Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric [Paperback]

Mark Amory's new biography, "Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric," traces the hedonistic and self-indulgent life of Gerald Tyrwhitt and his odd assortment of friends, who included some of the most supremely talented people of upper-class England, but which also comprised a collection of noted homosexuals, freeloaders, parasites, neurotics, and ambitious social climbers with whom he associated throughout his life. They are all here in Amory's biography - Gertrude Stein, the Sitwells, Picasso, Dali, Frederich Ashton, Siegfried Sassoon - and they all helping Gerald avoid boredom. Gerald Tyrwhitt became Lord Berners in 1918 and also became immensely rich. He sets up his estate at Farington, near Oxford, and for the next thirty years he hosts the beautiful and the rich, regaling them all with his eccentricity, practical jokes, and dark, sometimes cruel, humor. Robert Heber Percy, a man almost thirty years younger than Berners, becomes his companion, lives with Berners until the latter's death, and inherits almost everything from him, including the estate and over 214,000 pounds sterling. Of course, biographist Amory goes into the wild happenings at Farington: Berners' dying his pigeons different colors; Berners' inviting birds and his favorite horse into the dayroom for tea; Berners' inviting noted homosexuals like Cecil Beaton, Noel Coward, and Andre Gide for weekends; and Berners's designing a useless "folly" tower, one hundred feet high, partly to annoy the neighbors. During World War II, when Lord Berners became morbidly depressed (old age had closed in on him, his friends were leaving, his world was transformed beyond recognition) he confessed in a letter that for thirty years "I have given myself up to self-indulgence and hedonism." Lord Berners, however, was also a rather talented composer, an author of six novellas and stylish memoirs, and an artist of note. Stravinsky called him the most interesting composer in England, and he maintained close relationships with such creative artists as William Walton, Constance Lambert, Diaghilev, the Sitwells, and Frederich Ashton. Amory is particularly strong in describing Berners' musical career which included a number of ballets, including "The Triumph of Neptune," some light miniatures, and the film score to "Nickolas Nickleby." (His music is well documented on an excellent CD with the Royal Liverpool Orchestra, conducted by Barry Wordsworth.) Amory also examines Lord Berners' literary output. Berners' wrote a series of novellas throughout his life, but the ones he wrote during the 1940's when he was undergoing a nervous breakdown are the most fascinating. The story "Percy Wallingford" metaphorically describes this breakdown. He also includes in his stories characters that are based on his friends, sometimes mischievously, at other times cruelly. Lord Berners was apparently never a pleasant man - what would he have done for friends had he not inherited a fortune? - but his brutal teasing of such men as William Walton is unconscionable. So it is all there in Mark Amory's book, a biography that tells us about the eccentricities of Lord Berners, but never really involves us in his life or reveals who he really was. I thought the style of the writing to be mediocre, the analysis to be interesting but far from profound, and the details to be far from complete. For example, there is little discussion of Berners as a painter, despite his success in showing at galleries and selling his art for astronomical prices. It is, however, a thoroughly adequate portrayal of Berners' life until something better comes along. Since I had read almost all of Berners' fiction and memoirs, and since I am an enthusiast of 20th century British music of which Berners' is a small part, this biography served me well for putting pieces of Berners' life together and providing a chronological outline from which to work.

"Here lies Lord Berners
One of life's learners
Thanks be to the Lord
He never was bored"
(gravestone epitaph)

Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, the fourteenth Baron Berners, was one of the twentieth century's great eccentrics. He was also, as his gravestone truthfully reported, "never bored." Highly creative but also very frivolous, Lord Berner was famed for such stunts as dyeing the pigeons at his estate in rainbow hues and playing a clavichord placed in the back of his Rolls Royce. His social circle included members of the litterati such as Evelyn Waugh, Siegfried Sassoon, and Getrude Stein, as well as Igor Stravinsky, Cecil Beaton, and Salvador Dali. It's said that Nancy Mitford modeled her character Lord Merlin in The Pursuit of Love on him.

Lord Berners himself was a composer, novelist, playwright, and painter, with his work showing a strong surrealist and whimsical bent, never taking itself too seriously. He lived openly in a homosexual relationship on a vast estate that was something of a menagerie both socially and literally, with its numerous hangers-on and a pet giraffe roaming the grounds. Intent on a life of hedonism, he nevertheless produced some notable musical compositions and two memoirs. His various short stories and novellas were posthumously published as Collected Tales and Fantasies, and it was this book that initially led to my interest in this notable eccentric and aesthete.

Armory's biography does a good job of detailing the swirl of people and events in Lord Berners' life, but it seems curiously inert, somehow, in comparison to its subject. I'd hoped for a little more insight into the person and less for the external facts of his life. Still, it's the one of the few accounts we have of a complex and talented man, and it does capture the sense of the time and social milieu. Among the book's illustrations and photographs is a marvelous picture of a group having tea in Lord Berners' drawing room -- all very proper and English, with the lace tableloth and nick-knacks on the bireplace mantle. But then there's the large white horse standing placidly between two of the ladies, looking for all the world as if he were about to contribute to the table conversation -- this unusual animal apparently had free range of the house.

Full of snippets of correspondence and thousands of references to titled personages, literary luminaries, avant-garde artists of the day, this makes for bustling biography, one that serves as a portrait of a time. My one complaint is that it renders the age better than its ostensible subject.