The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (5 page)

To make matters worse, Gerald’s physical problems were not limited to his appearance and he often suffered from poor health – a bad case of rheumatic fever as a teenager may have had a lasting impact and his letters throughout his life are full of descriptions of illness. In a letter to Stravinsky written in 1918 when he was thirty-five, Gerald added a postscript: ‘My illness was complicated: infection, inflammation, followed by an abscess – prelude, chorale, and fugue!’33

Gerald knew how to poke fun at himself, and he manipulated his sense of the absurd to entertain others. When still at prep school, he wrote to his mother: ‘Why did you ask if I was ill? Because I have got insomnia in my leg very badly. Please come down to Cheam at once. I have also got Hooping-cough and measles and a slight inflammation of the bronchial tubes. Love to Everyone Gerald Tyrwhitt.’ To this he added an accomplished and charmingly offbeat sketch of a barefoot girl in long skirt and military jacket.

ERALD IS SOMETIMES VIEWED as a quintessential English eccentric, but in fact he was highly cosmopolitan, spoke several languages and chose to spend much of his life outside England. Although his father travelled with the Navy, Gerald’s affinity with foreign cultures did not seem to come from his family, whom he depicts as laughably parochial. When they had been in Italy, ‘It rained in Venice, Uncle Luke caught sunstroke in Florence, my mother lost a bracelet at the opera in Milan, and my grandmother found a bug in her bed in Bologna. These mishaps were often referred to when anyone spoke too enthusiastically about foreign travel.’34

Gerald’s love affair with ‘abroad’ began when he left Eton and, encouraged by his parents, decided to pursue a diplomatic career. Rather than go to university, it was deemed normal to go on a ‘sort of protracted Grand Tour’, to learn French, German and other languages.35 In common with his friend and later colleague Harold Nicolson, as well as numerous other aspiring diplomats, the sixteen-year-old Gerald went to stay in various private establishments that took in young Englishmen.

The first exhilarating step towards leaving the straitjacket of his English upbringing was taken at the beautiful Château Résenlieu in Normandy, where the teenager was deposited by his mother. Under the tutelage of an impoverished aristocratic widow who had opened her home to young men wanting to learn French, Gerald did learn the language. But more important, conveniently separated from the narrow outlook of family, school and dreaded sports, his horizons opened up. Many of the seeds of his future existence were sown, from a love of Corot’s art and a pursuit of this painting style himself, to an ability to converse on complex subjects with people from different backgrounds. Unlike so many of his compatriots who remained linguistically and culturally isolated, Gerald was brave enough to undergo the humiliation of being the vulnerable foreigner. He described the process of trying ‘to be amiable in a foreign language’ as like ‘a dog trying to express its thoughts to a human being’.36

According to Gerald, during this soft, flower-scented summer idyll, he even fell in love – if only from afar and somewhat self-consciously – with a girl named Henriette. More convincing than this dreamy romance are his descriptions of how food came to be a significant element in his life. He had shown an interest in delicious tastes in earlier days – a letter home from school mentions that ‘Fuller’s at Eton have got a wonderful new American drink called “Ice Cream Soda”’ – but France brought something different. Far from the plain cooking and embarrassment of the puritanical Victorians of his childhood, Gerald learned to take pleasure in a fast-developing Epicureanism. He became dedicated to eating and providing others with wonderful food. ‘I began to interest myself in questions as to whether tarragon were preferable to chervil in a sauce,’ and to watch dishes being prepared in the kitchen ‘without feeling that I was making a nuisance of myself or incurring the stigma of greediness’.37

By 1901, Gerald was in Dresden attending a diplomatic crammer where geography, history and Latin were required as well as languages. Composition was becoming increasingly significant to him and he took lessons with the composer Edmund Kretschmer. His early love for Chopin had moved on to Wagner, but in Germany he became an ardent admirer of Richard Strauss. His peripatetic, informal studies continued over the next years in pursuit of passing the Foreign Office exams, but it was music that remained at the centre of his existence. Despite there being no evidence of any particularly close relationships at this time, what is clear is that he was an intensely emotional young man. Gerald later described how his moods swung from ‘attacks of ecstasy almost orgiastic in their violence’ to deep depression and despair.38 It is tantalising to wonder whether these extremes of feeling were ever focused on people close to him, or whether (as some commentators have implied) he was too shy and diffident, and instead poured his passionate feelings into playing and composing music.

Despite Gerald’s intelligence and years of studying, he failed the demanding Foreign Office exams in 1905, much to his distress. Two years later he failed again, and shortly afterwards his father, Captain Tyrwhitt, died at sea – though he was convalescing on a cruise in the Mediterranean rather than on naval duty. Oddly, despite their alleged antipathy, his wife was on the boat too – her absence at the English memorial service was due to her being still at sea. Julia caused a family rumpus by remarrying the following year, confessing in a letter to her son, ‘I do not feel so sad as I thought I would. After all I had not a very happy time with your Father, and as you say, one ought to live a little for oneself! I wonder if you will be very surprised to hear that Col. Ward Bennitt is very anxious to marry me. It seems so funny at my age to have anyone so wildly in love with me!’

GERALD IN 1905 AGED TWENTY-TWO, WHEN HE FIRST FAILED TO BECOME A DIPLOMAT

The ageing newly-weds rented a new home in Berkshire – Faringdon House – and Gerald often went to stay there when he was in England. Old photographs show the house and gardens at this time in its more conventional Edwardian guise: ornate flowerbeds on the lawns, potted ferns in the drawing room, and lace-draped ladies reclining on wicker chairs on the porch. Creepers sprawl across the facade, so it looks very different to Nancy Mitford’s later description of the house as ‘plain and grey and square and solid’.39

A CREEPER-CLAD FARINGDON HOUSE SOON AFTER GERALD’S MOTHER MOVED IN WITH HER NEW HUSBAND

So much had changed around him, but Gerald was still frustratingly without direction or achievement. His lack of musical training would appear to rule out a career in that direction and the Foreign Office evidently didn’t want him. He was hardly on the look-out for a wealthy wife, as his father had been. The future must have looked quite bleak.

GED TWENTY-SIX, Gerald finally entered the diplomatic service, albeit as an honorary (i.e. unpaid) attaché, and left for the British Embassy in Constantinople. This was one way of starting a diplomatic career if an applicant was not successful in the exams, and it allowed Gerald to establish an existence that was not pressured by too many professional duties and in which he could pursue his own interests and pleasures. He set off in February 1909, travelling on the fabled belle époque Orient Express, which moved slowly through deep snow after its stop at Vienna. Leaving the familiar environment of Europe, Gerald must have found Constantinople a different world. The exotic theatricality of the polyglot, multicultural ‘Paris of the East’ appealed to him, with its colourful, diverse inhabitants: sailors and merchants mixing with Jews, Greeks and Armenians; veiled women and hookah-smoking men in red fezes; and the Friday army parade when the Sultan went to prayers. Gerald visited the Old Seraglio palace, where he admired the jewels (an ‘emerald the size of an orange’) and the dazzling views from the Golden Horn. Much of this was about to change; his posting coincided with great political upheavals as the Ottoman Empire gave way under the pressures of war and the radical new republican movement of the Young Turks.

Gerald’s contemporary Harold Nicolson overlapped with him as a junior diplomat, and though they were friendly, some have seen Nicolson’s unkind portrait of a mannered young diplomat, ‘Titty’, as being based on Gerald:

A peaky face, a little grey face with blue-black shadows, two small unsparkling eyes, a wet and feeble little mouth, shapeless hair. He had the sickly and unwashed appearance of an El Greco page: he perked his head on one side towards a long black cigarette holder: his other claw-like hand clutched a grey woollen scarf; he looked infinitely childish; he looked preternaturally wizened and old.40

Much later, Gerald would exact his literary revenge, and annoy Nicolson with an absurd, puffed-up character largely based on him – ‘Lollypop’ Jenkins.41

Gerald may have been a shy young man, but he was safely buttressed by the embassy system; by this stage he was already giving dinner parties (some with mischievously arranged guest lists) and was remembered as dressing up in outrageous costumes. On one occasion he arrived at a large diplomatic party dressed in a black leotard and accompanied by two attendants playing pan pipes, and was tickled to see the ambassador’s horror. ‘[He went] blue in the face with indignation. And little is so pleasing in the sight of God as a blue ambassador.’42 Letters home describe sports more soothing to a mother’s breast, like riding and even (following Byron’s glamorous example) swimming across the Bosphorus.

In November 1911 – shortly before Mr and Mrs Heber-Percy of Hodnet Hall, Shropshire, were blessed with a fourth son they named Robert – Gerald was posted to Rome. Some of the joy he experienced living there comes out in his fiction, where he describes a city that still retained some of its relaxed nineteenth-century charm. ‘The Forum and the Palatine had not yet been spoilt by archaeologists’, and one could wander or paint at liberty. In the summer the embassy moved southwards to a villa on the Bay of Naples where magnificent terraced gardens filled with orange and lemon groves looked out towards Vesuvius. The British diplomats bathed each day at noon. ‘It was almost too nostalgic. The days passed in a nirvana of delight and some of the happiest moments of my life were spent in a lazy amphibian existence, swimming in the sea or wandering about the hills with sketch book.’43 Gerald’s deepening devotion to Italy was reflected in the inspiration he found in the various intoxicatingly pungent scents: ‘a mixture of drainage, orange blossom and the sea’. In his novel Percy Wallingford, he wrote, ‘I have often thought of asking some chemist to concoct for me reproductions of certain mixed aromas evocative of places I have loved.’

A PHOTOGRAPH FROM THE FARINGDON ALBUM SHOWING THE HOUSE IN ROME

Now almost thirty, Gerald established the sort of life he must have longed for. He lived in a series of beautiful houses until, in the 1920s, he finally bought 3 Foro Romano – an elegantly solid, wisteria-clad building on the less accessible side ofthe Roman Forum. Gerald created an entertaining, theatrical environment wherever he lived, and the impressive vaulted drawing room on the piano nobile made the perfect ‘set’. Photographs show rooms decorated with a Renaissance elegance that was also playful: a large brass chandelier, heavy bookcases and impressive paintings were combined with a grand piano covered with objets (a mask, some portraits, a model galleon), and a leopard skin draped across the stool where Gerald sat to compose in the morning.

The arched loggia looked out across the spectacular sprawl of ancient columns and stone paths where, before the era of fences and tickets, Gerald and his friends could wander or sit in the sun. Gerald was later scathing about the burgeoning influence of archaeologists that made the Forum much less romantic and ‘lost to poets and lovers’. Tito Mannini, Gerald’s cook, bred canaries and once spent all day in the Forum trying to coax them home when they were somehow let out of their cages. Tito was temperamental and not universally loved, but he was a talented cook and made the most delicious chocolate cake with sour cream, rum, angelica and candied cherries. He took on the role of major-domo when Gerald let friends stay at the house in his absence, but there were rumours that he was spotted wearing his employer’s clothes and using the house as a sales room for antiques.

Roman friends came from a variety of sources, including the British community and the Embassy, where the Ambassador was the Rt Hon. Sir Rennell Rodd and his domineering, party-loving wife, Lilias (‘Lady Rude’).* Gerald also got to know people in Italian high society, the most dashing of whom was the near-mythical Marchesa Casati, with her mesmerising, kohl-rimmed green eyes, white skin and Cleopatra fringe. A central figure in the European avant-garde that was flourishing in Rome, she was dressed by Fortuny, Erté and even Diaghilev’s costume designer, Bakst, whose clashing colours and sensual clothes were thrilling audiences around Europe. The Marchesa’s dramatic style and unusual looks made her a popular subject for artists of the day, and she was photographed by Man Ray, painted by Augustus John and sculpted by Jacob Epstein.

Like Gerald, Luisa Casati started life as a shy, plain child from a privileged family and later learned to use eccentricity (and her wealth) to create a successful, worldly persona. Certainly, her enthusiasm for her own celebrity was indefatigable compared to Gerald’s, whose later use of publicity for his own purposes remained playful and low-key. The English diplomat and the Italian aristocrat also shared an unusual appreciation of animals, though La Casati had a menagerie that made anything Gerald would do look positively modest. Owning not only mauve monkeys, parrots and albino blackbirds, but also large and lethal snakes and felines, she became notorious for her appearances at parties, where she might walk in with a cheetah or a panther in a diamond-studded collar, or wearing a snake around her neck.

Italian life suited the young diplomat. There were dinners, rides around town, and expeditions into the stunning Roman Campagna to paint, or to the sulphur baths near Tivoli. Gerald helped found a ‘quartette society’, where members organised private concerts and gave poor but accomplished string players the opportunity to perform Mozart, Beethoven and early Italian music. Far more interesting, though, was his own composition, which he was now taking very seriously.