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

by Sofka Zinovieff

  When Robert left in September, Gerald was almost beside himself with anxiety. But he had to take some decisions: London was too risky and his Halkin Street house was shut up (to be sold by the end of the war); travel abroad was almost impossible; and he tried to rent out Faringdon, though a tenant was never found. Deciding to go to Oxford, he moved in with his old friend Maurice Bowra at the Warden’s Lodgings of Wadham College.

  A classicist with a devotion to Greece, Bowra was well known in Oxford for his waspish wit, his love of young men, and his exhilarating, audacious conversation that could leave the listener shocked, horrified and thrilled all at once. Anthony Powell described him as ‘Noticeably small, this lack of stature emphasized by a massive head and tiny feet’, resulting in a Humpty-Dumpty appearance (something that was also said of Gerald). Bowra’s humour easily slid over into cruelty; his ‘passionate praise and unbridled denunciation of enemies produced an intoxicating effect’, and ‘he dared say things which others thought or felt, but were prevented from uttering by rules or convention or personal inhibitions’.277 He wrote outrageously scatological poems about his friends.278

  A generation of young men in the 1920s and ’30s had gathered around Bowra, including Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene, Harold Acton and Kenneth Clark. John Betjeman claimed to have ‘met my friends for life’ within Bowra’s rooms. Cyril Connolly called him ‘Mr Bowra the boarer’, though it was clear that the older man ‘had developed a mocking, cynical way of treating events because it prevented them from being too painful’.279 Seen by some as a ‘dandified sodomite’,280 Bowra actually appears to have had much less experience in seduction than some supposed. Fearful of blackmail, he claimed that for him, sex was ‘inescapably in the head’, and that his lust was stirred by fetishism – the white shorts, grey flannel trousers and plimsolls he admired in the student population.281

  Gerald and Bowra had many things in common, from their stocky physique and love of fine living to their remarkable intellect and razor-sharp humour. Both men were also dogged by insecurity and had troubled sex lives, while revelling in handsome, talented youth. They should have made perfect bachelor companions as the Phoney War dragged on through the autumn of 1939. But Gerald was descending into deep despondency. Everything that provided the foundations for his life appeared to be vanishing, swallowed up by the miserable mix of bureaucratic restrictions and fear that would now dominate everyone’s lives. Rationing and petty rules would replace the colourful, luxurious life before the war.

  In a notebook of this time, Gerald identified himself with the character of the hedonistic grasshopper, which finds itself dying of hunger when winter arrives in Aesop’s fable The Grasshopper and the Ant. ‘The ant never stops doing its duty. I am not saying anything against doing one’s duty as a principle, but one can have too much of it. People who never stop doing their duty are seldom very agreeable people and generally end by doing more harm than good.’ Unlike the people who threw themselves into war work, Gerald saw only the quagmire that was enveloping him. Characteristically, though, even at a time of such gloom, his fear of war was evaluated in terms of amusement: ‘I can face the idea of annihilation with a certain amount of complacency but there is no doubt that it is an awfully dull idea.’282

  According to Diana Mosley, Gerald’s two greatest anxieties were being cut off from all his friends (he imagined no telephone, post or petrol) and that he would be hurt, not killed, in an air raid. ‘He did not fear death, but he greatly dreaded the idea that he might agonize untended, and he wished for a pill which would kill instantly.’283 There was widespread conversation about what citizens should do on encountering a German parachutist or how to behave in the not unlikely case of invasion. Certain people believed that death would be more welcome than life under the Nazis. Cyril Connolly openly discussed which sleeping draughts might be taken in overdose in the case of a German victory, while Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West agreed to find a ‘bare bodkin’ for their ‘quietus’, putting their plans in Hamlet’s terms.284 ‘Gerald keeps on asking what is the best form of committing suicide just as if he was asking for a cold-cure,’ wrote one friend.285 For a less dramatic solution, another friend recommended an unusual tranquilliser for general use and discovered by Frederick Ashton – ‘A splendid drug given to dogs to prevent them barking during air raids, it is called “Calm Doggie” and you can buy them in any chemists.’286

  In his subsequent novel, Far From the Madding War, Gerald fictionalised himself as Lord FitzCricket – perhaps a reference to the musical, improvident grasshopper he identified with. He is merciless in his depiction of the bald, stout man whom gossip columnists referred to as ‘the versatile peer’. ‘When he was annoyed he looked like a diabolical egg’, due to the ‘peculiar slant of the eyebrows.’ Lord FitzCricket admits that for a time, ‘the war knocked me out. I felt as if I had been pole-axed. I was unable to do anything at all . . . I couldn’t compose music, I couldn’t write or paint. It all seemed to have become so pointless. I believed it was the end of everything and certainly of people like me.’

  Although Gerald felt his creativity had been sapped, he managed to stay active, taking on a part-time job at the Taylor Institution Library in St Giles’. ‘The war has set me back mentally a bit,’ he admitted in a letter to Cecil Beaton, ‘and cataloguing books is about all I’m good for at the present moment. One must have something to do every minute of the day. Otherwise it’s hell.’ Over the first winter of the war, Gerald helped catalogue two collections of books recently acquired by the Institution – the Montgomery collection of German books and the Moore collection of volumes of Dante. Transcribing the authors and titles onto index cards, Gerald had plenty of time to think about Germany and Italy, the two European countries whose cultures and languages he treasured and whose citizens were now enemies. His old friends were now ‘Krauts’ or ‘Fascist Wops’. ‘I like everything to be nice and jolly and I hate to think of people hating one another,’ confessed Lord FitzCricket.

  Things didn’t work out with Bowra – some suspected the don might have been too boisterous for Gerald in his nervy state – and by mid-1940 Gerald had found lodgings in a small house at 22 St Giles’. His rooms looked out at the memorial commemorating the dead from the First World War and the gloomy graveyard of the twelfth-century church after which the road is named. Even the irrepressible John Betjeman wrote:

  Intolerably sad, profound

  St Giles’ bells are ringing round,

  They bring the slanting summer rain

  To tap the chestnut boughs again . . .

  Miss Alden, Gerald’s tall, bony landlady, brought austerity food to his dim, ground-floor rooms. She was kind to her unusual and distinguished tenant, even if some did see her as a ‘dragonish’ bully.287 Given Gerald’s miserable mood, she appears to have been useful as a guard-dog to stop unwanted visitors; ‘Miss Alden wouldn’t like that’ precluded all sorts of meetings. Apparently, on Robert’s return from Arabia, she never refused him, on the assumption that he must be Gerald’s illegitimate son.288

  The slide into accidie was not unfamiliar to Gerald, but this time it was more severe and lasted longer. With so little in which to find hope or joy, it was hard to return to normality. To make matters worse, Gerald’s habitual (and groundless) worries about money increased due to his psychological state. ‘Like some other rich men, when depressed he had an odd conviction that he was on his way to the work-house.’289 He believed, like one of the characters in his story Mr Pidger, that one of the chief advantages of being rich was that it enabled one ‘to ignore the follies and wickedness of the human race’. This no longer looked possible, money or not. ‘If only all this were just a nightmare!’ he wrote to Gertrude Stein in December. He even confessed to Cecil Beaton that he wished he could find God: ‘I think it might help – but He seems so very far off just now.’ Penelope Betjeman had a mass said for him at Uffington, but it didn’t bring Him any closer.

  In the desperation and self-loathing of a serio
us depression, Gerald decided to undergo psychoanalysis, something that had been gaining popularity since the 1920s. ‘Four times a week I visited an amiable Viennese Jewess, a pupil of Freud, and lay on a sofa in a small room in the Woodstock Road and was invited to say anything that came into my head (free association), evoke early memories and recount my dreams.’ It was significant that while birds brought an enormous degree of pleasure to Gerald’s existence, he announced: ‘The first discovery I had was that I had a dead bird inside me . . . Walking with my nurse in the fields I came across a dead swallow. It was my first sight of death.’

  Gerald began to keep a dream notebook and the intensity is remarkable. Birds crop up frequently, sometimes horrifically: ‘Dark courtyard in the snow. I slip and fall. Near me what I take to be two large birds fighting. One of the combatants is a raven the other an evil looking little man. The raven is getting the worst of it. The little man says it will make a good stew.’ Friends and relations also appeared to him at night, as did familiar places, including Rome and Paris. Michael Duff, Lady Colefax and Harold Nicolson all pop up, the latter in a garden of fruit trees, beyond which is a fat woman swimming, ‘Very naked – an enormous breast exposed and is wearing a black picture hat . . . also a very fat man bathing.’ In brilliant sunshine on the Riviera, he is reminded ‘of the Casati and think of what she was and what she is now’. In another dream his chauffeur, William, is indistinguishable from Robert when he is trying to pack a suitcase. The dream makes clear the intimacy he felt with William Crack and his reliance on Robert for practicalities. Gerald always addressed his loyal driver as ‘William’, unlike the other servants whom he called by their surnames, and he was doubtless sad to have seen him go soon after the move to Oxford.290 In reality, William and Robert could hardly have been more different and the chauffeur’s gentle manners often clashed with the Mad Boy’s fiery chaos.

  Places in his dreams are very precisely described – another indication of how settings and scenery were almost as significant as people to him: ‘Diana Mosley and I go to Germany. We are walking through a field with long grass and a fringe of trees lining a road behind us. We ask to see Hitler. We are standing at the top of a flight of steps in front of a glass door. Hitler comes out and shakes hands with us. Very politely but there is no attempt at conversation. He then goes back.’

  Some of Gerald’s dreams are mildly erotic. He runs up the slopes of a sunny hill that resembles White Horse Hill ‘with a sensation of great ease – (sexual). Two women lying on the grass – slightly lesbian in appearance. I want them to admire the way I run.’ At another time, a rather pretty adolescent face on a scrap screen ‘suddenly materialises into a real adolescent standing next to me. I lay my face against his and find that it is smooth and cool. We go out of the room together.’

  In his fiction, Gerald made a joke out of his dealings with a ‘trick cyclist’, as psychiatrists were known in army parlance. Lord FitzCricket describes psychoanalysis as having ‘the same sort of charm as going to a fortune-teller . . . You lie on a sofa and talk about yourself for hours and hours. That in itself is exhilarating for the Ego. All sorts of curious things were found in my Unconscious; a stuffed bird, a pair of gloves, a black rubber mackintosh, in fact the whole contents of a jumble sale. No wonder I felt queer.’ Having got the hang of the jargon, Gerald does it to death for effect: ‘Another thing the analyst found out was that my death-instincts were getting the better of my pleasure principle, and that it was something to do with my Oedipus-complex. It just shows how mistaken one can be about oneself. When I used to feel like that before I always thought it was my liver.’291

  URING THE DARKEST PERIOD of Gerald’s life, Robert was off on his most adventurous undertaking. Saudi Arabia was just as extraordinary as de Gaury had said, and they were treated as honoured guests of Ibn Sa’ud. Robert was kitted out in appropriate clothes – a dark camel-hair cloak, a silken Arab robe and a loose white turban. In his writings, de Gaury explained that men were also heavily scented (often with rose-water) and their ‘eyelids were blued with “kohl”’. There is a powerful homoerotic tinge to his descriptions of the handsome young men, whether galloping across the sands or emerging from a tent into the cold dawn. Even more alluring are the scenes at the oasis:

  By the reed-bordered pool a young man who had been bathing squatted to comb out his uncut curls. I watched him part them, three long plaits falling on either side down to his breast. As he finished he bent forward from his haunches to use the pool as a watery glass. Then he drew himself up erect in one movement, to stand straight and taut, his well-muscled body gleaming in the setting sun.292

  De Gaury took numerous photographs of Robert, posing in native attire by just such a desert pool, a small beard adding gravitas, cigarette in his gracefully slim hand. It was not long before the young man disrobed and waded into the warm water naked – something de Gaury didn’t fail to snap. Later, Robert told friends that he ‘was given code books to look after and had lots of gold for King Saud’, and that ‘it was very hot and the code books were very heavy’. As it was a secret expedition, linked to Britain’s national interests in the region, extremely little is available on record. Robert was a notoriously bad letter-writer and almost nothing remains of anything he wrote, so there is frustratingly little of his own assessments and emotions. This lacuna makes his letter to Gerald that November all the more interesting and worth quoting in full, notwithstanding the poor grammar:

  Darling G.

  I have just arrived here from Jedda on the Red Sea, it took six days the King had us sent up with a huge cavalcade, we started with 4 saloon cars and six lorries, tents, kitchens and such like. We had about thirty servants, and a guard of thirty soldiers, the answer to it all was we were frightfully uncomfortable and everything broke down, no road just a track for 300 miles, terrible going we were shaken to bits, after 300 miles we were decanted on to the desert, and put on camels it was very impressive and awfully funny if we hadn’t ached so much the second day on camels was hell, if I didn’t know that I should just die in the desert I should have dropped off, we covered 100 miles in two days on camels you tell that to Penelope [Betjeman] and I had never ridden one before. The last day cars met us from Riaydh [sic] and took us to the Palace where we are staying with the King, you have never stayed in a Palace with a King, even though the Palace is built of mud?

  ROBERT POSING FOR GERALD DE GAURY BY AN OASIS IN ARABIA

  I go for my audience with the King this evening and wear my Arab clothes which I look rather impressive in. I have got a lot of photographs but they can’t develop them here so they will have to go to Cairo and come back, so it will be a very long time before you get them. Do you realize how grand it is to be here, only Twelve Europeans have ever been here I am the Twelfth. There is an American doctor here, so there is just De Gaury, Doctor and myself. I told you in my last letter that one is not allowed to wear European clothes, smoke or drink Alcohol. The people are very wild and long to kill all foreigners, so we have to be very inconspicuous and can only go out with a guard.

  I have had no letters from you that are dated latter [sic] than 15th Oct. I hope I shall get one soon, as I miss them very much. There is a caravan leaving for Basra on the Persian Gulf tomorrow so I am giving it to them to take to the Br[itish] Council there, who I have asked to put it on Imperial Airways which stop there from India so I hope you will get this fairly quickly. I’m afraid that most letters to and fro will take a hell of a time. I do hope you are well and are happier now. I have not had much time to be unhappy, but when I ever am still I could cry. I hate this bloody abroad and being away from you and Faringdon, but still I’m very lucky so far.

  Will you tell Morris [the head gardener] to cover up the burners if has not already done so.

  De Gaury sends his best wishes. Please write often and cheer me up. I don’t think the £60 the Government gave me for my horse has ever been paid into my bank, would you let me know. I am going to write a book, while I’m here, so you had
better all look out!

  The King is a great character, very good looking and has been very kind to us, and so have all his ministers, in fact it is a beautiful country.

  Best love Robert

  The Mad Boy doesn’t sound very mad, even if he is not an elegant writer. He is homesick for Faringdon and Gerald, occasionally sounding more like a lost boy, veering between youthful pride at his derring-do and lonely tears. This burning Arabian desert was another world, the green fields of Berkshire or Shropshire as far away as Dorothy’s Kansas from the Land of Oz. Predictably, Robert’s threat to write a book never materialised, but it hints at the inadequacy he felt next to Gerald’s intellectual accomplishments, and those of so many of their friends. A single page remains of another letter, probably from an earlier date, in which all the housekeeping points are typed up and numbered, perhaps as an ironic joke but also because Robert was keen that Gerald take up some practical matters at Faringdon. He is full of suggestions and evidently worried about Gerald and what he is going to do in a war that has still not seriously got going:

  13. Why did you not thank me for the wire I sent you for your birthday [18 September]?

  14. Is your house in Rome still let?

  15. Had you thought of going there as an honorary diplomat?