Baby Face

John Bayley

• William Gerhardie: A Biography by Dido Davies
  Oxford, 411 pp, £25.00, April 1990, ISBN 0 19 211794 7
• Memoirs of a Polyglot by William Gerhardie
  Robin Clark, 381 pp, £5.95, April 1990, ISBN 0 86072 111 6
• Futility by William Gerhardie
  Robin Clark, 198 pp, £4.95, April 1990, ISBN 0 86072 112 4
• God’s Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age 1890-1940 by William Gerhardie, edited by Michael Holroyd and Robert Skidelsky
  Hogarth, 360 pp, £8.95, April 1990, ISBN 0 7012 0887 2

Who said of whom: ‘I have talent but he has genius’? Evelyn Waugh had been reading Futility, which first came out in 1922, but his favourite Gerhardie novel was to be Jazz and Jasper. This almost forgotten work appeared in 1927, two years earlier than Vile Bodies. Its author wanted to call it Doom, a title not adopted until the 1974 edition. In 1947 it made a brief appearance as My Sinful Earth, and the 1928 American edition was called Eve’s Apples, the American publisher having decided, no doubt wisely, that the word ‘jazz’ had been ‘worn threadbare’ in crossing the Atlantic.