The OGQ

OLD WRITERLY WOUNDS

by Sameer Pandya

As a reader, I have always wondered if writers spend their careers—over one book, across many—working through and turning over a singular moment, a primal scene, an idea, a trauma. Through the act of careful reading, we witness a mind at work, picking and prodding, examining a moment from multiple angles, maybe changing their minds about their relationship to that moment. Perhaps they may never be aware of the wound as they are writing, providing one line of inquiry for the critic. (As I realized after years of reading V.S. Naipaul, he certainly has a lot of dad issues and is terrible when it comes to women.) Or perhaps writers become aware of it when they see that they are returning to it over and over again, in different iterations and forms.

Over a decade ago, I was walking through the Willem de Kooning retrospective at MOMA. Even in my very limited understanding of his work and of abstract expressionism, I knew that I was strolling through a remarkable lifetime of work, from his earliest paintings to his late period when he was suffering from Alzheimer’s. I remember thinking then that de Kooning, and us by extension, were fortunate in that he had a lifetime of work, that he had moved from one artistic period to the next, from one great idea to another. I think about this in the context of Ralph Ellison, a novelist I have always greatly admired. As it is well known, he published Invisible Man in 1952 and spent the rest of his life working on a follow up, which he still had not published upon his death in 1994. What if things had been different for him? How would the metaphor of invisibility have changed in his writing over the years? Would he have moved on to something else? What could have been late style Ellison?

De Kooning and Ellison are remarkable artists. I am simply a guy fortunate enough to get to write books. But lately, I have been thinking about the things and ideas I have returned to over and over again. There are the sad men and the women who have to hold them up. There is the liminal space of racial brownness. There is the complexity of family life, of being a child, of parenting those children. But there is one thing that I have paid particular attention: the clusterf*&% that is contemporary masculinity.

I lived in India until I was eight, in an extended family that was heavily shaped by Gandhian notions of austerity and nonviolence. That is one model of masculinity. We then arrived in California, a state premised on the idea of making it. Another model. Over a collection of stories and now two novels, I have always been concerned with Indian American men managing and balancing these impulses. What does it mean to make money and be successful. What are the pleasures? And of course, what are the pitfalls?

In my latest novel, Our Beautiful Boys, I directly engage with the idea of living in the shadow of Gandhian nonviolence, while actually living in the bright light of a moment when our lives seem to be saturated in small and large moments of aggression and violence. What does it mean to stand up to it and what does it mean to walk away? My book has, of course, my sad men and race and family life. And that deeply un-Gandhian of sports: American football. And all this refracted through a bit of humor, which we all need in this moment.

TRUMAN CAPOTE’S FIRST LOVE

by Robert Hass

Thanks to Robert Hass and, especially, to Michael Judge, poet and publisher of The First Person with Michael Judge, for allowing us to reprint this essay by Robert Hass. It appeared originally on Judge’s Substack on January 9.

PILGRIMAGE: A  VISIT TO BREECE D’J  PANCAKE’S HOMETOWN

by Lindsey Steffes

Years ago, while waiting for a fiction workshop to start, a classmate slipped a book into my hands: The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake. I sat for a moment, staring down at the unassuming cover, cream-white with a drawing of a fox head. I remember thinking, what a strange name for an author. And I remember blushing because the book had been a gift—from an older, good-looking PhD student whom I had spent the semester trying to impress.

I read the stories that same night, feeling haunted by Pancake’s depictions of life in rural Appalachia, by his characters’ longing and loneliness, and by the fierce loyalty he seemed to have to the place he called home, a small town called Milton, West Virginia.

A decade later, on a 14-hour road trip through the Appalachian Mountains, it occurs to me that I might be close to Milton. I hadn’t set out to see Pancake’s hometown. I hadn’t even thought of it. At a gas station, I search for Milton and am shocked when it pops up, only a few hours away. The site of his childhood home is a minute off I-64.

I feel a pang of sadness thinking I would have driven right by it—and how that speaks directly to one of Pancake’s themes: being overlooked or left behind. One of his wider-known stories, “Trilobites,” which was published in The Atlantic in 1977, follows a young man named Colly, who seems to stand still as life moves on around him. Following his father’s death, his family stands to lose the farm. He pines for and resents an old high school girlfriend, Ginny, who returns from Florida for a short visit and perhaps reminds him of all he cannot have. A future. Escape from this town.

The longing and the language of this story are so powerful I feel I have been here before we pull off the interstate. Milton is a working-class town of less than 3000. There’s a main street of fading brick buildings that reminds me of the main street back home in rural Wisconsin. It’s Easter—the town is quiet, and the Wendy’s that now stands at the site of Pancake’s childhood home looks spotless, brand new.

I order a Frosty twist at the counter, tempted to ask the teenage cashier about Pancake. I can’t be the first person to ask; he has a cult following and might be the most famous person from Milton. At the same time, I feel embarrassed. I worry about holding up the line—older women in pastels who’ve come straight from church.

I idle in the Wendy’s. My partner drives me down the road to the main street where “Trilobites” is set. I stand in front of the building that used to be the café featured in the story. I think of Colly and his dead father’s mug that hangs from a hook in the storefront. I rub a space clean on the glass, hoping to catch a glimpse of it. The building’s empty.

The cemetery sits on a hillside overlooking the town. Down below a church sign reads: “Luke 24:6 He is not here but is risen.” I wander around, but my partner finds his grave right away. He calls me over. There’s a tails-up quarter (Florida) on the flat grave marker. Two dandelions grow at the perimeter. Looking at the dates I realize it’s been 44 years and one day since Pancake died by suicide. I have a creeping sensation that I have arrived too late.

The eeriness of the date and the church sign remain with me long after we pull back onto the interstate. I think of the Wendy’s and the empty café and Pancake growing up in this place—of his characters’ loneliness and desire to leave, and his own desire to return.

In a letter to his mother, Pancake wrote, “I’m going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There’s something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I’ll never really be able to leave for good until I find it.”

I have always been drawn to stories with a strong sense of place and to writers whose words feel like artifacts. Returning to these stories feels like returning to Milton and to a state of yearning for something that feels just out of reach.

I cannot overstate how much these stories affected me as a reader and writer. My first novel, Gichigami, which will be published this March, takes place in a rural town on the frozen shores of Lake Superior and features the kind of people that might’ve had their own mug hanging at the local diner, or who may have come to Wendy’s straight from Easter mass.

When people ask why I wrote about this setting, it is hard for me to answer. I grew up wanting to leave the small Wisconsin town I had been raised in, and eventually I did. Writing about rural Wisconsin—the people I missed, the remote places, the rugged beauty—was a way of returning to it and perhaps accessing some part of myself that I had left behind or assumed I’d lost for good.

INTERTWINING PERSONAL & PUBLIC HISTORIES:
AN INTERVIEW WITH LYNNE THOMPSON

by Lynne Thompson

Lynne Thompson’s fourth book, Blue on a Blue Palette, reads like a master class in how to put together a collection. Using visual art as its central metaphor, the book blends retablos, the enslaved rebellion on Berbice, store-room sex, the Pandemic, aging, Breonna Taylor, Elizabeth Short, and Joni Mitchell into a seamless whole. Thompson accomplishes this with virtuosic forms: footnote poems, centos, free verse, and a form she believes she invented: centoums. The book highlights the shades of women’s lives–sometimes joyful, sometimes dirgeful, always against a background of blue. I was taken by the range of subjects in this finely-wrought collection, and by the amount of research that went into the book, so Lynne and I met over Zoom to discuss it.

______________

Laura Wetherington: We worked together in UNR Tahoe’s low residency MFA program. When Matt Franks and Patrick Hicks gave talks on their work, I asked something about research. You came up afterward and said that we should talk. So I’m really glad to be here with you now and able to ask you about what research you’ve done in your poetry writing. You’ve published four books, which means that you’ve had a lot of time to really kind of stretch and grow. So can you talk a little bit about the evolution of your research process?

Lynne Thompson: As you asked me that, I’m thinking of a poem in my first book, “The Van Dyck,” which was kind of a falling into research that I hadn’t planned. My parents came to the U.S. from the West Indies and they came separately through Ellis Island. The Ellis Island records are all digitized, so if you know the name of your grandfather or great grandmother or whatever and they came through Ellis Island, you can find their records. In the case of my dad, among the many records, they had a record about the ship. They knew the name of the ship, so I started to just kind of do a little research into when it sailed and where it sailed from. It turned out that this ship would travel between South America, Barbados and New York every two weeks. It did that for five years before it was decommissioned. World War Two broke out and it was recommissioned. It turns out its first assignment was to evacuate the Jews in Narvik, Norway. The Nazis found out about it, torpedoed the ship, and to the best of my knowledge, that ship is still at the bottom of the sea. The reason we know that is because they had a hearing in the London courts. That’s how I found out the information and I was able to write the poem from that bombing backwards to when it picked up my dad in Barbados. But that was all because the information was available, I just had to dig for it. So that really kind of propelled me into recognizing how valuable little snippets of information accessed through research can be.

LW: Do you feel like there’s been an evolution from your first book and you are doing something different now or…?

LT: I still like to fall into things. I often don’t plan specifically, but maybe I have a kernel of an idea and then I start Googling and reading and that just pulls me through, like a thread. I wouldn’t say the process has changed necessarily, although I’ve learned new tools and new ways to do the research and the writing. But I think part of it is being a lawyer by training that makes me want to dig into the facts and ask, how do I make it fit together? I think those two concepts dovetail to make a poem.

LW: Can you say a little bit more about your legal training and how that has prepared you to write poems?

LT: Yeah. I mean, there’s a difference. A lawyer tries to persuade, whereas a poet is really trying to dig into your emotions and not necessarily persuade you, but to present something that’s going to impact you emotionally. But they’re both about language; they’re both about the best words in the best order. They’re both about telling a story, whether you’re a criminal attorney or you’re a corporate attorney, or if you’re a litigator, which I was. You’re trying to tell the most convincing or the most effective story: the most convincing if you’re a lawyer and the most affecting if you’re a poet.

I was just looking at an exercise, as a matter of fact, that I got from the amazing Ellen Bass. She was talking about word lists and how that takes you down a rabbit hole into your own poem. And she was saying that she was doing a word search in Brigit Pegeen Kelly’s book, The Orchard. And she found dragon, heaven, split, honey, swollen and those took her off into her own poem.

In both areas, law and poetry, which have no other synergy perhaps, they have the basic synergy that they’re both about language.

LW: Moving from litigating to painting, I think about the title of your most recent book, Blue on a Blue Palette, and how it hints at ekphrasis. How did you make your way to this through-line for the book and can you say something about how the title works as a kind of operating principle for what’s inside?

LT: A friend of mine said while I was Poet Laureate of Los Angeles and not writing as much, “This is a good time for you to put together a book if you have enough poems.” And I had a big stack of poems that I thought could be book-worthy, but they weren’t written as a book. One of the things I noticed as I went through them was how often either the Blues or the color blue was referenced in the poems. I was a little surprised. Blue’s not necessarily a favorite color of mine. And so that was balanced against the fact that a lot of the poems were about women. Their rage, their joys, their sexuality, their aging, their religious and spiritual feelings, all of that was kind of arrayed on this blue palette. I am totally title-challenged, but this just came to me.

LW: ‘Title-challenged’? I mean, it’s hard to imagine that by looking at the table of contents.

LT: Well, maybe I’m learning over time. You can teach an old dog new tricks. My first book was originally titled The Open Hydrangea Box. And my editor at Perugia said, “But what does it mean?” And I said, “Well, I don’t know, but isn’t it lovely?” She said, “OK, lovely. But you know, it’s got to fit somehow.” So it is something that I give a lot of thought to because I do feel a little insecure about titles. But thank you for that compliment because I do struggle with it.

LW: Well, maybe that struggle means you’re putting a lot of attention into it. It shows. But also I’m the kind of person who would read a poem called “Open Hydrangea Box” and think “That’s beautiful. I don’t know what it means, but I love it.”

LT: Yeah, that’s what I was hoping I could get away with. It ended up being Beg No Pardon, which actually for the collection is a much better title.

LW: I’m thinking about the notes section in the back of Blue on a Blue Palette and how it’s a reading list. I mean Ai, Ruth Stone, Kwame Dawes. Is reading poetry a form of research to you? Do you think about it that way?

LT: I haven’t until now. But now I will give that some consideration. When I do workshops, I say: “You know, the days when you feel like you’re not writing? If you’re reading, you’re contributing to your writing process.” So I like to read as broadly as possible: science, recipe books, anything kind of out of my wheelhouse, but I read widely, especially for the language that I can get from it, that’s going to really deepen the poem’s meaning.

One of the poems you’ll notice in here uses the phrase “Stephanotis floribunda” to refer to flowers and I wouldn’t have known that, but I had a book with all these Latin terms for flowers and I thought, OK, there’s got to be something in here. Reading is crucial on many levels that can feed your own work. And also with poetry, what are other poets doing out there? What’s occupying people’s thoughts? To me if you fail to do that, you miss an opportunity to deepen your own work. And you may not read what I want to read, but you’ve got to read something.

LW: That’s right.

LT: So I do consider that part of the process, because I like finding little kernels of facts and going down that rabbit hole to see, is this something I can use in some way? Maybe I’ll throw out 80% of it, but that 20%, man, it can be so, so rich.

Oh, and the other part is that this is a book where I wanted to honor and highlight people like Kwame and Ai, my literary forebearers. In the case of “Assemblage”, which is honoring the artist Betye Saar, I mean, she’s just a heroine. The woman is 95 and she is still working in the studio. I think that persistence is a crucial part of the creative process.

LW: Do you feel like there are people in Blue on a Blue Palette that a reader would not see? Like, either influences or references that are not in the notes, but like, here’s somebody who’s really deeply influenced this?

LT: Yeah, I mean, either would not see or perhaps have forgotten. That’s why I wanted to do the Joni Mitchell poem because I have a lot of nieces and nephews under 40, and they’re like, “Who is this Joni Mitchell person?” I’m in my head, I’m thinking, “How could you not know that?” But they’ve got their own people and their own music, and that’s fine. But I want to just put a little kernel there for them, just a little nugget that if they’re curious enough, they’ll go and say, “OK, yeah, I know those songs. I’ve heard them but I didn’t know she was the person,” right?

So, to highlight, to honor, to just feel like I’m in an actual conversation, with Terrence Hayes and Diane Seuss by writing a cento incorporating lines from their work. I purposely didn’t want to do a sonnet because the two of them are like the reigning king and queen of the American sonnet, right? So I came up with essentially a form that I’m calling a centoum because it’s a cento in a pantoum form, which was my way of saying, “Let’s invent something new” in the way that they invented something new.

LW: Yeah, I love that. I love that! And I think there are so many forms in this book. Pantoums, villanelles, centos, but also just the form of the perfectly shaped tercet that runs the page, or the couplets. And rhetorically we could think about anaphora or call and response. And I wonder if you could talk about when the formal elements develop in your process? The beginning or the end?

LT: It could be both. It has been both. Sometimes I recognize it early on. Sometimes in the revision process I think, “Gee, what if I tried X?” I did purposely want there to be a lot of forms as a metaphor for the many forms in which women present themselves as mother, sister, daughter, doctor, lawyer, minister. I’m not sure it’s always as clear, and I’m not sure I was as clear early on, but I just recognized that this was a book where these different forms would fit into the whole I was trying to craft.

LW: Yeah. And is there a connection for you between these forms of women and also the forms of blue or of ekphrasis or the Blues.

LT: Yeah, I think that was why when I found the Cornelius Eady quote, I said, “Oh my God, this is just—this is so perfect. This is exactly what I’m trying to say: ‘Some folks will tell you the Blues is a woman.’ Alright, I’m good.” That’s exactly right.

I tried to put joy in where I could, but the fact is that especially now, where many of us feel that women are being undermined, marginalized, physically abused, murdered. Yeah, that’s the Blues, you know, that’s really the Blues. So, it is a form of ekphrasis I guess, although not for a specific piece in most cases. “Assemblage” is composed of titles of Betye Saars’ work to tell a biography of women. But other than that I don’t think there’s a specific reference to any piece of work. Actually, that’s not true: “Torch to Shogun” refers to John Bigger’s piece, Shotgun, Third Ward, #1.

LW: I want to end by asking a question about research that’s kind of messy, so forgive me, but I’m thinking about the line between fiction and nonfiction because in the three-genre track in an MFA program, these are categories that get pulled apart and siloed. But as a poet, I’m always thinking about the continuum between fiction and nonfiction within poetry. And as I was reading your book, I was thinking about how some of the poems are historically rooted. Right? Like “A Rage in Berbice 1763.” Which is rooted in fact, right? But it’s also told from a first-person perspective, from a kind of persona. So there’s fact and fiction there.

And then also something like “A Birth Mother Wears a Costume her Daughter Will Never Fit Into” which, I hope that you’ll forgive me, but after reading Fretwork I thought of as like—not the facts of it, but the feeling of it—maybe as something autobiographical, but deeply, deeply imagined. So here’s another angle with fact and fiction. And then, you know, there’s this other category of poems, I think, which are even more non-fictionally autobiographical, because there’s a narrator reflecting on real life events, like the killing of Sandra Bland in “Boketto.” So I guess I’m wondering how you think about fiction and non-fiction operating in your poetry and how that connects to research.

LT: I think the great thing about poetry, and maybe why I gravitate to it as I do, is that you can take something like the events depicted in “A Rage on Berbice, 1763” that was based on a book called Blood on the River, about the actual slave rebellion on Berbice, now Guyana. The book was written by a Dutch woman who found records in a library in Amsterdam. I had never heard of this, and so many people have said, “Lynne, how did you find out? I said, “I found out because she found out”—about this slave rebellion that went on for over a year, and she had this one sentence that stood out that was the genesis of the poem: “While the great majority of leaders were male, a few female counselors exerted crucial leadership early on in the rebellion.”

And so even though this story that I’m telling in this poem isn’t specifically described in the book, I wanted to give those women a voice, and I couldn’t figure out how to do it without putting an “I” in the middle of it so that readers could be there with those women and what they experienced, and to realize those women produced the generations that are telling you this story today. So that was one poem where it was very clearly based on her research and that one sentence. With respect to the birth mother poem, I am always trying to figure out a way to talk about the family in ways that are not so specific so that the reader can identify with the poem’s themes.

“Boketto” was very much born of a need to say the name of people who have been murdered by the police, particularly women. I never bought the story that this woman who was on her way to a new job, got stopped by the police, put in jail, and that made her commit suicide. The family was adamant that they didn’t believe it—and neither did I. And so I just wanted to say to her and readers: If the police were to stop me, I would never give in to them as I don’t believe she gave in, but ultimately paid the price.

And I combined this concern with a word I found in the book Lost in Translation by Ella Frances Sanders which has words like “boketto” that have no corollary in English. Hmm. So I was thinking of Sandra Bland and also thinking, as we all do when we’re writing poetry, “How can I pump this up linguistically” and I’ve always liked that word. I think it’s fabulous, and then to give it the weight of saying, “If you’re doing this while you’re black, you might have a problem. You’re just bopping down the street. What the heck, you know, OK, give me a ticket. Because the police officer said she didn’t signal. OK, that’s a ticket. How do I end up in jail?”

Also, this poem reflects the early influence of Natasha Tretheway, i.e., looking for public histories to intertwine with personal histories. How can we make that juxtaposition so that it broadens how the two histories are understood. Patricia Smith, who’s a dear friend of mine, said whatever you want to write about, every poet on the planet wants to write about. George Floyd or January 6th are good examples. How are you gonna find a way into these public concerns that’s a little more unique. So rather than writing specifically about Sandra Bland, I put myself in that situation, getting stopped by cops. A judge says, “How do you plead?” And being a lawyer helped.

LW: Well, I think that’s one of the beauties of that poem is that everyone’s going to know who Sandra Bland is, and so this part of the context is there. And then you’re able to kind of go into your own space and it’s deeply moving.

LT: Yeah. Ask yourself, what would you do in that situation? How would you respond?

LW: Yeah. I think you’re asking a rhetorical question here, but I also recognize that I don’t have an answer, and I think this is part of what makes your book so deeply engaging. I want to thank you for taking the time to talk to me about Blue on a Blue Palette, which I hope moves into many, many readers’ hands.

LT: I’m so honored that you wanted to do it, Laura. I am glad that you found much to like in the book.

Lynne Thompson was the 4th Poet Laureate for the City of Los Angeles. The daughter of Caribbean immigrants, her poetry collections include Beg No Pardon (2007), winner of the Perugia Press Prize and the Great Lakes Colleges Association’s New Writers Award; Start With A Small Guitar (2013), from What Books Press; and Fretwork (2019), winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize, and most recently, Blue on a Blue Palette (2024). A lawyer by training, Thompson sits on the boards of the Los Angeles Review of Books and the Poetry Foundation, is the former Chair of the Board of Trustees at Scripps College, her alma mater, and was recently elected president of the Cave Canem Foundation. She facilitates private workshops, most recently for Beyond Baroque, Poetry By the Sea Conference, Moorpark College Writers Festival, Napa Valley Writers Conference, and Central Coast Writers’ Conference. Thompson is a native of Los Angeles, California, where she resides.

Laura Wetherington is a poet living in Reno, Nevada. She teaches with the International Writers’ Collective and the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe Low-Residency MFA. Her latest publication is Little Machines.

“HANK” FROM ALL THE NUNS ARE DEAD

by Sandra Scofield

We’re delighted to share a work-in-progress from staffer Sandra Scofield. She shares the following by way of introducing this chapter from the novel All the Nuns are Dead.

Set in 1950’s Texas, a young mother, Margit, longs for something greater than the poverty she knows, both for her and for her precocious daughter, Penelope. Margit stumbles into Catholicism, which opens the doors of education to her child, and inspires her to better herself as well.

Wichita Falls, Texas, 1950

One day in October a young man came in to buy cigarettes at the drugstore, but Mr. Charles didn’t stock them. The man bought toothpaste and a package of bandaids, and said, “Fine day!” to Margit at the register. A few days later he was in again to have a cup of coffee at the counter in the back. Margit was just finishing her lunch, and from his perch on a stool he tried to start a conversation with her–the weather, a current movie she knew nothing about–but she had to get back to the register and she cut him short, politely. A week later, as she was leaving at three, he was standing on the sidewalk in front of the store, waiting for her. He looked nice in flannel pants, a checked shirt and twill jacket. His hair fell across his forehead. He said hello and introduced himself as Henry Borden. “Nice day,” he said. “And it’s Hank, actually.” Margit nodded. She felt a bubble of excitement. When he tried to engage her with small talk yet again, though, she said as politely as she could that she didn’t have time to talk. “I have to pick my daughter up at school.”

“That castle on the next block?” They could see the convent from where they stood. She began walking toward it. He fell into step with her. She didn’t want him to follow her, but she just kept walking, saying nothing, not looking at him. He walked beside her, with ample room between them. At the school there were kids and parents all over the place. She moved past him. “See you!” he said as she walked away, but she didn’t look back.

Two weeks passed and there he was again in the drugstore. She was at the two-seats booth in the back corner, and he slid in across from her. “All I want is to introduce myself to the prettiest girl I’ve seen since I can remember.”

He had just had a buzz cut, and there was a white line along the edges of his hair. He was dressed neatly in pressed slacks and a crisp long-sleeved shirt. They were in a drugstore, for heavens sake. “So go ahead,” she said.

He was a salesman for a flooring company owned by his parents; their showroom was not far from the pharmacy. He said, “I’d like to invite you to dinner or a show, or whatever you want to do. I’d like to get to know you. You aren’t wearing a ring, so I figure you’re single. I’m a good guy. I know you’re Margit, hard G, I never heard that name before.”

She sighed. “It’s German. You seem very nice, Mr. Borden, but I don’t have time to date. I take my daughter home from school and make supper and the next day I come back to work.” She wasn’t quite looking at him, but she saw that he was wearing a tie with a tiny duck embossed on it.

“Well, there’s the weekend, and I know you don’t work on Saturday.”

“Sorry,” she said, getting up. She had an urge to touch the ridiculous little duck.

“And it’s Hank,” he said. She smiled; he was a customer, after all.

Weeks went by, and she was surprised to catch herself watching for him, but he didn’t come the rest of the Fall. On Tuesday the week after Christmas, he showed up again, waiting for her when she came out of the store at three. She shivered as cold wind hit her and she pulled her cloth coat tighter. He stepped toward her.

He had had a brutal haircut, and she could see pale skin above his ears. It was oddly affecting; she could imagine touching him there. “There’s a circus in town,” he said. “Eye-talians. My brother took his kids. It’s more acrobatics than animal stuff. Small. Their last show is Sunday afternoon. I’d like to invite you and your daughter. I’ll pick you up and have you home by dark.” He looked harmless, friendly. Maybe he was like her, stuck in a rut. Penelope had never been to a circus. Actually, neither had Margit. She smiled, nodded, and told him her phone number; he wrote it down on a small pad of paper from his shirt pocket. He called that evening.

When he came to pick her and Penelope up on Sunday, her mother’s day off, Margit made introductions quickly and led the way out the door. She had told her mother that Hank was a friend of her boss, Mr. Charles. She didn’t leave time for any conversation once Hank arrived. He was shy with Frida, ducking his head and speaking softly.

When they returned that evening, Hank walked her and Penelope to the door. She thanked him, her hand on the knob, and waited briefly for him to realize he wasn’t going to be invited in. At the last minute, she kissed him on the cheek quickly, and stepped inside and shut the door.

Frida was in her pajamas on the couch, reading a magazine. Penelope ran to tell her about the circus–there had been amazing acrobats and rings of fire. A huge dog that walked on its hind legs. Costumes that shone like mirrors. A Black man juggler! Margit told her daughter she needed to wash up and go to bed immediately. She told Frida she was bushed, kissed her cheek, and went to check on Penelope. She thought her mother would want to know more about Hank, but on Monday they had supper together, and neither of them mentioned him. Frida wasn’t asking, and Margit wasn’t telling. Not that there was anything to say.

Hank was waiting just outside the pharmacy door on Tuesday, just after New Years Day. He said, “Happy New Year, Margit. I hope this is the year I get to know you.” He grinned.

Margit noted that he was a little pudgy, a man who would run to fat. She politely told him she had something to do at the school that day. She still wouldn’t accept a ride. She didn’t want her mother to meet him again; she didn’t want to have to explain him. She didn’t want him to think he had bought any rights with his circus tickets. Then it was Thursday and sleeting. He came in, stood close to the register, and said, “The car is just outside. I’ll keep it warm.”

It was winter, cold with lots of sleet and snow and heavy clouds and sometimes winds you thought might knock you down. On Tuesdays and Thursdays Hank met her at the store, walked with her to meet Penelope, and drove them home. He came in for a visit, not too long. The first time, Margit said right away that she didn’t have the makings or the energy to invite him to supper. She was going to offer to make coffee at least, but he laughed and said, so let’s get hamburgers, and they did. The next time, Penelope ran straight out to play with Libby next door, and Margit made coffee. She and Hank sat at the table. They talked about the weather, and after a while, about their families. She told him her father had died when she was a little girl. She talked about the farm in Oklahoma, her mother’s folks. No indoor plumbing, no running water, but family loved to visit. Her grandfather could usually be coaxed into telling some outlandish story about weather and pigs. There was always pie. Margit had lived on the farm for a long time after her father’s death, while Frieda trained as a nurse. At first she had been too young for school, so she mostly spent her days following her grandmother around, clutching her big skirt. Later, two daughters of Frida’s sister, Louise, had lived at the farm, too, after their own father’s fatal heart attack, and had gone to Devol Elementary School. Her grandparents were called Rightmama and Daddy K, for Keller. Hank followed Margit’s talk with an earnest gaze, and then he said his mother’s parents were in Burkburnett, living in a refurbished garage behind his aunt’s house. His father’s parents lived in a bungalow at the back of Hank’s parents’ house here in town, and that grandmother took in sewing, mostly for little girls. They were all interchangeable, he said: Methodists, tight-lipped and stingy. None of them had any use for storytelling or affection.

It was all news neither one needed, but they relaxed, feeling better than strangers; and Margit felt a ripple of sympathy for Hank, who didn’t seem to have much affection in his life.

She said nothing about the father of her daughter, and Hank didn’t ask.

He was neither short nor tall. Neither fat nor thin; a little soft. He had nice hazel colored eyes and a dimple in his chin. He spoke quietly, almost hesitantly sometimes. Their conversation was almost all questions and answers. Which schools they attended. What movies they liked. Could he cook? Could she drive? Had she ever been across the border? She thought of asking him what he read but didn’t, because he didn’t seem like a reader, and she didn’t want to put him on the spot.

He was the youngest of three sons. One was a lawyer, and the smartest one was a high school math teacher. Calculus. Hank had failed to go to college. He was twenty-two, three months younger than she was. He said he was sorry he had missed the war. He had worked at his parents’ furniture store since he graduated from high school

“I should look for something else,” he said. “Something more interesting, or at least better paying. My parents think I have it easy but I feel like I’m on a leash.”

“You should find a different job if that’s what you want!” Margit said. “Isn’t the city booming? There must be lots of jobs.” She wanted to be polite. She thought he was nice enough and not bad-looking, but she wasn’t interested in a man who worked at a job he didn’t like without trying to find something he did. As if she had a fulfilling job. She thought of a date she had when Penelope was three, with a man from the Lutheran church. He talked about having lots of children. Another time, a man she talked to in the library took her and Penelope to lunch at a nearby diner. He was polite and almost handsome, but Penelope spilled her drink and whined to go home, and the man didn’t ask for Margit’s phone number. The only other date she had had was with a man whom Connie thought she would like. He was Baptist, of course. He was polite; they went to a barbeque place for dinner. He asked her if she had come to Jesus. Afterwards, she told Connie she wasn’t ready for men, without saying how boring they were. She was an unmarried mother, but she wasn’t experienced with men.

Hank Borden told her his parents owned the furniture store, he was their “main man.” She had no idea what that meant. How “main” could he be, working for his parents? And how did he have time to give rides to her and Penelope at 3:30 in the afternoon? She asked him if he lived at home; it was embarrassing that she lived with her mother, but she had responsibilities, she needed the help. She assumed that was obvious and understandable.

He scoffed. “Lawdie no. I have a room in a boarding house not far from the pharmacy. I’m saving for my own place.”

He disappointed her. She thought: we’ll never have sex. She flushed crimson; her heart beat hard. He put his hand on her cheek. “Are you okay?” She wanted to throw up, she was so ashamed.

She got up, stepped across to the livingroom and sat on the couch. Hank had nothing to offer. He wasn’t all that good-looking; he was the type who would run to fat. In his own way he was as dependent on his parents as she was on her mother. She said she was tired. The store had been really busy all day and her lunch was rushed.

He sat down beside her. “Let’s go out to a nice restaurant soon. Maybe this coming Saturday?”

“Oh stop!” she cried. “Can’t you see how stuck I am? I have a child, a job. I live with my mother. And she works on Saturday!” Both of them were flushed. Hank cleared his throat. “We’ll figure something out.” He let himself out.

She closed the door after him and threw herself on the couch and sobbed. Once a few years ago, Derek Alder, Connie’s son, the oldest of her three children, had taken her for a ride out of town in his father’s pickup. They had known each other since they were toddlers. He had been home on leave from the Navy. They parked in a blind alley and necked like they were on fire. He unbuttoned her blouse and undid his jeans. She whimpered, I can’t, although she probably would have. He said, Don’t worry, I just want you to touch it, to kiss it, I won’t do anything you don’t want. She did what he asked, terrified; and he masturbated while she shut her eyes so tight they hurt, thinking about the fateful time when she was fifteen, in a car in the parking lot behind the Youth Center; a guy she had met at the dance said the same thing, only he was a liar.

One Sunday afternoon Frida said, “Is your fella a secret, Margit? Is there a reason you don’t mention him?” She had her arms full of laundry and tossed it on the couch.

“He’s nobody!” Margit cried. She grabbed a towel and shook it out furiously and folded it. “He gives us a ride, we visit a little, he goes away.”

“He lives nearby, then?”

“No!” Margit took a deep breath.

“Does he stay?”

Frida was never home before 11:30 at night.

“No, he does not stay, Mother.”

“Why don’t you invite him for Sunday dinner?”

“So you can look him over.”

“No, so we can reciprocate for the rides.”

A few days later, Frida came home with a new radio. “Now you’ll have something to do with your fella,” she said. The radio shell was hot red plastic. Margit took it to her room and turned it on low. She found a station playing love songs, and she cried herself to sleep.

They talked it over. Margit tried to make Hank think he had a say, but he didn’t. She said he was welcome two days, Tuesday and Thursday. They would get hamburgers once in a while. She wouldn’t ever cook, but she would make coffee and lay out some snacks. If he couldn’t meet them on a particular day, he should call to let her know. He would need to leave by seven, so she could get Penelope to bed. Honestly, she couldn’t see what was in it for him, but he had become familiar, and God knows it was nice not to take the bus twice a week, with a three block walk at the home end and no sidewalks.

The red radio was a big help. There were so many great shows. They laughed a lot. It was easier to laugh than to talk. One night they moved from the kitchen to the living room couch. She got up to say goodnight to Penelope, who was reading in her bed. She shut the bedroom door. She returned to the couch, sitting a little away from Hank, feeling nervous. Hank took her arm and pulled her closer. At first she demurred, but he wasn’t going to put up with that forever. He put his hands on her shoulders and looked at her straight on and said, “I’m going to kiss you now, unless you tell me to leave and not come back. I want to kiss you.”

She shut her eyes and leaned into the embrace. His kiss was almost chaste–tentative, for all his bravado–and she was the one who turned to make a more comfortable fit, she was the one who scooted closer and opened her mouth to his tongue.

“Jesus, Margit,” Hank said.

“I’m going to tell you something. No, don’t look at me. Look away.” He complied, rolling his thumbs round and round.

“I was with someone once, and I had Penelope. By once, I mean one time, you understand. And that was the only time, Hank. There was no love in it. No tenderness. It shut me down for a long time, but I had Penelope and I was glad. Now here we are. I don’t want to rush, you understand? And besides, we’re in my mother’s house, and my child is on the other side of the wall. Honestly, I don’t know if I’ll ever be okay about having sex with you, or anybody. You should think about going away tonight and never coming back, because I’m a little messed up and I think you are looking for a regular girl.”

“Margit, Margit,” he said.

She put her fingers on his mouth. “Shh.You think about it, whether you can kiss me and hold me and be okay with that for a while, until–if–I feel safe and sure about something more.”

Hank put his head in his hands. There was a long silence, and then she realized he was crying softly. He looked up, his face wet, his nose clogged. He wiped his face with his sleeve. She thought, now he’ll go away, and she thought she was all right with that. She hadn’t been looking for a lover. And if she had a type, it was Montgomery Cliff in Red River, and Hank was more like Joseph Cotton–round, smooth.

He pulled out a handkerchief from a pants pocket and wiped his nose and face, and he apologized. Then he held her hands and said, “You’re just a babe of a girl, Margit. You’ve got a whole life–” He blew his nose. “Look, all that stuff you said is in the past. I’m in love with you now. I’d never treat you any way but good. I’m no brain, you’re smarter than me, but both of us are lonely. I know you aren’t where I am with the idea of us, but you’ll get used to someone being nice to you.”  He sat up tall. “Me.”

Margit stared at him. “Baby steps, Hank, okay?”

She learned that he took the time off on Tuesdays and Thursdays and paid them back on Saturdays. She told him she and Penelope could go home on the bus and he could come over after a full work day, but he wouldn’t hear of it. On Tuesdays they went to a drive-in for hamburgers. On Thursdays Margit made omelets and fried potatoes. They listened to the radio, played cards, did crossword puzzles. Sometimes they played Go Fish or Old Maid cards with Penelope, or worked on a jigsaw puzzle, all three of them. He always kissed Margit goodbye, gave her a hug, and said “see ya” as he went out the door.

It was pleasant, it was. It could go on forever, as far as Margit was concerned. But it wouldn’t suit Hank forever. He looked for reasons to be close to her, to touch her, innocently but deliberately.

Frida cut the deck. She said, “Why in the world don’t you and that boy go out on a proper date on Sunday? You surely don’t think I would mind being here with Penelope without you, do you?”

So they started going to movies on Sunday evenings, and they parked in front of the house to kiss and talk. Spring came, and Hank found a place for them to park a few blocks away from the house, on a dead end street where no one passed by them. His kisses were more ardent. He put his hands on her breasts through the soft fabric of her blouse. She knew she didn’t feel what he felt, but she also knew she couldn’t take his good humor and generosity and give nothing in return. If she closed her eyes and gave herself over to the warmth of their bodies, she didn’t mind. Sometimes she crawled onto his lap and wrapped her arms around him. Sometimes she held back, so that he had to lean over to put his arms around her.  She didn’t know how to interpret her own feelings, which were anxious and heightened. She didn’t know how to tell him: You’re my first boyfriend.

Hank was growing impatient. He huffed when she pulled away. One night he took her hand and made her feel his erection. “You are making me crazy, Margit. We’re not teenagers.”

Margit reminded him that she was Catholic. “I can’t have sex outside of marriage.” They were sitting in his car at their dead-end parking spot. It was warm enough to roll the windows down. They had kissed, and she had unbuttoned the top buttons of her dress so that he could caress her breasts through the soft fabric. She was thinking too much; Hank felt remote. She started to cry. He hadn’t said anything in response to what she’d said. She didn’t know what she wanted him to say.

He pulled her blouse off one shoulder, then the strap of her bra, freeing her breast. He kissed her breast all over. Something in her opened so that heat spread through her body and she put her arms around him and held him as tight as she could.

“So we’ll get married,” he said quietly.

There were challenges. He wasn’t Catholic, so either he had to convert–going through months of instruction and agreeing to all the laws of the Church–or he had to promise to support his wife’s faith and allow any children of the marriage to be raised Catholic. He definitely wanted a child of his own. He said he didn’t want to “take up being Catholic,” but he would honor her commitments. He would go to church with her sometimes. The bigger challenges lay in finding a way to live together. He told her he had a few “logs in the fire,” he was looking for new, better-paying work, but he had no real savings. He had a car payment. She asked if his parents would help with money–as a wedding gift, perhaps, enough to make a deposit on a modest apartment. He scoffed. Finally, he said, “We have to save every penny until we have a deposit, it’s as simple as that.”

They didn’t try to establish a timeline. Margit didn’t say anything to Frida. It was the nicest time of the year, and they went on long drives or to parks in the evening with Penelope. Margit watched her daughter with Hank. They seemed easy together. She stopped fretting so much, determined to have her own home, her own life, at last.

Then Hank said his parents had told him they were cutting his hours. They didn’t need him so much, because–get this, he said–they were hiring a professional salesman. In other words, business was better and they could afford someone better than their own patient, loyal, blind-stupid son. He was furious. He found a job at a car dealer, handling paperwork. “Just until I find something better,” he told Margit. “I’ve got irons in the fire.”

One evening, Margit sent Penelope to the neighbor’s house to play, and went to her mother, who was mending something at her sewing machine in her room. She asked if Hank could move in with them for a while, until he had saved enough for a deposit on an apartment. “We want to get married, Mother.” Frida was startled. “In this tiny house!” she said. “Where would we put him?” She didn’t say anything about the marriage notion.

Margit had thought it all out. They would push the two twin beds together for them, and make a cozy bed for Penelope on the couch. Margit would put it away before they left in the morning, nothing would intrude on the order of Frida’s house. It was just for a little while. Hank would contribute to groceries, of course. He could do some repairs, too, whatever Frida wanted him to do. He was quiet and respectful, she couldn’t find fault with him, could she?

Frida went over to talk to Connie. Margit hated the thought of being their subject of conversation, but at least Frida hadn’t slammed the door shut on the idea. Margit washed dishes and tidied the kitchen and living room, plumping pillows, shaking out the couch cover, whatever she could see to do to be busy. She made chocolate chip cookies. She was just taking out the second, last pan when Frida returned.

Margit put cookies on two saucers, made ice water, and sat at the kitchen table with her mother.

Frida said, “Three months. Three months he doesn’t pay for wherever he lives now, and he doesn’t pay me; and the two of you save every cent. And then you get your own place. Understood?”

Margit nodded.

Her mother asked, “And when will you get married? Now, when he moves here and sleeps with you, or later, when you have your own place?”

Margit hadn’t really thought about it. “I have to talk to Father Danley,” she said.

“About living with your boyfriend?”

“Mom! About marrying a non-Catholic.”

Frida got up. “Three months.”

Hank didn’t move in, though. He saw an ad in the paper. He called in sick at the car dealership one day and drove to Dallas for an appointment with Halliburton. He took basic tests in writing and arithmetic, was weighed and examined by a physician, and was told to come back the next day. He took a room at a ratty motel, went out and had a steak dinner, and watched TV until the network went off the air.

The next day he was hired at a decent wage with a clear set of steps over the next year when, if his work was adequate, he would receive a substantial raise. The benefits were good. He had to be in Odessa in two weeks, but one would be better. He said yes on the spot and signed all the papers. He was going to start as a “helper.” They told him the work would be hard, but it would get better, the more he learned. He was given a piece of paper with names and phone numbers of three Halliburton widows who might have a room for rent until his job was secure and he had saved for deposits on a house. The first one had a man moving out in ten days–time to clean top to bottom, the lady said. He took her address and mailed a check from Wichita Falls the next day.

Margit was stunned. Oh how she wished she hadn’t asked her mother if Hank could move in! She wanted to protest: Hank hadn’t said a word about what he was up to. But before she opened her mouth, he said, “I didn’t want to tell you in case I failed; I wanted to surprise you if I passed. I’ll get a house and move you and Penelope when school’s out.”

She could see how excited he was. His face was bright red, and he kept gulping. All she could say was, “Odessa? Have you ever been there?”

He hadn’t.

One night before he left, Margit walked Penny over to spend the night with Libby. Hank had rented a nice motel room. He took Margit out for a steak dinner. In their room they drank gin and tonics–the only liquor Margit could stand–and got drunk. Hank made a “ring” of his finger and thumb around Margit’s ring finger and said, “I love you. You talk to your priest. I’ll come for you as soon as I have passed the probation period. When I have money to get us into a house. We’ll get married here then, in your church. We’ll have our own life, Margit!”

Margit took a hot bath in the big tub and crawled onto the bed naked. Hank was lying on his back, his arms and legs stretched out. Grinning. Everything happened fast; Hank had been waiting a long time.

The Polyglots (dedicated to Wharton) is a black comedy that describes an English captain, Georges, with a career not unlike Gerhardi’s: he is sent to Japan, Vladivostok, and Harbin on an absurd set of missions during and immediately after the war. There he meets “an amazing collection” of his relatives who had been “blown before the storm.” Gerhardi’s ancestry is complicated, and when his fictional alter-ego asks his aunt in Japan to fill in his knowledge of the family tree, she tells him of births, naturalizations, and marriages in Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Siberia, Italy, Scotland, Japan, England, Spain, Holland, France, Denmark, Spain again, Italy again, Russia again, and Belgium. The Rabelaisian riot of random detail is matched with a Tristram Shandy-like über-wry understatement. His description of the military administration of his protagonist adds a large loaf of Kafka with a larger ladle of Wodehouse. When he arrives in Vladivostok, the protagonist stops to fill us in:

Our “Organization,” let me say at once, was something without precedent—one of the really comic side-shows of after-armistice confabulation. It was the poor old sentimental military mind, confronted with the task of saving civilization, forced to draw upon the intellect, and finding that in truth it had not such reserves to draw upon, plunging gallantly into a Russian sea of incoherence! And puzzled—daily more puzzled; coming out of it at last, with its tail between its legs, considerably bedraggled. There was really nothing to it but to enjoy the spectacle. The spectacle consisted of a number of departments whose heads amused themselves by passing buff slips one to another, the point of which lay in the art of relegating the solution of the question specified to the resources of another department. It was a kind of game of chess in which ability and wit counted for quite a great deal. The department which could not pass on the buff slip to another and in the last resort was forced to take action itself was deemed to have lost the game. From time to time new officers would be called for: specialists in embarkation, secret service, and so forth, and usually six months or more would elapse before their arrival from England, by which time the need for them would generally have passed. Unwilling to go home, they would prowl about the premises, coveting their neighbors’ jobs, and usually end by establishing a new department of their own, with themselves as heads. A fat, flabby Major prowled about our offices, intriguing hard to get my job, and I (myself a master of intrigue) intrigued to keep my place by letting it be known that I would soon vacate it of my own account. Meanwhile the Major was content to work under my orders. I favor, on the whole, a mild atmosphere of Bolshevism in public affairs.

The narrator’s relatives have somehow converged on Harbin, in China’s far northeast, halfway between Russia and the Korean peninsula, where he is stationed, and he ends up engaged to his cousin. A constant stream of characters comes and goes as he waits to be married:

Since early morning on New Year’s day visitors had been calling on us. Franz Joseph came. The spelling lady came. The virgin came. After the virgin and the daughter of the actual-state’s councilor, there came a morose-looking Russian Major-General with pale mad eyes, whose conversation was largely incoherent. I was besieged by them, yet I liked them. They were good, well-behaved lunatics, trim and neat in their diminutive, harmless lunacy compared with our war lords in their raving, disorderly madness. They were floating in a sea of bewilderment and confusion, but we who were waging this colossal war with seriousness and with method were more destructively futile in our pretensions, more grievously self-deluded. The world had got unhinged and was whirling round in a pool of madness, and those few lunatics were whirling independently within ours: wheels within wheels! And I received them with courtesy, to the pained astonishment of Vladislav, who, pointing at Franz Joseph, said: “In France they wouldn’t have spoken to that man.” So sensible and nice and relevant they were in their own little world of delusion that we, big lunatics, who were engaged in making war and revolution, allowed the little lunatics to roam in peace at large: out of a latent instinct of proportion that it would have been absurd to lock them up in the face of what was being done by admittedly sane people in our midst.

In the midst of this chaos, our narrator, who regularly reminds us loudly that he is an intellectual, a serious man, is writing his opus, A Record of the Stages in the Evolution of an Attitude, which we suspect is the book we are reading.

Most of the people in the novel do nothing and have no ambitions to do anything. The few who do—the woman campaigning to simplify Russian spelling and the man determined to merge the Anglican and Orthodox churches—are ridiculous or, as he keeps repeating, lunatics. Our narrator is working on that opus, a history of his own depressed attitude, and he is of course ridiculous as well. At one point—there is no plot in the usual sense—his uncle, a man with many children from an assortment of marriages, commits suicide, hanging himself dressed in his own older sister’s “camisole, knickers, silk stockings, garters, and a boudoir cap.” The narrator writes that he has “no tears to waste over this sort of thing.” He tells the sister that it is not tragedy, but tragedy-bouffe. He decides that “the ordinary normal spectacle of life as it is lived on our planet had unhinged his [uncle’s] mind: had proven too much for him.”

The lack of plot is by design. Gerhardi, who read Chekhov before he was translated into English, wrote an appreciation in 1923 claiming that Chekhov was the first writer to dispense with contrived plots and write stories that were “blurred, interrupted, mauled or otherwise tampered with by life.” William Boyd wrote that Gerhardi “single-handedly imported the Chekhovian point of view, the Chekhovian sense of humor, the Chekhovian absence of judgment into English fiction.” Since plot is what constructs the moral of the story—when people do x, y happens—to avoid plot is avoid causality, and thus avoid the moral.

The narrator’s “attitude” is composed of equal parts postwar despair, Eastern philosophy, fashionable bohemianism, and the new physics. At one point he tells someone that their problem is that they believe in reality, in the information they get from their senses, but in fact reality “consists merely of vibrations in ether, . . . merely a world of appearance.” Invariably, such proclamations are undercut by his own self-loathing, his sense that he is talking “ostentatiously” and “affecting perhaps half-consciously that pose of people of superior intellect, that everything was understood between us, and that we took for granted on the part of each all knowledge hitherto available about all things.” As he is talking, characters break in to puncture his pretentiousness. One asks to borrow £15, promising to pay him back, which he knows will not happen. The problem with people, he proclaims, is that they believe “happiness is always somewhere else. It is one of the failings of our common nature that our pleasures are chiefly prospective or retrospective.” He says this right after a scene of pure happiness when he finally has sex with the object of his desire. He is satiated and, therefore unconfused about the fact that he doesn’t actually care for the young woman. He wants to take a post-coital nap while she demands his continued attention—he realizes he is just a trivial, two-faced, trite boor, in other words, not a philosopher. Which doesn’t matter because she doesn’t listen to him, anyway.

In Shanghai he addresses this woman:

“You look upon the Other World,” I said, “as a sort of furnished flat where everything has been prepared for our arrival. I believe the world is more like music seeking in its inspiration its rebirth; and man like a composer who awakens and releases life and causes it to echo to his tune which he had plucked out of life’s sleep to suggest to him new secrets and new melodies.”

“Darling, you speak so loud that everybody can hear you.”

“I don’t care. I am speaking the truth.”

“Oh!”

“What?”

“Bother this fly,” she said.

He continues to philosophize at her—“We work, I reflected, but no one knows why”—as she responds by asking for a pearl necklace. As they move through Hong Kong, he sees the people as “dark human beetles who rushed in all directions, and among the many dark ones there rushed a few white beetles, shouldering the ‘white man’s burden.’ I hated myself.” In Cairo he restates his basic view:

The Sphinx—what did he think of it all? He was right: life was terrible. He knew that talking, writing, even at its best, was prating. To make a statement, unless it be safeguarded by a thousand definitions (when it were better it had not been made at all), is to prate. To state is to ignore. To maintain a position is to maintain a false position. To maintain no position is to negate existence. To assert is to give oneself the lie. To cease asserting is to give the lie to other men’s assertions—the sanction to that lie. To know, to know all, would mean to be silent. . . . It is as if one trod upon an empty world, an atmosphere of void, a universe of nothing.

Gerhardi once said, “Critics feel uneasy when a writer is not solemn. Who is he laughing at? Who with?” And many reviewers in 1925, even if they thought The Polyglots “a great novel” or a “brilliant performance,” felt a need to hedge their bets and mark the “incompetence, idiocy, ineptitude, unmorality” (North American Review); the “vital pictures of inept, devitalized people, full of strange, perverse attractions” (Independent); “depraved and disintegrated . . . a very sad book indeed” (Spectator); “impudently haphazard and discursive” (Saturday Review). Bookman iterated the point, writing “it makes fascinating reading if you do not object to the impudence, perversity, and rattle-headed quality of its story telling and its characterizations.”

But some critics saw it as Greene, Waugh, and Berlin did. Walter Yust wrote:

Here is no pessimism, here is irony, burlesque, humor and mellow resignation. Here is a feeling for, an intense sensitiveness to, beauty; but here also is as intense a sensitiveness to the impact of cheapness, and useless tragedy, and aimless living. Here is plenty of moral speculation but no moralizing. Here is pain without syrup. Mr. Gerhardi never misses a stroke. And he never spoils it all with too many strokes.

Harrison Smith in the New York Herald Tribune urged “all puritans, philistines, tidy ladies, men who are afraid of marriage, women who fear love, all who dread responsibility, children or poverty, to read this book” and learn from Gerhardi’s “amoral philosophy of negation.” The New York Times, although noting the novel’s “frivolous and diffuse” style, found it “the most painstaking and authoritative study in fictional form yet written of the general ‘let down’ in common sense and conduct which was the aftermath of a war prolonged unduly…. The perception of human futility which haunts every page.”

When he died, the New York Times headlined its obituary, “William Gerhardie, An English Novelist: Wrote ‘The Polyglots,’ ‘On Mortal Love’ and Other Works—Had a Small Public: Lost to Public View.” He was very much aware. As his star was already dimming in 1931, he wrote his publisher: “Sophistication, cynicism, and the like, which still cling to me, I don’t know why, have not endeared me to anyone.”