Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric - Softcover

Mark Amory was born in 1941 and educated at Eton and Oxford. He has been a publisher, journalist, theatre and film critic, ghost (for the Kabaka of Buganda), biographer (Lord Dunsany, 1972) and edited the letters of Evelyn Waugh (1980) and Ann Fleming (1985). He is the literary editor of the Spectator and is married with three daughters. He lives in London and Somerset.

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.