The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (6 page)

During these years, while much of Europe was plunged into the horrors of the First World War, Gerald’s diplomatic status exempted him from fighting and he found himself at the centre of Europe’s most excitingly innovative creative arts. Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, then at the height of its European success, was based in Rome during the war, and Gerald was pulled into the orbit of its thrilling, colourful, experimental combination of art forms. In 1915 he met Igor Stravinsky, possibly at the Italian premiere of Petrushka. The Russian was already well known for his daring, iconoclastic music, and the riotous reaction of the Parisian audience to the first performance of The Rite of Spring a couple of years earlier had only added to his fame. In the same year, Gerald wrote a piece for piano called ‘Le Poisson d’or’ and later dedicated it to Stravinsky after the Russian said he liked it. Gerald wrote words to accompany this experimental yet graceful musical picture, whose pretty glissandos, knowing dissonances and jokey repetitions and pauses seem to describe his own intimate feelings of sadness, tinged with a darkly humorous awareness of how small and isolated an individual life can be. In this piece, Gerald is the lonely fish, however much he makes others smile about it.

Mournful and alone, the goldfish

circles in his crystal bowl.

He dreams of a little mate, beautiful and as shiny

As a twenty franc piece …

A bright, modern cover for the score was commissioned from the Russian painter Natalia Goncharova, who designed marvellous costumes and sets for Diaghilev’s ballets.

After the Russian Revolution in 1917, Stravinsky (who was a supporter) wanted to find a substitute for ‘God Save the Tsar!’ to play at his performances and to offer to the Bolsheviks. Though far from being politicised, let alone anybody’s idea of a revolutionary, it was Gerald who worked through the night with Stravinsky to help orchestrate the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’.44 It was never used by the Soviets, but the exiled Russian composer went on playing it as a national anthem at his concerts.

Since the outbreak of the war, Stravinsky had been based with his family in Switzerland and in 1916 Gerald went to visit him there in the hope of musical advice. The thirty-four-year-old Russian was willing to act as a musical mentor to the thirty-three-year-old Englishman, and their correspondence illustrates their increasing familiarity, opening with, ‘Dear Friend’, ‘Dear Friend Tyrwhitt’, and Gerald signing off as ‘Your devoted Gerald Tyrwhitt’. Gerald’s penchant for pranks and jokes was already in evidence when he sent Stravinsky one of his characteristically doctored postcards – a painting of Brahms that was adjusted so he was surrounded by naked women and clouds. The caption reads: ‘Why all of these nude women? I was always assured that Brahms was chaste.’

Stravinsky advised Gerald about composing, but the latter’s style remained quite different from the former’s, albeit displaying the odd Stravinskian fingerprint, such as the use of repeated rhythms and phrases, or surprising the listener with the sudden development of a melody in an unexpected direction.45 Gerald tried to assist Stravinsky with practical issues concerning performances and even payments. The letters show him to be more than willing to act as go-between in the famous composer’s dealings with the Ballets Russes, the dauntingly demanding yet brilliant Diaghilev, and even government authorities. When Stravinsky had problems taking a Picasso portrait of himself back home from Rome to Switzerland, it was Gerald who arranged for the painting to be carried in the diplomatic bag and saw his friend off with delicious mandorlati figs.

While Gerald was mixing with the great artists and musicians of the day, an interest in popular theatre, pantomime and song had already taken root and would remain for life: years earlier, Gerald had admired Mozart’s The Magic Flute for being ‘just like a pantomime’. In 1917, Gerald wrote to Stravinsky: ‘Near my house I have discovered a tiny, dirty little theatre-music hall, which I want you to see when you come. They have a variety programme and an orchestra à tout crever [that could raise the roof]. I took Picasso and Cocteau there the other night, and they were thrilled.’46

Jean Cocteau, like Gerald, was a man of varied talents who was in danger of being seen as a dandified dilettante. The apparent simplicity and succinctness of their work did not always endear them to cultural heavyweights. Gerald liked his compositions (and other people’s) to be entertaining, even escapist; nothing too long or too serious was permitted. As he wrote in his novel Far From the Madding War, ‘The English have a tendency to judge art by size and weight.’ In his work, he always aimed for brevity, and frequently levity – not to mention parody. According to his future friend and collaborator, the composer Constant Lambert, Gerald ‘was the first to introduce into music the Max Beerbohm type of sophisticated satire – a mordant wit combined with classicism of style’.47

Gerald’s major influences were not English but European. His Three Songs in the German Manner are settings of poems by Heinrich Heine which sound like versions of conventional lieder, but subvert the traditional themes so that, for instance, one is addressed to a pig instead of a fair young maid. In his 1920 Three English Songs, the playful words of ‘The Green-eyed Monster’, by E. L. Duff, are just the sort of ironic take on an emotional theme that appealed to Lord Berners the composer.

James gave Elizabeth a Dodo,

He only offered one to me –

The loveliest lemon-coloured Dodo,

With the greenest eyes that you could wish to see.

Now it isn’t that I’m doubting if James loves me,

And I know that he would ask me out to tea,

But he did give Elizabeth a Dodo,

And he never even offered one to me.

Nevertheless, there was feeling behind the flippancy. As Constant Lambert said in a BBC radio tribute to Lord Berners, ‘though his tongue was often in his cheek, he could wear his heart on his sleeve’.48 His clever, facetious wit did not undermine the deep emotions in his music, and while he did not create a huge body of work (thirty pieces in all), the composer Gavin Bryars describes him as one of the few truly original British composers of the twentieth century. ‘In his music, Gerald Berners is true to himself. It is a key to his character and his emotions.’

The fact that this young, unknown English amateur was supported by leading professionals as dynamic as Stravinsky and the Italian composer Alfredo Casella was very encouraging. The former described him as ‘an amateur, but in the best – literal – sense, I would not consider him amateurish, as we now use the word’.49 And in 1917, the musical journal the Chesterian revealed that M. Igor Stravinsky had recently written to them saying that ‘Mr Tyrwhitt is not only a composer of unique talent, but also a very typical and very representative character of his race.’50

Technically an amateur, Gerald was professional enough to have his Spanish parody, Fantaisie Espagnole, performed at the British premiere of The Rite of Spring in 1921, with Stravinsky present. And it was a major triumph that Diaghilev chose him as the composer for a ballet to be performed ‘in accordance with Lord Rothermere’s wish’, in London in 1926.51 The Triumph of Neptune was choreographed by George Balanchine, had a story by Gerald’s friend Sacheverell Sitwell, and took pantomime and a playful Victorian aesthetic as its inspiration. There are not only sailors, policemen and street-hawkers but also flying fairies, ogres and goddesses. Hornpipes and polkas are danced next to London Bridge and then in the Ogres’ Palace and the Frozen Forest. Gerald’s music combined charming dance pieces and comic burlesque with a characteristic hint of irony, and at one performance Diaghilev was said to have laughed ‘till the tears ran down his face’.52 The first night was a great success; flowers were showered on the entire cast as well as Gerald and Sacheverell.53

F GERALD HAD BEEN BROUGHT UP in the provinces, oppressed by the need to be manly and surrounded by horses and dogs and people who were traditional and conservative, he had left all that behind him. He had become a European: he spoke and read widely in French, German and Italian (even his music had foreign titles); and he was a modernist as interested in the ‘free atonality’ of Schoenberg as in the romance of Wagner or the immediacy of popular music. If not quite an enfant terrible, then he certainly knew a good number of them and used some of their techniques. In his memoir of childhood, he wrote, ‘In those days the Three R’s, Russians, Radicals and Roman Catholics, inspired many Victorians with an unholy terror.’ His mother had opted for a Swiss governess to teach the young Gerald French, rather than ‘confide a little protestant soul to a Papist’. He must have found it deeply satisfying to see how he had surrounded himself in Rome with these three Rs, with his friendships and collaborations with Stravinsky and Diaghilev, not to mention his innumerable Italian and French friends who belonged to the Catholic Church.

By the time Gramophone magazine surveyed some public figures about their favourite music in 1926, Gerald was able to give witty responses that showed the daring yet unpretentious breadth of his interests and how far he had travelled from his childhood:

My favourite song is ‘The Last Rose of Summer’; my favourite composer Bach; my favourite tune is the third of Schoenberg’s Six Pieces, because it is so obscure that one is never likely to grow tired of it (which you must admit is as good a reason for preferring a tune as any other); and if by ‘singer’ you mean any kind of singer then the one I prefer is Little Tich [a tiny comic music-hall performer]. But, on the other hand, if you mean merely concert singers, please substitute Clara Butt [an imposingly tall and loud contralto].54

Gerald’s composition ‘L’Uomo dai baffi’ (’The Man with the Moustache’) was performed by Casella at a marionette show in the Teatro dei Piccoli in Rome – perfect for Gerald’s love of playfulness. A somewhat provocative part of the puppet ballet was the ‘Trois petites marches funèbres’, consisting of three marches for a statesman, a canary, and an aunt leaving an inheritance. The humorous, even subversive approach to death was daring. This was an era when lengthy mourning periods and swathes of black crepe were still the rule, and though the canary’s march is genuinely sorrowful, the other two are obstinately cheerful. But Gerald had long seen the potential in gallows humour. As a child, he was said to have written a funeral dirge for his mother, who had been amused enough to ask him to perform it as a party piece.55 Mixing the pathos of the small bird’s demise with the pomp of the politician’s was typical of Gerald’s naughty wit, and while the statesman could be seen as representing his father’s formality and officialdom, the canary reflects both his and his mother’s love of birds.56 Although Gerald was not sure of his own future inheritance, it was a theme that had obvious humorous potential. Below the title of ‘Pour une tante à héritage’ (before music marked ‘allegro giocoso’) is the French tag, ‘At last we can go and buy a car.’

It was not long before Gerald had his own windfall. In fact, it was the death of his unmarried paternal uncle, not an aunt, and there was a title as well as property and money. He liked to spin his own fanciful tales concerning his inheritance: a collection of uncles had all fallen off a bridge after a funeral, he wrote. But it was not actually such a surprise. Nevertheless, his letters suggest that he was unclear as to what his legacy would finally entail, and that he even wondered whether his uncle might have a hidden child or wife somewhere who would take precedence. Soon, however, Gerald was swanning around Rome in a large chauffeur-driven car. In 1918, just as the First World War was coming to an end, he became 14th Baron Berners, 5th Baronet. A year later, his surname was changed to Tyrwhitt-Wilson.

Gerald wrote to tell Stravinsky his news: ‘Did you know that I had changed my name and am no longer Tyrwhitt? My aunt – or rather my uncle – à héritage died. Unfortunately I inherit only the title, with a lot of taxes to be paid. I would so much like to see you. I beg you to write me a little note and tell me what you are doing just now.’ Gerald continued to compose music, pursue his painting and travel widely. Although his priorities did not change with his rise in social status, his circumstances did. He turned out to be much richer than he had first imagined – he sold houses, land and silver – and this eased Gerald’s progress as an aesthete and allowed him to augment the degree of luxury and playful indulgence that already suited him so well and for which he became known. He gave up diplomacy (though remained technically attached to the embassy in Rome), and bought Faringdon House for his mother and stepfather, establishing two years later the Berners Estates Company to manage the property. He was delighted to notice how charming the Berners arms were. ‘A Greyhound and an Eagle, symbolical of the two most admirable qualities – swiftness and clarity of vision.’ Although Gerald was rather dismissive of his forebears for being dull, provincial types, he counted among them John Bourchier, the second baron and illustrious translator, whom Henry VIII appointed as Chancellor of the Exchequer, and as his diplomatic advisor at the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

Along with the new car, Gerald had hired a tall, handsome chauffeur, William Crack, who had ‘gold hair and violet-coloured eyes’ and wore a black suit and a cap with a shiny peak.57 Universally liked for his quiet good manners, he later recalled leisurely drives across Europe with his employer. Mussolini was organising his first Fascist marches; Crack recalled that the blackshirts ‘would pull you up in the street if you didn’t wave your hat when they marched by’.58 There was a Fiat, a Lancia and then a specially designed Rolls-Royce – a ‘false cabriolet’ with a top that could be lifted off and folded back if the weather was fine.59 The car also had a space made under the front seats for a portable Dolmetsch clavichord (with no legs and decorated with flowers and butterflies), which Gerald took around with him and played when he stopped. This gave rise to one of the more lasting legends of his eccentricity – that Lord Berners kept and even played a piano in his car – but the reality was a clever way of keeping a small keyboard close at hand for composing and playing. Certain friends claimed that Gerald wore a hideous white mask made by Oliver Messel in the car, but his chauffeur denied it, admitting only that his employer donned a different hat when going through a town. Driving home from Rome, Gerald would allow up to two weeks for the journey, taking in the coast road past Genoa and Monte Carlo, and stopping to dine at appealing restaurants or to visit friends. In Paris, Gerald usually stayed at the Ritz, where Crack remembered delicious meals at a long table in a special courier’s room.60