The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me

by Sofka Zinovieff

  In First Childhood, there is an attempt to distance this type of adoration from clearly homosexual relationships. Gerald wrote that he was not aware of his longings for Longworth being sexual, though ‘my infatuation for this boy-hero of my school-days was accompanied by all the usual symptoms connected with sexual attraction’. He suggests there was a purity ‘in those innocent, pre-Freudian, pre-Havelock Ellis generations . . . [unlike in] these days of intense sex-sophistication’.26 In A Distant Prospect, Gerald writes in an ostensibly open manner about the force of other passionate, youthful friendships, yet his discussion of homosexuality at Eton does nothing to elucidate his own experiences or his later life. He mentions the ‘vices’ which took place in the school and the hypocrisy that still existed on the subject, but then suggests that though a good deal of this sort of thing went on, ‘to speak of it as homosexuality would be unduly ponderous. It was merely the ebullition of puberty.’27 Gerald’s soothing, avuncular tone was surely intended as a knowing wink to those who knew.

  The Longworth episode did not end happily. Following a short if miraculous period of friendship, bestowed by Longworth de haut en bas, Gerald was dropped. His disgrace came after the two boys climbed onto the moonlit roof to smoke and Gerald vomited ignominiously. The misery of being rejected was overwhelming and the child fell into a state of deep depression. Whether this was the first time he experienced it is unknown, but it was a condition that recurred throughout his life. What he called accidie (a term originally used to describe the inability to work or pray among monks and other ascetics) made him feel that he ‘might as well not exist’.28 During these phases, he believed he was unloved, unworthy and that he would never do any good. The literary theorist Walter Benjamin described ‘acedia’ as an ‘indolence of the heart’ that ruins great men, and believed it was the key to understanding tragic figures such as Hamlet. This ‘slothful inability to make decisions’ leads to the hero passively accepting his fate rather than resisting it. Certainly, Gerald found that melancholia destroyed even his great love of music and literature, and what were normally such consolations brought no pleasure. There was ‘that awful nervous sensation of a windmill going round in one’s heart (known in later years as angst)’.29 When struck by depression, nothing could comfort him and he re-experienced the hopeless disempowerment and torment he had known as a schoolboy. ‘In this black nightmare all the old strictures of the headmaster . . . cropped up again and revived once more my self-consciousness at being bad at games’.30 The triggers could be various, but the effect was deadening and familiar. Nevertheless, like many artists and writers who suffer depression, Gerald was able to spin creative gold from his disadvantages.

  Gerald’s unhappiness was not helped by a keen awareness that he was far from good-looking. At Eton, his contemporaries called him ‘Newt’ and Osbert Sitwell described his ‘natural air of quiet, ugly distinction’. Even when he was an adult, some of his friends made unkind remarks. Beverley Nichols recalled, with cuttingly cruel, if inaccurate, comedy worthy of his subject, that ‘he was remarkably ugly – short, swarthy, bald, dumpy and simian. There is a legend that nobody who has ever seen Gerald in his bath is ever quite the same again.’31 In fact, Gerald’s face is rather appealing in his photographs, with his evident intelligence and sensitivity taking precedence over his unremarkable features. He took care with his appearance and he was consistently well-dressed and groomed; striped socks or shiny white spats added a touch of elan to a dapper ‘snuff coloured city suit’.32 As a boy, he was always anxious to do the ‘right thing’, and it was not until later that he discovered the liberating effect of departing from conventions. Still, for someone who valued beauty so highly, it is likely that at least in his youth he was troubled by his lack of it. The frustration, even anger, Gerald must have felt was one of the roots of a humour that could be hurtful to others.

  To make matters worse, Gerald’s physical problems were not limited to his appearance and he often suffered from poor health – a bad case of rheumatic fever as a teenager may have had a lasting impact and his letters throughout his life are full of descriptions of illness. In a letter to Stravinsky written in 1918 when he was thirty-five, Gerald added a postscript: ‘My illness was complicated: infection, inflammation, followed by an abscess – prelude, chorale, and fugue!’33

  Gerald knew how to poke fun at himself, and he manipulated his sense of the absurd to entertain others. When still at prep school, he wrote to his mother: ‘Why did you ask if I was ill? Because I have got insomnia in my leg very badly. Please come down to Cheam at once. I have also got Hooping-cough and measles and a slight inflammation of the bronchial tubes. Love to Everyone Gerald Tyrwhitt.’ To this he added an accomplished and charmingly off-beat sketch of a barefoot girl in long skirt and military jacket.

  ERALD IS SOMETIMES VIEWED as a quintessential English eccentric, but in fact he was highly cosmopolitan, spoke several languages and chose to spend much of his life outside England. Although his father travelled with the Navy, Gerald’s affinity with foreign cultures did not seem to come from his family, whom he depicts as laughably parochial. When they had been in Italy, ‘It rained in Venice, Uncle Luke caught sunstroke in Florence, my mother lost a bracelet at the opera in Milan, and my grandmother found a bug in her bed in Bologna. These mishaps were often referred to when anyone spoke too enthusiastically about foreign travel.’34

  Gerald’s love affair with ‘abroad’ began when he left Eton and, encouraged by his parents, decided to pursue a diplomatic career. Rather than go to university, it was deemed normal to go on a ‘sort of protracted Grand Tour’, to learn French, German and other languages.35 In common with his friend and later colleague Harold Nicolson, as well as numerous other aspiring diplomats, the sixteen-year-old Gerald went to stay in various private establishments that took in young Englishmen.

  The first exhilarating step towards leaving the straitjacket of his English upbringing was taken at the beautiful Château Résenlieu in Normandy, where the teenager was deposited by his mother. Under the tutelage of an impoverished aristocratic widow who had opened her home to young men wanting to learn French, Gerald did learn the language. But more important, conveniently separated from the narrow outlook of family, school and dreaded sports, his horizons opened up. Many of the seeds of his future existence were sown, from a love of Corot’s art and a pursuit of this painting style himself, to an ability to converse on complex subjects with people from different backgrounds. Unlike so many of his compatriots who remained linguistically and culturally isolated, Gerald was brave enough to undergo the humiliation of being the vulnerable foreigner. He described the process of trying ‘to be amiable in a foreign language’ as like ‘a dog trying to express its thoughts to a human being’.36

  According to Gerald, during this soft, flower-scented summer idyll, he even fell in love – if only from afar and somewhat self-consciously – with a girl named Henriette. More convincing than this dreamy romance are his descriptions of how food came to be a significant element in his life. He had shown an interest in delicious tastes in earlier days – a letter home from school mentions that ‘Fuller’s at Eton have got a wonderful new American drink called “Ice Cream Soda”’ – but France brought something different. Far from the plain cooking and embarrassment of the puritanical Victorians of his childhood, Gerald learned to take pleasure in a fast-developing Epicureanism. He became dedicated to eating and providing others with wonderful food. ‘I began to interest myself in questions as to whether tarragon were preferable to chervil in a sauce,’ and to watch dishes being prepared in the kitchen ‘without feeling that I was making a nuisance of myself or incurring the stigma of greediness’.37

  By 1901, Gerald was in Dresden attending a diplomatic crammer where geography, history and Latin were required as well as languages. Composition was becoming increasingly significant to him and he took lessons with the composer Edmund Kretschmer. His early love for Chopin had moved on to Wagner, but in Germany he became an ardent admi
rer of Richard Strauss. His peripatetic, informal studies continued over the next years in pursuit of passing the Foreign Office exams, but it was music that remained at the centre of his existence. Despite there being no evidence of any particularly close relationships at this time, what is clear is that he was an intensely emotional young man. Gerald later described how his moods swung from ‘attacks of ecstasy almost orgiastic in their violence’ to deep depression and despair.38 It is tantalising to wonder whether these extremes of feeling were ever focused on people close to him, or whether (as some commentators have implied) he was too shy and diffident, and instead poured his passionate feelings into playing and composing music.

  Despite Gerald’s intelligence and years of studying, he failed the demanding Foreign Office exams in 1905, much to his distress. Two years later he failed again, and shortly afterwards his father, Captain Tyrwhitt, died at sea – though he was convalescing on a cruise in the Mediterranean rather than on naval duty. Oddly, despite their alleged antipathy, his wife was on the boat too – her absence at the English memorial service was due to her being still at sea. Julia caused a family rumpus by remarrying the following year, confessing in a letter to her son, ‘I do not feel so sad as I thought I would. After all I had not a very happy time with your Father, and as you say, one ought to live a little for oneself! I wonder if you will be very surprised to hear that Col. Ward Bennitt is very anxious to marry me. It seems so funny at my age to have anyone so wildly in love with me!’

  GERALD IN 1905 AGED TWENTY-TWO, WHEN HE FIRST FAILED TO BECOME A DIPLOMAT

  The ageing newly-weds rented a new home in Berkshire – Faringdon House – and Gerald often went to stay there when he was in England. Old photographs show the house and gardens at this time in its more conventional Edwardian guise: ornate flowerbeds on the lawns, potted ferns in the drawing room, and lace-draped ladies reclining on wicker chairs on the porch. Creepers sprawl across the facade, so it looks very different to Nancy Mitford’s later description of the house as ‘plain and grey and square and solid’.39

  A CREEPER-CLAD FARINGDON HOUSE SOON AFTER GERALD’S MOTHER MOVED IN WITH HER NEW HUSBAND

  So much had changed around him, but Gerald was still frustratingly without direction or achievement. His lack of musical training would appear to rule out a career in that direction and the Foreign Office evidently didn’t want him. He was hardly on the look-out for a wealthy wife, as his father had been. The future must have looked quite bleak.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Russians, Radicals and Roman Catholics

  GED TWENTY-SIX, Gerald finally entered the diplomatic service, albeit as an honorary (i.e. unpaid) attaché, and left for the British Embassy in Constantinople. This was one way of starting a diplomatic career if an applicant was not successful in the exams, and it allowed Gerald to establish an existence that was not pressured by too many professional duties and in which he could pursue his own interests and pleasures. He set off in February 1909, travelling on the fabled belle époque Orient Express, which moved slowly through deep snow after its stop at Vienna. Leaving the familiar environment of Europe, Gerald must have found Constantinople a different world. The exotic theatricality of the polyglot, multicultural ‘Paris of the East’ appealed to him, with its colourful, diverse inhabitants: sailors and merchants mixing with Jews, Greeks and Armenians; veiled women and hookah-smoking men in red fezes; and the Friday army parade when the Sultan went to prayers. Gerald visited the Old Seraglio palace, where he admired the jewels (an ‘emerald the size of an orange’) and the dazzling views from the Golden Horn. Much of this was about to change; his posting coincided with great political upheavals as the Ottoman Empire gave way under the pressures of war and the radical new republican movement of the Young Turks.

  Gerald’s contemporary Harold Nicolson overlapped with him as a junior diplomat, and though they were friendly, some have seen Nicolson’s unkind portrait of a mannered young diplomat, ‘Titty’, as being based on Gerald:

  A peaky face, a little grey face with blue-black shadows, two small unsparkling eyes, a wet and feeble little mouth, shapeless hair. He had the sickly and unwashed appearance of an El Greco page: he perked his head on one side towards a long black cigarette holder: his other claw-like hand clutched a grey woollen scarf; he looked infinitely childish; he looked preternaturally wizened and old.40

  Much later, Gerald would exact his literary revenge, and annoy Nicolson with an absurd, puffed-up character largely based on him – ‘Lollypop’ Jenkins.41

  Gerald may have been a shy young man, but he was safely buttressed by the embassy system; by this stage he was already giving dinner parties (some with mischievously arranged guest lists) and was remembered as dressing up in outrageous costumes. On one occasion he arrived at a large diplomatic party dressed in a black leotard and accompanied by two attendants playing pan pipes, and was tickled to see the ambassador’s horror. ‘[He went] blue in the face with indignation. And little is so pleasing in the sight of God as a blue ambassador.’42 Letters home describe sports more soothing to a mother’s breast, like riding and even (following Byron’s glamorous example) swimming across the Bosphorus.

  In November 1911 – shortly before Mr and Mrs Heber-Percy of Hodnet Hall, Shropshire, were blessed with a fourth son they named Robert – Gerald was posted to Rome. Some of the joy he experienced living there comes out in his fiction, where he describes a city that still retained some of its relaxed nineteenth-century charm. ‘The Forum and the Palatine had not yet been spoilt by archaeologists’, and one could wander or paint at liberty. In the summer the embassy moved southwards to a villa on the Bay of Naples where magnificent terraced gardens filled with orange and lemon groves looked out towards Vesuvius. The British diplomats bathed each day at noon. ‘It was almost too nostalgic. The days passed in a nirvana of delight and some of the happiest moments of my life were spent in a lazy amphibian existence, swimming in the sea or wandering about the hills with sketch book.’43 Gerald’s deepening devotion to Italy was reflected in the inspiration he found in the various intoxicatingly pungent scents: ‘a mixture of drainage, orange blossom and the sea’. In his novel Percy Wallingford, he wrote, ‘I have often thought of asking some chemist to concoct for me reproductions of certain mixed aromas evocative of places I have loved.’

  A PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE FARINGDON ALBUM SHOWING THE HOUSE IN ROME

  Now almost thirty, Gerald established the sort of life he must have longed for. He lived in a series of beautiful houses until, in the 1920s, he finally bought 3 Foro Romano – an elegantly solid, wisteria-clad building on the less accessible side ofthe Roman Forum. Gerald created an entertaining, theatrical environment wherever he lived, and the impressive vaulted drawing room on the piano nobile made the perfect ‘set’. Photographs show rooms decorated with a Renaissance elegance that was also playful: a large brass chandelier, heavy bookcases and impressive paintings were combined with a grand piano covered with objets (a mask, some portraits, a model galleon), and a leopard skin draped across the stool where Gerald sat to compose in the morning.

  The arched loggia looked out across the spectacular sprawl of ancient columns and stone paths where, before the era of fences and tickets, Gerald and his friends could wander or sit in the sun. Gerald was later scathing about the burgeoning influence of archaeologists that made the Forum much less romantic and ‘lost to poets and lovers’. Tito Mannini, Gerald’s cook, bred canaries and once spent all day in the Forum trying to coax them home when they were somehow let out of their cages. Tito was temperamental and not universally loved, but he was a talented cook and made the most delicious chocolate cake with sour cream, rum, angelica and candied cherries. He took on the role of major-domo when Gerald let friends stay at the house in his absence, but there were rumours that he was spotted wearing his employer’s clothes and using the house as a sales room for antiques.

  Roman friends came from a variety of sources, including the British community and the Embassy, where the Ambassador was
the Rt Hon. Sir Rennell Rodd and his domineering, party-loving wife, Lilias (‘Lady Rude’).* Gerald also got to know people in Italian high society, the most dashing of whom was the near-mythical Marchesa Casati, with her mesmerising, kohl-rimmed green eyes, white skin and Cleopatra fringe. A central figure in the European avant-garde that was flourishing in Rome, she was dressed by Fortuny, Erté and even Diaghilev’s costume designer, Bakst, whose clashing colours and sensual clothes were thrilling audiences around Europe. The Marchesa’s dramatic style and unusual looks made her a popular subject for artists of the day, and she was photographed by Man Ray, painted by Augustus John and sculpted by Jacob Epstein.

  Like Gerald, Luisa Casati started life as a shy, plain child from a privileged family and later learned to use eccentricity (and her wealth) to create a successful, worldly persona. Certainly, her enthusiasm for her own celebrity was indefatigable compared to Gerald’s, whose later use of publicity for his own purposes remained playful and low-key. The English diplomat and the Italian aristocrat also shared an unusual appreciation of animals, though La Casati had a menagerie that made anything Gerald would do look positively modest. Owning not only mauve monkeys, parrots and albino blackbirds, but also large and lethal snakes and felines, she became notorious for her appearances at parties, where she might walk in with a cheetah or a panther in a diamond-studded collar, or wearing a snake around her neck.