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

by Sofka Zinovieff

  HEN PEACE WAS DECLARED in May 1945, Gerald and Robert were at Faringdon with guests for lunch. Elizabeth Bowen described the scene as the fountain on the back lawn was turned on for the first time since 1939:

  After lunch we all went out and stood on the terrace; Robert did something to the fountain; there was a breathless pause, then a jet of water, at first a little rusty, hesitated up into the air, wobbled then separated into four curved feathers of water. It was so beautiful and so sublimely symbolic – with the long view, the miles of England, stretching away behind it, that I found myself weeping. I think a fountain is much nicer than a bonfire; if less democratic.382

  The end of war gave hope for some sort of fresh start in a country that had changed so drastically over six exhausting, tragic years. And yet, despite the relief, joy and dancing in the streets, much of the bleak, frugal atmosphere continued. There was a sense of disorientation for many who had been used to living on the edge, ready for death or disaster. Now, there was a vacuum. Cyril Connolly was deeply gloomy about post-war England: ‘Most of us are not men or women but members of a vast seedy, over-worked neuter class, with our drab clothes, our ration books and murder stories, our envious, stricken, old-world apathies and resentments – a careworn people.’383 With Attlee’s Labour government voted in, some believed that the era of the grand country house was over. The buildings were often dilapidated, the owners had run out of money, taxes had been hiked up to bewilderingly high levels for the better-off, and staff who had left to join the armed services didn’t usually want to go back to domestic service. There was a sense that the rigid class divisions of the first half of the century could not continue in a modern society that was developing a proper welfare state and free health care for everyone.

  At Faringdon it was possible to cut back without doing anything too radical. The house in London was sold and via Foro Romano was let. Faringdon itself was a mignon country estate and had always had an unkempt edge. ‘Any room of Gerald’s would be in the same muddle,’ remarked Robert.384 ‘There was luxury but it was rather uncomfortable,’ remembered Rachel Cecil, who often came over with her husband from Oxford. ‘It wasn’t very grand or highly organised. Things were quite in a mess . . . A very pretty room but it wasn’t quite like a bedroom. You’d have nowhere to hang your clothes.’385 The house didn’t need large numbers of servants to function perfectly well and in any case there were evidently enough local men who returned from the armed forces and needed employment.

  With Robert and Hughie running the practical side of the farm and gardens, Gerald was able to continue much as he always had; given the trials and miseries he had been through during the war, he was impressively active. In 1946, he wrote the music for Alberto Cavalcanti’s Nicholas Nickleby, an Ealing Studios film that came out the next year. More significant was another collaboration he undertook for the first new ballet for Sadler’s Wells after it moved to Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House. Les Sirènes was a re-gathering of old friends who worked together at Faringdon in preparation for the production: Freddie Ashton did the choreography, Cecil Beaton (back from an unlikely romance with Greta Garbo) designed the costumes and Margot Fonteyn danced the part of the Spanish Beauty who is pursued by a poor young man and a rich old king. It was a light comedy featuring a car, a balloon and mechanical waves on a beach, and although some found it ‘divinely pretty and funny’,386 and even Lord Berners’s ‘most brilliant work’,387 the production was generally considered to have been a flop. In the sober climate that followed the war, people apparently didn’t care for a frothy pastiche that epitomised the giddy excesses of the 1930s. It was just the sort of criticism that had been levelled at Cupid and Psyche when it was performed in the worrying days of 1939 as war was looming. Billa looked back on this episode as an attempt by Gerald to retrieve a golden era. ‘All the nice things had gone, and I suppose he tried to bring it back by writing a ballet like that, and then they didn’t come back at all. Then there was all that terrible time of austerity . . . really horrible. Endless shortages. Still evacuees . . .’388

  At Faringdon, there were well-tested ways of getting around the rationing, and visitors still flocked there. Among the many loyal friends who adored Gerald and Robert and who saw him regularly were the Betjemans, the Harrods, the Mitfords and the Lygons. Nancy’s The Pursuit of Love was published in 1945 with great success, and the depiction of Gerald as the glamorously sui generis Lord Merlin was a tip of her cap to the man who had provided such a refuge and such friendship to her and her sisters. In the book, the heroine, Linda, often rides over to chat with Lord Merlin for hours on all sorts of subjects. ‘He knew that she had an intensely romantic character, he foresaw much trouble ahead, and he continually urged upon her the necessity for an intellectual background.’ This was clearly a trait of Gerald’s, many of whose friends were far from being intellectuals, yet who had himself been saved over a lifetime by pursuing his interests with seriousness.

  Of course, sometimes the interests failed to catch Gerald and he plummeted into depression. He was also increasingly plagued by physical ailments for which he visited various fashionable and certain experimental doctors. By 1947, his already failing eyesight was badly affected, possibly due to his doctor’s prescriptions, and he wrote in a large, childish hand to Nancy Mitford, lamenting how he could hardly see:

  That arch beast Pierre Lausel! He gave me an overdose of an unknown and apparently dangerous drug, Vitamine E, believing it to be of the order of dear old Vitamine B. I just lapped it up unsuspectingly, with the most appalling results – the worst being this misfortune to my eyes. Lausel ought really to be warned off, defrocked or whatever is done to delinquent doctors who treat their patients as guinea pigs.

  Gerald had long been attracted to the idea of a wonder cure for body and psyche. Back in the early 1930s, he had dined with a Swiss millionaire who owned a pharmaceutical business and learned about a drug (supposedly sold from a particular pharmacy in Paris) ‘qui rend la vie merveilleuse’. For a time, Gerald fantasised that this miraculous medicine would permanently remove his accidie and render his life ‘marvellous’. Until, of course, he took it and it didn’t.389 Later in 1947, Gerald went to a clinic in Richmond, outside London, where Dr Gottfried gave him two weeks’ ‘electric treatment’ for his heart condition. Gerald found the enthusiasm to write a little description of Richmond as a place he had come to appreciate during his ‘enforced sojourn’ there. ‘Were Richmond in the Salzkammergut or in some foreign part of the world it would have been patronised by the wealthy and fashionable, for it holds all the delights of a foreign watering-place without the bother of the waters.’ He sent a letter to Nancy Mitford, declaring, ‘Did you know that one’s status in the nursing home depends entirely on one’s flowers? Robert brings me enormous chrysanthemums looking like poodles from les serres [greenhouses] de Faringdon and I stand very high.’390 However, he was not so positive about the therapy itself. He wrote to Edward James that it ‘has made me look better but feel worse. I suspect him of being a beauty doctor.’ Cecil Beaton was devoted to Gottfried – and apparently based Professor Higgins’s house in My Fair Lady on his Wimpole Street rooms391 – but Gerald was far from impressed. Indeed, other friends, including Harold Acton, believed that Dr Gottfried was a quack who had actually made them much worse.392

  The various complaints continued. Gerald told Osbert Lancaster, ‘I am permanently depressed,’ and confessed to Siegfried Sassoon that he had such problems with heart trouble and high blood pressure that he could barely walk, ‘let alone write, paint or compose music . . . Between 7 and 8 in the morning when formerly I felt delight in life and the prospect of another day, is now the time when I chiefly long for death. I have had these periods of gloom before and have got over them, but this time (as one likes to associate oneself with greatness) I fear it is the last, as with Cowper and Ruskin.’

  Some of Gerald’s friends tried to pull him towards religion – it was rumoured that Penelope Betjeman had been assigned Lord
Berners as a ‘conversion target’ by the Roman Catholic Church (while Evelyn Waugh had been given the ‘impossible assignment’ of Cyril Connolly).393 But far from keeping an open mind, as he had claimed to some at the start of the war, Gerald became fed up with his friends recommending God. ‘Why should I listen to them? It is all such bosh!’ he railed.394 When Diana Mosley reported that Waugh was praying for him, Gerald got quite cross and said, ‘God doesn’t pay any attention to Evelyn.’395 It is hard to know whether or not Gerald’s description of Robert being ill after the end of the war is true to life or exaggerated, but it appears that even the Mad Boy (encouraged by Penelope Betjeman?) didn’t rule out God as an appropriate companion for one’s final hours.

  Robert is getting awfully dotty. He had a slight temperature yesterday and went to bed in the drawing-room and said that he had got consumption and that the red damask from [illegible] would make a very pretty death-bed scene and asked the gardener to send in some lilies. He also wanted a Roman Catholic priest as he thought a death bed conversion would be very effective. However, he seems better today and is going out hunting.396

  There were periods of recuperation when Gerald’s spirits lifted. He read a great deal, taking particular pleasure in the classics. Writing to Cyril when he was ill, he said, ‘I’ve put in a good deal of reading: Balzac, Proust, and “Middlemarch”, Old Horse-Face’s masterpiece – which I had not read before.’397 He also enjoyed contemporary writers, including Angus Wilson, Jocelyn Brooke and André Gide. In 1947, after Gide was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, he was given an honorary degree at Oxford. The organisers were nervous about the French writer’s notoriously unconventional character and his homosexuality, and they came up with Lord Berners as a solution for the social side of the visit. Gide was taken to Faringdon for lunch the day after the ceremony. The house party included David and Rachel Cecil and Cyril and Lys Connolly; notwithstanding clinics, ill-health, depression and post-war austerity, Gerald and Faringdon seemed once more to be at the centre of European culture. Gerald was thrilled and claimed he considered Gide ‘the best writer in Europe and the most delightful of men’. He surely agreed with Gide’s aphorism ‘Believe those who are seeking the truth. Doubt those who find it.’

  During another period of optimism, Gerald hoped to create a scent of his own and even consulted his old friend Elsa Schiaparelli, whose 1937 launch of Shocking had been wildly successful. He abandoned the plan, however, when he learned that ‘the base of all scents is something quite obnoxious, like some secretion from the civet cat, which in itself, smells terrible, but which acts as an agent to blend all the other elements’. He feared that if he dropped some of this on the carpet there would be no way to get rid of the smell other than abandoning the house – something he was not prepared to do.398

  HEN THE WAR ENDED, Jennifer had considered staying in the countryside and even bought a house near Oare, but the city beckoned. She took Victoria and made their new home in South Terrace, South Kensington, but her life remained unsettled for several years. She continued to seek out the best nightclubs, enjoying ‘low life’ as well as classier places. Lucian Freud recalled visiting a club where a drag queen took Jennifer’s fur coat as a prop for his act and stroked his face with it. She was an alluring, glamorous figure for him, a regular at the seedy dives he also loved.399 Mickey’s continuing obsessive love proved wearing if not impossible. ‘He was glowering and furious,’ recalled Francis Wyndham. ‘Always threatening suicide, always desperate. And Jennifer was much older, as was often pointed out by Billa.’ There were terrible rows at South Terrace, with Mickey smashing piles of records on the floor in fury and throwing things out of the window. Victoria also liked to fling things from her third-floor bedroom window, emptying glasses of water and sugared almonds on the heads of passers-by, so locals may have learned to avoid the pavement outside No. 21 in the post-war years. According to Jennifer, Mickey had a ‘violent horror of his own violence’, and at least he was never sexually violent. As she wrote in a notebook, he ‘knew so much about psychology, poetry, music, everything’.

  DAVID AND PRIM NIVEN WITH NEW BABY ON A VISIT TO SEE JENNIFER

  At the end of 1945, Prim Niven gave birth to a second son, Jamie, and not long after, she and David gave a large farewell party at Claridge’s, announcing that they would soon be leaving for America. David and Prim decided that the guests would all have a common characteristic: ‘at some time in our lives they had been specially nice to us. It was a funny mixture – duchesses, policemen, actors, generals, hospital nurses . . .’ with David taking pleasure in weeding out any gatecrashers.400

  David crossed the Atlantic first and Prim made the trip with her young boys the following spring. It was in May that Jennifer received the terrible news from Hollywood: Prim was dead. There had been a freak accident. Prim and David had been invited to a party – a barbecue by the pool at Tyrone Power’s house, followed by games. They decided to play ‘Sardines’ and Prim opened a door thinking it was a cupboard, when it was actually stairs leading to the cellar. The hospital initially thought she merely had concussion, but she died the next day. It was of course a tragedy for David Niven and their two young children, but it was also a dreadful blow for Jennifer. She and Prim had grown up together and were true friends; they had seen each other through teenage parties, wartime marriage and childbirth. Prim was Victoria’s godmother. She was only twenty-five.

  Jennifer could barely mention Prim afterwards, and this surely added to what was already almost a phobia; she even avoided funerals of her close friends and found it impossible to discuss death. A few years after this loss, Cyril Connolly wrote out some pages for Jennifer, in which he numbered a long list of what must happen to us after death if you confront the subject rationally – something he knew both he and Jennifer found hard:

  C.C.’s cure for the fear of death.

  To be taken LOGICALLY

  I. Either there is survival after death or there isn’t (extinction).

  II. If there is survival it cannot be bodily survival for we know the body decays. Therefore it must be spiritual survival.

  III. Spiritual survival may be impersonal or personal. If impersonal we have nothing to fear, for the experience of spirit without personality cannot be painful, if personal (and it is difficult to imagine personal spirit) it cannot be very different from our own most spiritual moments in this life and they without exception are blissful, timeless and exalting.

  Etc.401

  n 1947, Robert and Jennifer were divorced. The next year Jennifer decided to give a joint party with Hamish Erskine, bringing together many of their old friends as well as more recent ones. After his heroic deeds during the war, Hamish was also finding it hard to re-make a life. Like others who began as the butterflies of the brittle and sybaritic existentialism that followed the First World War, the prospect of ‘settling down’ was neither appealing nor feasible. Hamish eventually became the homme d’affaires for Daisy Fellowes, Gerald’s old friend and country neighbour. Debonair and worldly, he spoke French and Italian, which was useful for Daisy’s international, yacht-set society, but middle age and post-war puritanism made the endless indulgence in revelry less appropriate. Many felt that the old ways they had embraced did not exist any more; perhaps the party was an attempt to see if they did. The only record that remains is an excoriating description by James Lees-Milne, who hated it in spite of the number of people present he counted as friends.

  I believe my generation to be, for the most part, ‘unreal’; cliquey, dated, prejudiced, out of touch with the new world and preposterously exclusive – arrogant, arrogant, with few redeeming qualities of any kind. They have nothing original to impart . . . I don’t truly care if I never see these people again. They are only tolerable singly or in very small groups. In a mass they are detestable and contemptible. Am I one of them?402

  Lees-Milne might have seen this cliquey circle as ‘unreal’ but it included people who were among the most interesting, creative individuals
of the time. Jennifer remained close to Cyril, who brought her to the heart of literary and artistic London, and her next love affair was with another writer – Henry Yorke. He was older (forty-three to her thirty-two) and, under the nom de plume Henry Green, the author of numerous successful if experimental novels whose titles mostly end in ‘-ing’ (Living, Loving, Concluding, and later, Doting). He produced writing that was strange, sparse and sometimes bewildering, with a penchant for working-class argot (‘It makes me ’eart drop when I remember the way ’e be-’aves, ’is own flesh and blood too.’).403 But nobody doubted it was spectacularly good, even if some said he was ‘a writer’s writer’. Tall, with dark, slicked-back hair and a pale, handsome face, Henry had been at Oxford in the 1920s with Cyril and that well-known group of aesthetes and writers that included Harold Acton and Brian Howard. Maurice Bowra had teased him about his heterosexuality.404 During the war, Henry had served in the Auxiliary Fire Service in London, a terrifying and exciting experience he wrote about in Caught (1943), though he did not puff up the characters with false heroism. In reality, one of the great advantages of the AFS was the opportunity for meeting women who liked the idea of a brave fireman. ‘Who are you going out with tonight, darling?’ girls would ask. ‘Is it someone you’d like to die with?’405

  Henry was also married. ‘Dig’ (née the Hon. Adelaide Biddulph), his wife since 1929, was universally recognised as ‘sweet’ and ‘nice’ and ‘almost as inscrutable as Henry’.406 When they were first married, they were known as ‘the Bright Young Yorkes’, and Dig’s friends included the Duchess of York (later Queen Elizabeth), who stood as godmother to their son, Sebastian. Dig was so nice that she seems not only to have turned a benevolently blind eye to her husband’s many girlfriends (who included Rosamund Lehmann and Mary Keene), but to have kept them close as friends. Later, when Jennifer remarried, Henry and Dig saw her regularly.