Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  Clark now found it difficult to write books, but still published An Introduction to Rembrandt (1978), based on his TV series. He also made a return to his roots with an introduction to a book on Aubrey Beardsley (1978), written in a fit of nostalgia about the artist who ‘meant so much to me when I used to live at Sudbourne’.20 John Sparrow was particularly delighted with it: ‘Beardsley – Superb!…You opened my eyes to his talents, and even persuaded me that he had genius…I love the phrase “do-it-yourself diabolism”. It would have been worth writing the essay for that phrase alone!’21 The invitations to lecture still flooded in, from university societies, Rotary clubs, arts clubs and more, but in 1978 the Saltwood secretary wrote: ‘I am very sorry but I am afraid I must tell you that Lord Clark has made up his mind not to address local societies any more. He is now seventy-five, he has a great deal of writing to do for which he must conserve his energies, and he tires easily.’ Clark made an exception for a charity lecture at Petworth on ‘Turner at Petworth’, because he thought it would give Nolwen pleasure to stay at the house. He spoke without notes in front of Turner’s paintings for about fifteen minutes, then ran out of steam, gazed out of the window onto the park and turned to the audience: ‘It is such a lovely evening, let’s all go and enjoy the sunshine.’22

  The following year Clark had the shock of the exposure of Anthony Blunt as the ‘Fourth Man’ of the Cambridge spies. Catherine Porteous told him the startling news at Albany one morning: ‘He said nothing for a moment, and then said, “I am devastated” – long pause – “but I am not, in fact surprised.” He then asked for a stiff drink, even though it was about 10 a.m. Although K had never been close to Blunt, he was a very old friend and colleague, and he thought “it was a tragedy that it all came out before Blunt died”.’23

  Clark now found himself frequently in demand to attend memorial services, either representing the Queen – as for both Benjamin Britten and Graham Sutherland – or giving the address for old friends, such as Colin Anderson.

  Parfondeval may have started out as a paradise, but it gradually became a cage for Clark, and he looked for distractions. His secretary Catherine Porteous remembers that he never wrote her as many letters as he did from there, because he often had nothing else to do all day. He became restless, writing to Janet: ‘Relieved that N’s son and d in law are staying as I had been alone with her for so long and one needs a little variety…I agree with you that I must find a way of going down to [Litton Cheney] – whatever Nolwen may say I will not be separated from you.’24 Indeed, he was up to all the old subterfuges: ‘My darling – it was lovely to hear your voice this morning. It was an ideal moment as Nolwen was on the other ’phone. She tends to come in when she hears my phone, and in fact did so, which accounts for my somewhat abrupt ending.’25 A few weeks later he was telling Janet how pleased he was to be back at Saltwood: ‘I love pottering about the garden and looking at books. Of course it is a futile kind of existence and I ought to be ashamed of myself. But after 75 one loses all moral sense.’26 Then in June 1979 Reynolds Stone died, and although Clark did not go to the funeral he wrote to Janet: ‘I wish you also had your old friend KC although I could have done little enough…I think of you all day with love and deep sympathy. And I do believe that you will be happy again.’27

  As far as Nolwen was concerned, the death of Reynolds dramatically raised the stakes. It was one thing to have a rival in the married Janet, but quite another for that rival to now be a free woman, and still pining for Clark. At this point Janet, no doubt encouraged by Clark, played into Nolwen’s hands. In her very distinctive italic hand she wrote a letter to Clark at Parfondeval marked ‘Personal’. Nolwen decided she had had enough, and wrote Janet a letter of startling frankness.28 She told her in the strongest terms to leave her husband alone – Nolwen was there to protect her husband; she was not Jane, and nor was she prepared to sanction such a relationship under her nose. Finishing with a final swipe to the effect of ‘Go and get a life,’ Nolwen declared that friendship between them was now impossible.

  This brutal document – which was sent without Clark’s knowledge – had a predictable effect on a devastated Janet. However tactless and silly it had been of her to send the provocation of a letter marked ‘Personal’, it was harsh of Nolwen to take it all out on Janet, whom Clark had been encouraging all along. This put an effective end to the relationship between Clark and Janet; any letters that followed were for information, and no more than courteous in tone. Nolwen had won. However, this left Clark a disappointed man, and one who had lost much of his motivation, which he would never regain. He wrote to Colette from Parfondeval: ‘I am longing to go home.’29

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  A new anxiety however was now bubbling to the surface. When earlier Meryle Secrest had written her biography of Berenson under Clark’s patronage, he had enjoyed helping her. At the time he had written: ‘I spent the morning talking to the very nice and intelligent lady who is doing a book on BB. She has a new and charming husband, much younger than herself…I was amused to find in her the kind of American prudery that one gets in Henry James. She was very shocked by the morals of I Tatti.’30 Secrest had not been given access to the I Tatti archive, which was a severe handicap; however, Clark had given her the somewhat curious advice, ‘Better not to use the Archive and put yourself under the obligation of letting him*3 censor your manuscript.’31 In the event Secrest’s book Being Bernard Berenson, published in 1979, had been well received – except by the art history establishment and Berenson’s admirers, who felt that Clark should have known better than to support a non-academic book which, in John Pope-Hennessy’s phrase, ‘led to a grave devaluation of his [Berenson’s] currency’.32 As early as summer 1977 Clark had written to Secrest: ‘You end your letter by asking if I would like you to write my biography. I could think of no one who could write it better, but I do not think it need be written. I have not done enough to merit a biography, and my two volumes of autobiography will be all that anyone can want.’33 It was not long before he changed his mind and was enthusiastically cooperating in his own biography; as one of his lady friends put it, ‘he wanted Meryle to justify his stature’. He even allowed Meryle to take him back to Suffolk, where he showed her Sudbourne Hall and mused about his childhood. He was enjoying it, and told her, ‘at every step I grow more curious as to who I am’.34 In fact he did not want to be revealed – he wanted an account of what he had achieved.

  When Clark saw the synopsis for Secrest’s proposed biography he responded: ‘It is, of course, far too laudatory, but on the whole it gives a fair idea of my life. The only part where you will have to do some work is on my public activities, which occupied the greater part of my time for about forty years – say 1930 to 1970.’35 Although he did not initially feel the need for a right of veto over Secrest’s material he was keen to have the chance to comment on the text, which was originally to be published by Jock Murray. Clark sent Secrest a list of people to interview, which left out his girlfriends, but Meryle was nothing if not assiduous, and was soon heading to Litton Cheney. ‘It is good of Mrs. Stone to have invited you to stay,’ Clark told her, ‘because the journey down to Dorset is quite long. On the other hand, I think you might have had a rather distressing evening.’36 Reynolds had died exactly a month earlier, and Janet was in an anguished state of mind and wanted her part in Clark’s story to be told.

  Clark, however, did not want any reference to his girlfriends in the book, and began to answer Secrest’s questions evasively. He asked Mary Potter: ‘How did it go with Meryle? She is a nice person, but her former profession (journalist) has made her somewhat insensitive, & too pressing in her curiosity about people’s lives. I don’t care a damn what she says about me, I shall be forgotten by the time the book comes out, and my friends…do not need to read it.’37 James Lees-Milne recorded a visit from Meryle: ‘Mrs Secrest came. A voluble, gushing, friendly lady…Tells me that K asked her to include all the love affairs.’38 Colin Anderson, however, had earlier warn
ed Clark, ‘We are being asked questions by Meryle that are quite beyond us,’39 and John Sparrow drolly observed that an anagram for Meryle Secrest was ‘Merely Secrets’. Clark would have preferred discretion – and Nolwen certainly did – but by now he realised that Meryle, who had also unearthed his affair with Mary Kessell, was unstoppable. He apprehensively told Colette that he was concerned about Meryle’s fascination with his love life – although he had to admit that she was ‘incredibly industrious’.40

  The question that now raged was whether Clark and Jock Murray should read Meryle’s manuscript (Jock thought yes, Clark inclined to no), and whether it should be published during his lifetime (again, Jock thought yes, Clark thought no). Naturally Meryle’s concern was that Clark’s heirs should not meddle with her text. Clark wrote to Alan: ‘I am sure that she will be equally fair in her treatment of me (as B.B.), but she is also capable of rather severe moral judgements, and she may say things which my family will not like.’41 A year later, when Janet asked how Meryle’s book was going, Clark answered: ‘You ask about Meryle…she is a victim of all contemporary manias, psycho-analysis etc…she keeps on trying to push back into my childhood to find some suitable evidence of sexual or other peculiarities – alas, all painfully normal. I think she would give it up were she not in need of money – and has bought a new country house – and she has sold the rights of KC to both Jock and Weidenfeld.’42

  Clark was rapidly turning against the project, and told Meryle that he was distressed by her selection from his letters to Janet: ‘Can you not suppress – many of them would be used in a very damaging way.’43 Shortly afterwards he wrote to warn Janet: ‘I am afraid Meryle has become a nuisance to us all. She is a very tenacious journalist. I ought to have recognised this from the start, but far from that I committed the inexcusable folly of agreeing that she should write my life…I can guess from the things she has not asked me about what the general tone of the book will be.’44 At this stage Janet had already agreed to lend Meryle her letters, which had been packed up and taken to London by her son-in-law, prior to being shipped to America. But now she had a change of heart. She wrote an anguished letter to Clark, and Jock Murray retrieved the correspondence.*4 Meryle did however take to America a carefully selected and important tranche of mostly pre-war letters from Saltwood (including all the pre-1945 letters from Berenson), which Clark apparently allowed her to do.*5 Alan’s widow Jane believes that her father-in-law found Meryle’s questions tiresome, and it may be that he acquiesced in the removal of the letters as an expedient to be left alone. The upshot of Clark’s disillusionment with Meryle was that the biography would not be published during his lifetime, nor with his permission to quote from documents.45 Jock Murray would eventually withdraw, and Lord Weidenfeld took the project over as its sole publisher.

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  Clark had not given up writing, but increasingly his projects involved republishing old essays and lectures. He was full of unrealised new ideas – the Murray archive in Albemarle Street is a graveyard of undeveloped themes: ‘Collectors and Collecting’, ‘Aesthete’s Progress’, ‘The Limits of Classicism’, ‘Art of the Church’, ‘First Civilisations’. Here was an old general still commanding armies in his mind, for none of these projects would be finished. The most revealing of them exists only in fragmentary form: ‘Aesthete’s Progress’ was intended to be ‘a quasi-autobiographical account of my responses to works of art’. It offers some interesting material not to be found in Another Part of the Wood.46

  One of the changes instigated by Nolwen was to appoint her niece by marriage, Maggie Hanbury, as Clark’s literary agent. Maggie was initially brought in to negotiate Feminine Beauty, a book proposed by Lord Weidenfeld. Clark had never had an agent before, but as he was using a publisher other than his old friend Jock Murray, it made sense. However, Maggie saw her role as being Clark’s main agent, even negotiating terms with Murray, which caused Jock Murray understandable upset. It was galling for a distinguished publisher, who had honourably and devotedly looked after Clark’s interests for thirty years, to have to pass everything through an agent – although they soon reached an accommodation.47 Clark’s verdict on Feminine Beauty (1980), which he dedicated to Nolwen, was very Bowraesque: ‘I cannot say it is good, but it is not wholly bad.’ The book traces the depiction of female beauty in art from fourth-dynasty Egypt, and gave Clark his last ride from the ancient world down to the present, ending with Marina, Duchess of Kent, looking very like his late wife Jane – dark, elegant and sharp – followed by a seaside photograph of ‘the glorious Marilyn Monroe’.

  At the end of his life Clark put together two compilations of essays and lectures, Moments of Vision (1981) and The Art of Humanism (1983). One reviewer said of the former: ‘the author himself is really like a sort of grand museum, and every great museum needs a few inferior examples, just by way of illustrating its enormous range’.48 Moments of Vision is of interest, however, because it includes some of his best pieces: ‘Pater’, ‘Mandarin English’, ‘The Artist Grows Old’, and the title lecture. The Art of Humanism was a return to Clark’s roots, with essays on Alberti and Renaissance artists. It also contains the delicious aperçu that the restoration of Mantegna’s Triumphs at Hampton Court by Paul Nash under the guidance of Roger Fry meant that they ‘had a flavour of the 1920s almost as strong as The Boyfriend’.

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  Clark gave up the set in Albany to Alan in 1981, and Catherine Porteous went through the archive: ‘I have been through the files gradually over the past year or two and have thrown out a good deal. Should I use my discretion and do another cull, or send everything else down to Saltwood as it stands?’49 Clark by now was starting to lose his memory; Catherine noticed that he began to write the same letter twice, and his handwriting became even smaller. Nolwen had taken over the management of his life, and dealt with all his business affairs. A sad example of his diminished state is given by Alan in his diary: ‘Tuesday 20th July 1982, Saltwood Great Library – My father has had a coup-de-vieux and is now in unhappy decline. There is scarcely any longer a point in going over [to the Garden House] to call on him. He just sits, on his low green velvet chair by the big window. Col was very aggrieved the other day because as he approached my father smiled simperingly and said: “Ah, now, who’s this?” “It’s your younger son, Colin, Papa.” “Aha” (Of course my father knew perfectly well who it was. He just gets irritated with Col blatantly sucking up to him and talking a lot of recycled balls about art). Aha. Of course my father would never have spoken like that to Celly. She would have cackled, said “You’re completely ga-ga” or something equally brutal. He is frightened of her as he is of most women.’50 Colin also recorded this encounter, adding, ‘I think that it was the saddest moment of my life.’51

  The last year of Clark’s life, 1983, was spent suffering from arterio-sclerosis, mostly at Saltwood or in Hythe Nursing Home; although Nolwen was a devoted carer, he was too frail to spend much time at Parfondeval. He fell in hospital and broke his hip, which marked the beginning of the end. On 15 May he told Alan, ‘I am perfectly clear, and I say this with all deliberation, that I will not be alive in a week’s time.’52 A week later Alan went to say goodbye: ‘Papa, I think you’re going to die very soon. I’ve come back to tell you how much I love you and to thank you for all you did for me, and to say goodbye.’53 Nolwen rang the castle the next morning with the news that Clark had died in the night.

  Even from his deathbed, Clark still had the power to surprise. James Lees-Milne recounts an episode at the memorial service: ‘An Irish Catholic priest gave another dissertation, claiming that before his death K sent for him, received Communion according to the proper rites, and said, “Thank you, Father, that is what I have been longing for.” Very surprising.’54 What are we to make of this reported conversion? Was it a remarkable example of Pascal’s wager? Nolwen, a Roman Catholic, would certainly have arranged the priest. She told Colette that her father was nervous at the end, but after being given extreme un
ction a beatific smile came over his face; he then went to sleep, never to wake up. Probably Clark felt that it was correct to leave the world in a sacramental way – a rite of passage to counterbalance baptism. He certainly would have thought it bad manners to refuse Nolwen and reject the priest. For Michael Levey this was ‘a sharp reminder of his elusive, complex personality, leaving as it were one last, unexpected facet to be revealed only posthumously’.55 Clark’s long fascination with the Catholic Church and its history had been pointing to such an outcome. Did he not once give a lecture on the Louvre in which he said: ‘For a work of art to enter the Louvre was like entering the Catholic Church. It would find itself in some pretty queer company, but at least it would be sure that it had a soul.’56

  Clark’s funeral took place in the church at Hythe, rather than at Saltwood, where Alan had fallen out with the vicar; a large congregation gathered, including the entire crew of Civilisation. The burial, however, was in Saltwood’s cemetery, and the mourners followed the coffin for the committal. Henry Moore, who was very ill, made a rare public appearance for his old friend, and with tears running down his cheeks got up from his wheelchair and, supported on two sticks, threw the first handful of soil. The Queen sent a telegram to Nolwen at the Garden House: ‘Lord Clark’s loyal and distinguished service to my Father and his outstanding contribution to the world of Arts and Letters will always be remembered.’

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  *1 Before his father’s death Alan referred to Clark as ‘more or less of a nuisance, but got to keep in with him for inheritance purposes’. Alan Clark, Diaries: Into Politics 1972–1982, entry for 6 January 1981.