Books: True Experience

RESURRECTION — William Gerhardi — Harcourt, Brace ($2.50).

Few authors deliberately pick a title some other man has already made famous; but few have the effrontery of William Gerhardi. And Gerhardi’s effrontery does not stop at lifting Tolstoy’s title.

His first, best-known novel, Futility, was a take-off (some phrased it: a comic appreciation) of his idol, Anton Chekhov. Resurrection pays its suspiciously grave respects to another of his heroes, Marcel Proust. Unwary readers might well be taken in by Author Gerhardi’s occasionally indubitable solemnity, might almost believe that the psychic experience he writes of is meant to be taken at its face value.

Says he, in a prefatory note: “The experience of which [Resurrection] treats is, incredible as it may seem, a true experience.” Alert readers will note that Author Gerhardi does not specify what parts of his narrative are to be taken without salt, will realize that he is seldom averse to spoofing.

Plan of Resurrection is ingenious, Proustian—with a Gerhardi difference. Written in the undisguised first person (though the other characters have pseudonyms), it tells how a brief experience of roaming in his astral body set him buttonholing his acquaintances at a London ball, telling them all about it.

While holding forth to one Bonzo, a critic, he had the happy idea for his book. “And I said to myself: If I were allowed to write one more novel only, what would I say, what would I put into it? I would resurrect my life, make it live, before my existence comes to an end on this strange and wayward star, resurrect my life while I am dying.” Expanding on this theme as the ball proceeds around him, he relates to Bonzo what Resurrection is to be.

By the time dawn ends the ball, the book is practically finished: Gerhardihas resurrected his life, while London society, while the recollections of his travels, loves, adventures dance about him. Readers who find themselves puzzled by Author Gerhardi’s wayward intelligence, unable to place him satisfactorily, will do well to take him as he comes, wrinkle no foreheads over the question of his “sincerity.” Though his unrelieved company in the guise of human soul may be at times a little wearing, as a wide-eyed observer his comments are never dull. Confessing his inability to make the most of sightseeing, apropos of a visit to India, he exclaims: “How did a closer acquaintance with elephants really profit me? What did I get out of it? Only that which I noted involuntarily: the elephants had a womanly walk which reminded me of Arnold Bennett.”