Posterity

Frank Kermode

  • God’s Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age, 1890-1940 by William Gerhardie, Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky
    Hodder, 360 pp, £11.95, March 1981, ISBN 0 340 26340 7
  • Futility by William Gerhardie
    Penguin, 184 pp, £1.75, February 1981, ISBN 0 14 000391 6

Gerhardie is one of those writers who are periodically rescued from near-oblivion. In 1947, a temporary revival of interest was brought about by the publication of a ‘Uniform Edition’ of his novels, and there was another in 1970, when the same edition was republished with prefaces by Michael Holroyd. Gerhardie himself prefixed to the reissue of his first book, Futility, an important essay called ‘My Literary Credo’, which is unfortunately omitted from the new Penguin Modern Classics reprint. (Futility is the only novel in paperback, another omission that Penguin ought to rectify.) The most recent upsurge of interest has been caused by the posthumous publication of God’s Fifth Column, in the preparation of which Mr Holroyd, sticking to his noble task, has sensibly enlisted the help of a historian expert in the period reviewed by the book.

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