By Gerald Kersh
With The music Of The Flea (1948) Gerald Kersh revisited the demi-monde of his well-known evening And town; yet this novel issues a author, striving doggedly to make his dwelling. "A amazing novel ...with this publication Mr Kersh has taken an important step forward". (Sunday Times). "[Kersh] has a awesome expertise ...he is without doubt one of the relatively few residing novelists during this kingdom who write with power and originality and whose principles usually are not drawn from a residuum of novels which have been written before...[The music of the Flea] is the tale of John Pym, a tender guy attempting to earn his residing as a writer...Mr Kersh attracts on his picturesque and convincing wisdom of human vileness in a way that is either unique and instructive". (Times Literary Supplement).
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One always suspects that he must have knitted it himself. ' Vivien, smiling persistently despite the fact that neither man was now paying any attention to her, passed through the gallery towards her small office at the back. She always enjoyed this walk: the gallery was so cool, so pale, so translucent (the paintings seemed to glow on the light grey walls) that it was as if her own feelings were slowly being bleached out of her until she reached her desk as the efficient secretary of Mr Cumberland and Mr Maitland.
The old man quickly took the coin and held it aloft in his right hand as he gave the pamphlet to Philip. ' He took him over to the north porch, the light from the half-closed door illuminating the righthand side of his body, his creased neck, his old overcoat, and his trembling hand with the coin still in it. 'There,' he said, opening the door and pointing out into the street beyond, There's his house. ' Philip looked in the direction to which he was pointing, and could see what looked like a painted surface raised up beside the main road.
Slowly they approached the baptistery. 'He's all written down, he is. ' And in the gently moving light, stained with the colours of the high windows, the old man pored through some pamphlets which had been left for sale beside a 'World in Peril' poster and a scale model of the church itself. ' He held up a pamphlet with the title Thomas Chatterton: Son of Bristol. ' 'You give what you can. ' Philip searched frantically in the pockets of his jeans, and eventually came out with a pound coin. ' The old man quickly took the coin and held it aloft in his right hand as he gave the pamphlet to Philip.