Biography - General & Miscellaneous, Classical Composers - Biography, Art Professionals - Biography, British Authors - 20th Century - Literary Biography, Ambassadors & Diplomats - Political Biography, British History - Social Aspects, Curiosities and Wond
Log in to track your reading progress.
Overview
Here lies Lord Berners/One of life's learners, Thanks be to the Lord/He was never bored. So reads the epitaph on the gravestone of Lord Berners. In its witty way, it hints at his range of accomplishment. He was a composer (admired by Stravinsky), writer, painter, aesthete and eccentric, indeed in Mark Amory's words 'The Last Eccentric', famously dyeing the pigeons at his house, Faringdon, in vibrant colours, and, for a time, having a giraffe as a pet and tea companion. His literary and artistic milieu was glittering: Stravinsky, Picasso, Salvador Dali, Siegfried Sassoon, John Betjeman, the Sitwells, Harold Nicolson, Frederick Ashton and Gertrude Stein - they all belonged to it. In fiction, he was famously portrayed as Lord Merlin in Nancy Mitford's The Pursuit of Love. 'As social history and a chronicle of a mad-cap English eccentric this long awaited, much needed and beautifully written book is, to use a simple cliché, indispensable.' Alexander Waugh, Literary Review 'In Amory, this engaging character has found the ideal biographer. Getting the exact measure of its subject throughout, written in a dry, wittily ironic prose ... the biography offers of sheer bliss.' Gilbert Adair, Sunday TimesEditorials
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 modernist--friend of Salvador Dali, E.M. Forster, Siegfried Sassoon, and ballet collaborator with Frederick Ashton and Gertrude Stein--who 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 Cahners Business Information.Angeline Goreau
[W]e should be grateful to [Armory] for an admirable job of research, bringing together the amazing carryings-on -- and the still more amazing variety of acquaintance -- of a man whose leap from Victorian to modernist set him only partly free.—The New York Times Book Review
Book Details
Published
October 4, 2012
Publisher
Faber and Faber
Pages
304
ISBN
9780571287284