white hair and taut, almost transparent skin. Yet his mind was alert and youthful.  His friends, including Michael, and the writers Olivia Manning and Michael Holroyd were all doing their best to get his work re-published, possibly with Macmillan’s. In this they succeeded in doing before his death.

However, Gerhardie remained a recluse until then.

Another visitor to his home, Malcolm Muggeridge, recorded his meeting with Gerhardie in an article entitled ‘ The Genius Syndrome’ ( New York Review of Books – April 1982) as follows:

‘I remember thinking that it was more like a suite in a 2nd class hotel than a residence, though he was to live there, becoming ever more of a recluse, until his death in 1977.  The furniture struck me as being Continental. The lighting was dim, the curtains heavy, and in the last two decades of his life, kept permanently down.

Even now, when I see the red  No.82 Metroline bus to North Finchley from Victoria station, my heart lurches a little, and I want to jump on to it  once again, and take that magical 10 mile journey to Martin’s home.

I feel a Betjemanesque joy at the marvels to be seen en route : Lord’s Cricket Ground, the Francis Holland school; the tube stations – St.John’s Wood and Finchley Road. And then my destination : the Refectory pub in Golders Green, where white-suited Martin, is normally sitting outside ( weather-permitting), writing in his Moleskine notebook, and drinking a glass of white wine, while waiting for me to arrive.

Martin is always very punctual. I must’nt be late.

Here is a man straight out of ‘Greeneland’; reminiscent of the foreign correspondent, Fowler, in The Quiet American, or Charles Fortnum, in  The Honarary Consul.( In fact, when Martin told me that he never drank water, I recalled Fortnum making the same remark to Plarr, and I wondered if this was a delightful literary ‘in-joke’ on Martin’s part)!

But to label Martin as a Graham Greene-ish ‘anti-hero’ would be so wrong. So one dimensional. These are just playful ‘nuances’.because Martin is a warmer, kinder and more authentic man

He is also immensely attractive and charismatic; and I was utterly beguiled by him from our first meeting.

An enchantment had begun.

Celine pt.5.

The meeting eventually took place in Meudon. Bob then wrote a piece about it, which was published in the legendary ‘Evergreen Review’, founded by the late Barnet Lee ‘Barney Fosset ( 1922-2012).

The article can be accessed from the ‘Evergreen Review’ archives – made available on their website in October 2013. I presume that the ;ER’ must have sole copyright of Bob’s work.

However, here are some tantalizing extracts:

C: I am almost 67 – in May I shall be 67…to do this torture.the hardest job in the world’.

Gallimard, his publisher, had just published his latest book, North.

BS: ‘There is a great deal of interest in you In America’

C: ‘What interest? Who is interested? People are interested in Marlene Dietrich and insurance – that’s all’.

N.B.  The US- based ‘Evergreen Review’ existed between 1957-73. In its time it published work by Camus,Ferlinghetti, Beckett, Edward Albee,Brecht, Borges, Bukowski, Nabokov, Burroughs et al,

Bob’s sole intention ,while he remained in Paris, however, was to accept Celine’s invitation and  to visit him at his house in Meudon.  But this required courage.

After all, Bob was a Jewish boy from New Jersey; and he was about to interview a virulent and rabid anti-semite.

He was not the only one to be attracted and dazzled by Celine’s remarkable and revolutionary prose style,

Both Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs had made the journey to talk to Celine in his Paris flat before him. He was to be much admired by many American writers in the future.

(Errata: the year Robert Stromberg travelled to Meudon to interview Celine  was early in  1961, not 1962, as written earlier). Celine died later that year), so the interview that he gave to Bob was one of the last ). Also, Bob was born in 1923, so he was 38 when he and Celine met). Apologies for these errors.

Tracking down Louis- Ferdinand  Destouches ( aka ‘Celine’) wasn’t easy, but Bob had been an investigative journalist on WWD, and later for Reuter’s news agency in London; during his peripatetic life ,and  the introductory letter that he sent Celine  must have impressed the writer.

The fact that Bob was American, too, may have been in his favour.

A time and date was arranged, and Bob then travelled to Meudon, ‘on the fringe’ of Paris, as Bob wrote. There, Celine lived with his  wife, Lucette Almanzor, who owned  the house (  three-storey nineteenth century made of wood and mortar),  and about half-a-dozen dogs ‘as near as I could count’.

But before he left for the meeting, Bob read as much by Celine and about the man as he could.  He read ‘Death on the Installment Plan’, which he  admired almost as much as much as ‘Voyage au bout de la Nuit’, and learned as much as he could about the reputation of the man. None of it good.

Meanwhile, he was in Paris for the first time in his life. Walking  the streets taken by Joyce, Dos Passos, E.E. Cummings – and Hemingway, who, conincidentally, was also to die in 1961,  He felt an affinity for the bars and haunts that so many fellow Americans writers had visited before him.  And, of course, he visited Sylvia Beach’s iconic bookshop ‘Shakespeare and Company’ in the rue de l’Odeon.   ‘Mme Shakespeare’, as Hemingway called Sylvia Beach  provided  a haven/salon//mail drop service for a large coterie of writers here at ‘The Quarter’ – a  salon that rivalled, but never surpassed the other great gathering place for writers and painters: Gertude Stein’s magnificent salon-studio in the rue de Fleurus

It is said that when Bob Stromberg came to live in ‘The Village’, that is Greenwich Village, New York, that he had just been sacked as a journalist on ‘ Women’s Wear Daily’, and that he was now planning to become a full-time writer.

Whether or not this was the case, I am not sure. But, he was thirty; it was 1960, and ‘The Village’ was the perfect place to hang out and listen to jazz. Or to become ‘a bum, a loser,a has-been,a schmuck’, as his old man was always calling him.

One thing we do know for certain, is that he lived across the street from the painter, Edward Hopper. We know this because Bob wrote detailed accounts in his diaries from 1960-62 about the comings and goings of Hopper, who was tall, slightly-stooped, and liked to buy his fresh fruit and vegetables from the market stalls every day.

I like to think that Bob may’ve seen that other great ‘Bob’ of the time – Dylan, or Zimmerman by birth, playing in one of the local bars at night.

I do not know if he did, for sure, but I can picture him dressed in a black, roll-necked sweater, being hip and living the existential life of a youngish beaknik.