The Chateau de Resenlieu

The talented and benignly eccentric Lord Berners wrote music, painted pictures, became a British diplomat, and developed an extraordinary writing style filled with wit, irony, and clarity of expression. I recommend listening to his ballet scores and his incidental music to a 1947 motion picture of "Nicolas Nickleby," but I also urge Anglophiles and lovers of British literature to read this slender and delightful volume of memoirs. The time is 1900, when, as Lord Berners writes, "international war still seemed a remote menace, and there were no passports." Gerald Tyrwhitt - for that was his name until he assumed Lordship in 1918 - has left Eton and is now preparing for a career in the British diplomatic service by visiting France for a year to perfect his faulty French, and to savor the culture of Europe. He is also experiencing complete freedom from academic and maternal control for the first time, encountering a late adolescent sexual awakening, and developing an artistic vision that will be the basis of his later creative life. In France he stays with an extraordinary woman, Madame O'Kerrins, the widow of a French-naturalized Irishman, who takes in British borders to support the Château de Résenlieu. The book documents his year's stay with Madame O'Kerrins and a few of her relatives and borders, and reveals the excitement and joy that a seventeen-year old British aristocrat feels when he confronts that totally different culture of provincial France. Written with the care and perception that is characteristic of Lord Berners' work, the book explores the changes that take place within the author. For example, Lord Berners explains his turning away from the heaviness of Romanticism and the overbearing denseness of Wagner's music and adopting the lighter, more impressionistic feelings of French music and art. These impressions, I believe, were solidified during this period and lasted his entire life. His music indeed sounds more like Satie than Wagner, and the lightness of his later work is influenced by the French. His perceptions of the people he meets and his descriptions of the provincial town of Gacé are beautifully written. His prose moves lovingly over each page, and his account of falling in love for the first time in his life with Mademoiselle Henriette is extremely poignant. I heartily recommend this short memoir by Lord Berners, for I am certain the reader, like myself, will be encouraged to explore his other works. In fact, I am beginning his "Collected Tales of Fantasies" as soon as I post this review!