Lunch at La Pietra

Peter Dickinson’s latest book, Lord Berners: Composer Writer Painter will be published in September. It is a refreshingly new documentary approach to a unique personality - interviews with leading figures and contemporaries who knew Berners and his work. Here Peter Dickinson recalls visiting Harold Acton in Florence.

In 1983 I made a BBC Radio 3 documentary about Lord Berners to mark his centenary – the interviews will be printed in full in my book. I also put on concerts at the Wigmore Hall and elsewhere with my sister Meriel Dickinson singing the songs and Timothy West giving readings from Berners’ novels and autobiography. One of the most fascinating interview subjects was Sir Harold Acton and the BBC producer, Arthur Johnson, and I went to Florence to see him. We joined other guests for lunch afterwards – the waiters wore white gloves – and then looked round the formal gardens lined by box hedges and featuring sculptured figures along vistas.

Acton’s family had had connections with Italy for several generations and it was his father who bought La Pietra around 1900. The villa, approached through a long drive of cypresses, became legendary for its art collection, scrupulously maintained by Acton following the death of his father in 1953 and eventually left to New York University.

Acton’s contemporaries at Eton included Lord David Cecil (also interviewed at length in my book) and at Oxford he was of the same generation as Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell. He wrote poetry, novels, a biography of The Last Medici, and studies of the Bourbons of Naples.

Acton spent most of the 1930s in China, lecturing at Peking National University and after the war he wrote Memoirs of an Aesthete and More Memoirs of an Aesthete. He was knighted in 1974 for services to the British Institute and to Anglo-Italian relations. His recreations listed in Who’s Who include ‘hunting the Philistines’. I asked him when he first encountered Lord Berners (he was the only person I met who could go back to World War I):

“I met him when I was quite a young boy really. I had just gone to Eton and I was visiting in Rome with my father who took me to see Berners’ studio, which was full of modern paintings and there were huge bowls of coloured water with tin goldfish in them, which used to stir. There were all sorts of gadgets such as marionettes and peculiar things that struck a boy as extremely unusual. He himself was never very talkative. He just waited for one’s comments. You could see he was anxious to surprise one. There were hidden jokes: something might pop out of a cushion or anything. It had a curious atmosphere of its own which he had created.

One of the most noticeable things was a large photograph of the Marchesa Casati, a very striking lady much painted by all the well-known painters of the period. She was a close friend of his, also very interested in eccentric things. She had Moorish servants feeding leopards from her house - very strange.

He was then in the British Embassy called Gerald Tyrwhitt as Honorary Attaché. That’s when I first met him. And I saw him fairly often when he came to Florence in his huge Rolls Royce with a porcelain turtle in it and a little spinet which he used to play while being driven.”

That was the legend – and legends persist because people often prefer them to the facts. But my book reveals that the instrument was a clavichord kept in a compartment under the front seat.

Lord Berners and the idea of the amateur

Writer, composer, pianist and teacher Peter Dickinson has published a number of books with Boydell and the University of Rochester Press, including studies of Copland and Lennox Berkeley, but most recently a fascinating series of interviews with and about John Cage entitled, appropriately enough, CageTalk. His next book, for publication in the second half of 2008, will be another collection of interviews, this time about Lord Berners (right, in a striking self portrait).

Berners (1883-1950) was not only an accomplished and highly respected composer, but also a painter, writer, wit, builder of follies and, famously, a man who used harmless vegetable dyes to colour his pigeons. For this reason, as Harold Acton mentions in one of Dickinson’s interviews, “He was always treated as an amateur, which was really a pejorative term in England.” This is one of many interesting themes in the book: the English have never liked polymaths or Renaissance men (or women) – perhaps it seems too much like showing off - and the word “amateur” comes with an almost obligatory sneer. Yet, as Acton continues, “it really means that you love what you are practising. Whether [Berners] was painting or composing or writing he enjoyed it very much.”

In another interview from the book, composer Gavin Bryars is quoted as saying that, so far as the work of Berners and Satie is concerned, “its ‘amateur’ nature is its strength…the independence of spirit and confidence in the quality of their imagination, and the range of work that imagination generated, are themselves sufficient reason for prizing the ‘amateur’ status above that of the competent professional.” Bryars maintains that “He did just the right amount of everything…if he’d spent more time on his music he could have become a duller composer.”

Bryars is almost certainly right. No less a composer than Stravinsky considered Berners to be one of the best English composers of the century. “Stravinsky took him seriously; Bliss, Goossens and Sauguet did; Lambert especially. Sorabji – one of the greatest British composers – took him very seriously…Berners was friendly with all the members of Les Six.” It seems his pastel pigeons have allowed many to get away with not treating Berners with the respect that others like Stravinsky were able to extend.

More from Peter Dickinson’s fascinating book over the coming months.