Lord Berners: The Last Eccentric

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.)