The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (7 page)

WILLIAM CRACK DRIVING THE ROLLS-ROYCE

After staying with Gerald in Rome and then accompanying him on the long trip home, Rex Whistler wrote about outdoor painting sessions on the way, and ‘a divine bathe in the river – with William the chauffeur!’61 The attractive young artist was still in his early twenties but was making a name for himself with his beautifully delicate paintings and murals; his recent trompe l’œil mural in the Tate Gallery’s restaurant had been a grand success, and Whistler’s subsequent tent-like decorations for Sir Philip Sassoon’s extravagant house in Kent, Port Lympne, include Gerald as a solitary child waiting by his coroneted trunk for a paddle-steamer, with Faringdon House in the distance. In 1929, he painted Gerald busy on a small canvas in the drawing room at Faringdon. Dressed in buttoned-up white shirt and striped tie, the balding, bespectacled Gerald has the awkwardness and careful deliberation of a bank manager at his first art class. Without his masks, hats and costumes and without the chance to speak or play music, he looks dull and rather gloomy.

During the stops for painting, Crack would unpack an easel, paintbox, camp chair and green-lined parasol for his employer. Once, when motoring in England, Crack was screwing together the easel as Gerald politely approached the ancient owner of an ancient cottage, who was tending his hollyhocks. ‘Sir,’ he enquired, ‘have you any objection to my painting your cottage?’ The old boy looked at Gerald with a suspicious eye, and said, ‘Well, if I want me cottage painted I paint it myself and anyway it’s barely six months done.’62

In London, Gerald lived in rooms or a shared house with other bachelors. There are some who wonder whether he might have been involved with one of his few close friends, Gerald Agar-Robartes (Viscount Clifden from 1930), though there is no solid evidence. Eventually he bought himself a more substantial townhouse in Belgravia – 3 Halkin Street – which became his London base until the Second World War. He made trips to the country to his mother and stepfather at Faringdon, visited Salzburg and Munich for their music festivals, and frequently went to Paris, where he met the members of Les Six (including Poulenc and Milhaud), composers who, like him, were influenced by the light, witty style of Satie. It was in this milieu that Gerald encountered the extraordinary musical patron Princess de Polignac. Born in America, Winnaretta (or ‘Winnie’, as her friends called her) was heiress to the Singer sewing-machine fortune and was known at the turn of the century as one of the ‘Paris Lesbos’, having affairs with many women, married and unmarried. Her husband was more interested in men and their manage blanc was based on their love of music and the arts. Though the prince died in 1901, the princess developed the salon they had created together and which supported and performed the music of contemporary composers; Debussy, Fauré and Ravel had premieres of their works there.

Gerald met Winnaretta in 1923, the year she fell in love with Violet Trefusis, with whom she remained involved for the next decade. The daughter of Alice Keppel (Edward VII’s mistress), Violet’s marriage to the diplomat Denys Trefusis had been brief and unsuccessful, and she was notorious for her recent and scandalous liaison with Vita Sackville-West. Violet was twenty-nine and Winnie fifty-eight, but the attractive, amusing younger woman was fascinated by the older woman’s intelligence, humour and her ‘rocky profile … her face more like a landscape than a face’. She felt like a willow to Winnie’s oak.63 If some found Violet annoying for her fickle nature and gossipy ways, she was also fun and full of life. Virginia Woolf found her hugely seductive – as did many others: ‘What a voice – lisping, faltering, what warmth, suppleness, and in her way – it’s not mine … how lovely, like a squirrel among buck hares …’64 And if Winnie could be daunting and formidable, she was also passionate and generous.

Gerald became close to both Winnie and Violet, and saw them at the princess’s palazzo in Venice, where there was ‘mad and constant music-making’ and visits from Stravinsky, Cole Porter, Arthur Rubinstein and Diaghilev.65 The tall American-born French princess and the short cosmopolitan English lord had more in common than might have been initially apparent and their interest in one another and in music developed into a lifelong friendship. Both were eccentric outsiders who managed to be at the centre of things, and though they were gay at a time when this was not widely acceptable, they were socially desirable because of their titles and their wealth. Above all, their love of music was the centre of their lives. There is an argument that music can be considered a conduit for ambiguous feelings that are ‘different, irrational, unaccountable’, and that it can provide the ‘perfect field for the display of emotion’ for those who have difficulty in expressing it or for whom there is disapproval.66 Although this is speculative, it is an interesting theory that makes some sense in both cases.

If Gerald did not openly declare himself as homosexual and did not leave any evidence behind of relationships with men at this stage in his life, he did have many friends whose sexual preferences were more obviously expressed. Diaghilev was a significant lodestar for numerous men of similar inclinations – a powerful, successful artist who didn’t hide his attraction to and liaisons with men. Another overtly gay friend was the young painter Christopher (‘Kit’) Wood, who had sat at the feet of Picasso in Paris and who took advice and opium from Cocteau. Gerald bought one of Wood’s paintings, and saw him again in Rome, where they enjoyed ‘painting trips … picnics, parties and dinners’ and met frequently with Igor Stravinsky and the Marchesa Casati.67 Kit Wood’s pale good looks, his sexually ambiguous style (he also got involved with women), his polio-induced limp and his fierce dedication to his painting made him hugely attractive to many people, including Gerald. ‘He was a painter who was at the same time naive and sophisticated. He saw directly with the eyes of a primitive and had that primitive sense of pure colour and elimination of the unnecessary,’ wrote their mutual friend, the painter Francis Rose.68 When Gerald wrote ‘a fantastic ballet in one act’, Luna Park – set in the freaks pavilion of a fairground and choreographed once more by Balanchine – it was Wood who designed the scenery and costumes for the show. The ballet was performed in 1930, the year the twenty-nine-year-old Wood, after a frenzied summer of painting and opium abuse, threw himself under a train.

It seems likely that Gerald introduced the young Kit Wood to Ronald Firbank in Rome. Tall, skinny, with white hands sporting long, carmine-coloured nails and Egyptian rings, Firbank stayed a good deal in Rome in the early 1920s, and constructed and cultivated even more masks and mysteries around himself than Gerald. His novels had already caused a stir, with their modern mix of unconventional sexuality, wittily malicious satire and experimental form, and while he often had to publish his own books, he is viewed by some as having written some of the most original fiction of the twentieth century.69 Certainly his works were adored by the Bright Young Things of the 1920s and would continue to occupy a place in many of their hearts after they stopped being bright or young.

Gerald had become friends with Firbank during the strange, disorienting years after the war, when strikes, shortages and the ravages of the dreadful flu epidemic were ameliorated by the joys of Mediterranean life. Both men had found a refuge from the stifling restrictions of English society, culture and climate in travel and art and both were shy, clever, sensitive and sexually diffident. They met at the Ballets Russes, where the audience was understandably nonplussed by the lanky aesthete, whose favourite posture ‘seemed to entail sitting with his head nearly touching the floor and with his feet in the air’.70 Initially, Gerald found this degree of eccentricity embarrassing. Although he was three years older than Firbank, he did not embrace the decadent, lily-scented style redolent of the fin de siècle, Yellow Book days of Beardsley and Wilde. Firbank also drank too much and didn’t always eat properly – when others ordered a meal, he might consume only peaches washed down with champagne.

Where Firbank was isolated and felt himself almost a social outcast, Gerald liked to be embraced by the society he also mocked, and was often surprisingly conventional in appearance and manners for someone known for eccentricity; he favoured a bowler hat and snug suits. Firbank, with his absurd behaviour, undulating walk and lonely isolation, might have seemed a warning to Gerald of the perils of taking unconventionality too far – a reflection in a warped mirror of his own characteristics. Firbank was not entirely devoted to Gerald, writing scathingly about Berners and ‘the Sitwell set’, whom he believed to be ‘afraid of my “witty” pen!’ In a letter to his mother, he compared Gerald to a great-uncle, ‘only less distinguished! For his face has no cleverness to redeem it! He is fat and rather bald, but with a pleasant manner, although under the “flabbyness” of the surface there is certainly steel! He might be an unpleasant enemy, and he is, of course, not at all simple.’71

By the time Firbank died of alcohol and lung disease in 1926, aged forty, Gerald claimed to be his only friend in Rome; in charge of the funeral, he managed to make the kind of mistake that could have occurred in either man’s novels. Having misinterpreted Firbank’s disparaging remarks about the prejudices of the Catholic Church, Gerald had him buried in the verdant Protestant Cemetery behind the Pyramid of Cestius, where Shelley and Keats ended up. It was subsequently revealed that Firbank was a Roman Catholic and he was disinterred, but Gerald recalled the ‘mistaken’ burial on a summer morning with wry pleasure. Amid the cypresses and roses were nightingales ‘whose vocal outpourings in Italy are not confined, as in Northern countries, to moonlit groves … The nightingales that attended Ronald’s funeral were presumably Papists, for they did their utmost to drown the voice of the officiating clergyman.’72

HE YEAR 1931 might have looked unpromising to Gerald. Heading for fifty, he couldn’t fail to notice the banking crisis that was leading inexorably to the Great Depression. Severe unemployment and a Labour government were hardly encouraging to the post-war era of excess, jazz clubs and fancy-dress parties so well satirised by Evelyn Waugh. In February, Gerald’s seventy-nine-year-old mother Julia died. He was soon to write his first memoir, First Childhood, in which she would be caricatured as a hard-nosed yet parochial, country lady. These were some of the childhood feelings he retained and now felt free to express, but in reality Gerald was a loved and loyal son. His letters to his mother were warm and regular and he often visited, bringing friends with him for country weekends. He even had his own set of rooms at Faringdon, on the lower ground floor, where he worked.

Siegfried Sassoon’s diary describes a stay at Faringdon in the 1920s: ‘B’s mother is a vague agreeable lady beautifully draped in old lace; probably a keen gardener; the drawing-room is full of freesias, and they are thinking of getting a new troop of goldfish for the lily-pond. In the dining-room are two glossy blue starlings in separate cages.’ Colonel Ward Bennitt’s ageing parrot, bought off a sailor many years before, was taken out for a bit of sunshine by the limestone pillars on the porch. It was presumably with this bird that Gerald tried to play tricks on his mother, persuading it to walk across the floor covered with a bowler hat. ‘This strange sight of a self-moving hat didn’t seem to surprise Gerald’s mother, which did surprise Gerald: perhaps Gerald wasn’t aware how well, even in old age, Gerald’s mother understood her son.’73 This was the woman, after all, who had welcomed the Marchesa Casati into her home when Gerald invited his Italian friend to stay, and was charmed. Despite the unusual appearance of the grandly eccentric Casati – unusually tall and slender, smoking cigarettes from a long, jewelled holder and sporting false lashes and tight, white satin trousers – Mrs Ward Bennitt later announced, ‘I like her much better than your other foreign friends.’74 Naturally, La Casati brought her python. Or was it an immense boa constrictor, as Osbert Sitwell remembered, packaged up in a large portmanteau with a glass top? ‘It was neatly coiled for its journey, but showing that it was alive by an occasional glistening shudder of its scaly skin.’75 Even this was accepted by Gerald’s mother. Apparently the hostess asked the Marchesa if her pet was hungry. ‘No, it had a goat this morning.’76 The Italian signed herself in the visitors’ book (an old hotel register) as ‘Tempteuse de Serpents’.

JULIA, GERALD’S MOTHER, SITS ON THE STEPS. HER SECOND HUSBAND, COLONEL WARD BENNITT, SITS ON THE WALL SMOKING A PIPE, HIS SAILOR’S PARROT TAKING THE AIR. THE LADY ON THE RIGHT CANNOT BE IDENTIFIED

Julia’s death was followed only three weeks later by her husband’s, the now ninety-three-year-old Colonel. Both were among the first people to be cremated at Oxford’s new crematorium and their tombstones are in the graveyard of Faringdon’s All Saints’ Church, just beyond the garden wall. Gerald decided to take over Faringdon as his own home (not relinquishing his others in London and Rome) and, freed from the beady maternal eye, the subsequent year would be a time of revealing and marvellous changes.

* Their son, Peter Rodd, would later marry Nancy Mitford.

F GERALD AND THE MAD BOY were dramatically different in terms of appearance, age and character, their backgrounds were remarkably similar. Hodnet Hall, the home of the Heber-Percys, was only eleven miles from Apley Park, and both families were wealthy Shropshire landowners who might easily have visited one another’s houses or ridden to hounds together. Though Robert was born twenty-eight years after Gerald, both experienced the same mixture of privilege and neglect as children, and both lived in households where horses were assumed to be as fundamental a species in daily life as humans. Throughout their lives, both retained a love of the rural English landscape, but they rejected the asphyxiating conventions of their childhoods and had a predilection for shocking the kind of people they had grown up with. They had different methods of achieving it, but in each case, épater le bourgeois was almost a creed.