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theorist Walter Benjamin described ‘acedia’ as an ‘indolence of the heart’ that ruins great men, and believed it was the key to understanding tragic figures such as Hamlet. This ‘slothful inability to make decisions’ leads to the hero passively accepting his fate rather than resisting it. Certainly, Gerald found that melancholia destroyed even his great love of music and literature, and what were normally such consolations brought no pleasure. There was ‘that awful nervous sensation of a windmill going round in one’s heart (known in later years as angst)’.29 When struck by depression, nothing could comfort him and he re-experienced the hopeless disempowerment and torment he had known as a schoolboy. ‘In this black nightmare all the old strictures of the headmaster … cropped up again and revived once more my self-consciousness at being bad at games’.30 The triggers could be various, but the effect was deadening and familiar. Nevertheless, like many artists and writers who suffer depression, Gerald was able to spin creative gold from his disadvantages.
    Gerald’s unhappiness was not helped by a keen awareness that he was far from good-looking. At Eton, his contemporaries called him ‘Newt’ and Osbert Sitwell described his ‘natural air of quiet, ugly distinction’. Even when he was an adult, some of his friends made unkind remarks. Beverley Nichols recalled, with cuttingly cruel, if inaccurate, comedy worthy of his subject, that ‘he was remarkably ugly – short, swarthy, bald, dumpy and simian. There is a legend that nobody who has ever seen Gerald in his bath is ever quite the same again.’31 In fact, Gerald’s face is rather appealing in his photographs, with his evident intelligence and sensitivity taking precedence over his unremarkable features. He took care with his appearance and he was consistently well-dressed and groomed; striped socks or shiny white spats added a touch of elan to a dapper ‘snuff coloured city suit’.32 As a boy, he was always anxious to do the ‘right thing’, and it was not until later that he discovered the liberating effect of departing from conventions. Still, for someone who valued beauty so highly, it is likely that at least in his youth he was troubled by his lack of it. The frustration, even anger, Gerald must have felt was one of the roots of a humour that could be hurtful to others.
    To make matters worse, Gerald’s physical problems were not limited to his appearance and he often suffered from poor health – a bad case of rheumatic fever as a teenager may have had a lasting impact and his letters throughout his life are full of descriptions of illness. In a letter to Stravinsky written in 1918 when he was thirty-five, Gerald added a postscript: ‘My illness was complicated: infection, inflammation, followed by an abscess – prelude, chorale, and fugue!’33
    Gerald knew how to poke fun at himself, and he manipulated his sense of the absurd to entertain others. When still at prep school, he wrote to his mother: ‘Why did you ask if I was ill? Because I have got insomnia in my leg very badly. Please come down to Cheam at once. I have also got Hooping-cough and measles and a slight inflammation of the bronchial tubes. Love to Everyone Gerald Tyrwhitt.’ To this he added an accomplished and charmingly offbeat sketch of a barefoot girl in long skirt and military jacket.
    ERALD IS SOMETIMES VIEWED as a quintessential English eccentric, but in fact he was highly cosmopolitan, spoke several languages and chose to spend much of his life outside England. Although his father travelled with the Navy, Gerald’s affinity with foreign cultures did not seem to come from his family, whom he depicts as laughably parochial. When they had been in Italy, ‘It rained in Venice, Uncle Luke caught sunstroke in Florence, my mother lost a bracelet at the opera in Milan, and my grandmother found a bug in her bed in Bologna. These mishaps were often referred to when