Read Online The Mad Boy, Lord Berners, My Grandmother, and Me by Sofka Zinovieff - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Sofka Zinovieff
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opium abuse, threw himself under a train.
It seems likely that Gerald introduced the young Kit Wood to Ronald Firbank in Rome. Tall, skinny, with white hands sporting long, carmine-coloured nails and Egyptian rings, Firbank stayed a good deal in Rome in the early 1920s, and constructed and cultivated even more masks and mysteries around himself than Gerald. His novels had already caused a stir, with their modern mix of unconventional sexuality, wittily malicious satire and experimental form, and while he often had to publish his own books, he is viewed by some as having written some of the most original fiction of the twentieth century.69 Certainly his works were adored by the Bright Young Things of the 1920s and would continue to occupy a place in many of their hearts after they stopped being bright or young.
Gerald had become friends with Firbank during the strange, disorienting years after the war, when strikes, shortages and the ravages of the dreadful flu epidemic were ameliorated by the joys of Mediterranean life. Both men had found a refuge from the stifling restrictions of English society, culture and climate in travel and art and both were shy, clever, sensitive and sexually diffident. They met at the Ballets Russes, where the audience was understandably nonplussed by the lanky aesthete, whose favourite posture ‘seemed to entail sitting with his head nearly touching the floor and with his feet in the air’.70 Initially, Gerald found this degree of eccentricity embarrassing. Although he was three years older than Firbank, he did not embrace the decadent, lily-scented style redolent of the fin de siècle, Yellow Book days of Beardsley and Wilde. Firbank also drank too much and didn’t always eat properly – when others ordered a meal, he might consume only peaches washed down with champagne.
Where Firbank was isolated and felt himself almost a social outcast, Gerald liked to be embraced by the society he also mocked, and was often surprisingly conventional in appearance and manners for someone known for eccentricity; he favoured a bowler hat and snug suits. Firbank, with his absurd behaviour, undulating walk and lonely isolation, might have seemed a warning to Gerald of the perils of taking unconventionality too far – a reflection in a warped mirror of his own characteristics. Firbank was not entirely devoted to Gerald, writing scathingly about Berners and ‘the Sitwell set’, whom he believed to be ‘afraid of my “witty” pen!’ In a letter to his mother, he compared Gerald to a great-uncle, ‘only less distinguished! For his face has no cleverness to redeem it! He is fat and rather bald, but with a pleasant manner, although under the “flabbyness” of the surface there is certainly steel! He might be an unpleasant enemy, and he is, of course, not at all simple.’71
By the time Firbank died of alcohol and lung disease in 1926, aged forty, Gerald claimed to be his only friend in Rome; in charge of the funeral, he managed to make the kind of mistake that could have occurred in either man’s novels. Having misinterpreted Firbank’s disparaging remarks about the prejudices of the Catholic Church, Gerald had him buried in the verdant Protestant Cemetery behind the Pyramid of Cestius, where Shelley and Keats ended up. It was subsequently revealed that Firbank was a Roman Catholic and he was disinterred, but Gerald recalled the ‘mistaken’ burial on a summer morning with wry pleasure. Amid the cypresses and roses were nightingales ‘whose vocal outpourings in Italy are not confined, as in Northern countries, to moonlit groves … The nightingales that attended Ronald’s funeral were presumably Papists, for they did their utmost to drown the voice of the officiating clergyman.’72
HE YEAR 1931 might have looked unpromising to Gerald. Heading for fifty, he couldn’t fail to notice the banking crisis that was leading inexorably to the Great Depression. Severe unemployment and a Labour government
It seems likely that Gerald introduced the young Kit Wood to Ronald Firbank in Rome. Tall, skinny, with white hands sporting long, carmine-coloured nails and Egyptian rings, Firbank stayed a good deal in Rome in the early 1920s, and constructed and cultivated even more masks and mysteries around himself than Gerald. His novels had already caused a stir, with their modern mix of unconventional sexuality, wittily malicious satire and experimental form, and while he often had to publish his own books, he is viewed by some as having written some of the most original fiction of the twentieth century.69 Certainly his works were adored by the Bright Young Things of the 1920s and would continue to occupy a place in many of their hearts after they stopped being bright or young.
Gerald had become friends with Firbank during the strange, disorienting years after the war, when strikes, shortages and the ravages of the dreadful flu epidemic were ameliorated by the joys of Mediterranean life. Both men had found a refuge from the stifling restrictions of English society, culture and climate in travel and art and both were shy, clever, sensitive and sexually diffident. They met at the Ballets Russes, where the audience was understandably nonplussed by the lanky aesthete, whose favourite posture ‘seemed to entail sitting with his head nearly touching the floor and with his feet in the air’.70 Initially, Gerald found this degree of eccentricity embarrassing. Although he was three years older than Firbank, he did not embrace the decadent, lily-scented style redolent of the fin de siècle, Yellow Book days of Beardsley and Wilde. Firbank also drank too much and didn’t always eat properly – when others ordered a meal, he might consume only peaches washed down with champagne.
Where Firbank was isolated and felt himself almost a social outcast, Gerald liked to be embraced by the society he also mocked, and was often surprisingly conventional in appearance and manners for someone known for eccentricity; he favoured a bowler hat and snug suits. Firbank, with his absurd behaviour, undulating walk and lonely isolation, might have seemed a warning to Gerald of the perils of taking unconventionality too far – a reflection in a warped mirror of his own characteristics. Firbank was not entirely devoted to Gerald, writing scathingly about Berners and ‘the Sitwell set’, whom he believed to be ‘afraid of my “witty” pen!’ In a letter to his mother, he compared Gerald to a great-uncle, ‘only less distinguished! For his face has no cleverness to redeem it! He is fat and rather bald, but with a pleasant manner, although under the “flabbyness” of the surface there is certainly steel! He might be an unpleasant enemy, and he is, of course, not at all simple.’71
By the time Firbank died of alcohol and lung disease in 1926, aged forty, Gerald claimed to be his only friend in Rome; in charge of the funeral, he managed to make the kind of mistake that could have occurred in either man’s novels. Having misinterpreted Firbank’s disparaging remarks about the prejudices of the Catholic Church, Gerald had him buried in the verdant Protestant Cemetery behind the Pyramid of Cestius, where Shelley and Keats ended up. It was subsequently revealed that Firbank was a Roman Catholic and he was disinterred, but Gerald recalled the ‘mistaken’ burial on a summer morning with wry pleasure. Amid the cypresses and roses were nightingales ‘whose vocal outpourings in Italy are not confined, as in Northern countries, to moonlit groves … The nightingales that attended Ronald’s funeral were presumably Papists, for they did their utmost to drown the voice of the officiating clergyman.’72
HE YEAR 1931 might have looked unpromising to Gerald. Heading for fifty, he couldn’t fail to notice the banking crisis that was leading inexorably to the Great Depression. Severe unemployment and a Labour government
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