Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  —

  During the 1970s Clark was to become increasingly involved in the conservation movement. He was deeply distressed by the philistine attitude shown to old buildings in the pursuit of profit. The movement to rescue them was in its infancy at this time, and there was still a general apathy about old buildings. As Clark told the House of Lords: ‘To conserve what is best in the architecture of the past is not to be a conservative…it is to simply realise that no society, no association of human beings, can cut itself off from its history, or pull up its deepest roots, without impoverishing, or even destroying its spirit.’35 To him the chief tragedy of conservation was that ‘all modern architecture, or at least the only likely style of modern architecture, cannot be assimilated into an old town’.36 This was particularly evident in Bath, the jewel of eighteenth-century British architecture, to which he had felt a sentimental attachment since his teenage years. Clark became a vice-chairman of Bath Preservation Trust in 1970, at a time when whole streets of old buildings were being pulled down around the Lansdowne and Bond Street areas. He believed that ‘If there are such things as national treasures, Bath is one of them…At the present rate every month is vital, and in eighteen months it may be too late.’*6 As he told Eric James: ‘Conservationists have cried “wolf” so often that one tends to think they are exaggerating, but in this case they are understating because all the depredations that I saw have been done since I was there last year, and heaven knows what will have happened by next year.’37 He was especially dismayed that the destruction of the streets in the name of ‘welfare’ was actually in the financial interests of developers. James Lees-Milne observed that at meetings of the trust ‘K was treated like the sage he is. All deferred to his opinions and when he spoke all stopped talking and listened attentively.’38

  Clark was happy to use his position in the House of Lords to raise the subject of Bath. He pointed a finger at the fashionable architect Hugh Casson, the darling of the establishment, who combined the role of paid consultant to Bath Council with membership of the Royal Fine Arts Commission, which Clark saw as a clear conflict. Inevitably this brought an angry reaction from Casson, and a sharp exchange of letters followed.39 Clark thought the real villain, however, was Bath Council, which had allowed houses to deteriorate in order to justify pulling them down. He wanted the matter to be taken out of its hands: ‘Bath belongs to us all…it is a national possession if anything is, and I personally much resent spending huge sums of money on Italian pictures which we do not require and which, if we did not buy them, would not be destroyed but made accessible in some other gallery, when our own great buildings are being pulled down or, in the case of cathedrals, in danger of falling down.’40

  Every conservation group wanted Clark’s name and prestige on its side. While John Betjeman used television to achieve his ends, Clark used his access to politicians and power; but he chose his battles with great care. He believed that in order to influence any outcome it was essential to go down and examine the proposal on the ground, and most importantly to offer a carefully estimated and thoroughly practical alternative. His friend Cecil Day-Lewis, Poet Laureate and chairman of the Greenwich Society, involved him in a successful attempt to prevent the Greenwich New Road and save St Alfege’s church.41 This was followed by a far more bruising battle over the proposed route of the M3 across Winchester meadows. Once he had been down to see the site, Clark offered to intervene with the Minister, or even the Prime Minister.42 He wanted to draw attention to the wider issue of roads in beautiful places, which he felt was demonstrably better handled in France and Italy.*7 He was certainly not against motorways, which he accepted were essential for economic life, and had little patience with people who thought fields and open land more important than a town like Winchester. However, the Capability Brown Park at Petworth was a different matter, and Clark felt strongly that such beautiful parkland – hallowed by Turner – must not be reduced. He was shocked by the hostility of the townspeople of Petworth towards Petworth Park, and wrote to the Minister of Transport, John Peyton: ‘I can see what a problem this kind of “democratic” sentiment poses for the Department of the Environment. It is certainly an argument against government by referendum. I suppose on the same grounds one could argue in favour of selling the contents of the National Gallery and using the site for a gigantic fun-fair. In these cases the governments have to understand the word democracy in a philosophical sense rather than a quantitative sense. And on this basis one could argue that the beauty of Petworth Park will continue to affect men’s minds long after the present inhabitants of Petworth have disappeared.’43

  Clark involved himself in conservation battles in York, Hythe, Hampstead, Covent Garden and for Christ Church, Spitalfields. Some development proposals were actually the consequence of his own television programmes; the proposed hotels and roads on Iona were the direct result of his moving descriptions in the first episode of Civilisation, as he was all too aware: ‘I am only afraid that the result of my enthusiasm may have added to the number of tourists, as a great many Americans write to ask me how to get to Iona.’44 How well he saw that we kill the things we love. The limits of Clark’s conservationist instincts are, however, shown by his reaction when invited to become president of Saltwood Village Preservation Society. He told the secretary: ‘I am all in favour of preserving the general aspect of the village, but I am not in favour of preserving picturesque buildings of no great architectural merit that are unsuitable for human habitation, and in general I would put social amenities higher than picturesqueness.’45

  —

  Clark still enjoyed travelling during the early 1970s. He went to Lugano to stay with Baron Thyssen and admire his fabulous art collection; to Czechoslovakia, where he saw Titian’s The Flaying of Marsyas at Kroměříž (‘and my God it is worth it: like reading a new scene in King Lear Act IV’46); to Venice to give the keynote lecture for Venice in Peril;47 and to Paris, where he was chairman of the exhibition ‘British Romantic Art’ in 1972.*8 He still went every year to America. New York was the main focus of these visits, as he described to Janet Stone: ‘Dinners every night…always the same five rich ladies…really very nice people, but it is rather comic to meet them every night – Mrs Astor, Mrs Whitney, Mrs Lasker, Mrs Wrightsman, Mrs Ryan – Oh I have left out Mrs Tree.’48 These US trips would have tightly-packed schedules, typically involving one function every day, travel to a different city every third day, and the giving of speeches, the laying of wreaths (for instance on Thomas Jefferson’s grave) and so forth – all of which, for a man turning seventy, must have been taxing. He would then usually stay with the Wrightsmans in Palm Beach, where as he told Jane, ‘the only drawback is Charlie’s conversation which is extremely monotonous and persistent. It consists almost entirely of stories of crimes committed on innocent citizens by negroes.’49

  Jane joined Clark for a holiday in 1973, when (perhaps surprisingly) he agreed to lecture on a cruise off the Turkish coast.*9 It was to be their last trip together. He described the expedition to Janet: ‘an unmitigated disaster…When we came on board and saw our cabin, Jane, her spirit already broken by the babble of American voices in the bus, began to weep, and went on weeping on and off for 12 hours. Now she succeeds in controlling herself by taking vast quantities of drugs and leaves her cabin for about 2 hours a day…I hadn’t quite realised how incapable of ordinary life she had become.’50 Matters had not improved a week later: ‘There is something terribly depressing in the utter futility of all these elderly Americans, but they are mon cher public. I am afraid my image as a sage is being rapidly destroyed.’51

  Clark still went up to London, and was distressed when his reputation as a ladies’ man caught up with him. He was at a dinner for Oliver Chandos at the St James’s Club when a fellow guest accosted him: ‘Sir Kenneth Clark? The Bart?’ When Clark denied it (he was a knight, not a baronet), he received the bewildered response: ‘But you must be the Bart, the other Sir Kenneth Clark is a frightful shit, everybody says
so.’52 Clark tells this story in his memoirs as an example of his unclubbability, but as he ruefully told Janet Stone, ‘Good to hear the truth occasionally!’53

  Janet remained maîtresse en titre and Clark’s most favoured confidante. She was, according to the diarist Frances Partridge, skittishly proud of the liaison: ‘She wants to give the impression she is having an affair with Kenneth Clark without actually saying so.’54 Two months after giving rise to this observation Janet did reveal to Partridge that for the past fifteen years Clark had been madly in love with her, suggesting that he would like to leave Jane and marry her instead; but this conversation was followed by a letter from Janet begging Partridge to keep her secret.55 Janet had always been careful to write loving, almost gushing, letters and postcards to Jane, offering to visit her when she was ill. She was a talented photographer, and Clark arranged an exhibition of her portraits at the New Metropole Arts Centre in Folkestone. He told a friend that Janet’s portraits ‘have not quite the carrying power of a real professional but they have the merit of great sympathy with the sitter, and the list of her sitters is, as you see, really interesting’.56

  One woman who reappeared in Clark’s life around this time was Meryle Secrest, an American journalist of English origins. When Clark first met her she had been working at the Washington Post, for which she interviewed him in the afterglow of Civilisation. She then persuaded the Smithsonian magazine to let her do a longer piece, and this had required her to visit Saltwood in the days when Clark still lived at the castle. Secrest opens her autobiography Shoot the Widow: Adventures of a Biographer in Search of Her Subject (2007) with a racy account of lunch at Saltwood (at which she wore a Robin Hood outfit), ending with Clark making a pass at her in the study. By 1971 she and Clark had reached such a point of familiarity that he was advising her how to write to him: ‘If you do please address the letter to the St James’ Club, Piccadilly, W.1. as…all my letters are opened, much love K.’57 He clearly had a bad conscience over some matter the following year, when he wrote: ‘I can’t tell you how delighted I was to get your letter. I had been longing to get into touch with you again, but felt ashamed to do so, as I thought you would think that I had treated you badly.’58 Secrest would play an important role in the Clark story during his last years: first when she began to write a biography of Bernard Berenson – encouraged and aided by Clark – and then when she moved on to writing Clark’s own life.

  For Clark’s seventieth birthday in 1973, Jock Murray threw a lunch for him and Jane at the Café Royal, which still retained something of the glamour of the 1890s about it. The guest list reads like the story of their life: friends from Oxford days, from social life, the Civvy crew, balletomanes, girlfriends and family.59 Each guest was presented with a copy of a specially printed edition of Clark’s Romanes Lecture, ‘Moments of Vision’, designed with engravings by Reynolds Stone in a typeface that he had named ‘Janet’. Murray made an elegant speech: ‘You did not ask for bread, but you have been given Stones.’ Jane sat between two of her great admirers, Henry Moore and Lord Crawford; the occasion was a warm and happy one. As they left the restaurant and crossed Regent’s Street, Jane turned to her husband and said, ‘Wouldn’t it be a good thing if we could be run over by a bus.’60

  The week before Christmas 1973 Jane had a severe stroke, and over the next few weeks Clark was to spend all his time visiting her in hospital. She became enfeebled, and it looked for a while as if she might not recover; but then she began to make progress, and returned to the Garden House in January 1974, with four nurses to look after her in shifts. She was a difficult patient, as Clark told Colin Anderson: ‘As you know, Jane is like the little girl in the rhyme, “when she is good, she is very, very good, but when she is bad she is horrid”.’61 Alan noted his mother’s arrangements with bleak accuracy, writing that she ‘returns tomorrow by ambulance to the Hythe nursing home and then (putatively) to the Garden House and a regime with special beds, chairs and apparatus that can only end when she dies’.62

  * * *

  *1 Presumably the representative of a medical charity.

  *2 Lees-Milne, A Mingled Measure, entry for 1 July 1972, p.257. Lees-Milne added that Briggs ‘says that K Clark treats him with the utmost courtesy because he is a friend of his son Alan, and makes it plain that this is his sole reason for doing so. The politer K is the more Michael realises how much he disdains him. I don’t suppose this is strictly true.’

  *3 The Morgan made him an Honorary Fellow of the library in 1972, and that may have given him the idea of the gift. He pointed out to Ryskamp in a letter dated 28 April 1972, ‘my children are not interested in rare books’. The library was the only organisation Clark actually suggested doing lectures for – writing to Ryskamp on 24 August 1972 that he was coming to the USA and offering ‘ “Blake and Visionary Art”, which was passed by Geoffrey Keynes so I suppose it is not disreputable’.

  *4 Burlington Magazine, March 1973, pp.143–51. ‘Now I am engaged on rather a ridiculous project. The Burlington Magazine had the perfectly sensible idea of sponsoring a series of lectures on portraiture, and then had the perfectly idiotic idea that the first lecture should be on Mona Lisa, which is not a real portrait in any sense of the word, and they asked me to give it.’ Letter to Kate Steinitz, 2 October 1972 (Tate 8812/1/4/68).

  *5 New York Review of Books, 12 December 1974. Clark said in his review that the Madrid authorities’ ‘state of mind could be made the subject of an interesting novel’.

  *6 Speech, July 1972 (Tate 8812/1/4/39). In 1972 Geoffrey Rippon invited Clark to join the Council for Architectural Heritage Year, which was coming up in 1975. He accepted, but pointed out that they should not wait until 1975 because so much was being lost every month, particularly in Bath.

  *7 This was certainly true of the preservation of historic town centres, but less applicable to landscape and natural beauty.

  *8 ‘It is really a splendid collection, which would have delighted Gericault and Delacroix, but it is receiving no publicity. The French characteristically said that they would do a catalogue on the same lines as that done for a recent show of Romanian Graphics.’ Letter to Ben Nicolson, 3 January 1972 (Tate 8812/1/4/68).

  *9 Smithsonian Sites, ‘Ancient Civilisation Cruise’. Clark gave talks on Islamic art, the earliest civilisations, Caravaggio (impromptu) and Greek art. The cruise turned out to be a disaster in every way; there was a terrible storm at Palermo and they had to leave the ship. See Clark, The Other Half, Epilogue, pp.233–8.

  36

  Another Part of the Wood

  How am I to live through the next five years?

  KENNETH CLARK to Janet Stone, 14 June 1974

  As Alan had predicted, Jane’s stroke changed everything: the mid-1970s became a period of broken engagements, nurses, wheelchairs, and Jane’s final decline and death. Despite the turmoil, Clark continued to make a number of public interventions*1 – the old lion could still roar – and it was also a period of surprising productivity. Clark always worked well under strain, which drew from him the compromises in which (as he had told Mary Potter) he found a kind of helpful coercion. As ever, he unburdened himself to Janet Stone: ‘Jane cannot be left at all, has a naughty child’s desire to exert power which is the only thing that gives her any pleasure.’1 He described their routine: ‘Write from 6.30 to 7.45 in bed. Rise. See Jane, always radiant at that hour. Get out b’fasts. Chores, letters, frequent visits to J fill the mornings with a blissful break to pick flowers in the snow. Long lunch as Jane eats incredibly slowly. Short snooze. Attempt at work till 4 o’clock. Music/reading aloud 5–7.30…No supper and pack up after the news. As far as the outside world is concerned I might just as well be dead.’*2

  Perhaps the most unexpected shift in Clark family politics was the fall of Colin from Jane’s favour and the rise of Alan – who could be very charming when it suited him. As Clark wrote to Janet: ‘Al easily the favourite member of the family now – and rightly, he is so attentive, jolly, and warm-hearte
d. Col has a tendency to give Mama lectures on how much better off she is than other people. Also he tells people that she is well – very “chipper” to the world, and this naturally infuriates her.’2

  Clark would gloomily tell his friends that he saw nobody, but equally he complained when people disturbed him. It was his visits to Covent Garden that he missed most, and his main distraction was to write the first volume of his memoirs, entitled, after Shakespeare, Another Part of the Wood.*3 He told Catherine Porteous that he also had the opening lines of Dante in mind, adding enigmatically, ‘we’re not out of the woods yet, is a good motto for life’.3 He claimed to have written the book entirely from memory: ‘I followed the principle of not looking up any documents or diaries, and this gives it a certain lightness, and consistency, but I suppose that it will be full of inaccuracies.’4 In fact, as the Tate archive demonstrates, he went to some trouble to check the points he made and to verify some facts, but the book is notwithstanding full of inaccuracies. These are mostly chronological, although occasionally he purports to recall events at which he was not actually present, such as the meeting with Neville Chamberlain at Downing Street in 1937.*4