Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  After two weeks of sightseeing in the Val d’Arno, Clark was despatched with a protégé of Mary Berenson to southern Tuscany and Umbria, still under Bell’s instruction. By the time he returned to Florence, ‘I felt as if I had lived in Italy all my life. The echoing corridors of Poggio Gherardo were no longer alarming; the coarse damp sheets were like my daily bread; the idea of a bath before dinner ridiculous. In a few days I had to leave and my only thought was how to get back.’11 As he wrote to his mother: ‘What an extraordinary holiday it has been! I have had rather a debauch of loitering among beautiful things and quite look forward to getting down to hard work again.’12 On the way home he mentioned Berenson’s offer to Bell, who commented, ‘You wouldn’t like it, you know. You’d hear nothing but abuse of your friends. They are like crows picking over the bones of everybody’s reputation.’13

  Clark’s parents – reluctant to see their only child leave Britain – strongly objected to him giving up his fourth year at Oxford. He therefore wrote to Berenson offering to come to I Tatti at the end of the academic year – with a trial month in January – although he realised that this might jeopardise the offer.14 Mary Berenson, who managed her husband’s commitments, wrote back accepting the arrangement and agreeing that Clark should improve his Italian and German language skills in the meantime.

  On his return to Oxford Clark settled down to work on The Gothic Revival. His final year at the university, from October 1925 to June 1926, is a rather shadowy affair, and marked by a return of his hypochondria. He lived out of college, in rooms in Beaumont Street, and rarely went in for meals, except on Sunday evenings when Oxford’s restaurants were closed. He was by now president of the Gryphon Club, and in February 1926 he read a paper about Ruskin in which he described ‘the continual struggle that went on in Ruskin’s mind to make his likes and dislikes agree with his theories of art’.15 His motivation in giving the paper – as he explained to Mary Berenson – was to help clarify his ideas on Ruskin’s relationship with the Gothic revivalists. Clark told her that although he was depressed about Oxford the work on the book was going well, and he already had more material than he could use.

  One of the pleasures of working on The Gothic Revival was that it brought him enduring friendship with one of the most original undergraduates in the university, John Betjeman. They met at Maurice Bowra’s, and as Clark later told Betjeman’s biographer, ‘as a young man he cast himself in the role of the nineteenth-century man. He loved life and he loved jokes, and he laughed more than anybody else I knew. His discovery of the merits of the Gothic Revival coincided with mine and went a little further. He had the merit of seeing through fashionable styles.’16 Clark and Betjeman remained friends for life.

  Clark occasionally returned to his parents’ house in Bournemouth. One evening in November 1925 when he happened to be staying at The Toft, his father appeared – ‘I shall never forget his face’ – holding a newspaper with the headline ‘WELSH DAM DISASTER, Whole Village Washed Away’. Clark senior had invested a considerable part of his fortune in an aluminium plant powered by water from a large dam near the village of Dolgarrog. The dam, woefully inadequate to its task, had burst, destroying the village with the loss of sixteen lives. Clark’s father had only been there once, but he recognised his responsibilities, and covered the resulting compensation claims. To his embarrassment, young Clark was put on the company’s board, but it never recovered and the plant was sold shortly afterwards at a loss. Clark senior reckoned that he had lost over a million pounds. This was probably half his fortune, but there were still sufficient funds to ensure that no immediate consequences were felt by the family. Clark spent what must have been a melancholy Christmas with his parents in Bournemouth, and then headed back to the pleasures of Italy.

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  The ‘trial’ three weeks at I Tatti in January were an evident success. Clark wrote to Mary Berenson that they were ‘the most delightful I can remember. Walking in the hills, shuffling Bellinis in the library or simply browsing amongst the books were all a great joy to me; and above all to be with people who understand…my enthusiasms, was a new and enchanting experience.’17 Mary’s brother, the belle lettrist Logan Pearsall Smith, was staying, and wrote to their sister Alys (the ex-wife of Bertrand Russell): ‘It is just like a little court here with favourites…Clark is the new great favourite now and he seems to deserve his favour – his knowledge and his reading and his power of expressing himself are certainly prodigious for his age. He likes it here immensely, loves the good talk and appreciates the humour of the situation and his own to the full, and being rich and popular and independent, he is not much concerned as to what happens. I have just left him sitting with the B.B.’s over a portfolio of photographs, emitting opinions about them which they seem to listen to with respect.’18 On the other hand, Nicky Mariano, BB’s librarian and mistress, who was adored by all, especially Mary, found Clark ‘rather standoffish and cutting in his remarks, also not free of conceit for one so young. But soon I realised that much of this was a mask for shyness.’19 She also observed that Logan had, without even realising it, fallen in love with him. It is a measure of Clark’s inscrutability that nobody at I Tatti was certain where his sexual tastes lay.

  Logan lived at St Leonard’s Terrace in London, where he was known as ‘the Sage of Chelsea’. His life was devoted to literary pursuits, malicious gossip and polishing sentences for his collections of maxims. Like Walter Pater, he played with words until ‘they glowed like jewels upon his pages’.20 He was always searching for the ideal literary apprentice, and threw a fly over Clark: ‘I don’t want to force an unwelcome correspondence on you, but I shall always be glad to hear from you, and will answer with due promptness. Only the notion of my teaching you to write seems more and more absurd, since you write so well already.’21 Clark replied offering passages from three of his favourite authors for Logan’s Treasury of English Prose: Samuel Johnson, Walter Pater and Lytton Strachey. Clark was to remain fond of Logan, but it was BB to whom he was apprenticed. He offered Cyril Connolly instead, which was an unexpected success.

  That spring Clark frequently wrote to Mary Berenson about forthcoming arrangements: questions about a summer visit to Germany to learn the language, the type of camera he should bring to I Tatti for photographing paintings on their trips to obscure churches, and most surprisingly, ‘If you think my car would be useful to me during August & September – as well it may be, if I am visiting out of the way towns – then perhaps it may be possible to find some lodgings for my chauffeur. It sounds preposterous that anyone of my age should have a chauffeur at all, but he will be able to valet to me when I am on my own; and I am afraid I cannot drive far without one, as I am a fool with the inwards [sic] of cars and when they break I am lost.’22 The chauffeur makes only sporadic appearances, and was not a permanent fixture. Clark wrote to Mary from the Golf Hotel at Sospel near Menton, which his father had built but was now bored with. He handed the hotel to his son, who claims to have ‘much enjoyed the drama and complications of hotel management’, but it is difficult to gauge exactly what this means, as the only example he cites is a guest stealing all the eggs and then throwing them at the night porter, the Swiss manager and himself.23 A more useful addition to his life was a place to stay in London. His parents had taken a serviced flat in St Ermin’s Hotel, a large Edwardian wedding cake in the middle of Westminster. From here Clark would venture out to the Burlington Fine Arts Club, which he had joined, where people were already beginning to speak about him as the coming man in the art world.*1 This was where the grand world of Edwardian connoisseurs, collectors and scholars gathered, and it was a natural home for Clark to gravitate towards. He also entered the fringes of the Bloomsbury group thanks to his friendship with Roger Fry. These two worlds of Edwardian connoisseurship and Cambridge intellectuals were to be assimilated, and eventually rejected, by Clark.

  Clark’s interests were never exclusively with the Old Masters. Roger Fry completed what the Leicester Galleri
es had begun, opening his eyes to Post-Impressionist French and contemporary art. Charles Bell had personally prevented this prophet of modern art from becoming Slade Professor of Fine Art at Oxford – ‘The old spider did it,’ Fry would say with glee – but for Clark ‘he was the most bewitching lecturer I have ever heard’. His lectures on Cézanne and Poussin at Queen’s Hall, often filled with two thousand people, succeeded in making Post-Impressionism acceptable to the British elite. Clark later pronounced that if taste was changed by one man, it was changed by Fry. It was said of him that, like T.S. Eliot, he drew a new map by presenting Post-Impressionism to London. E.M. Forster thought that Fry changed culture from being principally a social asset – he addressed new audiences, and encouraged them to enjoy art. This was something Clark inherited.24

  Clark had read Fry’s Vision and Design (1920) at Winchester, and was more impressed by the intellectual rigour of Fry’s analysis than by Fry’s friend Clive Bell’s doctrine of ‘significant form’. Fry was a painter who was searching to understand the anatomical structure of compositions. The essence of his ideas was to write about works of art in terms of their form rather than their subject-matter – a method suitable for discussing Cézanne, but inadequate for Rembrandt. Clark was soon to outgrow this approach, which played down historical, literary and iconographical interpretations.25 However, one aspect of Fry’s critical writing which was clearly influential on Clark was his tendency to draw visual analogies between works of quite different epochs and cultures. Clark would apply this to great effect in all his books and lectures. Fry was also a delightful companion, and when Clark bought one of his strangely dead paintings, they became close friends. Clark probably enjoyed talking about art with Fry more than with anybody else in his life, and once confessed, ‘I doubt if I have ever felt clever again since Roger died.’ In addition, Fry introduced him to Bloomsbury, which led to his friendship with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant. We owe it largely to Fry that Clark championed modern art when he was the director of the National Gallery.

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  Women had played only a background role in Clark’s adult life to date, but that was about to change dramatically. In June he wrote to his mother: ‘I stopped at Newbury to pick up Gordon Waterfield and his young lady,’ the first reference to his future wife, Jane Martin.26 Clark did not have one particular girlfriend at the time, although there are frequent references to an ‘Eileen’ in letters home, and also to Sybil Dawson, of whom he later wrote, ‘everybody expected that I would marry her, but she was too materially minded’.27 Sybil’s father was the King’s physician, and as a doctor’s daughter she did not approve of Clark senior’s drinking, as she tactlessly told his son.28 There were other girlfriends, and it is perhaps surprising that Clark had no grand passion before Jane Martin, the Oxford graduate fiancée of his friend Gordon Waterfield. Jane was a friendly, unpretentious girl, and attractive in a vivacious way. Men had flocked around her at Oxford, where she had read History, admiring her high spirits and natural elegance. Gordon Waterfield was also a dashing figure, whose father was a painter and whose mother, Lina, was a niece of Janet Ross. His fees at Oxford were paid by an uncle in the cotton business (who was interested to hear of his friendship with a member of the Clark family). At some point in the summer of 1926 Waterfield was sent to Egypt to learn about the cotton trade, and unwisely entrusted his fiancée to Clark’s care. Clark began to send her letters, and to perform small services on her behalf, such as acquiring tweeds for her. He consoled himself that Newbury, where she had taken a position as a teacher at a school, Downe House, was ‘only 25 miles from Oxford’.

  When Clark left Oxford in June, he was perhaps already in love with Jane; he had certainly ceased to admire Sybil. He spent the early summer with his parents in Scotland, which ‘was the happiest month I’ve ever spent…it is wonderful that the awful Sybil didn’t cloud it’.29 Back in London, he prepared for a visit to Germany, and in August he and Connolly went down to Logan’s house by the sea in Hampshire, where again he was happy: ‘We all worked on the lawn most of the day, Logan at an essay on Pater, Cyril selecting passages from Jeremy Taylor, I reading all Hazlitt’s art criticism. In the afternoon we sailed on the Hamble and in the evening we bathed. Logan’s blithe and mellow charm engulfed us…I find him tremendously stimulating and I come away feeling I must write on almost every subject.’30

  At the end of August Clark left for Germany, where he would stay over a month, learning the language, visiting the important art galleries and spending evenings at the opera. In those days German was the principal language of art history, and Berenson had underlined its indispensability if Clark was to read Riegl, Wölfflin and the other great art historians in the original.*2 He headed for Dresden, which was an interesting choice. Before World War II it was one of the loveliest cities in Europe, and its art collections were superb; moreover, it was small enough to be digestible. He lodged with a family who spoke little English, and he felt lonely: ‘Yesterday I found the strain of never speaking English and having no human relations with anyone rather unpleasant, I was seized with the melancholy. However, I’ve shaken it off by dint of hard work. “If you are solitary be not idle” were Johnson’s last words to Bozzy, when Bozzy went on his European tour.’31

  He was shaken out of his ennui by a visit from his friend Leigh Ashton. ‘Don’t expect a letter for three days,’ he warned his mother, ‘as it is impossible to write when one is with Leigh. He keeps one on the run all day.’ Clark had first met Ashton at Winchester, when he was already on the staff of the V&A, which he would one day direct. He was a flamboyant showman who had a creative rather than a scholarly mind, and like Clark he possessed a vast appetite for works of art. Together they toured Germany, and made subsequent trips to visit collections in Paris and Brussels. The greatest revelation in Germany for Clark was his discovery of the Baroque and Rococo, and he confessed that he was ‘so bowled over by Nymphenburg that forty years later I gave it too much prominence in the ninth programme of Civilisation’.32

  In the last letter he wrote to his mother from Dresden, he broke some important news: ‘I return to England, then…I must go down to Oxford to see Charles [Bell] and my tailor; also to Newbury to see Jane…as you know Jane and I are completely devoted to one another and I must see as much of her as I can. When you wrote that I was not in the least in love with her, I didn’t contradict you…However I have been in love with her for about two years now, and extraordinary as it seems she has with me…I think that unless anything unforeseen occurs we shall eventually get married. I have no gift for falling in love and am not likely to do so again. Nor am I ever likely to find anyone with whom I have so much in common.’ For whatever reason, he had convinced himself that his father would be against the liaison, and told his mother: ‘He must realise that I am, unfortunately very different to him; bachelor joys, parties and late nights and good fellows have no charm for me. I am the least “clubbable” of men and if I am not with intimate friends or at home I am alone; and I hate being alone. Try and impress on him that Jane would be a companion to me…My dear, I look forward to seeing you again more than I ever remember. I have enjoyed Dresden, on the whole, but I was not cut out for an exile.’33 It is significant that Clark’s love for Jane had grown under conditions of distance. He was away much of the time; and Jane was already engaged – both factors that protected him from the pressures of expectation. Besides, having promised Waterfield to look after Jane, Clark had every justification for offering her his companionship and support. Perhaps this ambiguity also kept him from feeling self-conscious about their deepening relationship.

  The first question everybody asked in those days, when caste meant so much, was, who is Jane Martin? She was an Irish girl, born Elizabeth (always known as ‘Betty’ in the family) Martin, who changed her Christian name at Oxford. She was brought up in middle-class Dublin. Her father, Robert Martin, was a feckless businessman who never stopped showing off. Clark called him an ‘incredible old fake’. On the oth
er hand, Jane’s mother, Dr Emily Dickson, who was ten years older than her husband, was a distinguished surgeon who gave up her practice on marriage. There were four boys in the family,34 and Jane had a tomboy side when she was young. Her parents eventually separated: her roguish father went to South Africa to run the Durban Cricket Club,*3 and her long-suffering mother to Tunbridge Wells, where economic necessity forced her back into medical practice – Clark seldom saw her smile. Jane was sent to school in England at Malvern Girls’ School, from where she went to Somerville, Oxford. She was naturally elegant and inclined to break the rules, both of which made her popular. Her academic career was undistinguished; she obtained a third class degree after retakes. Apart from her obvious and slightly gamine charm, Clark and she were both outsiders who would ‘invent’ themselves as a couple. Her father advised her always to subordinate her interests to her husband.

  Clark’s engagement to Jane entailed having to write an awkward letter to Gordon Waterfield in Egypt. He sent it from St Ermin’s Hotel. According to Clark’s account, Waterfield took the news philosophically, but a curious incident suggests otherwise. It happened almost at the end of Jane’s life, during her long and unhappy final illness, when Waterfield came to live at Hythe in Kent, close by the Clarks’ last home at Saltwood. One day, in conversation with Clark’s daughter Colette, Waterfield pulled out of his top pocket the letter that her father had written half a century before. It was on four sides of paper, a smooth, self-justifying document which Clark had concluded with: ‘in the end you will find that this is better for everybody’. It is clear that Jane’s abandonment still caused Waterfield pain, as he turned to Colette and said with feeling, ‘If only she had stayed with me, she would have never have got into this state.’35