Gerald was twenty years older than Lord Clark; they had similar boyhoods. Both were only children whose families were devoted exclusively to sport. Both disliked their philistine schools. But there is no doubt that Winchester, to which the unlucky K. was sent, was infinitely more barbarous than Eton. Like Gerald, he was fortunate enough to become ill, and had to go home for a few months during which, he says, he educated himself.
During Gerald’s holidays there were no games to be dreaded, but there was plenty of sport. He quite liked riding, and even shooting, for an hour or two, but one was supposed to ride or shoot from sunrise to sunset, which bored him. This worried his mother almost as much as his dislike of football and cricket annoyed his schoolmasters. Here again, his bad heart rescued him; the endless days of sport were forbidden by the doctor.
His mother, anxious about his health, took him away from Eton just when he was beginning almost to like being there. He loved the beauty of the place, where some of his lasting passions had their origins. The most important were music, friendships, and the taste of ‘hot buns at Little Brown’s before early school’. The memory of these buns shows he was already the gourmet whose food gave us so much pleasure. As to education: ‘I had learned nothing, less than nothing, a minus quantity.’ He had lost whatever knowledge he had, and ‘left Eton with a distaste for the Classics, and what was more serious, a distaste for work itself’. However, he says he never regretted having been to Eton, ‘although I left it as Antony left Cleopatra, with more love than benediction’.
Gerald was a slow developer. ‘Had I been more intensively educated at that period of my life, I might have grown up, as Herbert Spencer said of early risers, “conceited in the morning and stupid in the afternoon”.’
As he grew older he craved something more glittering than the humdrum surroundings of his home with its rather dull country neighbours. He was fond of his mother but he could not approve of her tweeds. She now began to worry about his future career. He thought it grossly unfair that he should be expected to earn his living; all his uncles and aunts lived in idle luxury. His education had only fitted him to be leisured. It is interesting to speculate upon what would have been the result of musical instruction in harmony and counterpoint for this gifted boy. Might it have given him a distaste for music, like his distaste for the Classics? Really bad, dull teaching can have a distressing effect, but of course he should before now have been sent to Germany to learn his métier. Such an idea would simply not have occurred to his mother, who considered the few professions at that time thought suitable for a gentleman. The army and the navy were both impossible; Gerald was short-sighted and wore spectacles.
He himself had a passing whim for the Church. Life in a pleasant country vicarage appealed to him; he could ride round his parish; the clergy were not supposed to hunt all day long. But there was an insurmountable obstacle; his attitude to God. Even when he was only five his mother wrote that she hardly dared tell him a Bible story, because ‘he inclines to favour the wrong side; Adam and Eve, the Egyptians, and even Cain and Jezebel, and he is always saying he thinks God must be very wicked’. Now that he was older his opinion had not changed. He thought it wrong of God to have inflicted a painful illness upon him when he had done nothing to deserve it. He failed to recognize that it had been his greatest blessing at Eton, and that God as usual was moving in a mysterious way his wonders to perform. He disapproved of the fact that Christ was put on the right hand of God in heaven. He thought Christ’s mother, a lady, should have sat there. All in all, the Church was a non-starter.
They settled in the end for diplomacy. He longed to go abroad, and this he would now have to do in order to learn foreign languages. It was thus purely fortuitous that he not only learnt French and German, and their literature was his joy all his born days, but was also able to hear music every night, and learn how to write it down.
An unpublished account of his ‘Grand Tour’, which was to have been the third volume of his memoirs, survives. The mere idea of ‘abroad’ enchanted him. Also ‘I had often heard foreigners, and particularly the French, criticized for not being sporting, for frivolity and laxity of morals, all of which deficiencies at that time appealed to me.’ He was sent to a château in Normandy, Résenlieu, where he was completely happy. He was freed from ‘many things that irked me at home, parental interference, and above all the tyranny of games and sport’. He loved his hostess, charming and witty, and spent his summer chatting with her, playing the piano and sketching out of doors. His watercolours of Résenlieu show how delightful it must have been.
Dresden he rather disliked. He arrived there in dead of winter, and the district where he lived was modern and ugly. There was a large English colony, settled in Dresden for the music. He says he was disappointed by this ante-room of Parnassus. These people were just as dull as the sporting neighbours at home. His passion for Wagner waned; he was put off by the hideous, massive tenors and the enormous sopranos whose appearance destroyed his illusions, though they were idolized by the English, with whom he spent most of his time. He read Nietzsche’s Der Fall Wagner, and found himself agreeing with its strictures. His new hero was Richard Strauss. He also acquired a passion for Ibsen, and dragged his hostess to the plays. After being harrowed by A Doll’s House, or Ghosts, she told him she preferred ‘ein elegantes Salonstück’. But the importance of Dresden for Gerald’s development was that he went to a famous teacher, Professor Kretzschmer, for lessons in orchestration. From him he learned how to put his music down on paper.
He only began to love Germany as he loved France when he moved to Weimar. There was the Hoftheater for operas and plays, an excellent bookshop, a Konditorei with all manner of sweets, ‘delicious coffee, chocolate and ices’, and a few minutes’ walk took one into open country, which Gerald always loved. He read Goethe, and Eckermann; and he hired a piano for his sitting room.
This little unpublished book ends with a lyrical description of a German Christmas. There was ‘a marvellous Christmas tree’, and they all drank glühwein hot and spiced. Paper caps were produced ‘and the Professor and the two spinsters in their caps looked like a Capricho of Goya… There was a discordant chorus of “Heilige Nacht”. The Professor bellowed, Miss Macpherson screamed and festivity reached the highest pitch of noise and gaiety.’ In the afternoon they went to church; ‘the decorated church, the chorales that were sung’ made Gerald feel ‘like the atheistic character in Anatole France who exclaimed when he heard the Dies Irae being played on the organ in the Cathedral: “Cela me foot des idées religieuses”. That Christmas in Weimar was one of the passages of my youth that remained imprinted in glowing colours in my memory,’ he wrote.
Gerald says in A Distant Prospect that the entrance exam to Eton was his swansong so far as examinations were concerned—therefore presum ably he failed the diplomatic exam. In 1907 his father died, and shortly afterwards Gerald went to the British Embassy in Constantinople as honorary attaché. At the end of 1911, when he was twenty-eight, he became honorary attaché in Rome. His love of Italy and of Rome lasted for the rest of his life.
When he first heard Stravinsky’s music, when he met Stravinsky, whom he described to me once as a genius—‘I felt I was in the presence of a great genius,’ were his words—I do not know. The music was an exciting revelation to him. He knew the Paris musical world, Princesse Edmond de Polignac was his friend. She was a rather splendid-looking American lesbian with the profile of Dante. Born Winaretta Singer, she loved music and was immensely rich and a noted benefactress to young composers. Gerald probably met Stravinsky and Diaghilev with her, as well as his French contemporaries, Les Six, and others. His Fragments Psychologiques date from 1915. His musical life was centred in Paris, but it was Italy he loved.
In 1935 Gerald once again invited me to stay in Rome: Phyllis de Janzé came too. I was obliged to put off my arrival for a few days as I had to go into a nursing home for a small operation. ‘Hurry up with your illegallers,’ wrote Gerald with his habitua
l disregard for discretion. During this visit he wrote The Girls of Radcliff Hall.
Radclyffe Hall was a lesbian who had written a famous book called The Well of Loneliness. It was rather sad and very dull, but it captured the attention of a large public and became a bestseller because a journalist had said in the Sunday Express that he would rather give his daughter a phial of poison than allow her to read The Well of Loneliness.
Gerald’s book was a roman a clef about himself and some of his friends. Radcliff Hall was a school; he was the headmistress; the girls were Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel, Peter Watson, Robin Thomas and Robert Heber-Percy, the school tomboy, all easily recognizable. Every morning Gerald read me the latest chapter; sometimes he had to stop reading he laughed so much. It was wonderfully funny if you knew the characters and their foibles but perhaps less so for the general public. He had The Girls privately printed.
John Betjeman wrote once of the stories Gerald told that they were ‘too much concerned with the peculiarities of his friends’ to amuse outsiders, and went on to describe them as ‘short, extremely funny and fantastic, yet so personal that their effect would be lost in trying to explain them’. Probably he was right. Gerald’s longest story was about a friend of his who woke after his siesta and saw that the lawn was covered in white. He rang for the footman and said, ‘What on earth is all that white on the lawn?’
‘It’s the hail, sir.’
‘What? One small bird did all that?’
‘I didn’t say the owl. I said the hail.’
Gerald made the two words sound the same. Kit, who liked to see me laugh, used to say: ‘Gerald, please tell one small bird.’
He was first and foremost a composer, whose hobbies were painting and writing. He was a great admirer of Corot, and it is easy to see the influence of the master—the golden Corot of Gerald’s paintings of Rome and the Campagna, and then the Corot of Ville d’Avray and its trees and ponds in the green Faringdon pictures—but they are at the same time very personal to himself. He admired Matisse, Tchelichev and Dali; some of their work hung at Faringdon, where most of the pictures were family portraits of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, framed in black.
Diaghilev and Stravinsky thought highly of Gerald’s music; he composed The Triumph of Neptune for Diaghilev in 1926, and a few years later another ballet, Luna Park, for C.B. Cochran, both with choreography by Balanchine.
When Cochran produced Helen!, based on Offenbach’s La Belle Hélène, Oliver Messel’s sumptuous décor and the beauty of Evelyn Laye when the chorus, pianissimo, sang Marlowe’s
Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
And burned the topless towers of Illium?
captivated me.
‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ I said.
‘Oh no. What on earth has become of the music?’ said Gerald. It had been cut to ribbons.
His last ballet, A Wedding Bouquet, with words for a chorus by Gertrude Stein, was performed at Sadlers Wells in 1936 with choreography by Frederick Ashton; the conductor was Constant Lambert. All these talented people came frequently to Gerald’s houses. Sir Frederick Ashton says when they were working together there were few jokes; Gerald always took work seriously.
Gertrude Stein, with her cropped hair and heavy tread, and her friend, Alice B. Toklas, with her moustache, were more mannish than any man. Gertrude Stein’s books were incomprehensible, her prestige rested upon her collection of paintings; she had bought Picasso’s pictures before he became well known. Gerald said she was a good businesswoman, and in any case he was amused when her self-proclaimed genius was taken seriously by pretentious critics. She and Miss Toklas were very American; years of living in Paris had not changed them in the slightest degree, though perhaps Paris gave them some sort of aura in their native land.
***
In 1936, when Kit and I were married, I went to live in Staffordshire. Although no longer a London neighbour, I saw almost as much of Gerald as before. He and Robert came up to Wootton, while I often stayed at Faringdon and sometimes at Halkin Street. One year they entered a horse for the Grand National: it amused Gerald to be a racehorse owner for a day, and we went to Aintree.
Faringdon is the perfect country house; not enormous but big enough for several guests to stay in comfort. It was built in the mid-eighteenth century. The beautiful double drawing room, with a fire at each end, looks out upon a lawn and a fountain, with great trees and a lake beyond, and an endless vista of English country stretching away for miles. On the other side of the house across a lawn is a pretty old church whose bells play melodious hymn tunes. Gerald said that whenever people who did not know the place came to stay, however sunny the morning, ‘visitors’ blight’ was sure to descend just as they arrived, shrouding the view in mist. There was no visitors’ blight in Rome, but it never mattered at Faringdon. The beauty of the house, the unfailing amusement of Gerald’s company and that of his friends, the delicious food, and in winter the warmth (The painter Adrian Daintrey called it ‘Faringdonheit’) quickly dispelled the encircling gloom of the English climate, and next day, having shown what it could do the blight lifted and the sun shone.
I was once invited to bring my sons Jonathan and Desmond Guinness, then aged six and seven, to stay at Faringdon. They never forgot this visit. Many years later Desmond arranged a concert of Gerald’s music in a country house near Dublin, and he wrote an article about the composer in the Irish Times for the occasion. He described his memories of Faringdon, a printed notice on the stairs, ‘MANGLING DONE HERE’ and another on the dining room door, ‘NO DOGS ADMITTED’ two feet from the floor, the right height for dogs. And, of course, he remembered the fantail pigeons dyed in bright colours flying round the house. Gerald was a born surrealist.
At about this time he conceived the idea of building a tower on the top of Folly Hill, a mound-like eminence covered in trees overlooking the town of Faringdon. When people round about heard of it there were protests in the local papers. It was rumoured that Gerald planned to put searchlights on his tower, and sirens, in order to annoy. The council, well known for the ugly council houses it had built here and there in pretty villages, rejected the plans for the tower, but it was over-ruled after an appeal to Whitehall.
Gerald’s tower has gothic features; he designed it with the help of his friend Gerry Wellesley, an architect. There is a spectacular view from the top, but the extremely pretty tower is almost invisible now except from the Wantage road, so high are the surrounding trees. It must be one of the last non-utilitarian buildings in England, perhaps even in Europe. Gerald painted a picture of it which was made into a poster for Shell.
***
The thirties are always described as a political decade, but Gerald was not in the least interested in politics. Of course he knew I was a Fascist and that Kit spent his life campaigning for Fascism, but he was quite accustomed to Fascism, which had been the system of government in Italy for years. Although in some ways less chaotic than of old, Rome was essentially unchanged. Gerald’s Italian friends held all sorts of opinions. Some of the Romans he knew were keen Fascists, others were keen anti-Fascists, and many had no particular preference either way.
At the time of the Abyssinian war most Italians thought it strange that England should be so anxious to stop them doing what a few years before had been a constant English activity, the colonization of Africa. When sanctions were imposed, Gerald said that the Duchess of Sermoneta was so indignant that she told him she wished she could let every drop of her English blood out of her veins, but as it was mixed with Italian she could not, and it therefore remained a pious wish.
We visited my sister Unity in Munich, where Gerald wrote a little poem for her in German. But I can only remember two specifically political occasions with him in the thirties. He and Robert dined with me before Kit’s rowdy Fascist meeting at Olympia, and so did Vivian Jackson. To my lasting regret, for it was to be a legendary occasion, I was unable to go because I felt ill. They all went off without me, and
Gerald telephoned at about midnight to say that Vivian had been arrested and Robert had bailed him out; he was charged with obstructing the police and fined a few shillings next day. Gerald gave evidence that a policeman had hit him on the head with a weapon like a sword, and that Vivian had gone to his defence.
The other occasion was when I dined with Gerald and we went with Wystan Auden to his anti-Fascist play, The Dog beneath the Skin. Auden was not famous in those days. He was pale yellow, hair and skin, he had bitten nails and a dirty suit. The play was not very good—it is better read than acted—but the poet himself was intelligent and agreeable. We naturally had to stay until the end as the author was with us. The Dog beneath the Skin is more anti-Land of Dope and Tory than anti-Fascist.
Gerald was always well dressed in a quiet and conventional way; not for him the rufty-tufty Bloomsbury clothes with their unpressed trousers. He was not overfond of Bloomsbury food; when he dined with Clive Bell and was told, ‘I hope you like oysters. I’ve got some from a dirty little shop round the corner,’ he was quite rightly terrified. His quiet clothes and serious appearance made his jokes, often childish, even funnier.
The Pursuit of Laughter Page 49
