Composer, writer, painter, and eccentric millionaire, Lord Berners led a life filled with music, art, travel, and high society. Stravinsky, Picasso, and Salvador Dali; the Sassoons, the Betjemans, and the Sitwells; Harold Nicolson, Frederick Ashton, and Gertrude Stein were all his friends, and many came to stay at his house near Oxford, where the pigeons were dyed all the colors of the rainbow. A charming, hugely enjoyable portrait of a life that was truly eccentric.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
An idiosyncratic composer, novelist, painter, playwright and baron, Gerald Hugh Berners (1883-1950) has developed a cult following, thanks in part to Turtle Point Press's recent reissues of his short stories and memoirs. A prot?g? of Stravinsky, once hailed as "the English Satie" (after avant-garde French composer Erik Satie) for his sharply contemporary compositions spiked with allusions, jokes, dissonance and parody, Berners rebelled against late Victorian values, routinely engaging in surrealist antics like coloring a flock of pigeons with vegetable dyes and putting masks over their heads; a no-trespassing sign on his property read: "Trespassers will be prosecuted, dogs shot, cats whipped." A homosexual, Berners lived openly with his companion, Robert Heber Percy, for 20 years. According to Amory, literary editor of England's Spectator, Berners deliberately avoided profundity in his creative works, aiming instead to entertain and enliven his audience. In this detached, punchy, but unfocused biography, Amory probes, but does not solve, the enigma of a sophisticated modernistAfriend of Salvador Dali, E.M. Forster, Siegfried Sassoon, and ballet collaborator with Frederick Ashton and Gertrude SteinAwho was such a "political innocent" that, although he came to despise the Nazis, he expressed sympathy for British fascist Oswald Mosley as late as 1940. The true nature (and depth) of Berners's political convictions can probably be gauged by the photograph of Mussolini he took in 1934, which so charmed Il Duce that he had it sent as his Christmas card. Only later did people notice that Berners had composed the picture such that an un-fig-leafed statue of Hercules appeared subversively close to Il Duce's person. Photos. (Oct.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
Amory, former literary editor of the Spectator, chronicles the life of Lord Berners, a ``dilettante in the very best sense'' (in Osbert Sitwells words) who excelled in music, painting, and writing, mingled with famous 20th-century bohemians, and had the financial security to establish the lifestyle he desired. Everything fell into the lap of Gerald Berners, born into a blue-blooded English family: years at Eton were followed by extensive educational travels throughout Europe, honorary diplomatic positions in Constantinople and Rome, and the inheritance of noble titles and estates. Although he took his place in the high society for granted, Berners nevertheless found the company of eccentric artists more congenial, as he himself was driven by a strong and variegated creative impulse. As a composer, he collaborated with Diaghilev, Balanchine, Stravinsky, and Gertrude Stein. When Berners turned to painting, choosing Corot as his model, several exhibitions of his landscapes enjoyed considerable success, and his novels and autobiography (in two volumes, both published here in 1998) found many a sympathetic reader. Berners had the good fortune to wine and dine with many celebrities, from D.H. Lawrence to Gershwin. However, he was not universally liked and was even the target of numerous snide comments, of which Virginia Woolf's were the most venomous. He possessed, in fact, a plethora of unpleasant traits, including hypochondria, neurosis and an obsessive anxiety about money, although he grew ever richer with the years. His personal life was generally devoid of passion, and his years-long commitment to a young homosexual companion and would-be heir of Berners's estate, Robert Heber Percy, was clouded by Percy's frequent infidelities and eventual marriage. Amory's assertions as to Lord Berners's extreme eccentricity remain largely unsubstantiated. While he frequently catered to somewhat unusual whims, Berners's extravagance pales in comparison with that of his acquaintance, the unsurpassed eccentric Dal, who once had Berners play a piano that was stationed in a shallow pond. Lord Berners possessed solid but second-rate talents, and his biography is above all an interesting secondary source on his more prominent contemporaries. (16 pages b&w photos) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Adequate, interesting, welcome, but not definitive,
This review is from: Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric (Pimlico) (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.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
A staid biography for a colorful subject,
By
This review is from: Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric (Pimlico) (Paperback)
"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.
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