The Pursuit of Laughter

by Diana Mitford (Mosley)

  When, a generation later, Lytton and Carrington were put under the microscope, I read the results with interest, but could hardly relate them to the people I knew and loved. Carrington in particular has been blown up into something quite unlike herself. Not that it much matters. Lytton lives in his books, and she in her pictures, her letters, and her diaries.

  Lord Berners

  Gerald Tyrwhitt was born in 1883 at Apley Park in Shropshire, a large house belonging to his rich but mad maternal grandfather. His father, third son of Sir Henry Tyrwhitt and Baroness Berners, came from nearby Stanley Hall. Gerald’s father died in 1907, his uncles died without issue (Gerald used to say ‘three uncles fell off a bridge’), therefore in 1918 he succeeded as fourteenth Lord Berners.

  It is a measure of the humdrum yet violent and threatening age in which we live that Gerald Berners should usually be referred to as an eccentric. He was talented, civilized, hospitable, and extremely funny. He liked the company of people who appreciated beauty, intelligence, elegance and jokes; he created an atmosphere in which these qualities combined to make perfection. Wherever he was host the food he provided was beyond compare. None of this would have been considered particularly eccentric in days gone by. He was fortunate in that he had enough money to live in comfort and surround himself with beauty, but he was not immensely rich except in talents and the number, diversity and devotion of his friends.

  I had met him a few times, but we first became friends staying with Mrs Ronnie Greville at Polesden Lacey in 1932, when I was twenty-two and he forty-eight. Our hostess was an amazing old woman, very ugly and spiteful but excellent company; her standard of luxury was of the highest. Gerald told me the story of Bacon, her butler, who one evening at dinner was so drunk that she gave him a note: ‘You are drunk. Leave the room.’ He put it on a silver salver and handed it to Sir Robert Horne. I have since been told this tale by others, the recipient of the note varies, some say it was the wife of Sir Austen Chamberlain. It matters little so long as the person was either prim or pompous, or preferably both. Mrs Greville was neither. She was extremely amusing, and her parties at Polesden Lacey and in London at Charles Street were delightful.

  Soon after this visit my marriage to Bryan Guinness ended, and I came to live a few minutes’ walk from Gerald’s house in Halkin Street; we saw each other constantly and I often stayed with him at Faringdon in Berkshire.

  He also had a small house in Rome overlooking the Forum, and in the autumn of 1933 I stayed with him there for a month. This must have been too long, and I can only hope he pressed me to stay on, and that I didn’t assume because I was happy, he too was content. Towards the end of the visit we were joined by Desmond Parsons, a good-looking boy with a pronounced lack of enthusiasm. This amused Gerald, who was delighted when he came in for luncheon one day and told us: ‘I’ve had a disastrous morning in the Vatican.’

  ‘I hope you like veal?’ said Gerald as we sat down. ‘Oh yes,’ replied Desmond in gloomy tones. ‘I’m a regular veal fiend.’

  Gerald worked every morning and the rest of the day he was sociable. We lunched and dined all over the place and his Roman friends came to Foro Romano. We visited churches and galleries in Rome. Not normally very fond of exercise he could perform feats of endurance when sight-seeing, but on the whole he preferred carriage exercise, so we often went driving very slowly in his cumbrous Rolls Royce to Caprarola, or Frascati, or the Villa d’Este, or lunched with the Caetanis at Ninfa, that oasis of green and rushing water, or we wandered along the Via Appia. At Caprarola the huge house was empty and locked, but the concierge gave Gerald the key, and we both loved the gardens. He was a superb guide because he knew Rome well, having been an attaché at the Embassy before the First World War when Sir Rennell Rodd was ambassador.

  Some of his favourite jokes were about Lady Rodd (My sister Nancy’s mother-in-law). When he was in Rome these jokes surfaced, because various places and people reminded him of how much the Embasssy staff had laughed about her, years before. She had a swarthy complexion and when she announced that she was giving a dîner de têtes, ‘Just dress up your heads,’ she told the attachés. ‘You know, black your faces or something.’ As she left the room one of them was heard to say gloomily, ‘Some of us won’t need to.’

  Lady Rodd never noticed when people were making fun of her, which was probably just as well. She gave a fancy dress ball at the Embassy: ‘Juno—Lady Rodd—was a striking figure in cloth of gold… Afterwards Nausicaa and her maidens performed a classic dance, which was interrupted by a Satyr represented by Mr Tyrwhitt of the British Embassy,’ says a contemporary gossip column.

  The attachés had a competition with a prize for the designer of the most hideous house combining the greatest number of architectural oddities. The winning drawing was pinned to the wall. Lady Rodd saw it, and exclaimed, ‘My dream house!’ She asked to borrow it and built her dream house at Posillipo. It stood there for many years until it was shelled and reduced to rubble during the Second World War by the British fleet; rather a mercy.

  Gerald’s work in the mornings was either composing or painting. When he composed, he sat at the piano and one heard a phrase or two played, and then silence while he wrote it down. He painted out of doors, usually in company with Princesse Marie Murat; they set up their easels side by side. She was a great friend of his. A widow, she had gone to live at the French Embassy in Constantinople where the Ambassador was Comte Charles de Chambrun. Gerald said that a young man, shown into the drawing room and finding her there alone, had shyly asked her: ‘Je m’adresse à la maîtresse de maison?’ and that she had replied: ‘Maîtresse oui, mais je ne m’occupe pas de la maison.’ When Chambrun was transferred to Rome she settled in at the Palais Farnèse, and after a time the Pope indicated that it would please him if she and M. de Chambrun got married. Marie Murat thought it somewhat ridiculous for two middle-aged people, but did as she was asked.

  A man with whom we sometimes dined at his luxurious villa near Rome was M. Sandoz, a Swiss millionaire whose pharmaceutical business bore his name. The villa was rather beautiful, with a marble floor designed by Picasso, and a large library. One evening, talking shop, M. Sandoz informed us that in Paris one could buy from a chemist in the Place Blanche a miraculous drug ‘qui rend la vie merveilleuse’. Gerald and Desmond Parsons both felt they needed to keep such a drug handy. Gerald suffered quite often from depression, and Desmond was more or less permanently ‘below par’.

  Going home to England Gerald, Desmond and I motored from Rome to Paris at the leisurely pace Gerald liked. Several times a day he would refer to the drug M. Sandoz had told us about; he could hardly wait to try it. It was supposed to be quite harmless, with no unpleasant side effects.

  We often stopped on the journey and we spent some time at Rapallo with Max Beerbohm, who showed us his collection of photographs of celebrities touched up in such a way as to make them into monsters with squints, huge noses and mouths awry. Max Beerbohm must have spent hours on these skilful transformations; Gerald was very appreciative. He himself was an adept at the work. One of his masterpieces was a photograph of George V with a group of army officers; his uniform could be opened to show a naked female body, a bearded lady. Perhaps this activity might be described as eccentric, but Gerald and Max Beerbohm were rewarded by the screams of any friends who were allowed to see the photographs.

  As we neared Paris, stopping at every three-star restaurant en route, excitement at the thought of the drug mounted. Gerald had really begun to believe it might cure him of his depressions, and that life would be permanently merveilleuse instead of intermittently so as was now the case. We deposited our luggage at the Hôtel Crillon and rushed to the Place Blanche.

  That evening we dined with Violet Trefusis, who lived in Paris and had an old château near Provins. She pointed out that as Gerald had a charming London house, and Faringdon, and Foro Romano, between them they had desirable residences for all seasons and moods, and that if they married and pooled them, how
delightful that would be. By the end of dinner they were engaged. Gerald must have swallowed the miraculous drug while dressing, which made him ready for any joke, however outrageous.

  I tried the drug myself and was very disappointed when it had no effect whatsoever. Gerald and Desmond Parsons persevered for a day or two, but they finally admitted it was a dud. Back in London, however, news of the engagement between Gerald and Violet appeared in a gossip column one evening. Next morning she telephoned him and said: ‘I’ve had dozens of telegrams of congratulation,’ to which he replied: ‘Have you really? I haven’t had one.’

  At Faringdon he had a toy, one of Disney’s Three Little Pigs: you wound it up and it danced on its little trotters. He used to put it on the dining room table and say: ‘Violet!’ And it was indeed the very image of Violet Trefusis—pink, plump, absurd. Violet’s mother, Mrs Keppel, thought the marriage joke in very poor taste and insisted upon a denial being published. Gerald thereupon sent The Times a note: ‘Lord Berners has left Lesbos for the Isle of Man,’ or at least so he said.

  He sometimes invented practical jokes to make us laugh, but I doubt, for example, whether he really invited Lady Colefax to meet the P. of W. and then introduced the Provost of Worcester. The idea was to pay her back for her illegible postcards, inviting people to meet H.G. or W.S.M., meaning Wells or Maugham. When Beverley Nichols, author of Down the Garden Path, visited Faringdon and went into ecstasies over the scyllas and grape hyacinths, Gerald pretended he had said, ‘Oh, I told the gardener not to plant those nasty little flowers,’ and rubbed them out with his foot. I never believed it. He would never have done it, not on account of Lady Colefax or Beverley Nichols, but because of the Provost of Worcester and the spring flowers.

  ***

  When I stayed with him the following year in Rome, Robert Heber-Percy was there. At that time aged twenty-two, he was to be a life-long friend. His high spirits, elegant appearance and uninhibited behaviour en chanted Gerald, who no longer needed a drug to give him contentment. Robert took his horses to Faringdon, hunted regularly and got a quiet hack for Gerald, who enjoyed riding round his farms. To Robert is dedicated the first volume of Gerald’s memoirs, First Childhood, published in 1934. He was an ideal companion for Gerald: busy all day out of doors, hunting or seeing to the estate, he had a streak of pure fantasy in his make-up. With Robert about, Diaghilev’s demand to Cocteau: ‘Étonne moil’ would not have been necessary, for he never failed to astonish.

  I spent Christmas at Faringdon that year; Gladys Marlborough (Second wife of the ninth Duke of Marlborough), Edward James (A collector of Tchelichev, Dali, Magritte, and Picasso) and I were all either getting divorces or hoping to do so, and Gerald put only bachelors’ buttons and thimbles in the Christmas pudding. When we reproached him about the absence of sixpences, rings, and lucky pigs, he said he had thought it best to put what he knew would please his guests.

  First Childhood is a deceptively artless account of a fairly happy childhood spent in the country with his mother. Of his two grandmothers, one was an angel and the other a devil. The devilish Lady Berners (Called Bourchier in the book) was, however, interested in ornithology, as was Gerald himself. ‘At a very early age I became a bird bore,’ he wrote. Lady Berners fed her birds on the windowsill and was very pleased because she had succeeded in taming a pair of blue tits so that they would take food from her hand; at least so she said, though nobody had actually seen them do it. “One day I was privileged to catch a glimpse of the birds and I remember causing a mild sensation by rushing into the drawing room where several members of the family were sitting and crying out excitedly: ‘I say! I’ve just seen Grandmother’s tits.”’

  He says Lady Berners looked like Holbein’s portrait of Bloody Mary, mixed with Charley’s Aunt.

  His whole family was devoted to sport; there was no music, until one day when he heard a guest, who was an excellent pianist, play Chopin’s Fantaisie Impromptu. He implored her to play it over and over again. Henceforward the very name Chopin had magic for him, and he managed to learn one of the mazurkas and play it on a piano in the billiard room. Nobody encouraged him.

  His mildly dull but quite happy existence changed when he was sent to school at Cheam where the headmaster was an appalling bully. Gerald says he feels that to call him a sadist would be unfair to the Marquis de Sade. ‘It would be doing an injustice to that wayward nobleman. Mr Gambril’s cruelty was of a far more inhuman type. It was cruelty for cruelty’s sake, pure unadulterated cruelty, and there was no extenuating circumstance of sexual aberration.’ Probably, here, Gerald was wrong. Be that as it may, he loathed the school and hated games. His only moment of triumph in four miserable years was when, at the school concert, he played a piece with brio.

  It was to be several years before Gerald published the second volume of his memoirs. A Distant Prospect is about his adolescence; it is a tiny wartime production on wretched paper and with minuscule margins, but it is the most delightful of all his books.

  The loathsome headmaster of his private school took leave of him without giving Gerald the customary lecture about sex which he had been told by the other boys to expect. He was rather surprised, although at that age he says he had ‘no intimations of immorality’. It may be that Mr Gambril vaguely felt that lurking in the little boy’s make-up there was a germ of deadly sarcasm. It is not always realized that masters fear their pupils as much as they are feared by them, and with more reason. It is the pupil who has the last laugh. Instead of warning him of the dangers of sex, Mr Gambril warned him against letting music interfere with his studies; then he gave him Scott’s poems and let him go.

  School at the end of the nineteenth century was extraordinarily disagreeable for boys who disliked games. They were severely discouraged from indulging in any artistic activity, looked upon as pure waste of time. Gerald wrote rather sadly of the hopelessly bad education he received; the accent was on the Classics, yet years of struggling with Latin and Greek grammar never enabled him to read Latin or Greek. He says the educational system at Eton had something leisurely about it, which was appropriate since it was a school for the leisured classes. Fortunately he was able to escape from hated cricket, because there was the alternative of rowing; ‘It was pleasant to think I should be able to boat on the river and “cleave with pliant arm the glassy wave”.’

  The Dame of his House was an ally when it came to his hobbies; not only did she allow him to play on a tinny old piano which stood in the dining room of his House, but she herself liked sketching and encouraged him to show her his efforts. ‘Her criticisms were always very much to the point. “A little more blue,” she would advise. “I always think a picture’s nicer if there’s just a touch of blue somewhere.”’

  While he was at Eton Gerald made two friends, whom he called Marston and Deniston in his autobiography; one, Marston, was dirty and untidy but clever and funny, the other, Deniston, handsome and beautifully dressed; he satisfied a taste for fashion which Gerald never lost. To him, dowdiness mattered infinitely less than boringness, nevertheless he always loved elegance—it was art of beauty, and not a negligible part. These very different friends represented in embryo what he called ‘the two worlds that have continued to fascinate me throughout my life, the world of scholarship and the world of fashion’.

  One day Gerald suggested to Deniston that he ought to do something in life, that being well-dressed and good-looking was not enough. Even as he said it he realized he was wrong. To be decorative and agreeable is an art in itself, giving pleasure to others and contentment to the fortunate possessor of such charms. In any case Deniston rejected his proposition with scorn.

  He had two pieces of great good fortune when he was at Eton. The first was a severe illness, an attack of rheumatic fever. He had to be taken away on a stretcher in view of all the boys, and when he came back among them, snatched from the jaws of death, they were much nicer to him. Fortunately for him, he could not now play football; he had a weak heart, games and character-
building were no longer possible, and he was allowed to sketch and play the piano.

  The second lucky chance was his purchase of a synopsis of Wagner’s Ring in an Eton bookshop. He was immediately captivated, imagining the music for this magic world of gods and heroes, giants and wicked dwarfs. Not long afterwards he saw the score of Rheingold in the window of a music shop. He asked the price; it was more than he could afford—twelve shillings. He turned over the pages; the thrilling music, chords, arpeggios, made him long to possess it. He bought the libretto, in the absurd English translation, for a shilling, and lived henceforward in Wagner’s world. Even the clatter of knives and forks at boys’ dinner transported him to Nibelheim and the dwarfs banging away with their hammers.

  Then his father unexpectedly came down to visit him. Gerald seldom saw him; he was a naval officer who, when he was not at sea, was busy being equerry to one of the princes. Bored by his wife, he actively disliked Lady Berners, and when somebody asked him, ‘Isn’t your mother a peeress in her own right?’ replied, ‘Yes, and she’s everything else in her own wrong.’ Gerald’s visitor asked him if there was anything he would like to buy. He dared not admit what he craved and just said a book, but that it was very expensive: twelve shillings. His father laughed and gave him two sovereigns. After seeing him off, Gerald flew to the music shop and to his relief the score was still in the window and he was able to buy it.

  There is something intensely moving about this boy, who had received no musical instruction, who had been actively discouraged, but who was so enamoured of music and possessed of such talent that he could read the score of Rheingold and play enough of it on the piano to be able to imagine what it must sound like.

  There is a parallel, also extremely moving, in the memoirs of Lord Clark, who at the age of seven was taken by his governess to a fair at the White City. By chance, they walked down a passage lined with Japanese screens—pictures of flowers which generated hitherto unknown excitement in the child. Many years later, now a renowned art historian, he saw the screens again at Kyoto and recognized them at once. But he was assured by his Japanese guide that he could never have seen them before, because they had never left Kyoto. However, back in Tokyo he asked a learned Japanese friend about them, who told him the screens had indeed been to London in 1910. They were supposed to be shown at the National Gallery but by mistake had been exhibited at a fair. The Japanese were rather offended by this, because as a result nobody saw them. ‘One person did,’ said K. Clark.