Volume 29, Number 5 · April 1, 1982
The Genius Syndrome
By Malcolm Muggeridge
God's Fifth Column: A Biography of the Age, 1890-1940
by William Gerhardie, edited and with an introduction by Michael Holroyd, by Robert Skidelsky
Jonathan Cape, $11.95
I first met William Gerhardie in the early Thirties, before he had added an 'e' to his name. Hugh Kingsmill, a friend of his and mine, took me to see him in his flat in Hallam Street, just behind Broadcasting House. I remember thinking that it was more like a suite in a second-class hotel than a residence, though he was to live there, becoming ever more of a recluse, until his death in 1977. The furniture struck me as being Continental, the lighting was dim, the curtains heavy, and, in the last two decades of his life, kept permanently drawn. One way and another I had heard a lot about him from Kingsmill and his brother Brian Lunn, both of whom were to collaborate in writing books with him—Kingsmill's being The Casanova Fable and Brian Lunn's The Memoirs of Satan. As the rebellious sons of a Methodist father, Sir Henry Lunn, they found Gerhardie's bohemian ways and unashamed hedonism exciting.
Review, 1394 words
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