William Gerhardie’s “Futility” must stand with Jane Austen’s “Persuasion” and Hubert Crackanthorpe’s “Wreckage” high among English fiction’s best single-word book titles. Written while its author was still an undergraduate at Oxford and first published in 1922, “Futility” is precisely what the subtitle announces: “A Novel on Russian Themes.” Its overall tone is distinctly Chekhovian, a mixture of comedy and pathos, suffused with low-key irony. When the American edition appeared, it bore a preface by no less an eminence than Edith Wharton, praising “the laughter, the tears, the strong beat of life in it.”
That description sounds off-puttingly Edwardian and old-fashioned, yet Gerhardie’s novel and its successors — especially “The Polyglots” and “Jazz and Jasper” (called “Eva’s Apples” in the United States before gaining its definitive title, “Doom”) — won a chorus of praise from Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells, Katherine Mansfield, Evelyn Waugh (“I have talent, but he has genius”), Graham Greene and many others. In short order, Gerhardie’s oeuvre embraced satirical novels, an important early study of Chekhov, short stories collected as “Pretty Creatures,” a play titled “Donna Quixote” and even an early autobiography. Nonetheless, after much acclaim, he fell silent in 1939, though he was still only in his mid-40s. When Gerhardie died in 1977, he had been largely forgotten by all but a coterie of admirers.
More from Michael Dirda
Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for The Washington Post Book World and the author of the memoir “An Open Book” and of four collections of essays: “Readings,” “Bound to Please,” “Book by Book” and “Classics for Pleasure.”
He was lucky, however. In 1972, while the old author was still alive, the biographer Michael Holroyd published a 30-page appreciation of his work (later reprinted in Holroyd’s superb collection “Unreceived Opinions”). I happened upon that essay 25 years ago and immediately began to collect and read Gerhardie’s books. They are a bit more ramshackle than I really like, but they share a subdued, often absurdist humor all their own. I copied one sentence from “Doom” directly into my commonplace book: “We refilled our glasses with cognac, after which all things seemed possible.”
“Futility” itself is obviously highly autobiographical, in that it is narrated by a young Englishman who has been brought up in Russia, which was just Gerhardie’s case. Called Andrei Andreiech in the book, our hero finds himself caught up in the operatic Sturm und Drang of the Bursanov family. Initially attracted to the daughters of the house — “the three sisters,” he calls them (echoing Chekhov’s play) — he soon discovers that the home life of Sonia, Nina and Vera is exceptionally tangled. The woman he takes to be their mother isn’t, Fanny Ivanova being, in fact, a former German actress who has been living in sin with their father, Nikolai Vasilievich, for 11 years. Their actual mother ran away with an incompetent dentist, but has resolutely refused to divorce her husband. Hangers-on in the household include, among others, a rather suspicious Baron Wunderhausen who is pursuing Sonia, and a so-called prince nicknamed Kniaz, who simply sponges on the father’s wealth.
Unfortunately, it turns out that Nikolai Vasilievich has been borrowing heavily for years, constantly expecting a gold mine in Siberia to pay off. Moreover, when the novel opens, this middle-aged man has fallen in love with a 17-year-old girl named Zina, to the disgust of his daughters and the distress of the long-devoted Fanny. Naturally, Zina’s family is penniless, so Nikolai Vasilievich is soon supporting her “aunts and uncles, sisters-in-law, second cousins” and a pair of doddering grandfathers, as well as a rather Oblomov-like writer named Uncle Kostia who talks constantly of his work but never puts pen to paper.
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