Talk:Phyllis Marion Gotch

Authorship of "Once I had a home"

Attribution of Once I had a home. The statement that Phyllis Gotch was the author of Once I had a home (1926) rests on her publication of Golden Hair (1938) in which Once I had a home is listed as ‘by the same author’. That attribution has been accepted by the British Library.

However, although Once I had a home was carefully constructed to suggest its author’s veracity and authenticity, it was published in the year of the General Strike in the UK and contains a passionate attack on the evil and threat of ‘Red Socialism’. As a safeguard the author used fictitious instead of real names and many people and places have been ‘disguised to escape recognition’. The prefatory ‘Note’ adds that there ‘are urgent reasons for preserving the incognito of Nadejda’.

One cannot therefore be certain about much of the book’s contents. In 1960 Prince Serge Obolensky (1890-1978) wrote in One man in his time: the memoirs of Serge Obolensky (Hutchinson of London, 1960), page 147, that in late 1916 or early 1917 when in Yalta, at a party given by Mme Popoff, ‘the wife of the owner of Russia’s biggest tea company ... I saw some distant relatives of mine, the Narishkin family connection. The father had been an ambassador at one of the European capitals, I forget which one. They had two daughters ... the younger wrote poetry, and later published an account of these days, in which I appear as one Prince Orlinsky [sic]. The older, Natalie, was a tall girl, very reserved’. When the Prince left Yalta, Natalie gave him a little icon and ‘I realized that there had been an impending romance right there before me’. She and her sister are not mentioned again. The name Obolensky/Orlinsky in fact appears in the book as Orolinsky on pages 173, 200 and 265. The Prince had married Catherine Yourievsky in October 1916 and the second and third mentions are of Princess Orolinsky.

Serge Obolensky’s mother was a Narishkin and there is a detailed account of the family in Nicolas Ikonnikov, La Noblesse de Russie: deuxieme edition, Tome K.1 (Paris, 1960) pages 189-263, where the most likely candidate to be Natalie is No 320, Natalia Kyrillovna Narychkyne, born in Paris in 1891 who died at Neuilly, unmarried, in 1957. She had a younger sister Anna (1894-1947) who also died unmarried. They were the daughters of No 268 Kyrille Mikhailovich Narychkine (1855-1922) who had been in the Preobajensky Regiment, was Equerry to the Czar and Minister Plenipotentiary at Stuttgart and Stockholm. His wife Sofia Nikolaevna, also born Narychkine, died in 1942. The two sisters and their mother are buried at St Genevieve des Bois, Paris.

Was the Prince misinformed or were the unreliable Phyllis Gotch’s publishers misinformed? AnthonyCamp (talk) 09:23, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

Authorship - some contemporary information

An article in the newspaper The Cornishman, dated 28 march 1935, informs that the author of the book, Once I had a home, was Phyillis de Verdières under the nom de plume of Nadejda. The article goes on to say that the narrative of the book is a composite work taken from the experiences of a Russian lady she knew in Paris, and supplemented by the stories from another Russian exile. Phyillis de Verdieres is described in the article as "interpreter", so it is possible that she took much of the story from the work of others.

That is a very valuable reference. It follows an earlier article in the Cornishman for 28 January 1932, page 5, which says "now that certain Russian friends are safely out of that troubled country, an authorship can be disclosed ... she acts as an interpreter of the emotions and experiences of a Russian friend". The 1935 article makes it clear that the book was not an account of her personal experiences [indeed in seems that she had never been to Russia], but a composite work, that the real Nadejda was a Russian lady living in Paris whom 'the Marquise' had known intimately when she resided in France, and that the author had been "able to embody the Russian lady's remarkable experiences, supplemented by additional facts gleaned from another Russian exile". An even later article on 28 April 1938, page 5, says the book was "based on her acquaintance with a Russian refugee in France, and was written sympathetically and with a graphic pen". I have little doubt that the lady the author knew was, as Obolensky said, Natalia Narychkine. The author's husband's titles adopted after her second marriage in 1922 seem entirely bogus (Marquis de Verdieres, Count D'Arquiers, Seigneur de Saint Estophe), even though the French ambassador was at the marriage. Andre is described as having been then "in the French diplomatic service" [Cornishman, 21 July 1938, page 2] but in Finland "he acted as a tutor" [Cornishman, 20 June 1935, page 5]. One wonders what the source of his income was. AnthonyCamp (talk) 11:49, 10 December 2019 (UTC).

Marquis de Verdières

In her biography of Thomas Gotch, The golden dream: a biography of Thomas Cooper Gotch, author Pamela Lomax says that Phyllis (Gotch) Doherty met Marquis de Verdières in St Tropez in 1921. and both "thought they had found wealthy partners". An announcement of their wedding in the French Newspaper La Figaro, September 1922, gives De Verdières name as M. André Schlossmacher de Verdières. They separated in 1928 and Phyllis received a letter from him saying that he was teaching in Finland. In the reminiscences of François Raveaur, Je suis le chat qui va tout seul..., (author Michel MOLLARD), he recalls having a private tutor in Salignac, France, during the early years of WWII named André Schlossmacher de Verdières. This person had fallen on hard times and was introduced to the Raveaur family by the local policeman who said, "There is a person under house arrest here who is a little hungry but has a large culture and can help you". François Raveaur describes him as follows: "He is very endearing with his knowledge. His culture, which he uses with warmth, is colossal, incredible, French, German ... He knows the Bible at his fingertips; every single word, even a brief invitation to lunch, is a masterpiece of literature. He is a bit of a worldly Drieu La Rochelle character, a sort of aristocrat with a faunque head, even devilish. I don’t know why he’s under house arrest. We are talking about financial nonsense. It is certain that he is very broke. Really very broke."

The reference to someone called André Schlossmacher de Verdières teaching in Finland, and later someone with the identical name tutoring François Raveaur in France lends to the possibility of them being the same person, although this has not been validated. During the war François Raveaur became a member of the French resistance and was eventually arrested and in April 1944, he was deported to Neuengamme, then Fallersleben and Wöbbelin. In his reminiscences Raveaur says that he later found out that de Verdieres had been arrested after the war for collaborating with the Gestapo, although he does not believe that he was betrayed by him.Sidpickle (talk) 21:04, 18 December 2019 (UTC)

When the Raveaur family were introduced to de Verdières they were also told that a person of some consequence in the town had known de Verdières in Paris. There is no mention in the reminiscences of François Raveaur as to whether this person gave a reference or not. However, this link to Paris is of interest because we know from the divorce papers filed by Phyllis (Gotch) de Verdières that her husband was in Paris in 1934, cohabiting with American actress Mildred (Arden) Blandy. In July 1939 Mildred tried to renew her ID card in France so that she could remain in the country, but this was refused. She sent a telegram to an old friend in the White House asking if this could be sorted out and he in-turn contacted the US embassy in Paris. The answer came back that "her ID card had been withheld because of a disputed 1933 hotel bill; she was now liable for about $125 in fines and faced possible imprisonment and expulsion for having failed to regularize her situation." Mildred was back in the USA in November of 1939, perhaps unable to pay the fine. This may also explain the financial difficulties that André Schlossmacher de Verdières was experiencing when he was introduced to the Raveaur family. Mildred Blandy used the name de Verdières until her death in Austin,Texas, in 1955.