Gerald Kersh, The Angel and the Cuckoo
Gerald Kersh was born in 1911, the son of a Teddington tailor, a prolific hack who turned out hundreds of hard-boiled short stories and magazine articles under a panoply of pen names during a thirty year career, and a novelist whose sharp eye was invariably trained on the seamier side of life.
He was the leading light of a movement that never quite was, a transatlantic counterpart to Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, peddling – along with guys like James Curtis and Robert Westerby - a peculiarly British form of noirish fiction that turned him into a bestselling author and household name during the thirties, feted by the press, and courted by Hollywood.
His debut, Jews Without Jehovah, invited controversy (he was sued by members of his family for thinly veiled, unflattering portraits of them), but by the time of his third novel, fame had come knocking. Night and the City, which sold over a million, and has twice been filmed, opens the door on a squalid London, where secretaries and hostess girls take rooms together in bedsits near Russell Square, rubbing shoulders with ratty little men sporting fake American accents, who scuttle from dodgy business deal to dodgy business deal, rushing as fast as they can, just to stay half a step ahead. The writing is fast, fluid and sharp as a tack; daylight is a distant memory; and the Britain of sober-suited commuters coming up for air a foreign country.
But Kersh was no tourist. He’d served his time, working as a door-to-door salesman, a fish frier, a debt collector, a bouncer and an all-in wrestler, before making his mark as a writer. By his own admission, he mixed with some pretty unpleasant characters, bore the scars of a hundred fights, and fed all this experience into his writing. If characters like the zoot-suited ponce Harry Fabian are painted with broad brushstrokes, they remain totally compelling because Kersh seems to know every one of them so intimately.
After the war, Kersh moved to New York, making a name for himself as a versatile magazine writer, who, in his own words, always managed to get ‘a certain zing,’ into what he wrote. But by the time he died in 1968, he’d been forced into exile in upstate New York, where languishing deep in debt, he was eking out a living writing lowlife hackery for second rate magazines. He still wrote fiction – he could hardly help himself - but despite positive reviews for his last major work, The Angel and the Cuckoo, a mix of under-promotion and public indifference on both sides of the Atlantic had left him frustrated, and suspicious that his second wife, Lee, had used her influence in the London media to smear his name.
Like almost all of his later work, The Angel and the Cuckoo drifted out of print almost as soon it rolled off the presses, and Kersh’s name was forgotten for best part of 40 years. But contemporary champions like Iain Sinclair and John King have brought about a revival in interest, and to mark the centenary of his birth, London Books have just released a new edition of the book, with a foreword by Paul Duncan, who’s currently working on a biography of Kersh.
The Angel and the Cuckoo is a brilliant read, the product of a fertile imagination left to ferment too long in obscurity on the wrong side of the pond. Kersh is drawn back to the inter-war Soho of his early London novels, and there are echoes of Night and the City’s Harry Fabian in the criminal mastermind, Perp, and of the sculptor Adam in the artist, Tom Henceforth.
But this time round, the writing is more dextrous, the schemes more intricate, and the cast of characters even richer, taking in Austro-Hungarian émigrés, hunchbacked African revolutionaries, and predatory film moguls with Napoleon fixations, alongside Kersh’s usual suspects.
The habitués of the Angel and the Cuckoo, a café hidden down a blind alley at the end of Carnaby Street, are fascinating grotesques, finely drawn. There’s the genial and philosophical café owner, Steve Zobrany, who waxes his moustache methodically and dotes on his beautiful but disinterested wife, Alma; Zobrany’s former partner in crime, the phoney Baron Cseh, whose lies take him all the way to Hollywood; and the artist Henceforth, who limps with great purpose around the city like Titus Groan’s Steerpike, full of a thousand brilliant stories and a million brilliant schemes, none of which he has any interest in seeing through. Almost to a man, they are corrupt, and Kersh relishes their dissolution.
Reading The Angel and the Cuckoo is like coming across some great lost Kinks album - like Davies, Kersh continued to hone his unique vision, even when the world had stopped listening. The Angel and the Cuckoo reads like the culmination of a life’s work – there should always be an audience for writing this good.
The Angel and the Cuckoo, Night and the City, and a bunch of other brilliant books are published by London Books.
