The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me (11 page)

ERALD’S FRIENDS WERE ASTOUNDED. They were used to the jokes and teasing, the stunts and parties, but there had never been a boyfriend. And here was a spectacular one. The Mad Boy could hardly be kept discreetly in the shadows, but this was part of the attraction. It was as though the death of his mother had freed Gerald to pursue love without fear or shame. There was also his age; forty-eight is a point when many start to ponder what time is left in which to taste the joys of life they have missed, or still desire. The younger man ‘had a streak of pure fantasy in his make-up. With Robert about, Diaghilev’s demand to Cocteau: “Etonne moi!” would not have been necessary, for he never failed to astonish.’104 Life as part of an unlikely couple was not straightforward, but Gerald blossomed. In a letter to Cecil Beaton describing his travels and Robert’s crazy escapades, he admitted, ‘Far from being a strain on my system the incidents of the last month have acted as a tonic and I feel years younger.’105

The Mad Boy expressed aspects of Gerald’s own character: a delight in the unconventional, in confounding expectations, and a tendency to what Nancy Mitford described as ‘Neighbour-tease’ – the pleasure in mischievously provoking the good burghers in the locality who could not see beyond their own parochialism. There was an element of savagery, even violence, in Robert that reflected Gerald’s more hidden elements: an uninhibited, unashamed shout to the more suppressed aggression that emerged in his humour. Gerald kept himself buttoned up; friends recalled his laugh being like a sneeze, or ‘a combination of a chuckle and clearing the throat’.106 Even his eccentricity was described as ‘a stately figure of nice madness; etiquette, and gracious manners were most important to this man who, physically, looked like a well-bred diplomat, a noble schoolmaster, a learned don.’107

GERALD IN PLAYFUL HOLIDAY MODE

If Gerald was struggling with his inner darkness and pessimism and transforming them into quirky jokes or artistic endeavour, Robert didn’t appear to be struggling at all. Robert claimed that being with Gerald ‘was the first time I had met civilised people. People thought I was funny and didn’t regard me as an outrageous child.’108 He may have been wrong about the last point, but just as Gerald escaped his stultifying background by going abroad, so Robert cast off the circumscribed (if, as the youngest son, unavailable) environment of Hodnet Hall. He was pleased to expand his horizons by entering the often fantastical, cosmopolitan world surrounding Lord Berners.

The nature of this relationship was understood by their friends but the after-shocks from Oscar Wilde’s trial still spread fear; the law had become no more lenient since the time of Wilde’s imprisonment. Gerald and Robert were committing exactly the same ‘crimes’ and faced equally harsh punishments if caught. ‘The love that dare not speak its name’ remained just as risky as it had at the start of the century. It would be several decades before Wilde’s eloquent testimony was heeded: ‘There is nothing unnatural about it. It is intellectual, and it repeatedly exists between an elder and a younger man, when the elder man has intellect, and the younger man has all the joy, hope and glamour of life before him.’

It is undeniable that in addition to Gerald’s intellect, wit and amusing character, Robert was offered the comforts and delights of his lifestyle. Life with Lord Berners incorporated London, travel abroad and, at Faringdon, the opportunity to pursue the riding and rural activities that he loved. Robert had scraped by with odd jobs and donations from his disapproving parents, but for how long could this have lasted? Gerald’s life was nothing if not luxurious and he was a generous man. While Robert was hardly a penniless boy plucked from the unknown territories of other classes and cultures, there were obvious practical benefits to back up the relationship. He might have been too flighty and wild to be a docile kept boy, but there is little doubt that Gerald provided an extraordinarily alluring environment. At Faringdon, Robert lived the life of a favoured first son on a country estate, but with the indulgence of an older man who was in love with him.

A colourful, fictionalised impression of Robert at Faringdon is given by the person who introduced him to Gerald – Michael Duff:

Suddenly, down the double staircase, came a noise like a sack of coal being emptied, and in another minute a thunder-clap, in the shape of Robert Oddman, appeared in the room … He was dressed in brown corduroys, a yellow polo shirt, and round his neck, arranged in an untidy mass, was a blue and white spotted scarf; his eyes were hazel and very gentle, and he resembled an attractive ape with his protruding lower lip.109

Michael’s camp novel, The Power of a Parasol, was published as a pretty, privately printed edition of 100, and gives a convincing if whimsical glimpse of some aspects of life at Faringdon after Robert moved in. The exhibitionism (he shows the Prime Minister’s wife photographs of himself ‘quite naked’, and picks his nose in public) is less than flattering. The Faringdon copy of the slim book is dedicated ‘For Hebey, Whose character was never so endearing as in this book.’ What Robert himself made of the portrait is anyone’s guess. He probably didn’t care.

Little is known about what went on behind the bedroom door between the trumpeter bird and the panther. There is a general assumption that it was not all that much. Gerald is presumed by some to have leaned towards the asexual or celibate. Other rumours said that Robert went for the weekend to Faringdon and his night with Gerald had been a flop. ‘When on Monday he asked, “Shall I leave?” Berners replied, “Don’t go. You make me laugh. I don’t mind about the other.”’110 Some have suggested that Gerald’s thrills were of the more vicarious kind, provoked by reports of, or even witnessing, the Mad Boy’s exploits. Notwithstanding the guesswork, there was love and affection between the two, and also that frequently affiliated feature of sexual relationships, jealousy.

Gerald’s letters from the early years of his relationship with Robert suggest a pitch of turmoil that normally accompanies the most intense emotional liaisons. When writing to ‘Dearest Cecil’ (Beaton), Gerald seems rather proud of how badly behaved his young lover is on their travels through Europe, though his remarks are unclear in their meaning: ‘I have taken to adopting homeopathic (not homosexual) methods with the Mad Boy and making “scenes and situations” myself.’ In spite of Gerald’s efforts, Robert’s ‘scenes’ continued.

There was only one terrific fracas in the Hotel Santa Caterina at Amalfi where we went for the night. The Mad Boy woke up in a Neapolitan mood, put on a scarlet shirt, a blue jumper, green trousers and a yellow belt and then suggested that I should go down and have breakfast with him on the crowded terrace. I said No certainly not. Whereupon the creature flew into a rage and hit me over the head with a button-hook.111

Worse was to come, when ‘the Mad Boy nearly killed a woman in the street at Salzburg by hurling down a glass tankard from that restaurant on the cliff’. And though Gerald makes light of it, things must have been pretty bad in Venice if the Mad Boy really tried to commit suicide as his letter describes:

[Robert was] removed next morning by me in a heavily drugged condition. Our arrival at the Hotel Excelsior in Florence was, to say the least of it, sensational, as the Mad Boy had to be carried into the hotel in a semi conscious state still dressed in his Tyrolean costume and with his hair hanging all over his face to the amazement and stupefaction of Bobbie Casa Maury and the entire Dudley Ward family who I found seated in the hall. (It required some explaining away I can assure you!)

Gerald seems more concerned about the social implications than the fact that his boyfriend has tried to kill himself, which suggests that Robert was out of control rather than actually suicidal. The older man’s tolerance of this degree of mayhem in a life that was normally orderly and determined by his own whims is surely an indication of the significance that the Mad Boy had taken in his life. Another guess about their relationship would be that while there was a sexual element, it was unlikely to have been the cornerstone of their bond, and doubtless created problems. Later in his life, Gerald admitted to his friend, the academic and writer A. L. Rowse, that ‘all that sex business is over for me’, and that this was a good thing as it was ‘nothing but a nuisance’.112

FTER ALL THE TRAVELLING, the discovering of other languages and cultures and the metamorphosis from a shy, isolated Shropshire boy into a cosmopolitan, artistically accomplished baron, Gerald created the ultimate English institution – the country house. Although Faringdon was compact compared to many such places – no distant wings or chilly corridors – it came complete with all the familiar accoutrements: kitchen gardens, parkland, stables and a generous staff quota. Gerald had his mother’s posthumous presence to deal with in the form of her belongings and furnishings, which had filled the place for nearly twenty years. The inherent elements of tradition, stability and solidity were the opposite of Gerald’s favoured light-heartedness. How would he combine running a country estate with the mood changes that took him touring, butterfly-like, from one European beauty-spot or cultural centre to another? And yet, as Henry James wrote, ‘Of all the great things that the English have invented and made part of the credit of the national character, the most perfect, the most characteristic, the one they have mastered most completely in all its details, so that it has become a compendious illustration of their social genius and their manners, is the well-appointed, well-administered, well-filled country-house.’113

Faringdon provided the solid canvas on which Gerald would paint his own fantasy details, and Robert became part of that creation. On the one hand, the Mad Boy can be viewed as Gerald’s plaything – a human version of the Marchesa Casati’s cheetahs – but actually the younger man found his own, complementary way of living at Faringdon. Osbert Sitwell sent his love in letters to ‘Robert Le diable’, but in reality the young devil was also building his own foundations, becoming increasingly involved with running the estate. It came naturally to Robert to take on certain responsibilities; he had been brought up by his father to take an interest in all aspects of the countryside, and it was not long before Gerald described him as the estate manager. The house now resonated with Gerald calling ‘Robert! Robert!’ as he required help and advice. There was evidently a dimension to the Mad Boy that was far from mad; indeed he had many practical abilities that his older partner lacked.

Robert brought his horses to Faringdon from Hodnet, and moved Gerald’s ancestral portraits out of the stables where they had been languishing since he inherited them with his title. Robert went hunting and thus got to know the influential county set. They often met on the gravel at the front of Faringdon House on frosty mornings, and trays of stirrup cups were handed up to the riders in their scarlet-and-black finery. Photographs show Robert in immaculate hunting gear – tightly fitted jacket, top hat and shiny black boots, ready to speed away on his thoroughbred Arab hunter. Although Gerald was never a keen rider, there was a quiet old horse kept for him, and sometimes he would don his jodhpurs and go out for a gentle ride around the farmland with Robert. Admittedly, the Mad Boy was also known to ride into the grounds naked and bareback, and then return, like a living statue, to the house.

Both Gerald and the Mad Boy bore the legacy of their Shropshire gentry backgrounds; they could both dress impeccably and liked a well-run house and good manners. It would be easy to assume that the Mad Boy was the one who brought an anarchic streak to their cohabitation, but actually it was sometimes Robert who introduced the county conventionality that bored Gerald. After all, it was Gerald who had a lifelong fascination with masks and fancy dress and who wrote modern music and cultivated artistic, avant-garde friends. While Robert loved fine clothes and would often mismatch his colours to produce a clownish, dandy effect, he was not intrigued by the grotesque and the peculiar like Gerald. Once, when Robert was entertaining some dull hunting friends in the drawing room, Gerald made himself scarce so he would not have to talk to them. Then, realising he needed a book from the shelves, he pulled a large hearth-rug over himself and, as if disguised as a strange animal, crawled into the room, proceeded to the bookcase, reached up a hand to take the required volume and crawled out again.114 One can only imagine the guests’ conversations after they had departed. When Robert later asked Gerald why he had done this, he replied, ‘I didn’t want to draw attention to myself.’115

’LL BE ACCUSED of dropping names if I admitted to having spent the weekend at Lord Berners, so I deny absolutely that practically everybody was there.’ Thus wrote Tom Driberg, journalist, socialist and later Labour MP. Yet another Oxford contemporary of Harold Acton and his circle, Driberg was unusual at Faringdon for his Communist leanings, if not for his open homosexuality or his penchant for rough trade. Clever and witty, he had long used and been used by his extensive social network to fuel his Daily Express gossip column, which he believed ‘described the absurdities and extravagancies of the ruling class’, and into which he tried to smuggle as much social conscience as possible.116 Driberg invented or confirmed people’s social rise and demise, revealing the artificial tinsel shine of the Bright Young Things and their endless, madcap parties, while also enjoying himself with them. But he was careful to remain loyal to old friends and avoided biting too hard on the many hands that fed his column. While his height, deep voice and authoritative bearing were those of a bishop, his scandalous sex life and links to Aleister Crowley led people to call him ‘satanic’ and ‘evil’.117

There was a steady parade of friends to Faringdon, especially at the weekends. Gerald was busy with his composing, writing or painting in the mornings, and Robert might have been out and about on a horse, but standards for visitors were high. One friend claimed that when listening to Lord Berners’s music, ‘I can always tell when Gerald’s weekend guests arrive. There’s a sudden cymbal crash!’118 All reports are of spectacular food, dazzling surroundings and company that included many of the wittiest, most attractive people to be found in English and European drawing rooms. Although the house was comfortable, it was not overly formal; there were worn chair covers and piles of books lying around. Gerald’s easel and typewriter were left with on-going endeavours, and music books and manuscript paper were out on the Bechstein baby grand. Gerald didn’t need to try too hard. The magic was there.