In any case, discovering the man's existence has brought me some amusement on a grey windy morning in Brussels. In the spirit of Christmas, I am therefore reproducing here Wikipedia's account of his life, (despite its including the tedious cliché "exploring his sexuality" [it's the verb "exploring" that seems to me so silly]), so that someone else might be able to get the odd laugh from it as well:
Baron Berners
Lord Berners (18 September 1883 to 19 April 1950), also known as Gerald Tyrwhitt was a British composer of classical music, painter and aesthete. He is usually referred to as Lord Berners. He was born at Apley Hall, Shropshire, in 1883
His father, a naval officer, was rarely home. He was raised by a grandmother who was extremely religious and self-righteous, and a mother who had little intellect and many prejudices. His mother ignored his musical interests and instead focused on developing his masculinity, a trait Berners found to be inherently unnatural.
The eccentricities Berners displayed started early in life. Once, upon hearing that you could teach a dog to swim by throwing him into water, the young Gerald promptly decided that by throwing his mother's dog out the window, he could teach it to fly. The dog was unharmed, though the act earned Berners a beating.
After devising several inappropriate booby traps, Berners was sent off to a boarding school in Cheam at the age of nine. It was here that he would first explore his homosexuality; for a short time, he was romantically involved with an older student. The relationship was abruptly ended after Berners vomited on the other boy.
After he left prep school, Gerald continued his education at Eton College. Later, in his autobiographies, Berners would reflect on his experiences at Eton, claiming that he had learned nothing while there, and that the school was more concerned with shaping the young men's characters than supplying them with an education.
As well as being a talented musician, Berners was a skilled artist and writer. He appears in many books and biographies of the period, notably portrayed as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love.[2] He was a friend of the Mitford family and close to Diana Guinness.
Berners was notorious for his eccentricity,[3] dyeing pigeons at his house in Faringdon in vibrant colours and at one point entertaining Penelope Betjeman's horse to tea. There were paper flowers in the garden and the interior of the house was adorned with joke books and joke notices, such as "Mangling Done Here". As visitor Patrick Leigh Fermor recalled:
His Rolls-Royce automobile contained a small clavichord keyboard which could be stored beneath the front seat. Near his house he had a 100-foot viewing tower constructed, Faringdon Folly, a notice at the entrance reading: "Members of the Public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk".[4] Berners also drove around his estate wearing a pig's-head mask to frighten the locals.[5][6]
He died in 1950 at Faringdon House, bequeathing his estate to his companion Robert ('Mad Boy') Heber Percy, who lived at Faringdon until his own death in 1987.
His epitaph on his gravestone reads:
- "Here lies Lord Berners
- One of the learners
- His great love of learning
- May earn him a burning
- But, Praise the Lord!
- He seldom was bored".
Music
Main article: List of compositions by Lord Berners
Berners' musical works included Trois morceaux, Fantasie espagnole (1919), Fugue in C minor (1924), and several ballets, including The Triumph of Neptune (1926) (based on a story by Sacheverell Sitwell) and Luna Park (1930). In his period at the British embassy in Rome during World War I he composed avant-garde piano music and several song cycles and later ballets and film scores, notably the 1947 feature Nicholas Nickleby.
His friends included the composers Constant Lambert and William Walton and he worked with Frederick Ashton. Walton dedicated Belshazzar's Feast to Berners, and Lambert arranged a Caprice péruvien for orchestra, from Lord Berners' opera Le carrosse du St Sacrement.
Berners himself once said that he would have been a better composer if he had accepted fewer lunch invitations. But English composer Gavin Bryers, quoted in Peter Dickinson’s biography of Berners, disagrees saying: "If he had spent more time on his music he could have become a duller composer".[7] Dinah Birch, reviewing The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother and Me, a biography of Berners written by his granddaughter, Sofka Zinovieff, concurs saying: "Had he committed himself to composition as his life's work, perhaps his legacy would have been more substantial. But his music might have been less innovative, for its amateur quality - 'amateur in the best sense', as Stravinsky insisted - is inseparable from its distinctive flair".[8]
Literature
Berners wrote four autobiographical works and some novels, mostly of a humorous nature. All were published and some went into translations. His autobiographies First Childhood(1934), A Distant Prospect(1945), Resenlieu and Dresden are both witty and affectionate.
Berners obtained some notoriety for his roman à clef The Girls of Radcliff Hall (punning on the name of the famous lesbian writer), initially published privately under the pseudonym "Adela Quebec",[3][9][10] in which he depicts himself and his circle of friends, such as Cecil Beaton and Oliver Messel, as members of a girls school. This frivolous satire, which was privately published and distributed, had a modish success in the 1930s. The original edition is rare; rumour has it that Beaton was responsible for gathering most of the already scarce copies of the book and destroying them.[11] However, the book was reprinted in 2000.
His other novels, including Romance of a Nose, Count Omega and The Camel are a mixture of whimsy and gentle satire.
Bibliography
Fiction
- 1936 – The Camel
- 1937 – The Girls of Radcliff Hall
- 1941 – Far From the Madding War
- 1941 – Count Omega
- 1941 – Percy Wallingford and Mr. Pidger
- 1941 – The Romance of a Nose
[See Collected Tales and Fantasies, New York, 1999]
Non-fiction
- 1934 – First Childhood
- 1945 – A Distant Prospect
The Chateau de Resenlieu (2000); Dresden (2008)
See also
- Lord Berners profiled in Loved Ones, book of pen portraits by close friend, Diana Mitford.
- Oxfordshire Blue Plaque to Lord Berners erected on Faringdon Folly on 6 April 2013.
- Lord Berners: Composer, Writer, Painter by Peter Dickinson (2008)
References
- Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson at the National Portrait Gallery
- Birch, Dinah (11 October 2014). "Composer, novelist, poet, painter and hedonistic host – the real Lord Merlin and his glamorous, desperate world". The Guardian (London).
- Mark Amory, Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric, London, 1998 ISBN 978-0-7126-6578-0
- Wilkes, Roger. "Cultured country house". Telegraph.co.uk. Retrieved 2 July 2013.
- Thompson, Damian (20 September 2008). "Review: Lord Berners by Peter Dickinson". Daily Telegraph (London). Retrieved 14 October 2014.
- Birch, Dinah (11 October 2014). "Composer, novelist, poet, painter and hedonistic host – the real Lord Merlin and his glamorous, desperate world". The Guardian (London).
- Thompson, Damian (20 September 2008). "Review: Lord Berners by Peter Dickinson". Daily Telegraph (London). Retrieved 14 October 2014.
- Birch, Dinah (11 October 2014). "Composer, novelist, poet, painter and hedonistic host – the real Lord Merlin and his glamorous, desperate world". The Guardian (London).
- Bryony Jones, The music of Lord Berners (1883–1950): the versatile peer, Ashgate Publishing, 2003, ISBN 0-7546-0852-2, pp.9,101,143
- Beverly Lyon Clark, Regendering the school story: sassy sissies and tattling tomboys, Routledge, 2001, ISBN 0-415-92891-5, p.143
- Florence Tamagne, History of Homosexuality in Europe, 1919–1939, Algora Publishing, 2004, ISBN 0-87586-356-6, p.124
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Lord Berners was great friends with a notorious society lesbian. His mother, blissfully unaware that her son was homosexual, thought that he was about to be publicly humilated by an unsuccessful courtship and urged her son to distance himself from the woman.
ReplyDeleteLord Berners responded by placing a notice in the Times that read: "Lord Berners wishes to announce that he has left Lesbos for the Isle of Man".
As a fellow mother, I find that very sweet.
DeleteI hope that you have given your 1.5 brothers a good dry beating. They must be taught not to deny Berners information to the world.
ReplyDeleteIt seems to me that the edition of The Pursuit of Love (or was it Love in a Cold Climate, or both?) must have said something about him, in notes or front matter, for I don't know how else I would have heard of him. I gave it away long ago, and can't check.
I have read that the young Charles Lindbergh, who resembled Lord Berners not at all, tossed a cat out of a high window to see whether cats always land on their feet. I don't remember whether he was punished for this.
More importantly, was the cat all right?
DeleteI believe that the cat was all right. It has been about 50 years since I read the biography, but I doubt the biographers would have thought a dead or crippled cat edifying.
DeleteThe dog it was that died.
Delete