- High Tea at Merlinford:Remembering Lord Berners
When writing of Lord Berners, it is virtually de rigueur to invoke Nancy Mitford's portrait of him as 'Lord Merlin' in her delectable novel, The Pursuit of Love:
he was an artist and a musician himself, and the patron of all the young. . . .Modern music streamed perpetually from [his estate] Merlinford . . . his astonished neighbors were sometimes invited to attend such puzzlers as Cocteau plays, the opera 'Mahagonny', or the latest Dada extravagances from Paris. . . . As LordMerlin was a famous practical joker, it was sometimes difficult to know where the jokes ended and culture began. I think that he was not always perfectly certain himself.
While Mitford exaggerates in order to magnify Lord Merlin's fabulousness, her descriptions of him reflect the image that her friend Lord Berners cultivated assiduously: aesthetic, modernist, and, above all, frivolous. Furthermore, Lord Merlin, for all his jokes, is portrayed as a sensible, tactful, and generous friend.
While he must have been flattered by Mitford's portrayal, Berners could hardly have failed to detect a sly undercurrent of implication surrounding Lord Merlin. For the background of her portrait, Mitford subtly provides an allusive landscape that could be comprehended fully only by post-lapsarian readers. At one point, for example, the violent and hyper-masculine character Lord Radlett declares: 'If we ask that brute Merlin to bring his friends, we shall get a lot of aesthetes, sewers from Oxford, and I would not put it past him to bring some foreigners.' Indeed, when Lord Radlett's daughter Louisa, a guest at one of Lord Merlin's house parties, inquires of a 'beautiful young man' why he and his companion (another beautiful young man) are wearing pink hunting coats if they don't hunt, he replies, 'Because we think they are so pretty'. Finally, the narrator, a prosaic young woman, admits her trepidation in dealing with Lord Merlin: 'To tell the real truth he frightened me. I felt that, in my company, boredom was for him only just around the corner.'1
Mitford was hardly the only author to base a character on Berners; in 1927, Harold Nicholson—yes, Vita Sackville-West's husband—caricatured him as 'Titty' in his volume Some People. Indeed, Berners himself provided an equivocal but revealing self-portrait in his diffuse novel, Far from the Madding War, a putatively comic story of [End Page 406] life in Oxford tactlessly published in 1941, the darkest year of the Second World War. Using the pseudonym'Lord FitzCricket', Berners offered this self-analysis:
Lord FitzCricket was a stocky little man with a countenance that varied rather considerably with the mobility of his features. . . . He had now become completely bald, and when he was annoyed he looked like a diabolical egg. . . . He was always referred to by gossip-column writers as 'the versatile peer', and indeed there was hardly a branch of art in which he had not at one time or other dabbled. He composed music, he wrote books, he painted; he did a great many things with a certain facile talent. He was astute enough to realize that, in Anglo-Saxon countries, art is more highly appreciated if accompanied by a certain measure of eccentric publicity. This fitted in well with his natural inclinations.2
The final sentence of this passage raises the question: what, exactly, constituted Lord Berners' 'natural inclinations'? Did he have any? For several decades, few cared: from his death in 1950 until the early 1970s, Berners's reputation suffered an almost total eclipse. Interest in Berners has quickened gradually over the last thirty years, however: a great deal of his music has been recorded; his books, including two diverting autobiographies, have been reissued in handsome new editions; and he has been the subject of several studies, including a biography by Mark Amory published in 1998 and a monograph on his music by Bryony Jones that appeared in 2003. The latest addition to this modestly expanding corpus is Peter Dickinson's handsome volume Lord Berners: Composer, Writer, Painter.3
Dickinson can rightly claim to have launched Berners's posthumous career by organizing and also performing in an all-Berners evening held...