Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  * * *

  *1 Cecil Beaton was in America during Clark’s first trip, and heard him speak at the Met in New York: ‘The speeches were unbelievably tedious and K made a marvellous Freudian slip when he said “I’m very conscious of this horror” instead of “honour”. Too near the knuckle for general laughter.’ Vickers (ed.), The Unexpurgated Beaton: The Cecil Beaton Diaries, entry for 20 November 1969.

  *2 Letter to Clark, 15 May 1969 (Tate 8812/1/4/117). When the Daily Express suggested that Clark received his peerage because Wilson enjoyed Civilisation, Clark commented, ‘That would be as good a reason as any.’

  *3 Clark gave a lecture to the Académie des Beaux-Arts on 8 May 1974, in which he spoke about what France meant to him: devouring Voltaire as a child in the library of Sudbourne, and his admiration for Michelet and Fontenelle (Tate 8812/2/2/2).

  *4 This is the highest honour the school can bestow on its old boys. Introduced to one boy, Christopher Rowell, who expressed an interest in fifteenth-century French books of hours, Clark immediately arranged for him to be invited to a lecture by Millard Meiss at the RA, and sought Rowell out there – making Clark a hero for life.

  35

  Lord Clark of Suburbia

  I am not a public figure like A.J.P. Taylor, Graham Greene, Arthur Schlesinger or Kenneth Clark.

  ISAIAH BERLIN to Noel Annan1

  By the early 1970s Jane’s health was deteriorating, and she was beginning to find the Saltwood staircases difficult to manage. Moreover, despite the bonanza from the publication of Civilisation, Clark was beginning to feel the pinch financially. Taxation was high, and the castle devoured money in wages and upkeep; it distressed him to have to turn down a cause like the Students’ Emergency Fund when Carel Weight asked him for a donation.2 He decided that the answer was to build a single-storey house for himself and Jane within the castle grounds. Having friends to stay would of course no longer be practical, but then Maurice Bowra, their most frequent visitor over the years, had died in 1971.3 But what style should the new building be in? Declaring that he was ‘frightened of a reproduction Kent house’,4 Clark described how impressed he had been by his visits to Japanese dwellings. When Margaret Slythe recommended John King, a colleague at Bournemouth, Clark showed him pictures of the Katsura Summer Palace in Kyoto, and gave him instructions for a building in a moderate modernist idiom with three pavilions: one for living, one for sleeping and one for eating, all arranged around a central hall. The result was the Garden House, a bungalow on the site of the old kitchen gardens. However, as Clark told Janet, it was ‘foully expensive, simply because it isn’t all made of standard parts’,5 and he had to sell some paintings to pay for it, including the big Tintoretto portrait, which had followed him and Jane around since Richmond days.

  The biggest problem that now faced Clark and Jane was deciding what to take with them to their new home, as he told Lord Crawford: ‘We have almost finished our change from the Castle to the Garden House. The first stages were very agreeable as everything looked so pretty in its new setting. Then, as more things moved in, the rooms did not look so nice and we are having a great struggle to keep them empty – an extension of my daily struggle between greed and vanity. We are determined to prevent the house from being cluttered up with possessions.’6 The most important painting was the Turner seascape, which he positioned to dominate the sitting room. This was to be Clark’s last picture hang, and as he told Janet, ‘I spent most of my time moving (quite small) pictures. It is very strange what will fit in and what won’t. Nothing too strong will go. If I owned a Van Gogh I should have to give it away.’7

  The move from the castle had not been without pain, and Clark was full of anxieties. He confided to Janet: ‘My chief trouble is that I have become violently hostile to the new house. I hated it last weekend, and won’t visit it today. And I weep at leaving Salters!…I absolutely dread going to the three boxes…it is all so small and predictable after all the waste and craziness of Salters.’8 Inevitably, it was his library that worried him most: ‘all my life-work of creating that library rather shattered’.9 In the event he decided to keep the library and the study in the castle for his exclusive use, allowing nobody to disturb him there – which he declared in his memoirs was a rare case of having his cake and eating it. He had spent a great deal of his life doing just that.

  The move from Saltwood Castle to the Garden House mirrored Clark’s transition from Victorian intellectual elitist to twentieth-century populist. On 7 April 1971 he gave a small and dutiful leaving party, of which he left a shorthand record: it was a mixture of friends like John and Anya Sainsbury, official folk like the Dean of Canterbury, two vets, ‘cancer man’,*1 a schoolmaster, etc.10 The following week he made the formal handover to Alan, to whom the castle was being bestowed, as he reported to Janet: ‘on my birthday we had a very jolly and rather touching party. I signed the deed of gift to Alan, and we all had a glass of champagne…I drank a great deal and became very talkative, and told stories like an old lion. And I must say that I have never looked back.’11 Once they had made the move they felt relieved, as Jane told Lord Crawford: ‘We adore this house – the views of the castle are much nicer than living there!’12 On the other side the house led directly onto a street of the ever-expanding village of Saltwood – Clark dubbed the Garden House ‘the Motel’, and joked to Cecil Beaton, ‘Celly says I should be called Lord Clark of Suburbia.’

  The Clarks gradually settled into their new life, and routines were established, such as Clark hiding his Mars bars in the safe. The house, however, turned out to be less than satisfactory: the radiators leaked, and Clark, who was extremely impractical, had no idea how to fix anything. They depended on their cook/factotum Leonard Lindley, the loyal and attentive manservant at the Garden House (and a bit of a card) who had been Margot Fonteyn’s chauffeur for seventeen years. He said of Saltwood: ‘I came for six months and stayed for fourteen years.’13

  Clark’s main concern, as always, was Jane, who was by now losing much of her energy. As he told Janet: ‘She never puts on the Telly or reads a book – just moons about, or rings people up, and worries about the servants’ Christmas presents. It is very sad.’14 Jane was in and out of nursing homes: ‘The trouble is one gets better quite quickly and then loses interest in everything, people included,’ she told Colin Anderson.15 Clark even hoped that she might convert to Catholicism, as he thought it might help her – particularly as ‘they always pottered into churches and would pray together’.16 His own health was now also causing trouble; in 1971 he had a gall-bladder operation from which it took him six weeks to recover. Never one to waste time, he took this opportunity to set about writing his memoirs, telling Morna Anderson: ‘As I have never spent a day in hospital in my life I do not know how disagreeable it will be, and I am not in the least worried. It is a bore to be out of action…but what luck that I have started the autobiog which is the ideal occupation for convalescence.’17 The two volumes of memoirs, written over the next four years, were to be his last great achievement.

  Cecil Beaton took Irene Worth down to lunch at the Garden House, and left a characteristically feline pen portrait of life there: ‘a slightly straggling Japanese one-floor building…admittedly the drawing-room is rather beautiful and it shows off to great advantage a fine Turner and Degas…but [Colette] was right. As we drove down a road with worse and worse villas each side, we turned off and bang in front this, another suburban bungalow, had a rather horrid picture window and red brick low walls…I feel the move is a great mistake and it was difficult to enthuse. But the visit was interesting for after lunch (a bit of nonsense talked about how brilliant the cook was…a dreary meal with the main course veal, covered in sizzling chewing-gummy cheese, and how we…should go and thank him in the kitchen. “Don’t tip him,” said Jane, but “he’d be so pleased to be thanked”). K held forth in the most delightful way. His mind is as clear as ever…I warmed to K. He is the best company even if one has reservations about his point of view, his
idea of the truth. He is a cold-blooded fish [but] one feels that he has a heart, otherwise how else could he put up with Jane’s continual drunkenness? Jane was sozzled by lunchtime and took a long time getting to the dining-room, but she is one of the nicest drunks for her goodness and benign attitude come to the surface. She must be a very Christian creature for in her cups she only becomes sweeter.’18

  —

  Alan was by now making his own name as a military historian and a somewhat maverick Tory candidate for Parliament, and was already keeping the diary that is his chief claim to fame. He and ‘young Jane’, as she was known in the family, had two children: James, born in 1960, and Andrew two years after. At first the couple were not sure that they wanted the responsibility of the castle, since it came with no means of support apart from the value of the remaining art collection, but the place worked its charm on them. Alan confided to his diary: ‘I always feel strangely randy there’ – was it the effect of the sea, he wondered.

  It was certainly awkward for young Jane having her parents-in-law still about and apt to interfere. The main area of contention was inevitably the contents of the castle. Alan described the problem: ‘I am concerned that relations with my parents may be deteriorating…this morning we were in Canterbury. When we returned [Alan’s housekeeper] Mrs Yeo said that they had both been over and “gone upstairs”. This has happened a great many times since my parents moved out. They lie awake in the Garden House and brood on the various items of “contents” that they left behind…sometimes Lindley, who fancies himself as an antiquaire manqué is sent over in the car to collect objects, which whenever practicable, he does without referring to us.’19 Rows would follow, with tears and recriminations on both sides. James Lees-Milne recorded a conversation with Alan’s old friend, Michael Briggs: ‘He [K] has already had trouble with Alan, now installed in Saltwood Castle. It is the usual story when a father having made over a property to his eldest son continues to live on in the property…Alan has sold off a parcel of land for building, which is v. near the Castle and K’s new bungalow. Hence – conflict.’*2

  Clark told one of his correspondents, ‘I have given the castle to my son, who lives there in a somewhat bizarre splendour.’20 In fact, he admired what the younger Jane had done when she ‘turned the entrance into a sort of manoir in the Normandy style, with cocks and hens, ducks and pigeons, and eleven peacocks. This has a humanising effect on the medieval exterior.’21

  Having settled the castle on Alan, Clark rewrote his will. He had already made considerable provision for Jane, so the question was how to be fair to the twins Colin and Colette. He left the Turner – which was far and away the most valuable item in the art collection – to Colin, and all the remaining contents of the Garden House to Colette (bar some specific bequests to Janet and others). As none of the Clark children were bibliophiles he decided on a different fate for his most important books, which were to go (with his collection of letters from Edith Sitwell) to the Morgan Library in New York. He left a note explaining this decision: ‘There are two reasons why I offered the Morgan Library a choice of my books. One is that, in spite of the size of the Library, it does not feel like an institution. The books seem to be loved and cared for as they are in a private library. The other is that during the last fifty years the United States has been infinitely generous to Great Britain…as far as I know the movement has been all one way.’*3 He also liked the director of the Morgan Library, Charles Ryskamp, a fellow member of the bibliophile Roxburghe Club. When the books, most of them Italian and sixteenth- and seventeenth-century (some relating to Clark’s studies on Alberti and Leonardo), were removed from Saltwood before Clark died, Alan was much upset, as he recorded in his diary: ‘My father came over with Mrs Sly [Margaret Slythe] and taken over 30 books from the library. V. depressing. He is such a shit, so sly and weak, without the slightest concept of succession and the boys.’22

  The Clarks were not good grandparents, Jane being too far gone and Clark, a solitary child, having no natural affinity with infants (although in 1972 he used up his two free passes for the Tutankhamun exhibition at the British Museum to take James and Andrew). He saw less of his other grandchild, Colette’s son Sam, because, as he told Janet, ‘I never see Celly now and miss her very much. Col appears a good deal, but he is such a strange fellow I know him much less well than the other two.’23 He was about to get to know Colin rather better, for they were to collaborate on two television series.

  —

  Following Civilisation, Clark was constantly in demand for television appearances, and although he was out of love with the BBC he agreed to participate in its film about Berenson at I Tatti, made in 1970. It took the form of a conversation between Clark, Umberto Morra, the biographer and writer Iris Origo, and Nicky Mariano’s sister Alda Anrep. The programme presented a particular problem for Clark, as he afterwards told the BBC’s Stephen Hearst: ‘I was rather worried about the passage in my script…on the effect that working for dealers had on B.B.’s judgement…I do realise that there are still a number of people who are longing to attack B.B’s reputation and if I were to give them a chance they would make far more of it.’24 Clark was already starting to reassess his views on Berenson, and was shortly to become the main witness for and endorser of Meryle Secrest’s damaging account of BB’s dealing activities.

  The next two television series Clark made were with his son Colin as director. Colin’s career in film and television had been mixed, and it seems that his further employment was dependent on directing his father, whom Lew Grade wanted back at ATV; the press release spoke of him as ‘returning to his television home’. The chosen subject was Pioneers of Modern Painting, five programmes on Cézanne, Monet, Seurat, Manet and Munch. Although essentially lectures, they were shot on location in France and Norway (where Clark was amazed to see how true Munch was to nature). If he had an overall point of view in this series, it was that these artists, if rebels in their own time, were not ‘born free’ but were in fact disciplined students of history. With hindsight Clark judged the programmes a failure, as he later told J. Carter Brown: ‘They seem to fall rather uncomfortably between entertainment and education.’25

  Colin decided to set up his own television production company, with offices in Knightsbridge, to create the next series, Romantic versus Classic Art (a book of which was later to be published as The Romantic Rebellion). The thirteen episodes were largely based on Clark’s Slade Lectures, and included several of his old favourites: Constable, Blake, Rodin and Turner – and some new names, including Piranesi and Fuseli. Exploring the dance between Classicism and Romanticism, the series was to culminate with Ingres and Delacroix.

  By now, however, Jane’s health had declined so much that Clark refused to leave her while shooting lasted, so the series had to be filmed mostly in the study at Saltwood. Colin found a researcher, Robert McNab (recruited through the Courtauld Institute noticeboard), whose role was to go through the scripts meticulously with Clark identifying the pictures required. Clark never had much confidence in Colin, and McNab remembers that ‘One day K turned up unexpectedly at Knightsbridge to inspect Col’s offices when he was away. He was probably aware that he was paying for them.’ McNab recalled: ‘The series, which was quite old-fashioned, came out of the ashes of a scheme Col thought up to film all K’s lectures. I liked Col, although people disparaged him…K complained that he made no money out of it because Col had given all the royalties to the backers.’26 McNab enjoyed working with Clark, but observed that he could be mean with money.27 The series was in fact Clark’s most effective attempt at ‘pure’ art history on television, earning a modest success particularly in America; although as he noted, ‘I doubt if I received a single letter about it, which shows how much the reception of “Civilisation” had depended on a kind of self-identification by the viewer.’28

  If during the early 1970s Clark’s television programmes mostly derived from earlier material, he gave some of his most original and memorable lectures
at this time. One, ‘Mandarin English’, might be seen as a homage to Logan Pearsall Smith and those he had held dear – Gibbon, Sir Thomas Browne, Jeremy Taylor – and to Clark’s own heroes, Ruskin and Pater. Another, ‘The Artist Grows Old’, the 1970 Cambridge Rede Lecture, was an exploration of ‘old-age style’ in art and poetry, which Clark characterised as ‘a sense of isolation, a feeling of holy rage, developing into what I have called transcendental pessimism’.29 This exploration of late Michelangelo, Titian, Milton and Rembrandt was exactly the kind of work Clark did best. He was less happy with his lecture on ‘The Universal Man’, given at the Ditchley Park Foundation in Oxfordshire (a body dedicated to Anglo–American relations) and exploring Alberti, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin. ‘The old imposter pushed it through,’ he told Janet, ‘and one had the impression that one can fool all of the people all the time…a large audience of pure unalloyed establishment. I have never seen so many under one roof before, because even at Buck House there are always a few bounders. My lecture – incredibly shallow – was said by the ladies to be “above their heads”.’30 James Lees-Milne was in the audience, and wrote in his diary: ‘very suave, very balanced, and plenty of food for thought. No lecture by K disappoints…Lord Perth in giving thanks suggested that K was [a universal man] himself. I think this may be so.’31

  Clark kept up with Leonardo scholarship all his life, and continued to write about the artist, with an article on the Mona Lisa for the Burlington Magazine*4 and a lecture, ‘Leonardo and the Antique’ (1970), for Michael Kitson at the Courtauld Institute. When he reviewed the newly discovered Leonardo notebook in the New York Review of Books – whose editor Robert Silvers commissioned Clark to write a number of pieces, on subjects ranging from Alberti to Balthus, which raised his profile in the United States – he did not pull his punches. He accused the Madrid authorities of a disgraceful cover-up over their failure to recognise the notebook, and exposed their attempt to take the credit when a young American student, who was not even a Leonardo specialist, finally identified it.*5 The doyen of Leonardo studies by this time was an Italian scholar, Carlo Pedretti, with whom Clark was on excellent terms (it was Pedretti who had revised Clark’s old Windsor drawings catalogue when it was republished in 1968–69). Pedretti, unaware of the ambivalence towards Clark among the British art establishment, innocently enquired whether anybody would be doing a Festschrift for his seventieth birthday in July 1973. Clark gloomily responded, ‘I am sure that no one else has thought of such a thing.’32 It is worth noting that when Apollo magazine asked Clark to write his own brief résumé for notes on contributors, he gave his ‘present occupation’ not as art historian but as ‘author’.33 He himself could show great thoughtfulness towards colleagues: when Anita Brookner, whom he had barely met, published a brilliant but overlooked work about French critics from Diderot to Huysmans, Genius of the Future (1971), he not only sent her a fan letter but wrote to Raymond Mortimer begging him to review it in the Sunday Times.34