The Best of Gerald Kersh

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GERALD KERSH tells stories. Good and bad, long and short, neat, dramatic, bizarre, perverse, scientific, supernatural, historical, they have been flowing out almost without pause for the last twenty years. They range from full-length novels, such as the recent Fowler’s End or the celebrated novel-documentary They Die with their Boots Clean, to little jokes of some fifteen hundred words. In between, there are short ‘novels’ of perhaps 30,000 words, long short stories of 10,000 or 12,000, and a great many short stories of what one might call classical length (4,000 to 8,000). All of them, from the novels proper to the little jokes, have three things in common: they are vigorous, they are inventive (sometimes to a point near lunacy), and they can be read with the greatest of ease.

First of all, then, Kersh’s vigour. This is particularly in evidence when he is describing circumstances of squalor ‘Busto is a Ghost …’ His phrasing, when he comes, for example, to describe a sleasy lodging house and its verminous inhabitants, has a near-Falstaffian richness which he never quite achieves at any other time. Which is not to say that he ever becomes flaccid. He may be careless, he may overplay his hand, he may be downright embarrassing; but he is never floppy. And indeed he could not afford to be: for Kersh’s people, whether squalid or not, are always on the go; cheating, drinking, cruising, fornicating, making money or spending their immortal souls, they live in a world where it is always necessary, for good or ill, to act; and if they – or their creator – lost their vigour for one moment, then they would surely die.

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