The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me Read Online Free

anyone. He may, of course, have been skilful in his secrecy; certainly it would seem unlikely for an emotional, passionate man to have reached his age without a love affair of some sort. Robert, on the other hand, was highly sexual, and, though he preferred men, also had periodic involvements with women. Though there is no record of how the two men reacted to one another, it was clearly a catalytic point in both their lives. Those who knew Gerald described it as a coup de foudre. Not long after their meeting, they started living together.
    ITLED, TALENTED AND RICH, Gerald risks being viewed only as Lord Berners, the eccentric joker, the ‘versatile peer’. Like Nancy Mitford’s minor though colourful character Lord Merlin, he can be blithely summed up by his facades and foibles, his glamorous parties and dyed doves. His image looks as managed as that of a contemporary celebrity, with a trademark style and the manipulation of publicity smoke and mirrors to create a personal myth. Hiding behind dark glasses and under hats, he went to parties in fantastical dress and posed for photographs wearing all sorts of masks, including a First World War gas mask; he was not afraid of the grotesque. He loved theatrical scenery, wind-up toys and decorated screens, and was well aware of the transformative and liberating nature of altering one’s appearance and the power of creating the right surroundings.
    Many of his famous and affluent friends mentioned Gerald in their memoirs and, though his artistic creativity is acknowledged, he tends to play a humorous cameo role, often as a generous, gourmand host. Harold Acton described him as bubbling over ‘with private jokes and farcical inventions’, but, more revealingly, that by ‘constantly changing his skin, as it were, he revelled in mystification’.5 Even friends like Siegfried Sassoon, who wanted to get beyond social niceties, were sometimes frustrated by ‘the monocled peer, bowler-hatted, and imperturbable’. In his 1921 diary, Sassoon wrote, ‘He wears the same mask (it is a mask, and is, to me, consistently inhuman and unfailingly agreeable).’6 Sassoon later revised this opinion, but Gerald’s disguises and superficiality became effective screens for the complex, thoughtful man behind them. Even his fascinating social circles and the good-looking women and men with whom he liked to surround himself sometimes appear like another protective layer. All the beauty and merriment make it harder to get through to the intimate sides of his character.
    Given the decorative barricades that Gerald became increasingly expert at erecting around himself, it is important to uncover the thin-skinned, lonely boy and emotional, creative youth who made the man. First Childhood and his three other memoirs (A Distant Prospect, The Château de Résenlieu and Dresden) provide many clues, even if they sometimes sacrifice objective facts in favour of a good story. Additionally, two excellent books about Lord Berners have gone a long way to confounding the stereotypes and are fundamental reading for anyone wanting to know more about Gerald’s life: Mark Amory’s Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric and Peter Dickinson’s Lord Berners: Composer, Writer, Painter.
    Gerald embraced the twentieth century’s iconoclasm and its love of experimental art forms, but he was a child of the nineteenth century. Throughout his life, he was characterised by a mixture of conformity and rebelliousness – a love of luxury and ease combined with a disciplined work ethic, an ability to play the fool while caring deeply about his creativity.
    His early years bore many of the hallmarks of upper-class Victorian life that emerge in his novels and short stories, with critical or remote parents, nannies and servants at the heart of the household, and the oppressions of austere Christianity. It is an environment in which he pokes fun at vicars, well-heeled ladies and their pampered lapdogs, a contained world of rigid class