At the age of eight – as was usual in those days – the children were packed off to prep school at Cheltenham, which was conveniently near Upton.3 It was also where Clark’s mother lived, and whatever her shortcomings as a mother she was better suited to the role of grandmother, although as Colette recalled, ‘Granny was very Quaker with quite a sharp tongue.’ There is no doubt that Granny Martin was the more selfless of the two grandmothers; she offered herself for medical war work before she died in 1944.
After a bomb fell near Granny Clark’s house she went to live with the ménage at Upton. Here she joined the newly arrived Graham Sutherlands, which led to a running confusion between ‘Gran’ and ‘Gram’. The other long-term war guest was Clark’s old Oxford friend Eddie Sackville-West, and these arrivals improved matters for Jane, who had some distraction and help with the organisation of the house. As she told David Crawford, ‘Eddie plays us the gramophone and we forget the war for moments. He is the perfect guest and has taken complete charge down here and runs everything for me!’4 At Christmas 1940 Jane noted in her diary: ‘Graham gave K Palmer etching and he gave G Palmer drawing! K gives me lovely agate box and Colette an exquisite necklace of small Italian cameos. Maurice [Bowra] and Eddie are also staying.’ But she was to change her mind about Eddie Sackville-West: ‘[Graham] and Katherine leave us on Friday, tho’ they will be back for Xmas…they have lived with us for over a year and we are very sorry they are going…Alas I can’t say the same of poor Ed – we just don’t feel the house is our own any more…E quite intolerable…follows one all over the house even when I am seeing the cook.’5 The cook, Mrs Nelson, was nothing if not exotic. In her youth she had been on the stage in Paris, and had been a friend of the can-can dancer Jane Avril. With dyed red hair and the remains of beauty, she claimed her daughter had been fathered by the composer Edward Elgar.6
A graphic picture of Upton during the Clarks’ time there is provided by Clark’s sometime collaborator Roger Hinks: ‘The house itself is almost grotesquely filled full of pictures: positively encrusted, like the Casino Pio,7 as K remarked. Apart from the Clark collection, Upton houses distinguished evacuees like Emerald Cunard’s Manets, which she inherited from George Moore, and a whole troop of Bogey [Harris]’s8 Sienese primitives, all the way up the bedroom stairs. My bathroom contains a nude by Duncan Grant, a landscape by Tchelitchew, a Henry Moore, and no fewer than three Graham Sutherlands.’9
In 1941 the Sutherlands returned to Kent, where they eventually bought the White House at Trottiscliffe, Clark guaranteeing their mortgage. Jane was keen to get more help with the housework at Upton, and wrote to Mrs Massey’s Agency at 100 Baker Street to find ‘a second Housemaid’, pointing out that the area was considered safe.10 Henry Moore and other friends came down to stay whenever they could. Bobby Longden, now headmaster of Wellington, visited, and afterwards wrote a six-page letter trying to persuade Jane to send Alan, his godson, to Wellington rather than Eton. Bobby was killed shortly afterwards by a stray bomb that fell on the school. This prompted Jane to write to David Crawford: ‘I always meant to ask you if you would mind being a deus ex machina if we were both killed? The guardians for the children (there are separate financial trustees!) are Tom Boase and William Walton with Eddie [Sackville-West] as a substitute if anything happened to either of them.’11
The composer William Walton had in fact just become Jane’s lover. On New Year’s Day 1941 she confided to her diary: ‘Elizabeth [Arnold – Clark’s pre-war secretary] is in love with K and W with me.’12 While Clark was in London, Walton would come down to Gloucestershire, as Jane’s diary reveals: ‘Willie and I play marriages with children and Grannie C[lark]…and Willie plays me the Ravel “Daphnis and Chloe” he has just given me.’13 Clark had managed to get Walton exemption from active service by attaching him to the Crown Film Unit. Walton’s affair with Jane was probably a relief to her husband, as it made her less tense, and provided him with room for manoeuvre. One evening when Jane was out with Walton, Clark took Colette to Verdi’s opera Falstaff. At one point she asked about the meaning of a certain aria. ‘Jealousy,’ said her father – ‘something I do not suffer from in the least.’14 Colette thought that ‘Willy Walton was very good for her as he was so full of Yorkshire common sense and worldliness. My mother would proclaim, “I know about life,” to which Papa would retort, “I know nothing about life and I am hoping to get through life without knowing about it.” ’ Jane’s affair with Walton continued for a decade, and some even thought they would run off together.*1 His letters to her are short and passionate, written on letter cards (a sort of folded postcard without a picture), inviting her to come up to London for the day for assignations at the Paddington Hotel: ‘I adore you and are [sic] obsessed by you.’ There is a pile of them at Saltwood that Jane put in an envelope marked ‘J.C. To be burnt unread.’
For holidays the family would go to Portmeirion, which was conveniently close to Manod. This colourful architectural fantasy of an Italian fishing port served them well, and their times there were carefree and happy for the children, who enjoyed bathing and climbing. The family were becoming noisy, as Clark told his mother: ‘Family talk is fairly ferocious – sometimes deafening. Being an only child I cannot accustom myself to these boisterous arguments which I am unable to distinguish from real quarrels.’15 Catriona Anderson, daughter of Clark’s Oxford friend Colin, remembered those holidays: ‘We went to Portmeirion when I was six or seven. I found K very daunting. He had this way of looking at you expecting you to say something clever. Jane was more human…K had absolutely no small talk. I don’t remember him swimming. He was very detached and took my father over to see the Manod Caves.’16 Clark’s relationship with his own children had generally been emotionally distant, but at Portmeirion when Jane was away they began to see a different man. He developed a warm and admiring relationship with Colette, which may have caused further resentment to a jealous Jane. Curiously, the only occasion on which the children ever saw their father lose his temper with their mother was on a visit to Portmeirion. They had a train to catch, and Clark, who was always extremely punctual, became irritated by Jane’s tardiness and diva-like behaviour. Finally, to everyone’s astonishment – and particularly Jane’s – he exploded and told her to come at once. She went like a lamb.
The children were turning into teenagers. After Alan had gone to Eton, Clark reported to his mother, with extraordinary percipience, that ‘he has a good head and should do well if he can find any occupation to bring out his qualities. I think he would do well in politics if he weren’t – by profound conviction – a fascist. That will never do in this country, tho’ the rest of the world may ultimately require it.’17 Clark never explained why they chose Eton for the boys, but probably his choice, like his father’s before him, was negative – in this case that it was not his old school, Winchester. Colette was sent to Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where she rose to become head girl. After one visit to see her there, Clark confided to John Piper, ‘I can’t think why girls who are the age of Shakespeare’s heroines are all so hideous.’18
Apart from the Lees, the Gloucestershire neighbour they saw the most of was a rich industrialist named Hiram Winterbotham, a bachelor with intellectual tastes who may have fallen in love with Alan (and who later put him on the board of St Thomas’s Hospital). Whenever Clark needed to do some serious work, he would borrow Hiram’s house and see nobody. But by 1943 things were turning sour in relation to Upton. Apart from the extreme possessiveness of Uncle Arthur, who drove Jane mad when Clark was in London, the owners of the house were sending solicitors’ letters about the arrival of evacuees, and were trying to make the Clarks take full responsibility for the damage, wear and tear caused by up to sixty occupants. The house had been requisitioned by the Women’s Land Army, and the Clarks’ things were bundled into three rooms. They finally gave up the lease, deciding to spend more time in London, where Jane had found interesting war work.
Jane had been invited – probably at her husban
d’s suggestion – to take charge of the decoration of ‘British Restaurants’, canteens that sprang up during the war in parish halls and other public places to feed a hungry population. She commissioned murals from friends like Duncan Grant, Vanessa Bell and John Piper. Clark lent pictures to the scheme (twenty-two to the East Ham branch alone),19 and everybody agreed that Jane showed formidable energy and zeal in her organisation. Her other occupation was to run the Churchill Club, for culturally minded American GIs, housed at Ashburnham House, Westminster, to which she persuaded friends like Edith Sitwell and T.S. Eliot to come and speak. Sitwell had become a close friend of the Clarks, and Kenneth was to be a great champion of her poetry and a faithful correspondent.20 He himself gave a number of lectures at the Churchill Club, including an ‘Introduction to Sculpture’ and ‘Looking at Drawings’, but he felt that his effort ‘was a failure – not sufficiently up to date. Americans are intelligent about anything on the front page – otherwise ignorant as pigs, and embarrassed at anything dowdy.’21 T.S. Eliot was more upbeat, writing to Jane: ‘The Churchill club creates a new comradeship for the future informed by the Majesty of the past.’22
After the loss of their flat in Gray’s Inn Square, when in London the Clarks put themselves up at Claridge’s Hotel, where they enjoyed making requests to the string quartet that played in the foyer. Social life continued, and hostesses still gave pared-down dinners. Harold Nicolson saw Clark at dinner with Sibyl Colefax, where he claimed that all she could offer her guests was biscuits and sherry. Clark would attend Edith Sitwell’s eccentric lunches at the Sesame Club, at which Dylan Thomas was often a fellow guest.23 Other sightings of Clark at this time were by James Pope-Hennessy, who called him ‘the emu K. Clark’,24 and James Lees-Milne, who described hearing him lecture: ‘superhuman learning worn with ease…he makes me feel like a nurserymaid addressed by royalty’.25 Lees-Milne spent a day with Clark sorting out the pictures at Polesden Lacey in Surrey, and left a vivid portrait of him: ‘he impresses me as being extremely intelligent and capable, very ambitious and energetic. He has the missionary drive…of Lloyd George. He dresses like a dapper footman on his half-day off. He is immaculate, spruce and correct in blue topcoat, gloves and blue Homburg hat.’26
Of all their friends, the Clarks worried most about the Berensons stranded in Italy. BB’s position as a Jew in a country now allied to Germany was profoundly dangerous, and his refusal to leave the country was a matter of courage and love. He did eventually go into hiding, but essentially his faith in his adopted country was justified: by staying out of sight he was left untouched, and so was I Tatti. Clark had hoped that Berenson might come to England, and at the outbreak of war wrote to him: ‘So if you can get permission for Nicky to leave I think I can promise to find you a small house where you would be comfortable, and I can guarantee that you will not be put to any inconveniences other than those inseparable from our climate. It would be best of all if we could find a house for you somewhere near our own so you could use our Library, such as it is, and Edith’s…You can well imagine that there are a great many German refugees for whom I am partly responsible and so far none of them seems to have suffered the least inconvenience.’27
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Refugees indeed took up a great deal of Clark’s time, and he referred to ‘the great new British sport of passing the refugee’.28 In August 1940, fifteen interned artists, including Kurt Schwitters, wrote to Clark asking if he could help them, and he pleaded their case with a judge and with the minister responsible at the Home Department, Osbert Peake.29 Helen Roeder of the Artists’ Refugee Committee expressed her gratitude on behalf of the refugees: ‘You can have no idea what a relief it is to meet someone who can pick up a telephone and suggest leaders to people like the Times. Please go on making them sit up and take notice – they need it.’30 Clark frequently got involved in the cases of individuals, such as the Hungarian Michelangelo scholar Johannes Wilde;*2 Sebastian Isepp, a Viennese Jewish restorer at the National Gallery; and the Austrian painter Oskar Kokoschka, of whom he wrote to the Chief Constable of Cornwall: ‘Quite apart from being anti-Nazi, I should think that he is far too dreamy and undependable for the Nazis to use as an agent.’31
The Warburg Institute presented a special problem, because most of its staff were German and Austrian refugees. Clark believed that the war was being fought to save institutions like the Warburg. This distinguished body, dedicated to the study of the Classical tradition and its subject-matter as the embodiment of impulses in art and history, had moved to London in 1933–34. Clark was an ardent supporter, comparing their mission to the Benedictine ideal of learning: ‘nothing more monastic than their corpus of Platonic studies could be imagined’.32 Fritz Saxl, the first London director, depended on Samuel Courtauld for financial support and on Clark for the influence he could bring to bear, especially in the early days of the war, when several members of staff were sent to internment camps.33 Saxl would write to Clark, often on a monthly basis. When the institute came close to relocating to America, he drafted a letter to Clark stating that: ‘it is more important than ever that the Institute’s work goes on, and goes on in London. Every fool can go to America.’34 When money was running out in 1943 he turned to Clark once more, and although some of Clark’s replies are missing, the continuation of the Warburg in London is due in the first instance to Saxl’s determination, and secondly to the support he received from Clark.
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After giving up Upton, the Clarks moved briefly to Dorking, Surrey, and then in January 1942 bought the freehold of a pretty, cottagey house in Hampstead, named Capo di Monte, for £6,500. The house was far too small for their needs, and the stairs were too narrow for most of their furniture, which had to be winched up through the first-floor windows. As Jane recorded in her diary: ‘Chaos at Capo…[servants] arrive from Upton with 6 hens, Tor [the dog] and the canaries and are v sniffy about the house.’35 Clark wrote to Roger Hinks with the same story: ‘Yes, we have practically bought a very small house on the top of Hampstead Heath with the appropriate name of Capo di Monte. It is far too small to take a tenth of our pictures, books and objects for which I despair of ever affording a house big enough to accommodate.’36 At first he adored the house: ‘I am more than a little in love with Capo,’ he told a friend, and its remoteness gave him an excuse to refuse dinner invitations. A year later, however, they were looking longingly at a Georgian beauty across the road, Upper Terrace House, a large detached house with a spacious garden behind a high wall. In April 1943 Clark had an offer of £20,000 for it turned down, but his next offer was accepted, and this would be their only home for the next decade.*3
Upper Terrace was big enough to accommodate Clark’s art collection and library, and the garden delighted Jane. The house had been altered by the architect Oliver Hill, ‘who did a number of stunts on the interior’, particularly with ‘a staircase in the Odeon style’.37 Clark asked Albert Richardson to rectify the worst of them. Unfortunately, the following February a fire broke out while Clark’s mother was alone in the house. On his return he found most of his books damaged, while a Dosso Dossi, a Bourdon, a Corot and several other pictures had been destroyed. Jane told David Crawford, ‘Till now with no floor it has not been possible to know how many books can be cleaned and rebound and how many are total loss…I fear all the gramophone records are too warped to use. The Samuel Palmer was protected by glass and has survived so has the Constable letter. The Bellini I had taken to A Lee the day before as the raids had been so noisy.’38 The only irreplaceable loss was a collection of letters from Cyril Connolly dating from Oxford days. We get a glimpse of Clark the shrewd businessman in his negotiations with the insurers. He refused to sign any acceptance form from them until every last piece was agreed, including the door with false books, the cost of renting somewhere else to live (six weeks for the children at Portmeirion at a guinea a day per head), etc. There is no doubt that when he chose, Clark could be a difficult customer. In April 1943, organising a dinner at the Savoy
, he wrote beforehand to renegotiate the price (mentioning on the way the presence at the occasion of Lady Churchill and several cabinet ministers), and again afterwards about the bullying behaviour of the head waiter, who it seems had been rude to Jane.39
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Clark continued to maintain a vigorous private life. Although he was a ladies’ man, not all women liked him – Mary Crawford, wife of David, for one, thought he was pretentious and irritatingly intellectually superior. His publisher Jock Murray’s wife Diana was another who intensely disliked his habit of talking over her head to somebody he regarded as more interesting. Clark always preferred lunching with women, whether or not they were lovers. Berenson well described his position: ‘So my kind of person turns to women, surrounds himself with women, appeals to women, not in the first place and perhaps not at all for reasons of sex, no matter how deodorized, alembicated and transubstantiated, but for the one deciding reason that women…are more receptive, more appreciative and consequently more stimulating.’40 Clark would have agreed with every word. He favoured the Étoile, and later Wheeler’s fish restaurant, where he might take Vivien Leigh (who was not a lover) or Margaret Douglas Home, who worked in the publications department at the gallery (and may have been). Sometimes he would have lunch at one of his clubs, typically the Travellers’, from where he would write to his girlfriends, asking them to use the address as a safe place to send letters without Jane intercepting them.
By now Clark had fallen seriously in love. Early in the war, in answer to an enquiry seeking a deserving artist to receive some materials, he suggested: ‘most of the impoverished young artists I know have been called up, but there is a young woman of considerable talent who, I think, would be glad of the paints and canvases. She is named Miss Mary Kessell, 12 Queen Street, Bath, and comes to London periodically.’41 The following year he was describing her work as ‘most original, full of grace, vitality and dramatic invention’.42 She and Clark fell deeply in love. Colette, to whom Mary was to become a surrogate mother, told the author: ‘Col and I adored Mary Kessell, an artist par excellence, warm, wore exotic, fantastic clothes, smocks, with ribbons in her hair. She had two houses, one in the little square beneath Upper Terrace which Papa had bought her.43 She frequently came to Upper Terrace. Col and I once went to see Mary on Downshire Hill and Papa’s car was outside but we still went in. She was absolutely enchanting.’44 The relationship was tender, but full of reverberations. An early letter from Mary, addressed to the National Gallery and marked ‘Personal’, sets the tone: ‘Try & see me if you can – I am feeling so utterly alone this week end…I want to see you very much. Your Mary.’45
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