outlandish place he spent happy years in Rome as honorary attaché at our Embassy. He adored Italy and made friends with avant-garde artists in Rome and Paris. In the 20s he inherited Faringdon, but he kept a house in Rome.
In about 1933 he met the Mad Boy, Robert Heber-Percy. Some said he first saw him swinging on a chandelier in a Munich hotel. Gerald was not fifty, a well-known composer from whom Diaghilev had commissioned ballets; his music was admired by Stravinsky. He invited Robert to bring his horses to Faringdon; Robert hunted, and efficiently ran Gerald’s farms. He was no longer lonely in the country; the Mad Boy was sometimes outrageous , but never dull.
One year in Rome Gerald wrote a story about a girls’ school,
The Girls of Radcliffe Hall
. He was headmaster, the ‘girls’ were Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel, Peter Watson, and Robert, the heroine. The book has not worn well. It depended on the ‘girls’ crushes and jealousies, comic at the time.
At Faringdon he painted, wrote memoirs and composed
The Wedding Bouquet
, with words by Gertrude Stein and choreography by Frederick Ashton. It was produced at Covent Garden, with Constant Lambert conducting. The war came, and made him sad. Europe, his paradise, tore itself to pieces. Music cannot be bombed, but everything else was at risk. He shut Faringdon and went to live in Oxford. His depression deepened, he had some sort of breakdown. He wrote
Far From the Madding War
, very funny but a biting satire.
Back at Faringdon once more he almost recovered, and lived for several years sharing delicious food and the beauty of his surroundings with many friends. In those days of rationing people such as Cyril Connolly, who lived in London, thought of nothing but food. Gerald and Faringdon achieved a rare perfection.
Mark Amory has cleverly captured the essence of Gerald Berners: his professionalism in music, his generosity and genius for friendship, his teases and jokes and sure sense of values. He was broadminded about everything except pomposity.
Lord Berners: the Last Eccentric
, Amory, M.
Sunday Times
(1998)
Battling for Beauty
Are diaries ‘true’? Jim Lees-Milne’s are a long and fascinating novel, of which he is the charming, companionable and unpretentious hero. As he gives his characters their real names, and is as frank as he is observant, the diaries have probably wounded quite a few readers. They are sometimes true and sometimes invented, just as novels are. This sensitive man seems never to have imagined anyone might mind his strictures andjokes.
Here he is in his late sixties, thinking death is just round the corner. So many friends died, hardly a week without a painful loss. Yet he had 20 years to live. Although fond of them, he never spared his old friends, freely expressing his horror at what age had done to them. Some were shrunken and bent, some immensely fat like collapsed puddings, nearly all smelt rather horrid. He resolved to be very clean, an antidote to inevitable change and decay. He himself remained an elegant figure, and when he was over 80 my sister Pamela, seeing him stride across a field, said, ‘Doesn’t Jim look just like an undergraduate when he walks!’
As a young man, working for the National Trust, he did more to save England’s beautiful country houses than anyone else has ever done. He deserved every honour England has to bestow, but, needless to say, he was neglected. Deeply religious, he was a Roman Catholic convert, but returned to the Church of England after Vatican II and because the Pope forbade birth control, as he here explains.
Those who knew him well are aware that he left huge chunks of his life out of his diaries; they are highly selective, like all novels. Pepys wrote his diary in shorthand so that ‘my wife, poor wretch’ should not know what he did with barmaids. Tolstoy hid his in his boot, he was taken ill, his boots were pulled off, Countess Tolstoy found it and read it and the fat was in the
In about 1933 he met the Mad Boy, Robert Heber-Percy. Some said he first saw him swinging on a chandelier in a Munich hotel. Gerald was not fifty, a well-known composer from whom Diaghilev had commissioned ballets; his music was admired by Stravinsky. He invited Robert to bring his horses to Faringdon; Robert hunted, and efficiently ran Gerald’s farms. He was no longer lonely in the country; the Mad Boy was sometimes outrageous , but never dull.
One year in Rome Gerald wrote a story about a girls’ school,
The Girls of Radcliffe Hall
. He was headmaster, the ‘girls’ were Cecil Beaton, Oliver Messel, Peter Watson, and Robert, the heroine. The book has not worn well. It depended on the ‘girls’ crushes and jealousies, comic at the time.
At Faringdon he painted, wrote memoirs and composed
The Wedding Bouquet
, with words by Gertrude Stein and choreography by Frederick Ashton. It was produced at Covent Garden, with Constant Lambert conducting. The war came, and made him sad. Europe, his paradise, tore itself to pieces. Music cannot be bombed, but everything else was at risk. He shut Faringdon and went to live in Oxford. His depression deepened, he had some sort of breakdown. He wrote
Far From the Madding War
, very funny but a biting satire.
Back at Faringdon once more he almost recovered, and lived for several years sharing delicious food and the beauty of his surroundings with many friends. In those days of rationing people such as Cyril Connolly, who lived in London, thought of nothing but food. Gerald and Faringdon achieved a rare perfection.
Mark Amory has cleverly captured the essence of Gerald Berners: his professionalism in music, his generosity and genius for friendship, his teases and jokes and sure sense of values. He was broadminded about everything except pomposity.
Lord Berners: the Last Eccentric
, Amory, M.
Sunday Times
(1998)
Battling for Beauty
Are diaries ‘true’? Jim Lees-Milne’s are a long and fascinating novel, of which he is the charming, companionable and unpretentious hero. As he gives his characters their real names, and is as frank as he is observant, the diaries have probably wounded quite a few readers. They are sometimes true and sometimes invented, just as novels are. This sensitive man seems never to have imagined anyone might mind his strictures andjokes.
Here he is in his late sixties, thinking death is just round the corner. So many friends died, hardly a week without a painful loss. Yet he had 20 years to live. Although fond of them, he never spared his old friends, freely expressing his horror at what age had done to them. Some were shrunken and bent, some immensely fat like collapsed puddings, nearly all smelt rather horrid. He resolved to be very clean, an antidote to inevitable change and decay. He himself remained an elegant figure, and when he was over 80 my sister Pamela, seeing him stride across a field, said, ‘Doesn’t Jim look just like an undergraduate when he walks!’
As a young man, working for the National Trust, he did more to save England’s beautiful country houses than anyone else has ever done. He deserved every honour England has to bestow, but, needless to say, he was neglected. Deeply religious, he was a Roman Catholic convert, but returned to the Church of England after Vatican II and because the Pope forbade birth control, as he here explains.
Those who knew him well are aware that he left huge chunks of his life out of his diaries; they are highly selective, like all novels. Pepys wrote his diary in shorthand so that ‘my wife, poor wretch’ should not know what he did with barmaids. Tolstoy hid his in his boot, he was taken ill, his boots were pulled off, Countess Tolstoy found it and read it and the fat was in the
Similar Books
