Futility

FUTILITY

WILLIAM GERHARDIE (1895–1977) was born Gerhardi — he added the final “e” late in life — in St. Petersburg, Russia, the son of British parents who owned a cotton mill there. At 17 they sent him to a British vocational college to prepare him for joining the family business. However Gerhardi disliked the school and at the outbreak of World War I enlisted instead. His language skills led to assignment to the British Mission in Siberia, to work on a propaganda campaign aimed at disrupting the Bolshevik take-over of the country after the Russian Revolution (which had ruined his family and forced them to flee the country). Gerhardie’s work earned him an Order of the British Empire at age 24. Upon his return to England, he enrolled at Oxford and soon produced his first novel, Futility, based on his recent experience in Russia. The book won praise from Evelyn Waugh, H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw, Edith Wharton, Graham Greene and others — yet did not sell well. While still at school he wrote a critical biography of Chekhov, the first such appreciation of the writer in English, and still cited by scholars as one of the most perceptive. Several critically praised novels followed, including The Polyglots, Doom, and Pending Heaven, and he became the toast of literary London. He was especially doted upon by press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, who tried, unsuccessfully, to increase Gerhardie’s sales by serializing his books in his newspapers. In 1939 Gerhardie stopped publishing, although for the rest of his life he told friends he was working on a novel called This Present Breath, a tetralogy in one volume. Falling into poverty, he rarely left his London apartment, and when he died there in 1977, no trace of This Present Breath was found.

EDITH WHARTON (1862–1937), the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize, was the author of more than twenty novels, including The House of Mirth, Ethan Frome, and The Age of Innocence.