Word: gerhardi
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...name (he pronounces it Jer-HAR-di) he is an Englishman whose ancestors were first Italian, then German. He long spoke English with a Russian intonation, for Russian was his first language. He was born in St. Petersburg (Leningrad), because his father ran a cotton mill there. The Gerhardi children were naturally polyglottal; they learned Russian and German from their nurses, French in school, English from their parents. Their Fraulein "used to take the five of us for walks and she dressed us so warmly, tying woolen hoods over our heads, that by the time the fifth was dressed...
...broke out. After long and useless attempts to make him into a cavalryman, he seems to have had a pretty good time as a staff officer in Petrograd and Siberia. He got along well with generals, and his poly-glottism came in handy. When the Russian Revolution ruined Gerhardi pere, the family stayed hard up for years; William went through Oxford on £1000. his demobilization bonus. There he looked about him with a quietly superior eye and wrote most of his first book, Futility, which, it was hoped, would retrieve the family fortunes. It was at Oxford that Gerhardi...
...only socially eligible but estimable, Gerhardi enjoyed meeting the Great, especially when they said nice things to him, which they often did. When potent Lord Beaverbrook took him up, Gerhardi met everybody he wanted to. His carefully loaded anecdotes about them (too long, often too delicate for quotation) rarely miss fire. In common with most rising writers, Gerhardi does not think highly of Author Hugh' Walpole: "It may be truly said that all there is in his books is his own: no divine spark has assisted...
Candid to the point of indiscretion about his love affairs, Gerhardi, now 36. admits to many, describes his inamoratas but preserves their pseudonymity. One. whom he calls "Nina," he won by "telling the story of the man who cut off his nose while shaving, dropped the razor and cut off his big toe, and in the confusion which overtook him clapped his nose on the stump of his toe, and his toe on his face, so that whenever thereafter he happened to blow his nose, his boot came off. She laughed freely, and felt herself drawn toward...
...Author. William Gerhardi was born in St. Petersburg in 1895, the son of an English cotton-spinning manufacturer settled there. He was educated in St. Petersburg schools and at Worcester College, Oxford; served in the World War in the 5th Reserve Cavalry, with the Military Attache of the British Embassy at Petrograd, with the British Military Mission to Siberia. He was decorated with the Czechoslovak Croix de Guerre, the Rus-sian Order of St. Stanislav. Though he was a friend of Katherine Mansfield and corresponded with her for years, he never met her. Other books: Futility, Anton Chekhov, The Polyglots...