Published: 22 September, 2011
by DAN CARRIER

IT was a natural talent: Gerald Kersh had a photographic memory that soaked up everything he encountered, from people and their conversations to every word he ever read.

“Everything I have ever seen or felt has been research to me,” the author once said.

“I’m cursed with that kind of mind. Everything is astoundingly interesting.”

This is apparent in the novel The Angel and the Cuckoo, first published in 1967 and now re-issued by London Books.

The beautifully crafted story captures Camden and the West End with a camera’s clarity.

It tells the story of émigré Steve Zobrany, his Carnaby Street restaurant The Angel and the Cuckoo, and a host of diners, friends and acquaintances that pass his way.

Spanning decades, it also spans central London. We are taken from Poland Street in Soho through to Oxford Street, south to Blackfriars and then to the Farringdon Road, before shifting back to Carnaby Street once more.

The story of the man behind this London classic is just as enthralling, yet he is no longer the household name he was during the 1940s.

Biographer Paul Duncan says that in a strange way, it was precisely because Gerald Kersh sold so many books and was so successful during the war years – at one point he had four books in the top ten best selling list – that he wasn’t as feted as he could have been by his peers.

“He was taken a little for granted,” says Duncan.

“I can’t help but compare Kersh to how we look at Stephen King today – always rolling out a best seller.”

This novel, his last, is classic Kersh. Brilliantly written, it shows off his many talents.

There are self-composed ditties throughout, snatches of made up, popular songs from the period, all drawn from his imagination.

The characters, their voices, show an ear for everyday conversation, and for eavesdropping, too.

To read Kersh is to stand at the bar of a 1930s pub and listen to the banter.

Kersh was born in London in 1911. His father, Hyman Kershenblatt, fled the Russian army at the turn of the 1900s and settled in London. Hyman was a tailor, running a small store off Baker Street, where he would put together smart threads for Saville Row shops.

Kersh’s early talent shone through: he was a clever child, and devoured books. He loved Shakespeare – so much so that in every book he would make oblique references to, and often quote, the playwright.

He was also fortunate to have been part of a wave of working-class writers who found their voices during the Depression, quite separate from the better known intellectual Left.

He wrote hundreds of pieces for newspapers and magazines under a variety of names. There are over 1,000 articles, 30 short stories and 19 novels to his known canon, and possibly many more:
“Kersh was not highly educated, but was highly intelligent,” says Duncan.

“He left school when he was 18 and also left his family, so as not to be a burden on them.”

He worked in a number of jobs, and in his 20s, things were tough – pre-war London was not an easy place.

He was often living on the streets, getting small jobs that did not last, moving from one grim lodging place to another.

Yet these hard experiences gave him plenty of material he would later draw on, in such books as The Angel and the Cuckoo.

It meant he was able to portray the authentic voices of the London streets simply because he was part and parcel of them.

His wartime started with the Coldstream Guards but during the Blitz he was buried three times and the injuries he sustained were such that he could not see active service.

Instead he picked up his pen and churned out propaganda novels, as well as working for the Ministry of Information. His book They Die With Their Boots Clean, about infantry training, was a bestseller, and though rejected by the War Office was considered by soldiers as brutally honest.

His other works, often published under the name Piers England, must also have had an effect on the war effort: Hitler gave him the honour of a death sentence.

In the early 1950s, Kersh, who had always adored the glitz of America seen through the prism of Hollywood movies, headed across the Atlantic.

“He was such a raconteur, the Americans loved him,” says Duncan.

He was published in magazines such as Esquire and The Saturday Evening Post: he was dazzled by the vast sums offered, especially in comparison to the paper-rationed publications he had been penning for back home.

But things did not go smoothly. Duncan says Kersh had a real problem with maths – “he literally found it hard to add two plus two” – and this lead him into financial trouble.

A badly managed tax issue lead to trouble – he was asked to pay up twice, once in the States and once in the UK.

This had another, knock-on effect: tax officers began telling Kersh what to write, as they could see what would make him the most money and help clear his unintended debts.

It meant he was left plugging away at short stories and his novels took a back seat.

His financial difficulties meant he couldn’t afford to live in New York and headed upstate, where he died in poverty in 1968.

With him, his literary reputation also died – and has only recently been resurrected by the re-issue of some of his best-known works by the publisher London Books.

“Kersh was never really taken up by the literary elite,” says Duncan. “It meant he was never included in the literary canon of the period. He became lost – if you look at reference books about writers and the 1930s, he simply isn’t there.”

He also avoided the literary set, more comfortable with people from wide variety of life.

“He socialised with Soho people, real people, workers – they were who he got on,” says Duncan.

And it is because of this he has bequeathed us a very visual account of life in London during the pre-and post-war periods.

• The Angel and the Cuckoo. By Gerald Kersh. Introduction by Paul Duncan. London Books £11.99