Gerald Kersh

Gerald Kersh? I hear you say. Who’s that? And part of me doesn’t want to tell you. Part of me wants to keep him a treasured secret to be enjoyed alone by those of us in the know­—members of the Gerald Kersh Fan Club. But you might be surprised to learn that there was a time when Gerald Kersh was one of the highest-paid writers in the country. According to his younger brother, Cyril (a Fleet Street journalist and novelist), Kersh wrote some three thousand short stories—this in the golden age of the form, when prestigious magazines in both the US and UK would pay well for the content. At the time of his first sojourn in the States in 1945, Kersh was getting paid up to $5,000 per short story by publications such as Colliers and Saturday Evening Post, that’s over $80,000 in today’s money. And he’d often joke that when Hollywood bought the rights to his novel Night and the City they’d paid him $10,000 per word (an allusion to the fact that the script bore absolutely no resemblance to his book, and therefore they’d paid him $40,000 merely for the title). His stories came wrapped in various genres—science fiction, horror, crime thriller, Hogarthian comedy—and were often infused with the grotesque or the fantastic; indeed, some of them might easily be regarded as pulp fiction. But Kersh also wrote a handful of novels (Night and the City, Prelude to a Certain Midnight, Fowler’s End, The Angel and the Cuckoo) which were on a grander scale, rich and complex studies of lives led on the fringes of society, often set in the West End of London.

At the heart of Kersh’s writing was a cast of extraordinary characters. In his book I Got References (the closest thing he produced to an autobiography) he says, “…the writer, in producing a Book About People, never knows when to start or stop. There is so much to be said, even about the dreariest of God’s creatures.” But Gerald Kersh’s characters are seldom dreary, nor do they remain silent for long on the page. Characters such as Pio Busto, the landlord of the shocking bedsit-house in Oxford Street, who, according to Kersh, has managed to find some loophole in the Law of Gravity (“I can think of no other reason to account for the fact that his house has not yet fallen down”) and who “…looks like Lorenzo the Magnificent, and sleeps with a savage old dog named Ouif”. These characters come alive before your eyes as soon as they open their mouths, so wonderfully observed is the dialogue with which Kersh animates them:

“First afloor fronta vacant, thirteen bobs. Very nice aroom. Top floor back aten bob, electric light include. Spotless. No bug,” lied Busto.

“Ten shillings. Is there a table in that room?”

“Corluvaduck! Bess table ina da world. You come up, I soon show you, mister.”

Or take Sam Yudenow, the despicable, catarrh-ridden owner of the Pantheon cinema in Fowler’s End (a woebegone mythical area of the city, peopled with thieves and drunkards, coves so desperate that “They’d steal the rings from under their mother’s eyes.”). Yudenow’s vaudevillian entrance opens the novel:

Snoring for air while he sipped and gulped at himself, talking between hastily swallowed mouthfuls of himself, fidgeting with a little blue bottle and a red rubber nose-dropper, Mr. Yudenow said to me : “Who you are, what you are, I duddo. But I like your style, what I bead to stay—the way you wet about applyig for this ’ere job. Dishertive, dishertive—if you get what I bead—dishertive is what we wat id show biz. Arf a tick, please—I got to take by drops.’’

He filled the dropper with some pale oily fluid, threw back his head and sniffed; became mauve in the face, gagged, choked; blew into a big silk handkerchief, and then continued, sighing with relief : “Wonderful stuff. It’s deadly poison. But it loosens the head.”

Anthony Burgess thought Yudenow “as superb a creation (almost) as Falstaff”. So, Kersh was one of those great observers of the denizens of the shadows, a mimic of the demi-monde. A social camera. Like Dickens, right? Well, Copper Baldwin (another of the characters from Fowler’s End) would have something to say about that:

“…don’t give me all that stuff about ’aving met Dickensian characters. I know you ’ave, the same way you’ve met Gloria Swanson, or King George, or Jesus Christ in the Old Kent Road. Give the stinking rabble something to copy — that’s all — and there you are: ‘true to life’, as they say. ’Umbug! People like Dickens aren’t true to life — life’s true to Charles Dickens. And that goes for that poor bastard William Shakespeare, too— though I admit ’e done ’is best within ’is limitations.”

No, Kersh was a raconteur; after all, this is entertainment, not social history. And Gerald could enthral you with a tall tale about almost anything: why the Mona Lisa had such an enigmatic smile (to hide her rotten teeth); circus freaks shipwrecked together on an island; chess grandmasters haunted by dybbuks; possessed ventriloquist dummies (his short story “The Horrible Dummy” was surely the prototype for this popular horror trope); victims of atomic explosions thrown back in time to be mistaken for mermen. One of my particular favourites (and my introduction to Mr Kersh when I was just a kid) is “Sad Road to the Sea”, the vignette of an impoverished tailor at the end of his rope, which is a masterclass in claustrophobic tension. Mind you, he’d had a colourful life to garner those stories from. Born in 1912, as well as writing from an early age, in his time he’d found employment as a debt-collector, all-in-wrestler, cinema manager, sausage salesman, journalist and bodyguard. He served in the Coldstream Guards, and as a war correspondent. It seemed that when the dice rolled well for him, Gerlad Kersh could have glimpses of greatness. In 1945 he wrote the screenplay for the Oscar-winning documentary The True Glory. For many years he enjoyed an extremely successful career as a columnist (under the pseudonyms Piers England and Waldo Kellar), and was considered by some at one stage to be the country’s most talented and prolific writer.

It was, however, a chaotic life. Kersh seemed to be forever chasing a pound-note. Even though he had periods of great success, according to his brother, Kersh was “…not only eternally broke, but always in debt.” He went on Homeric benders, cadged money from his mates, and often slept rough on the benches in Regent’s Park.

Finally, after years of spinning yarns while dodging the taxman and alimony lawyers, it all caught up with him. Gerald Kersh died in November 1968, after a long period of cruel health and crippling debt. It was a tawdry end to a gloriously colourful life. Two years previously he’d had his larynx removed as a result of throat cancer. He was totally dumb immediately after the operation (“A nice turn-up for the Old Raconteur” he comments in a letter from the time), having to learn ‘oesophageal speech’—which he described as “a form of belching in the shape of words”—ironic echoes of Sam Yudenow there. “What haunts me at the moment is a dread that a wasp might get into my breathing pipe!” he said.

I mean to touch on further Kersh connections in future articles here—but for now, I urge you to hunt out his wonderful novels and short stories and see if he’s to your taste. Personally, I don’t know why he’s been so neglected.

I’ll leave you with his brother Cyril’s account of the last visit he paid to Gerald, just before he died (from “A Few Gross Words”, Simon & Shuster Ltd, 1990):

“I went to New York in 1967 and spent the night at Gerald’s house at Cragmoor. It was little more than a shack; quite isolated with sparse and not very good furniture, no television, one room piled with old newspapers, while a small mountain of beer cans dominated the back garden. On the living room table was a loaded revolver: protection, said Gerald, against bears which, when hungry, would break in anywhere. The place was cold and shabby and I had the firm impression that Gerald and Flossie really were on the poverty line, particularly with his small earnings swallowed by horrendous medical costs… Gerald looked remarkably good, if very thin, and, to my astonishment, was able to conduct a normal conversation, even though the words came out as a sort of breathless, gravelly series of hiccups. We talked of family and Fleet Street and old friends, his anecdotes having lost none of their wicked inventiveness… the next morning he took me to the bus stop to see me off… My last sight of him was as he waved and grinned, no longer the upright and confident ex-Guardsman in elegant mufti, but a sad and tired man in a shabby mac.”