Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation
James Stourton
SHORTLISTED FOR THE BERGER PRIZE FOR BRITISH ART HISTORY 2017SHORTLISTED FOR THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE 2017A SUNDAY TIMES ART BOOK OF THE YEARA SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEARAN ECONOMIST BOOK OF THE YEARA NEW YORK TIMES ART BOOK OF THE YEARFrom his time as Bernard Berenson’s protégé to being the Keeper of the Western Art at 27 and his appointment as the youngest-ever director of the National Gallery, Kenneth Clark displayed precocious genius. No voice has exercised so much power and influence over the arts in Britain as Clark’s. A formidable aesthete, his coterie included John Betjeman, Winston Churchill, Margot Fonteyn, E.M. Forster, Vivien Leigh, the Queen Mother and Henry Moore. Hidden from view, however, was his wife Jane’s alcoholism and his own philandering. In James Stourton’s dazzling biography, Clark is shown as a man who conveyed the profound beauty and importance of art, architecture and civilisation for generations to come.
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Copyright (#u7d46c88d-95fc-54d9-ae81-3569150c9997)
William Collins
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This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2016
Copyright © James Stourton 2016
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Cover photograph of Sir Kenneth Clark, England, 1958 © The Irving Penn Foundation
Unless otherwise stated, images are from the Clark family archives
While every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material, the author and publisher would be grateful to be notified of any errors or omissions in the above list that can be rectified in future editions of this book.
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Source ISBN: 9780007493449
Ebook Edition © September 2016 ISBN: 9780007493432
Version: 2017-08-02
Dedication (#u7d46c88d-95fc-54d9-ae81-3569150c9997)
To Colette, Jane and Fram
Contents
Cover (#uc03cecae-dfab-545e-97b9-2a6f6686f235)
Title Page (#u7da0a2dc-31c4-507d-bea9-86b18d674a6f)
Copyright (#u4d81ce21-1511-5857-bfce-9537f19c1501)
Dedication (#u75f08781-7f60-5a0e-9198-5bb83d35fa25)
Foreword (#u00bd2b30-98ea-5733-9026-9ee50847c8f4)
1 ‘K’ (#ua0bf4a59-5191-5722-9148-003bff0cdc1f)
AESTHETE’S PROGRESS
2 Edwardian Childhood (#u4100137e-827e-5ca7-bc26-78b90543a784)
3 Winchester (#u29a2aa23-d54c-5de0-b655-924d7087915d)
4 Oxford (#u35ab4625-cd5c-592f-9441-66918fca9ff8)
5 Florence, and Love (#u4c7facbf-4c2b-5eff-8e96-d318a1df2fa1)
6 BB (#ua7c42124-ba76-50f9-841f-e45fd503a1a2)
7 The Gothic Revival (#u9bb0f1c2-e147-5ebb-8bef-3ad82ecf3be6)
8 The Italian Exhibition (#u06a3e65b-e536-55b1-b1f6-fc055aa1d6ed)
9 The Ashmolean (#ua7d900af-3406-5606-844f-d2980662e40e)
THE NATIONAL GALLERY
10 Appointment and Trustees (#ue4e0263c-8e57-5cc0-a030-c0ce609d1186)
11 By Royal Command (#u5bca50eb-4975-55a0-bdba-54f407b88268)
12 The Great Clark Boom (#u0e9c76de-e2c0-5188-9c23-d6613a1c5271)
13 Running the Gallery (#u596df266-974c-506d-8c1f-d1e78d1218cc)
14 Lecturing and Leonardo (#u0a64d236-2d50-53ff-8386-2c50d103925f)
15 Director versus Staff (#u4e15b120-bda5-52df-bd31-9d6025fc6487)
16 The Listener and the Artists (#u7e8d546c-28c9-5d17-a212-2cec8e75a959)
WORLD WAR II
17 Packing Up: ‘Bury Them in the Bowels of the Earth’ (#u12acc545-d988-5e21-a69f-848dc1228f07)
18 The National Gallery at War (#ub5d1b1ed-3467-5b55-bef8-1778ebc7cf38)
19 The Ministry of Information (#u3a66d965-349c-5f3a-87d1-6819bbc7c767)
20 Artists at War (#u92ce391a-9a20-5de5-adb5-512e8e325e11)
21 The Home Front (#u5bd09534-68bc-5193-8cc0-ac04fbbc7ab5)
22 The Best for the Most (#u00c72201-829b-5aa5-aa35-888f130c5618)
ARTS PANJANDRUM
23 Writing and Lecturing (#uadb1bbdb-782a-5bf5-b582-979a8c5661ca)
24 Upper Terrace (#ufcf4d489-221c-5556-b8d1-ed65b61c8a0b)
25 Town and Country (#uec818e15-58bc-52a4-a5d6-6e9605621156)
26 The Naked and the Nude (#u7734b787-db56-5f87-9173-0bf43f9fa24a)
TELEVISION
27 Inventing Independent Television: ‘A Vital Vulgarity’ (#u04f7049b-8874-57fb-948d-ff07c054757e)
28 The Early Television Programmes (#u2f5255b7-564c-52be-b06a-373413656e3e)
SALTWOOD 1953–68
29 Saltwood: The Private Man (#u9209b550-e532-583c-98ee-6184a377d502)
30 Public Man: The 1960s (#ua15452af-d23d-53b1-95e7-11d4d2a019d7)
CIVILISATION
31 Civilisation: The Background (#uec4a02a1-4bb5-5578-89af-3a1fb8b797a6)
32 The Making of Civilisation (#u98988ce3-8b1d-5548-89ef-c1b5f23d16ac)
33 Civilisation and its Discontents (#u70b734a2-ba6c-501a-a1eb-99c630a6b702)
34 Apotheosis: Lord Clark of Civilisation (#u978d95c5-7d47-5795-ba12-ba2fd2322c3a)
LORD CLARK OF CIVILISATION
35 Lord Clark of Suburbia (#ub3853df9-fe9b-555d-9e19-39d3ad51ff0b)
36 Another Part of the Wood (#u6b2d3122-3371-5edc-9161-4431360d39b1)
37 Last Years and Nolwen (#u6037d1a9-e9f3-5f3a-9dde-0ca60129f57e)
Epilogue (#uc75572c4-decc-5300-a7f1-4115d1291b46)
Appendix I: The Clark Papers (#ue5fbf1e0-d693-553b-858d-5b5786ef96a0)
Appendix II: ‘Suddenly People are Curious About Clark Again’1 (#u025f889f-5f64-533a-8b47-e072c071c970)
Picture Section (#u085dadaa-0521-5c55-a7cb-5a35d7751e15)
Acknowledgements (#ue9aca438-c88f-58f2-a5d3-9dcc9edabd53)
Notes (#ud0771742-7ff5-5326-8814-1bb75e538a92)
Bibliography (#ud0a8cded-2b1f-52fd-ad82-a503679717b1)
Index (#ufd4ce3b6-8d64-546f-9d01-b0c7424baa1e)
Also by James Stourton (#u7ecaee6c-4586-5bf4-8b17-d59affd8e2e5)
About the Publisher (#u157185c5-9204-558d-b2db-bc42b30d1166)
Foreword (#u7d46c88d-95fc-54d9-ae81-3569150c9997)
In his memoirs Kenneth Clark complained that Harold Nicolson ‘could not resist shampooing’ his account of a dinner party, and added the warning that ‘the historian who uses “original documents” must have a built in lie-detector’.1 This is equally true of published material. Clark’s own two volumes of memoirs are exceptionally entertaining, and are both friend and foe to the biographer. Friend, because they cover most of Clark’s life and tell his story more beautifully than any biographer ever could; foe, because Clark wrote them mainly from memory, which was not always reliable – and sometimes verged on the mytho-poetic. Every event needs to be checked against alternative sources; the chronology is loose, and Clark occasionally puts himself at events at which he was demonstrably not present. This was not deliberate on his part, but simply due to the passage of time. The memoirs tell many good stories, although I have reproduced only a tiny handful of them, as they are usually about other people. Since Clark’s own voice is always eloquent I quote him whenever possible; where he has written an alternative and usually earlier account of an event, I have used this for a fresh perspective. An example is the manuscript containing fragments of an art-historical autobiography that he wrote at the end of his life, Aesthete’s Progress, now in his publisher John Murray’s London archive.
Clark did have an eye to history; he kept all his letters to his parents, and rarely threw anything out, even occasionally annotating documents in his own archives. The Clark Archive held at Tate Britain is of a daunting scale, with thousands of letters and documents full of biographical treasures. Clark, however, offered a second warning to a would-be biographer: ‘One realises how little the historian, who must rely on letters and similar documents, can convey a personality. So much depends on the accident of whether or not a character can get himself into his letters.’2 Clark had a famous dislike of both receiving and writing letters, and whenever he could he would dictate them to an assistant. He was too busy to put art into them, but even the briefest will contain a striking phrase; he was incapable of writing a dull sentence. The majority of the letters quoted here are from carbon copies retained by Clark’s various assistants for reference. I have altered Clark’s pervasive use of ampersand to ‘and’, for reasons of flow. Quotations from the Berenson–Clark letters are taken from the excellent Yale edition edited by Robert Cumming.
For the second half of Kenneth Clark’s life we have the astonishing series of letters that he wrote to Janet Stone, which provide a vivid self-portrait, and offer a depth and nuance hitherto unavailable. In these letters his true unbuttoned character is displayed – they were a safety valve, just as a diary was to Pepys or a wartime journal to Lord Alanbrooke. It is tempting to compare these letters to his son Alan’s diaries, but their motivation – beyond the love of writing – was different. The letters to Janet Stone are held at the Bodleian Library in Oxford under a thirty-year moratorium (for reasons explained here). Fortunately, when Dr Fram Dinshaw of St Catherine’s College, Oxford, was appointed to be the original authorised biographer of Kenneth Clark in the 1980s, he was given permission by Janet Stone to read them. All the Stone letters I quote are from Dr Dinshaw’s selected transcriptions.
The biographer of Kenneth Clark is fortunate that both his sons, Alan and Colin, left behind such compelling accounts of their parents. I was equally fortunate in having his daughter Colette, and daughter-in-law Jane, ready to answer questions, and I put it on record that neither of them has at any time attempted to alter anything I have written apart from correcting factual errors. I am lucky to have known some of the main players in the story, John and Myfanwy Piper and Reynolds and Janet Stone, which makes it easier to understand why Clark found them so attractive, and their houses such blessed plots. Virtually all the crew of Civilisation are alive and were able to give me interviews except for Michael Gill, who I met before his death, but alas before I knew I would be so concerned with his story. Perhaps the greatest surprise of all was to find Clark’s favourite television producer from his ATV days in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Michael Redington, not only alive and well but living just three streets away from me in Westminster.
A word on nomenclature: Clark was always known as ‘K’ by family and friends. In 1938 he became Sir Kenneth Clark, and in 1969 he was given a peerage and became Lord Clark of Saltwood – but I refer to him throughout as ‘Clark’.
Clark studies will continue to produce new interpretations and information. This work must be seen as ‘notes towards a definition’ – space restricted me on nearly every subject covered – and it should be taken as an encouragement to other scholars to investigate his life and achievements further.
JAMES STOURTON
London, 2016
1
‘K’ (#u7d46c88d-95fc-54d9-ae81-3569150c9997)
Everything about Lord Clark is unexpected.
ANTHONY POWELL, reviewing Another Part of the Wood 1
At 12 noon on Sunday, 25 March 1934, King George V and Queen Mary climbed the steps of the National Gallery in London. It was the first time a reigning monarch had visited the gallery. The ostensible reason for the visit was to see the gallery’s collection of paintings, but the real purpose was to meet the new thirty-year-old director, Kenneth Clark. The trustees had been told not to disturb their weekend – a gentle instruction that their presence was not required – the King wished to see the director. Clark had only been at the gallery for three months, and his appointment had been greeted with universal approval – except at Windsor Castle. The King and Queen had been advised two years earlier by Owen Morshead, the Royal Librarian, that Clark would be the perfect candidate for the anticipated vacancy of Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. But Clark neither wanted the job nor felt that he could possibly combine it with his heavy duties as director of the National Gallery. The sixty-nine-year-old King Emperor, in an extraordinary move, decided that he would directly intervene and go down to Trafalgar Square to invite the young man to work for him. He had resolved that Clark was the man he wanted, and where his courtiers had failed, he would persuade him personally. The visit was a success, and the two men – as different as can be – found much to enjoy together. Clark later described how just after proclaiming that Turner was mad, the King ‘stopped his routine progress, faced me and said’:
‘Why won’t you come and work for me?’
‘Because I wouldn’t have time to do the job properly.’
The King snorted with benevolent rage: ‘What is there to do?’
‘Well, sir, the pictures need looking after.’
‘There’s nothing wrong with them.’
‘And people write letters asking for information about them.’
‘Don’t answer them. I want you to take the job.’2
There is no other recorded occasion of George V making such an effort – for instance, he never visited Downing Street – let alone for a thirty-year-old aesthete whose interests were as far as can be imagined from those of a gruff, pheasant-shooting, philistine sailor King. What was it about Kenneth Clark that made him so ardent? Clark had already had a similar effect on a series of distinguished elders, who all seem to have believed that they had discovered him: Monty Rendall, his headmaster at Winchester; Charles Bell, the keeper at the Ashmolean Museum at Oxford; Maurice Bowra, the Warden of Wadham College; Bernard Berenson, the most famous connoisseur in the world; and Sir Philip Sassoon, the chairman of the National Gallery. He was a Wunderkind from a brilliant generation of Oxford undergraduates; everybody recognised from the beginning that he would achieve great things (so often a recipe for lassitude in later life). Intelligence, charm and charisma played an important part in his story, but he was not alone in possessing these. What set him apart was his focus and complete absorption in art at a time when – artists aside – this was a singular quality. And he brought to this absorption an unusually synthetic power of analysis, expressed in a supple prose style that was able to fuse thought and feeling.
Early in life Clark discovered a sensibility to works of beauty: ‘Ever since I can remember, that is to say from about the age of seven, the combination of certain words, or sounds or forms has given me a peculiar pleasure, unlike anything else in my experience.’3 He called it ‘a freak aptitude’, and told a friend, ‘What is certain is that without it I would have been no more than an obscure and timid playboy.’4 This love of art in all its forms sustained him, and in one of the characteristically teasing yet self-revealing passages of his autobiography he remarked: ‘A strong, catholic approach to works of art is like a comfortable Swiss Bank … I never doubted the infallibility of my judgements … This almost insane self-confidence lasted until a few years ago, and the odd thing is how many people have accepted my judgements. My whole life has been a harmless confidence trick.’5 The confidence of youth was followed by the doubt of age.
Self-doubt is the last quality that anybody meeting Clark for the first time would have suspected. Most people were terrified of him and feared being snubbed, an attitude that baffled Clark himself, who was always expected to be one thing but was invariably something else. A folklore grew up around him – ‘impossibly, implausibly, supernaturally debonair’; ‘delicately poised between diffidence and disdain’; ‘a tranquil ruthlessness’; ‘he measured people and turned on an appropriate amount of charm’ – were all opinions offered about Clark. Most descriptions refer back to his solitary and protected childhood. His introversion suggested to many that he possessed no ‘radar’, or much perception of other people’s feelings; he could appear self-absorbed, and often cut people without even realising it. Yet those who worked for him – cooks and secretaries adored him – found him easy, and even cosy. There was a private Clark and a public Clark, one funny and warm, the other formal.
As Anthony Powell suggested, everything about Clark was surprising – he might have added contradictory and paradoxical: the writer who loved action, the scholar who became a populariser, the socialist who lived in a castle, the committee man who despised the establishment, the indefatigable self-deprecator whom many found arrogant, the shy man who loved monsters, the ‘ruthless’ man who hated confrontation, the brilliantly successful man who considered himself as a failure, the mandarin who had a passion for lemonade and ice cream. The impenetrably smooth performer had a highly emotional side, weeping in front of works of art and subject to spiritual and religious experiences. Graham Sutherland, who knew him as well as anybody, and lived in his house during the war, said: ‘of course K is a divided man … & of all my friends the most complex’. Behind all this was a mania for independence – never wishing to be caught or identified with any group except artists. As one confidante put it, ‘He was nervous of contamination.’6
There are many Kenneth Clarks to describe: the museum director, the courtier, the darling of society, the Leonardo expert, the man of action, the wartime publicist, the would-be contemplative scholar, the lecturer and journalist, the administrator and the professor, the television mogul and performer, the public intellectual, the non-academic art historian, the collector, the patron, the committee man, the conservationist, the family man and the lover – the sum of the man is equal to the parts. Describing Clark’s apparently detached progress through life, his younger son Colin thought that parents, schooling, wife, child and art all just flowed by like interesting scenery, and his father was scarcely aware that ‘there were other human beings on the planet until he was about twenty-eight years old’.7 Worldly or unworldly, Clark expected to go onto boards and for women to fall in love with him. It did not seem odd to him that he was offered the chairmanship of the Independent Television board without ever having owned a television.
An appetite for public service, born out of the ethos of Winchester, informed Clark’s life; a belief that the elite justified their position through pro bono public works. What was unique about him was his position, through which the creative and academic worlds met those of power and influence. As early as 1959 the Sunday Times thought that ‘It will be difficult to write the definitive history of England in the twentieth century without some reference, somewhere, to Sir Kenneth McKenzie Clark.’8 His role in public life, broadcasting apart, is less obvious to us today; the evidence lies in the minutes of meetings preserved in archives such as Bournemouth (the Independent Broadcasting Authority) and Kew (the Ministry of Information). There are, however, the astonishing outcomes: his hand helped build and guide arts institutions that we all take for granted today: the Arts Council, the Royal Opera House, Independent Television, the National Theatre and countless others. Everybody agreed that his writ ran everywhere: ‘K Clark doesn’t think much of it’ was a knockout blow in debate.9 His success on committees was based on an exceptionally careful reading of the papers, an acute analysis of the options, and a well-thought-out response. He would rarely be the first to speak, and waited to be asked his opinion, which was usually the one that counted. Everybody wanted to know what Clark thought. This was rarely predictable, and in writing this biography I have found that it was impossible to be sure what Clark would think on any subject. Anita Brookner wrote of the ‘unshakeable fairness of outlook [which] may have been his most extraordinary achievement’.10 Clark, however, rarely looked back with satisfaction, and even had a sense of disappointment with his contribution to most of the institutions and boards he joined – except for Covent Garden and the Scottish National Gallery.
What is certain is that Clark never wasted a minute more than he wanted to with people, subjects or institutions. He was extraordinarily disciplined with his time. Everything was timetabled – even friendship and love affairs. He was a master of disengagement. His only relaxation was to write, and what a master of prose he was. If his books are still read today, it is as much as anything because of the pleasure of reading about art described in such beautiful language. Books, lectures, essays and letters poured from his pen in those snatched moments when he was not engaged in public life. The constant question I asked myself while writing this book was, how on earth did he manage to do it all?
Clark always portrayed himself as something of a loner; he honed his lecturing skills as a child, soliloquising on country walks. But he needed an audience; he was a natural teacher who could make any subject interesting. When he was not lecturing to the public, his audience was invariably female – Clark was always most at ease with women. His greatest pleasure in life was to share his interests with a woman. The first of these was his wife Jane. What an extraordinary figure she was: moody, mercurial, expansive, generous, clever, rash, destructive, fascinating, pathetic and magnificent. No single description could ever remotely describe Jane, who Clark needed as ivy needs oak. Her unusual powers of sympathy were exercised on everyone from Margot Fonteyn to the station porters at Sandling, and were matched at home by a shrew-like anger of astonishing force. She is the key to understanding Clark – she was to support him and persecute him, and this cycle was the pattern of their life together. Clark and women are inseparable – they fascinated him, and he made the second half of his life unusually complicated by a series of amitiés amoureuses. But Jane was the greatest love affair of his life, however strange this may appear as the story unfolds.
Clark’s sharpest critics were drawn from his own profession. As the Burlington Magazine pointed out: ‘It has become almost a habit, among a very small minority, to sneer at Clark’s lifestyle.’11 The fact that he lived in a castle made him an irresistible target, and so did his inability to fit into the world of professional art history. With notable exceptions such as Ernst Gombrich and John Pope-Hennessy, his professional peers increasingly viewed him from the 1960s onwards as a non-academic television presenter and literary figure. He did himself no favours by once comparing their scholarly minutiae to knitting. But to the world beyond the Courtauld Institute of Art, whether highbrow or middlebrow, Clark came to represent the popular idea of an art historian. He became an emblem of art and culture to the public. Clark’s own hero in this endeavour was the great nineteenth-century writer and thinker John Ruskin. His debt to Ruskin can never be sufficiently emphasised, and it informed many of his interests: the Gothic Revival, J.M.W. Turner, socialism, and the belief that art criticism can be a branch of literature. But above all, Ruskin taught Clark that art and beauty are everyone’s birthright – and he took that message into the twentieth century. This is the central point of Kenneth Clark’s achievement.
2
Edwardian Childhood (#u7d46c88d-95fc-54d9-ae81-3569150c9997)
I have been reading … your memoirs. What a strange and lonely childhood – a psychologist’s dream.
DAVID KNOWLES to Kenneth Clark, 27 August 19731
Kenneth Clark’s autobiography has one of the most memorable openings in the language: ‘My parents belonged to a section of society known as “the idle rich”, and although, in that golden age, many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler.’ His account of his belle époque childhood is a minor masterpiece, both subtle and comprehensive. There are virtually no other sources to challenge its veracity, nor is there any reason to doubt its essential truth; despite lapses, Clark had extraordinary recall, not only for events, but also of his feelings and awakenings. Perhaps in this, as in so much of his life, he was following John Ruskin, whose own autobiography Praeterita told the story of the making of an aesthete. Like Ruskin, Clark was an only child, one who was exceptionally sensitive to the visual world and for whom the act of recollection was a reconstruction of his inner life. He was to paint an elegiac picture of his childhood, and even the parts he found distasteful (such as the pheasant shoots) are described with a poetic eye.
When Clark described his childhood he frequently changed his point of view. His children believed that he was unhappy, the victim of dysfunctional parents. His younger son, Colin, summed it up: ‘My father felt very strongly that his parents had neglected him. He thought of his father as a greedy, reckless drunk and always described his mother as selfish and lazy.’2 Yet to others, Clark painted a sunny picture of solitary bliss.3 Both positions can be demonstrated to be true; there were moments of great happiness, and periods of melancholy solitude. It was by any standards a peculiar upbringing. What is perhaps most striking is that young Kenneth had no friends of his own age to play with, and in consequence never learned to relate to other children. Even in infancy he started to build around himself the carapace that Henry Moore later called his ‘glass wall’.
‘I am the type of local boy makes good,’ Clark once wrote to his friend Lord Crawford, ‘like Cecil Beaton as opposed to the Sitwells.’4 As he came from an extremely privileged background, and was educated at Winchester and Oxford, this statement might seem puzzling, but there is a truth behind it. The Clark family were in the mezzanine floor of English society – no longer trade, landed but not gentry. They played no part in traditional county social life, and drew their friends from a raffish band of Scottish industrialists, entertainers and shooting boon companions. Clark was brought up with none of the hereditary culture of the Sitwells. His parents were without any intellectual interests, and he could justifiably see himself as self-created. In practice what his parents failed to provide he sought elsewhere, and few young men have attracted so many mentors or used them to such good effect.
‘Family history has very little charm for me,’ Clark told his biographer. ‘I find I always skip the first ten pages of a biography.’5 He dismissed his own in about five lines. But the Clark family story in Paisley was very remarkable. Paisley, today a suburb of Glasgow, was effectively a company town of the cotton industry, and was dominated by the Clark family. After Clark’s great-great-great-great-grandfather William Clark, a farmer at Dykebar, died in 1753, his widow had moved with her children to nearby Paisley, where her son James (1747–1829) started a business as a weaver’s furnisher and heddle twine manufacturer. The shortages of imports arising from the Napoleonic blockade stimulated the development of a new English cotton that was as smooth as silk, and Clark’s son, another James (1783–1865), laid the foundations of the family fortune with the invention of the cotton spool. With his brothers he built the enormous factory that established Paisley as a world leader in manufacturing cotton thread. Paisley grew into a town of consequence, with grand public buildings presented by the Clarks and their commercial rivals, the Coats family: the town hall (Clark), infirmary (Clark), and art gallery and library (Coats) as well as schools and churches. By what Kenneth described as ‘the not very exacting standards of the time’ the Clarks were conscientious employers, and their philanthropy probably conditioned his belief that humanitarianism was the greatest discovery of the nineteenth century.6
In 1896 the family sold out to J&P Coats for the enormous sum of £2,585,913 (about £2.5 billion today). This fortune was divided between four family members, including Kenneth Mackenzie Clark (1868–1932), who was to become the father of Kenneth. Clark senior had been brought up in Paisley, and left school in Greenock at fourteen; according to his son he had a very good brain, although it was untrained and undisciplined. He was sent to Australia and New Zealand, and adored both, and on his return at the age of twenty-two he took up a position as a director of the family business. After two years it became evident that his love of sport and the bottle was distracting him; he was effectively sacked, and from that moment onwards devoted himself entirely to pleasure. His main occupation became building and racing yachts on the Clyde, naming three of them Katoomba, after the chief town of the Blue Mountains in New South Wales (his racing yacht was named Kariad). The family, as his son later explained, ‘were big frogs in the small pool of Clyde yacht racing’. All through his life, Clark senior never cut his links with Paisley, and was always generous with charitable subscriptions: he was fondly remembered as the ‘news-boys’ friend’, providing them with an annual outing and dinner.7 He also never lost his Ayrshire accent.
Clark paints a rollicking portrait of his father as an independent-minded, self-indulgent ‘roaring boy’. Attracted to women, he drank too much and delayed marriage until the age of thirty-five, when his choice fell upon Alice McArthur, a puritanical cousin who made it her unsuccessful mission to save him from his alcoholic excesses. Before she married, Alice had been living with her Quaker mother in Godalming, ‘so different to the rowdy boozy world of Clyde yacht racing’.8 ‘Two more different people than my father and mother can hardly be imagined. He was convivial, natural, totally unself-conscious; she was shy, inhibited, and prone to self-deception. They were united by two qualities, intelligence and a total absence of snobbery.’9
Clark’s father was a big man with a drooping moustache, who was burdened by no inhibitions and knew no boundaries. Clark was fond of his father but alarmed by him, and embarrassed by his drunkenness and bad behaviour. He found his mother by contrast cold and sharp, although he was aware that he had painted a particularly unfeeling portrait of her in his autobiography: ‘I have been worried that the allusions to her in Vol 1 were incomplete. Her life was ruined by being in the wrong box. At the end of her life she reverted to being a shrewd, frugal Quakerish lady, living in a bedsitter. That suited her much better than [the family’s Suffolk home] Sudbourne, and she became quite peaceful.’10 He claimed that she never held him as a child, which several photographs show to be untrue. She remains, however, a shadowy and rather mournful figure who only came into her own as a grandmother. Unfortunately, no letters survive from her until her son was eighteen – by which time she had belatedly discovered his genius.
‘Like so many remarkable men he was the only son of two entirely opposite and incompatible parents,’ Clark wrote in his obituary of Cyril Connolly, and he certainly saw himself in these terms.11 Yet despite everything, his parents made a successful marriage, and remained devoted to each other. Theirs was an extraordinarily peripatetic existence. The Edwardian era is often portrayed as an earthly paradise for the rich, and no doubt it was to those who welcomed an uninterrupted social life. The Clarks, however, had no social ambitions, and were too eccentric to belong with comfort to any fixed society. They adopted the conventional habit of the rich and moved from house to house, but for them it was a stratagem to avoid rather than to meet polite society. Alice Clark found herself mistress of a house in Grosvenor Square, a large rented house in Perthshire, an even larger house and estate in Suffolk, two yachts, and soon an additional house at Cap Martin in the south of France. Their life became a progress dictated by the sporting calendar, but to the young Clark ‘my home was Sudbourne Hall, about a mile from Orford in Suffolk’.12 One remarkable aspect of Clark’s childhood is how very well documented it was by good photographs. His father employed a professional photographer to take numerous pictures of all aspects of their life – Sudbourne Hall, the yachts, the shooting parties, and young Kenneth in many poses and costumes. All these are preserved at Saltwood, and suggest that Clark’s parents were not as indifferent as he maintained.
Named after his grandfather, Kenneth McKenzie Clark was born at 32 Grosvenor Square in London on 13 July 1903. He was delivered by Caesarean section, which in those days meant that he would remain an only child. A year later his father acquired the eleven-thousand-acre Sudbourne estate for £237,500, with a mortgage of £75,000.13 From what followed we may deduce that the purchase was made with his son in mind, and the expectation that the boy would grow up to enjoy the pleasures of a rich man’s sporting estate. This was in fact as far as Clark senior’s dynastic ambitions would ever go: Kenneth once came into his father’s study at Sudbourne and found two men in black coats and striped trousers offering Clark senior the chance to buy a peerage – one of them was the notorious Maundy Gregory, Lloyd George’s chief agent in the sale of honours – ‘Wouldn’t you like this little chap to succeed you?’ The response was ‘Go to hell,’ and the men drove off.14 This encounter also tells us that the Clarks were in all probability supporters of the Liberal Party.
Even by expansive Edwardian standards the Sudbourne estate was large; it included a model farm and several well-ordered villages. The house was elegant but rather stark, ‘one of Wyatt’s typical East Anglian jobs, a large square brick box, with a frigid, neo-classical interior’.15 It was built in 1784 for the first Marquess of Hertford, and had devolved on his colourful descendants, the triumvirate of art collectors who created the Wallace Collection. The eponymous Richard Wallace, the illegitimate Hertford heir, mainly used Sudbourne for its shooting, and on one occasion entertained the Prince of Wales, the future King Edward VII, there. Clark senior bought the estate in 1904 for the shooting, but found the house cold and uncomfortable, and consequently ordered a makeover. He and Alice went abroad, and returned to their newly minted ‘Jacobethan’ interior in richly carved walnut, which was probably a more suitable setting for their furnishings and paintings. Young Kenneth thought it was all in very poor taste, although he found the renovations more friendly than Wyatt’s original interiors.
Clark’s parents had few connections with the local social life of the county set. One of these was the Suffolk Show, at which his father would show his pigs and his prize collection of Suffolk Punch draught horses. These beautiful animals had their own special stables at Sudbourne, and would be brought out every Sunday morning and paraded on the lawn in front of the house before trotting home ‘as complacent as Morris dancers’.16 The main stables at the side of the house were refitted to hold the collection of motor cars: a Rolls-Royce, two Delaunay-Bellevilles and a Panhard, ‘a quiet, insinuating electric car which had been intended for use in London’.
Clark senior was a well-intentioned if unconventional landlord, who built a cottage hospital in nearby Orford and allowed Coronation sports at the hall in 1911. His main preoccupation, however, was the pheasant shoot from October until the end of January; the Sudbourne shoot was one of very high numbers and low-flying birds. At first the young Clark enjoyed the shooting parties because they brought female visitors to the house, whom he would persuade to come to his bedroom for a beauty parade of their dresses, which he would judge with care and precision, evincing the first signs of the emerging aesthete. Then at the age of ten Clark had a gun placed into his hands, and we have the recollection of Phyllis Ellis, a young girl on the estate, that ‘Young Kenneth used to get very upset when all these birds were brought in – pheasants and ducks. They looked so beautiful in their winter plumage … He didn’t like shooting – which, of course, annoyed his father.’17 Sometimes as many as a thousand birds a day were shot, which sickened young Kenneth. He gave up shooting as early as he could – Phyllis tells us that after a time ‘he would never go out with the shooting parties’.18 Since this sport was the main point of Sudbourne, young Clark’s reaction was particularly distressing to his father, and this is the earliest external evidence that Kenneth was not going to be a conventional boy of his background. Apart from the shoot, Sudbourne boasted a private cricket pitch and a fourteen-hole golf course, complete with a professional. Clark’s father was too impatient to play a proper round of golf, but in his irresponsible way would encourage visitors to try to hit a ball over the house, causing the inevitable broken windows, which delighted him and pained his son. Phyllis Ellis reported that Alice Clark ‘when alone would play golf on the private 14-hole course with the gamekeeper’s wife’. She cuts a rather lonely figure.
One day when Clark was six his mother came to the nursery and caught his German governess scolding him. The governess was sent away the next morning and replaced by a Highland Scots woman, Miss Lamont, thereafter always known as ‘Lam’. Lam was the daughter of a minister from Skye, but was not at all dour; she was a great giggler, with a naughty sense of humour, and above all she was affectionate and full of unsentimental goodness. Clark adored her, and for the first time he encountered uncritical love. ‘The arrival of Lam,’ he wrote, ‘was the first of several pieces of human good fortune which have befallen me in my life.’19 He always claimed that Lam saved him: ‘At last I had someone whom I could love and depend on, and who even seemed to share my interests.’20 Lam became his protector and companion. This remarkable woman spoke four languages, never married, and ended up, thanks to Clark’s recommendation, as the housekeeper at Chequers, where she once remarked on the similarity between Clark senior and Mr Churchill.
At the end of January, when the shooting season was over, the Clark household would move by wagon-lit to the south of France, where one of the pleasure yachts would have sailed from the Clyde to await them in the harbour at Monte Carlo. His father loved the casino, but his mother found Monaco too socially demanding, and preferred the quieter pleasures of nearby Menton. One day a French woman who had joined them for lunch on the Katoomba expressed the wish to own a yacht of such beauty. Clark senior saw his chance, and named an enormous price, which to everyone’s surprise she accepted. The Clarks left their yacht the following day, and with the money Clark senior acquired a parcel of land near Menton on Cap Martin, where he employed the Danish architect Hans-Georg Tersling to build – using Scottish labour – a sturdy wedding cake of a villa in which the family would stay for three months of every year. Clark senior would gamble all day at the tables, where according to his son he had extraordinary luck that would fund extravagant purchases.* (#ulink_96adedb4-2ecd-5f18-974c-a1673e757bf9) The Menton casino also put on early-evening shows for children, with conjurors, jugglers, acrobats, comedians and stuntmen, and through these entertainers the young Clark developed a desire to become an actor; he loved showing off his newly learned skills to his rather bored mother and her friends. In France, his mother’s only occupation seems to have been directing the head gardener, who returned during the summer months to his native Pitlochry.
Clark claimed to have had no childhood friends on the Riviera, but Isobel Somerville, the daughter of the English vicar at Menton, remembers playing rounders with him; she also recalls his passion for parsley sandwiches. She was captivated by Lam, with her compassion, her sense of the ridiculous and her exhortations to her charge – ‘Kenneth, don’t be silly.’ She remembers Lam bringing ‘her fabulously rich employers to Menton, each in turn. When she went to the Churchills, because we got no gossip whatever out of her, we changed her name into “Damn-clam-Lam”.’21
Perhaps the first indication of Clark’s remarkable gift for engaging the affection of distinguished friends and mentors is his improbable attachment to the Empress Eugénie, the elderly widow of Napoleon III, a neighbour who would allow him to accompany her as she took her morning walks. Otherwise the rather sedate life of the Riviera was punctuated for the small boy with carnivals and flower festivals which brought colour and a welcome vulgarity.
When his parents left Menton in April for a cure at Carlsbad or Vichy, young Clark would be sent back to Sudbourne – which was a mixed pleasure. With his parents away he found himself looked after by resentful servants, whom he accused in his memoirs of taking out their malice on him by serving him rotten food.* (#ulink_002f9c79-9474-5d53-a77b-60621d745438)
But there were also enormous compensations to life at Sudbourne. His favourite room was the library, the heart of the house, still filled with books left by the previous owner. Clark learned to read late, from an illustrated manual called Reading Without Tears in which each letter was represented by a pictogram. He read all the standard Edwardian children’s classics, but claimed that one series of books ‘influenced my character more than anything I have read since’. This was the illustrated adventures of ‘Golliwogg’ by Florence and Bertha Upton.22 Golliwogg, as Clark explained, lives on terms of perfect happiness with five girls. He always treats them with the greatest courtesy, and they share his adventures. Their role is to admire him, and when things go wrong they rescue and console him. ‘He was for me an example of chivalry far more persuasive than the unconvincing Knights of the Arthurian legend,’ wrote Clark, who added the frank admission, ‘I identify myself with him completely and have never quite ceased to do so.’23 Indeed, he was to spend the second half of his life enjoying carefully managed relationships with a number of women at the same time, and their role would be to appreciate and console him in a not dissimilar fashion.
Meanwhile in his nursery the solitary Clark enjoyed constructing elaborate Classical buildings with his bricks, and putting on performances with his circus figures à la Menton. ‘When my parents departed for Cap Martin and Vichy, I was left to my own devices,’ he wrote. ‘I was an only child and should have felt lonely, but in fact I do not remember suffering any inconvenience from solitude. On the contrary, I remember with fear and loathing the rare occasions when some well-wishing grown-up arranged for me to meet companions of my own age.’24 When other children did appear he found that he had little in common with them. Nor did he expect them to share his interests, thus nurturing a personal exceptionalism from an early age. He rejoiced when they left, and ‘returned with relief to my bears, my bricks, or at a later date, my billiard table’.25 All his life he would be pleased when guests had departed, and he believed that his early solitude ‘made me absolutely incapable of any collective activity. I cannot belong to a group.’26 He tended to exaggerate this point: in fact he was to demonstrate an unending capacity for collegiate activity by serving on numerous committees throughout his career, from the war onwards. His solitary childhood did make him shy – except with grown-ups – but it also helped to develop his sensitive perception of works of art.
Perhaps a greater enemy than loneliness to a solitary child might have been boredom. But Clark was at pains to dispel any such notion: ‘my days were all pleasure. Most children suffer from boredom, but I do not remember a dull moment at Sudbourne. I loved the Suffolk country, the heaths and sandpits, the great oaks in Sudbourne wood, the wide river at Iken.’27 Equally, he could write: ‘in family life the enemy of happiness is not oppression, but boredom, and against this the unfortunate parents are almost powerless’.28 All his life Clark was frightened of boredom – an important consideration in his attitude to other people. To most observers he displayed a very low boredom threshold; he was always allergic to bores, and was terrified of becoming one himself in his lectures or television programmes.
The large eighteenth-century Sudbourne Hall was opulent, and its estate well-tended, but down the road was romantic Iken on the Alde estuary, with its isolated thatched Saxon church of St Botolph. Clark would be taken there by horse and cart to go shrimping, and it was to remain a magical spot for him: ‘I found that the delicate music of the Suffolk coast, with its woods straggling into sandy commons, its lonely marshes and estuaries full of small boats, still had more charm for me than the great brass bands of natural scenery, the Alps or the Dolomites.’29 It was here, in a cove on the edge of the River Alde, that Clark was painted by Charles Sims, the first artist he befriended. He had already had his portrait painted by Sir John Lavery in the manner of Velázquez (which he described, using Maurice Bowra’s favourite term of praise, as ‘by no means bad’). Clark thought the Sims portrait lacked freshness, but the choice of setting on the Alde estuary is important. He would return there all his life, and at nearby Aldeburgh on the coast he would write his best books. When in later years he formed a close friendship with Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears, he became an early champion of the Aldeburgh Festival and helped establish its reputation.
In London the family had given up the house in Grosvenor Square where young Clark had been born, and rented a flat in Berkeley Square. ‘We never stayed in London for long,’ wrote Clark, ‘because my mother thought, and rightly, that my father would get into trouble; but I enjoyed these visits because it meant going to the theatre.’30 He was taken to see all the famous Edwardian actors: Squire Bancroft, Gerald du Maurier, and his favourite, Charles Hawtrey. His mother may have watched her husband like a hawk in London, but he was allowed to take young Kenneth to the music hall; Clark senior kept boxes at the Empire and the Alhambra theatres. As a result the young Clark stored a repertoire of music-hall songs in his head, which would emerge in later life to the surprise of his friends.* (#ulink_a56f7cad-8cac-5d95-98d7-e54511d6a482)
In 1910 Lam took Clark to see the great exhibition of Japanese art at White City. It was one of the most formative moments of his childhood. There he saw life-sized dioramas representing various scenes and settings of Japan, but it was the screens that made the greatest impression, ‘with paintings of flowers of such ravishing beauty that I was not only struck dumb with delight, I felt that I had entered a new world’.31 He realised that something had happened to him. This aesthetic awakening marked the birth of his ‘freak aptitude’. The following Christmas his grandmother gave him a picture book of the Louvre, which was his first introduction to the Old Masters. The images fascinated him, and he found himself similarly enchanted. However, when he showed her his favourite plate, Titian’s Concert Champêtre (then attributed to Giorgione), her only comment was, ‘Oh dear, it’s very nude’ – which was probably the first time he encountered the word.
In fact, paintings surrounded the young Clark at Sudbourne. His father was a voracious buyer of pictures of the Highland cattle variety, although occasionally he bought something more interesting, such as Millais’ Murthley Moss, a Corot or a Barbizon School landscape. In general, however, he enjoyed the high polish and sentimentality of Jozef Israëls’ Pancake Day, Rosa Bonheur’s Highland Cattle and William Orchardson’s Story of a Life. This was what his son called ‘a coarse diet for a growing aesthete’, but he came to believe that those who had grown up with too much good taste were less capable in later life of a catholic response to works of art. ‘It is no accident,’ he wrote about Ruskin, ‘that the three or four Englishmen whose appreciation of art has been strong enough and perceptive enough to penetrate the normal callosity of their countrymen – Hazlitt, Ruskin, Roger Fry – have all come from philistine, puritanical homes. To be brought up in an atmosphere of good taste is to have the hunger for art satisfied at too early an age, and to think of it as a pleasant amenity rather than an urgent need.’32
Clark senior enjoyed the company of artists. No doubt they appealed to him as living outside the conventions of the day, and he befriended several, including Sims and Orchardson. He encouraged his son’s interest in them, and the boy’s ambitions did indeed change from acting to painting. His father even allowed him to rehang the smaller pictures at Sudbourne on a regular basis, developing a skill that would one day help to make the National Gallery in London one of the most carefully hung picture galleries in the world. And on young Clark’s twelfth birthday his father, presumably remembering his son’s rapturous tales of his visit with Lam to White City, gave Kenneth a scrapbook, put together around 1830 by a Japanese collector, containing drawings and prints from the circle of Hokusai; a wonderful treasure which he still owned at the end of his life, and one that fed young Clark’s growing passion.
Each summer the family would make the long train journey to Ross-shire for the fishing. They would spend a night at the North British Hotel in Edinburgh, where his father would invariably get very drunk and have to be fetched by his son from a sofa in the main lounge and helped upstairs muttering, ‘It’s a hard road for an old dog.’ Young Clark hated the holidays in the Scottish Highlands, and his heart sank at the thought of the threadbare comforts the house there offered. He described the country around Loch Ewe as ‘endless bogs, not an acre of cultivated land, persistent rain, followed by swarms of midges’.33
The British habit of sending their offspring away to boarding school at the age of seven or eight, which Clark abhorred (but repeated with his own children), was, he believed, ‘maintained solely in order that parents could get their children out of the house’.34 His parents’ choice of preparatory school was Wixenford, a fashionable school in Hampshire. Like most schools of its type, Wixenford was faintly ridiculous, and Clark probably made the place sound even more ridiculous than it actually was, with shades of Llanabba Castle, the school from Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall. Wixenford was a feeder for Eton, and in Clark’s description expended more effort on entertaining parents than educating children. It was housed in mock-Tudor buildings and had a very pretty garden, ‘leading to an avenue of pleached limes, under which, it was alleged, school meals were served in the summer term’.35 Lord Curzon was an alumnus, and the pupils were the children of the upper classes and of American and South African millionaires.
By the standards of the time Wixenford was an easy-going and benign establishment, whose staff Clark characterised as a ‘pathetic group of misfits and boozy cynics’. The only master with whom he had any kind of rapport was the art master, G.L. Thompson – known as ‘Tompy’ – who introduced him to the drawing methods of the Paris art schools of the 1850s. Wixenford encouraged the boys to put on theatrical productions and write for the school magazines, and Clark did both. He staged a revue incorporating all his favourite music-hall songs. Harold Acton, the future leader of the Oxford aesthetes, was a contemporary at Wixenford. He edited a magazine, and it was probably for him that Clark produced his first literary effort, an article entitled ‘Milk and Biscuits’ (which referred to those breaks added to the school’s curriculum, so Clark argued, in order to please the parents). Acton in his memoirs remembered Clark as a mature prodigy, ‘walking with benign assurance in our midst, an embryo archbishop or Cabinet Minister’, and mischievously added, ‘Since those days he seems to have grown much younger.’36 Wixenford provided one revelation for Clark. The ‘school dance was the first time I had met girls and I was enchanted beyond words, not by anything tangible, but the aura of femininity. Incipit vita nova.’* (#ulink_99fe0efd-9f84-5dda-85c1-688bc5b7cc12)37 For good and ill, this enchantment would remain with him for the rest of his life. He enjoyed his days at Wixenford, and was described in his leaving report as ‘a jolly boy’ – a description that would be beaten out of him at Winchester.
When Clark looked back on his childhood world of Edwardian England he described it as a vulgar, disgraceful, overfed, godless social order, but admitted that he had enjoyed it. He also allowed that the period was a golden age of creativity: ‘Well it always seems to me that there was a great deal to be said for living between 1900 and 1914, because it wasn’t simply the age of the Edwardian plutocrat; it was also the age of the Fabians, of extremely intelligent people like Shaw and Wells. It was the age of the Russian Ballet. It was the age of Proust. It was the age of Picasso, Braque and Matisse. In fact almost everything I enjoy in what is called modern civilisation was in fact evolved before 1916. I do think the 1914 war was the great turning point in European civilisation.’38 When he came to tell the story of Civilisation on television he ended his account in 1914.
* (#ulink_c7a9428a-adcc-5501-9896-b1c69cc62fad) Clark senior bought the Imperial Hotel in Menton with his winnings. On another occasion he acquired a golf course at Sospel and built a large, ugly hotel on it, also designed by Tersling, which he later gave to his son. Curiously, the art historian R. Langton Douglas and Sotheby’s chairman Geoffrey Hobson were partners in the golf course. (Information from the late Anthony Hobson.)
* (#ulink_effc98b9-d095-5fec-a238-fd38d263c54b) His friend Joan Drogheda wrote to complain about this passage in his memoirs, stating that most servants did not treat children in the way he claimed, nor were they resentful of their employers, and that he had ‘struck the wrong note’. Letter from Lady Drogheda, 19 February 1972 (Tate 8812/1/4/36).
* (#ulink_50980af5-466e-5282-88b5-fa71b1319fa9) It would also provide a mutual interest with Val Parnell and Lew Grade when Clark was chairman of ITV. Their background was in music hall and variety.
* (#ulink_97213e4a-5b97-514b-8a4e-13e3c4c2ee6a) ‘Thus begins a new life.’
3
Winchester (#u7d46c88d-95fc-54d9-ae81-3569150c9997)
Winchester helped to open for me the doors of perception.
KENNETH CLARK, Another Part of the Wood 1
Winchester was a curious choice of public school for Clark’s parents, and is perhaps best understood in negative terms: it was not Eton or Harrow. Clark senior had a horror of the nobility, who – as he liked to point out – only ever wrote to ask him for something. He did not want his boy turning into a snob, and he and Alice would no doubt have felt uncomfortable at speech days – had they ever bothered to attend. The idea of sending Kenneth to Winchester almost certainly came from Wixenford. Even in an establishment so academically lax, it was recognised that the boy was exceptionally promising. His sponsor in the entry book at Winchester is given as P.H. Morton, Wixenford’s headmaster. Kenneth was the only boy in his year to go to Winchester.
Winchester is one of the great schools of England, with a distinctive and cerebral reputation. Founded in 1382 by William of Wykeham, Bishop of Winchester, as a school for poor scholars, it maintained a standard of academic excellence that was daunting to all but the cleverest boys. Clark painted a miserable picture of the school in his early years there, but pointed out that ‘All intellectuals complain about their schooldays. This is ridiculous.’2 He believed that they tended ‘to regard bullying and injustice as a personal attack on themselves, instead of the invariable condition of growing up in any society’.3 Ridiculous or not, Clark certainly took bullying personally. An additional privation was the effect of arriving at the school in the middle of World War I, which meant little heat and very poor food. Clark, who all his life was mildly epicurean, suffered accordingly. He also missed the soothing feminine influences of Lam.
Like all English public schools, Winchester had its peculiar rites and customs, including a vernacular language called ‘notions’. It was an academic hothouse, with a dual emphasis on studying the Classics and sporting achievements. When Clark was later honoured by the school in the Ad Portas ceremony, its highest honour, he said, ‘Winchester was once famed for the uniformity of her sons: a uniform excellence, no doubt, but one obtained at the expense of individual fulfilment.’ This was to be one of several hindrances he felt at Winchester, since his trajectory was not to follow the conventional Classics route to scholarly recognition. He chose instead to walk an individual path through the study of art and its history. Arriving from Wixenford poor in Latin and without Greek, he was underrated during his early years at Winchester until Montague John Rendall, the school’s unconventional headmaster, recognised his singularity.
The second problem Clark faced was his total unpreparedness for the tribal cruelties inflicted by older boys on younger ones. As a mollycoddled only child who had never experienced sibling rough-and-tumble, nor yet learned teenage cunning, the thirteen-year-old Clark was to experience probably the greatest trauma of his life in his first week at Winchester. He tells the story with some emotion in his autobiography. On the school train he addressed a handsome senior boy, who ignored him. The boy turned out to be the head prefect of his house, and on arrival at the school Clark was summoned to the library, where he was instructed to ‘Sport an arse’ – i.e. bend over – and received several painful strokes of a cane for his bumptious behaviour in speaking to an elder. The prefect’s children were later to become close friends of Clark’s children, but he never revealed the story to them.
Tony Keswick,4 who became Clark’s closest friend at Winchester, recalled that first day at the school. The new boys for the 1917 spring term had arrived on an early train, been abandoned and got over their tears. He and Clark were beginning tentatively to make friends when the main school train arrived. There was a tremendous cacophony of voices, at which point ‘a river, an avalanche of boys poured in’. Clark turned to Keswick and said, ‘This is dreadful, isn’t it?’ Keswick agreed, and later said, ‘It’s the most vivid memory I have of him.’5 Clark’s torments were only just beginning. On the second evening Clark encountered a prefect who was an artist, and rashly offered an opinion on his work. ‘Bloody little new man. Think you know all about art. Sport an arse.’ In addition to these beatings, Clark found himself regularly cleaning fourteen pairs of prefects’ shoes. ‘In the twinkling of an eye,’ as he put it, ‘the jolly boy from Wixenford became a silent, solitary, inward-turning but still imperfect Wykehamist.’6 The traumas of his first week at Winchester gave him a bruise from which he never fully recovered, and a lifelong horror of upper-class tribalism.
The school was divided into ten ‘houses’ of about thirty boys each, and Clark was placed in the house of Herbert Aris, known as ‘the Hake’, with whom he had no understanding or sympathy. Houses were remarkably individual, and took their character from the nature of the housemaster. Aris was Clark’s housemaster for three years, until 1920, when he retired on his wife’s money to a country estate and his place was taken by Horace Jackson, ‘the Jacker’. The house still stands as it did in Clark’s day; a line of small brick houses at 69 Kingsgate Street, pleasant cottage architecture with internal panelling. Aris – whose motto appears to have been ‘Go hard, go hard’ – wanted to make a man of Clark, who describes in his autobiography how Aris encouraged him to learn boxing, and exclaimed, ‘I want to see that big head knocked about.’7 After a few weeks he asked Clark how he was getting on. ‘I am enjoying it sir.’ Aris was furious: ‘I don’t want you to enjoy it, I want you to get hurt.’ Clark wrote a witty dialogue entitled ‘The Housemaster’ reproducing this scene. It is the earliest surviving manuscript in the Saltwood archive, and it suggests a more humorous gloss, with Clark responding ‘(penitently & repressing tears – or is it laughter! – with difficulty) So sorry sir.’
Clark’s portrait of Aris in his autobiography was of a small-minded sadist, but he records Mrs Aris as charming. Their son, John Aris, later wrote to Clark remembering his mother lending him a book on Ruskin (which Clark acknowledged had a crucial influence on his life) and allowing him to play her piano. He added, ‘You might be right about my father as a schoolmaster, though your contemporaries would not all agree … He was not unkind but he was a man of rather simple austerity, and I believe he was then preoccupied with those who went from Winchester to France [i.e. to war]. I hope you have not misjudged him.’8
Clark’s second housemaster, ‘the Jacker’, was something of a Winchester legend. A school manuscript describes him as ‘a ferocious little man who didn’t suffer fools – wounded in the war, he became an ardent militarist but he collected china and knew about woodcuts. He had many unlikeable qualities and was not by nature affectionate. It was said he was only interested in athletes.’9 Despite their obvious differences, Clark thought he treated him very fairly. Jackson hated conceit. When someone towards the end of Clark’s time at the school asked him what he was going to do afterwards, Clark answered, ‘Help Mr Berenson to produce a new edition of The Drawings of the Florentine Painters.’ Jackson, whom he had not observed, remarked ‘Bloody little prig.’10 He was not the last to voice this sentiment. Equally often quoted, though probably misinterpreted, was the Jacker’s remark when sitting between Clark and Keswick, whose father was a leading Hong Kong nabob, ‘Never, never again will I have the son of a businessman in my House.’11 In fact there were many such children in the house, and as Jackson’s obituary stated, ‘he could crack a joke, maybe with an edge to it’.
Like most clever and sensitive boys at school, Clark found refuges. The most important was ‘the drawing school’ or art room. On his third day he called on the art master, Mr Macdonald – ‘a kindly, agreeable person but the laziest man I have ever known’. Winchester frowned upon extra-curricular activities, and Macdonald did not have many pupils, so it was probably with mixed feelings that he eyed the eager young student. Fortunately, Clark admired two prints by the Japanese artist Utamaro on the wall, and Macdonald invited him to ‘come next Sunday, I have some more in those drawers’. Clark devoured the astonishing collection of prints by Utamaro, Hokusai and Kunyoshi – later, he was always to have Japanese prints in his own art collection. He had already resolved that he was going to be an artist, and this decision informed the rest of his time at Winchester. His Sunday afternoons with Mr Macdonald ‘were among the happiest and most formative in my life. They confirmed my belief that nothing could destroy me as long as I could enjoy works of art.’12
Macdonald taught Clark to draw plaster casts of sculpture – a training, as he ruefully observed, that would be more useful to him later as an art historian – and each year he duly won the school drawing prize. The kind Mrs Aris showed him copies of The Studio, the bible of the Aesthetic Movement, and it was there that he encountered the work of Aubrey Beardsley, who together with the illustrator Charles Keene was the main influence on his drawing. Years later it was these two artists that Clark chose to lecture about at the Aldeburgh Festival. Several drawings survive in the Tate archive in the modish naughty nineties style of Beardsley, occasionally signed ‘KCM’, mostly male nude studies. Others show the cross-hatching manner of Keene. It was Mr Macdonald who introduced him to one of his later gods: ‘I remember vividly the first moment at which my drawing master at school pulled out of a cupboard some photographs of Piero della Francesca’s frescoes at Arezzo, then seldom reproduced in any book. Even upside down, as they emerged, I felt a shock of recognition.’13
Apart from the art room, Clark’s other refuge was the school library. This had practically no art books except Richard Muther’s monograph on Goya.14 But it did contain the set of volumes that were to have the greatest influence on his life, The Collected Works of John Ruskin in the edition edited by Cook and Wedderburn (1903–12). ‘I expected them to be about art. Instead they were about glaciers, and clouds, plants and crystals, political economy and morals.’15 If the works of Roger Fry and Clive Bell were more contemporary and easier to read, the Ruskin volumes ignited a slow-burning flame that would last all his life. They profoundly influenced not just the way he looked at and described works of art, but also his political and social attitudes. Among his own books, Clark’s favourite was to be his selection of the Victorian writer’s work, Ruskin Today. Almost as important was his discovery of Walter Pater,* (#ulink_cb42849a-86a9-538b-a5f1-c7baaafa7c95) his writings on art and his story in Imaginary Portraits of the nihilistic young patrician ‘Sebastian Van Storck’, in whose ‘refusal to do or be any definite thing I recognised a revelation of my own state of mind’.16 Clark’s unhappiness at school and rejection of the sporting life at Sudbourne fed these melancholic feelings. He was to be prone to ennui all his life, and in later years only action and work would enable him to overcome his fear of boredom.
At home during the holidays, the teenage Kenneth Clark was a withdrawn figure. To the annoyance of his father, he still refused to go out shooting. Phyllis Ellis described him at Sudbourne during this period: ‘They also had a pianola in the billiard room. When young Kenneth came back from school, on holiday, we used to go through the pianola rolls. And he’d take me out in a boat on the lake. It was extraordinary, a boy of fourteen spending his time with a four-year-old girl, but he was always different from other people and perhaps, like me, a lonely child. He wasn’t very happy at that time.’17
It was a great disappointment to his father that Kenneth was not interested in the shoot, and this, combined with the upheavals of the war, called into question the future of the estate. No doubt Clark’s mother also longed to be free of the burden of organising house parties, and his father decided to put Sudbourne on the market in 1917. We can only imagine the distress felt by Clark’s father at selling what he had spent so long creating. He almost sold the property to Walter Boynton, a timber-man who offered £170,000 but was unable to pay. The estate was therefore auctioned the following year in parcels, but most lots failed to find buyers. It was a disastrous time to sell, with a quarter of all English estates being for sale. Finally, in 1921, the industrialist Joseph Watson, shortly to become the first Baron Manton, stepped in and bought it with a reduced acreage for £86,000, representing a massive loss for the Clark family.* (#ulink_c7e7769f-f004-5ec8-bf61-4aca6bd60d32)
The Clarks moved to Bath, where they remained for most of Kenneth’s schooldays. His father would spend all day at the club playing bridge and billiards, but Kenneth could never fathom what his mother did, apart from visit antique shops. He became very fond of the city, and was unexpectedly to spend a school term there.* (#ulink_be26e42b-f95c-5101-b754-732872a49b6b) Perhaps surprisingly, he was a good sportsman – an improbably skilful bowler for the cricket team, and he even won a running prize. One day after a long run he was taken ill with pneumonia. So serious was his condition that he was removed from the school for a term. He was already showing signs of the hypochondria that dogged him for the rest of his life. Always liking to project himself as an autodidact, he described being ill as ‘the only time at which I learnt anything of lasting value’.18 He passed his days reading and playing Chopin on his pianola, and was later to view this period as crucial to his development: ‘My mind was in a plastic condition, and for the last time I was able to remember a good deal of what I read.’19 He was devouring English poetry of the seventeenth century, particularly Vaughan and Milton; Chinese poetry of the ninth century in Arthur Waley’s translations; Ibsen, who taught him the complexities of human motivation; Samuel Butler, a different kind of scepticism; and of course Ruskin, ‘whose Unto This Last was the most important book I ever read’. He also did most of his novel-reading at this period, enjoying the works of Anatole France, Joseph Conrad and Thomas Hardy.
The end of the war produced one extraordinary benefit without which no aesthetic education of the period was complete – the arrival in England of Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes. ‘It was an intoxication,’ Clark wrote, ‘even stronger than Beardsley.’20 The sight of works such as Scheherazade and The Firebird was an escape from the dreary parochialism of school into a dream world. Who it was that took Clark to see the Ballets Russes is a mystery, but it may have been Victor ‘Prendy’ Prendergast, a slightly older boy in the same house. Clark described him as ‘a great influence on my life at Winchester. He was a dyed in the wool aesthete and a Yellow Book character.’21 They shared a mutual interest not only in ballet but also in modern art. Prendy must have been a sympathetic figure, but Clark lost sight of him at Oxford, and the Winchester old boys’ register simply says he ‘travelled and did literary work’.
If the Ballets Russes gave Clark his first taste of international modernism, this education continued at the modest London gallery that put on the first one-man show in England of just about every major European avant-garde artist, the Leicester Galleries. It was in these unpretentious surroundings, under the gentle guidance of its director Oliver Brown,22 that Clark discovered the joys of collecting, at this time usually drawings under £5. When he was sixteen a godfather gave him £100 with which to buy a picture, and he was struck by an oil of a primitive-looking boy by an artist he had never heard of, Modigliani. He reserved it, but at the last minute – trying to imagine it hanging alongside his parents’ Barbizon works – his courage failed him and he cancelled the purchase. As a testament to its quality, today it hangs in the Tate Gallery.
The man who more than any other was responsible for the transformation of Clark and his growing confidence at Winchester was the towering, eccentric, quixotic headmaster, Montague John Rendall. He was a Harrovian bachelor who devoted his life to the school, and whose old age was spent catching up on what old boys were doing from the newspapers. He is one of the greatest and most striking headmasters of his era, in the class of J.F. Roxburgh, the founder of Stowe. Monty Rendall responded to originality and cleverness in boys, and was the first person outside the family circle fully to recognise Clark’s potential. Clark always spoke of him later with affection, claiming ‘he saved me’.
What was Rendall like? Clark thought he combined the muscular Christianity of Charles Kingsley with the aestheticism of the pre-Raphaelites. He was something of an actor, both grave and absurd, who affected a shaggy Edwardian moustache and always wore a tie unknotted but dragged through a key ring. One contemporary described him: ‘Monty was so marvellously, so intoxicatingly, so memorably, so splendidly funny … he came from a generation who had the courage to dramatise itself.’23 Chivalry was the cardinal virtue for Rendall, and he commissioned a medievalising triptych in praise of it, which he bequeathed to the school. He believed, wrote Clark, in ‘that mixture of learning, courtesy and fair play, which seemed to him the ideal of a gentleman either in Mantua or Winchester College’.24 To Clark, as to many Wykehamists, Monty Rendall was always the loveable, inspiring teacher who introduced him to Italian art.* (#ulink_8a0d104e-aed9-5aca-a1a0-390e859f629c)
Rendall set up a study centre at Winchester with images of Italian drawings and paintings. He produced detailed and beautiful wall charts of the painters of northern Italy – Florence, Umbria and Siena – in which he referred to Clark’s future mentor Bernard Berenson. His rooms were full of Italian art and Italianate contemporary art. He even created an Italian garden in front of the headmaster’s house, cheekily known to the boys as ‘Monte Fiasco’. Above all Rendall was an inspired lecturer, and Clark had his eyes opened to the wonders of Giotto, Fra Angelico, Pisanello, Botticelli and Bellini, all presented with the kind of humorous asides that he was later to employ himself. The lectures were a mixture of learning from Berenson, Roger Fry and Herbert Horne, but Rendall had bicycled around Italy and actually seen all the works of art he described, so his lectures had a directness that spoke to the young Clark. Every year Rendall would give his most memorable lecture, on St Francis of Assisi. Fifty years later, when Clark made the third episode of Civilisation and spoke of the saint, many old Wykehamists – and he acknowledged that they were right – heard echoes of Rendall. It was these lectures and exhibitions at Winchester that predisposed Clark to work with Berenson. When he was leaving the school Rendall gave him a copy of Berenson’s A Sienese Painter of the Franciscan Legend.25
There was another important way in which Rendall influenced Clark. He would invite a dozen of the more interesting boys to join a society known as ‘SROGUS’, which stood for Shakespeare Reading Orpheus Glee United Society. They met on Saturday evenings, wearing dinner jackets, in the headmaster’s house, where Clark found himself alongside two future socialist grandees, Hugh Gaitskell and Richard Crossman. These readings cemented his lifelong taste for Shakespeare and the theatre, which one day would lead him to play a significant role in the formation of the National Theatre. The parts he asked to read show an interest in character: Justice Shallow, the porter in Macbeth, and Caliban.26
‘The beauty of the buildings of Winchester penetrated my spirit,’ Clark later wrote, and they inspired his lifelong love of architecture. He was bowled over by the cathedral: ‘nothing had prepared me for such a sequence of contrasting styles, each beautiful in itself, and yet palpably harmonious’.27 He later referred to it as the building he had in his mind during the war when he was put in charge of Home Publicity, and was formulating the values for which the country was fighting.28 Clark sketched the ruins of the Romanesque arches in the south transept – he was already aware of Turner – and was encouraged by the greatest architectural draughtsman of the day, Muirhead Bone, a kindly Scotsman who visited Winchester and would later play an important role in Clark’s life on the War Artists’ Advisory Committee. He also admired the fabric of the school itself, the Gothic chantry and its cloisters, and even the nineteenth-century buildings by William Butterfield. There is no doubt that Clark’s love of architecture was ignited at school, and from this later emerged his book The Gothic Revival and his acquisition of Saltwood Castle. It extended beyond the stones: ‘No Wykehamist can forget that Keats lived there while he was writing the Ode to Autumn, and walked every day through the meads to St. Cross: so his poem and letters are mixed up with the most vivid memories of natural beauty.’29 During the 1960s he was to campaign to save the water meadows.
Did Clark make any school friendships? Tony Keswick, who later became an important patron of Henry Moore, remembered his kindness when he had nothing to put up in his ‘toy’.* (#ulink_9a966f6b-06a5-5134-8137-8982762ab252) Clark said, ‘Don’t worry, I have an envelope full of drawings, help yourself,’ and pulled out drawings by Augustus John and William Orpen, which as Keswick recounted, ‘being the dear fellow that he was’, he was allowed to keep for ‘the rest of my career at Winchester’.30 It was in his last year that Clark encountered a fair-haired boy who was three years younger than himself. They met in Gilbert’s second-hand bookshop off the Cathedral Close, which ‘became a potting shed for my mental growth’, where John Sparrow* (#ulink_44e14453-da6e-5a4f-b733-ec0d6a1d22ea) mentioned that he had just discovered a copy of a lost book, John Donne’s Devotions.31 Their friendship was based on a shared interest in seventeenth-century literature; Clark became Sparrow’s mentor, and the relationship endured. Clark would later inscribe books for him as ‘my oldest friend’, and Clark, Sparrow and Maurice Bowra would form a lifelong friendship triangle.
Clark’s academic progress was steady but not outstanding by Winchester standards, and he eventually became a house prefect. We can follow the improvements in his reports over a two-year period, 1921–22:
‘Fair report … Mustn’t shirk the dull part of work’
‘Coming on in character’
‘Lack of concentration: must take being a prefect seriously’
‘Plenty of intellectual interests but does not let them prevent his ordinary work’
‘Useful prefect’
‘Must keep art as a hobby and keep a sense of proportion’
‘Brilliant report’
Contrary to the impression given in his autobiography, by 1921, his penultimate year at the school, Clark was regaining the confidence so dented by his first year. He became a conspicuous school intellectual, giving art history lectures and vigorously debating international affairs and post-war politics. We begin to observe the future leader of the arts in Britain finding his feet. He gave a lecture about ‘Wall Decorations’ from Byzantium to Puvis de Chavannes – The Wykehamist reported that his ‘style was free, but somewhat spoilt by the frequency of artist jargon’. The greatest surprise, however, to those who have read his own accounts of his obscurity and shyness at school, is the debates. On 8 November 1921 he opened a debate to speak in favour of benevolent despots, and reflected that there ‘might be found perhaps some educated Dukes … but that there were practically no educated charwomen’. In March 1922 The Wykehamist tells us Clark informed the chamber that ‘To argue was great fun … and concluded on a magnificently journalistic note by enquiring if there was anything more pleasant than to really squash (ugh!) your opponent.’32
Clark had come a long way since the miserable first week at the school. It was now his turn to terrify juniors, though he never did so physically or cruelly. One said, ‘My attitude towards him is, I think, best expressed in the simple word “fear”. He was impatient of stupidity, humbug and conceit … his demeanour was one of urbane ferocity.’33 Clark was in fact undergoing several changes at this time. He was coming to the gradual realisation that his talents lay not in his rather derivative drawings, but in writing and the use of his intellect. He was struck by Matthew Arnold’s dictum that if an Englishman can both write and paint, he should write, for writing is the national form of expression. A few of Clark’s early writings survive, including a story entitled ‘Historical Vignettes: Wonston, 80 A.D.’, ‘written at school for the Library master 1921’. This is a whimsical, rather Shavian dialogue between a wise savage Briton and his foreman, a sophisticated Roman centurion, about the virtues and graces of civilisation.34 What finally cemented Clark’s belief that his future lay with the pen rather than the brush was winning a scholarship to Trinity College, Oxford, in 1922. He liked to pretend that everyone at Winchester was astonished, and nobody more than his housemaster, the Jacker, but the evidence suggests otherwise. The idea suited Clark’s view of himself as an autodidact outside the mainstream.
Kenneth Clark was thought later in life to embody certain characteristics that it used to be claimed were Wykehamical: he was astringent of mind, ferociously disciplined, and occasionally chilly. When he was interviewed for a school magazine in 1974, he reflected, ‘It always surprises me when I hear people talk of Wykehamists as a special breed, because you simply cannot group them all together: I was there with David Eccles, Hugh Gaitskell, Cecil King, Dick Crossman, Douglas Jay – possibly the only real Wykehamist among them – John Sparrow and Denis [sic] Lowson;* (#ulink_0f7bc0f2-4c45-59ad-9e77-ee1cef7793d2) they were a very mixed lot.’ Winchester produced more than the usual number of socialist intellectuals, but the only one of that list who was to become a close friend of Clark was John Sparrow, who emerged as the tease of the left. Dick Crossman characterised the typical Wykehamist as a ‘blend of intellectual arrogance and conventional good manners’.35 Winchester may not have had the Whig insouciance and Athenian elegance of Eton, but it had a high seriousness of purpose and an intellectual distinction that has produced generations of ambassadors, permanent secretaries, heads of Oxbridge colleges and field marshals. The school encouraged a social conscience, often revealed in public service, and apart from the specific benefits of Rendall, this remained its strongest influence on Clark’s life.
The charm of Golly and his Dutch dolls, who formed such an integral part of his private world, and the affectionate support of Lam may have been rudely interrupted by the male rituals of Winchester, but if the school destroyed the innocent dreams of the solitary boy, it brightened his quicksilver mind and opened it to the possibilities of Italian art, English theatre and poetry, which were to be the sustenance of his life. Every Winchester boy has a note on his file – called ‘Leaves’ – that gives an indication of what happened after he left the school. Clark’s is wonderfully schoolmasterish: ‘Did not get a first in history at Oxford, probably too much drawn off to art: turned to art criticism.’
* (#ulink_49c3e93f-8de3-54c6-b89d-0575beb20c9e) ‘I read Walter Pater at Winchester but for some reason left this out of the autobiography, a disgraceful omission.’ (BBC, ‘Interview with Basil Taylor’, 8 October 1974, British Library National Sound Archive, Disc 196.)
* (#ulink_4054730c-bb6b-5354-8554-e3b5bcb7c188) Information supplied by the Orford Museum. Today Sudbourne Hall is gone, but the drive, converted stables, model farm and village remain. The trappings of Edwardian wealth are still evident, and the vast empty walled gardens, the cricket pitch and surviving outbuildings speak of the former scale of the establishment.
* (#ulink_062629ff-b445-51e6-9a28-c6d5244e23bb) In the 1960s Clark would become one of its leading defenders against developers.
* (#ulink_34c2955b-db0e-5dc5-9dfe-92202a4764ca) In 1951 Clark funded the reinstallation in Thurbern’s Chantry chapel of four beautiful stained-glass windows from 1393 showing the tree of Jesse, in memory of Rendall. The cost was in excess of £5,000, an enormous sum at the time. See letter to L.H. Lamb, 27 July 1973 (Winchester P6/135).
* (#ulink_c93586d4-7f3f-5011-95d5-4c88e5e24a8f) The Winchester term for the wooden partitioned area allowed to each boy.
* (#ulink_c93586d4-7f3f-5011-95d5-4c88e5e24a8f) Sparrow (1906–92), the future Warden of All Souls, was to be a lifelong friend.
* (#ulink_3c5ad19e-ab0e-5227-9296-686677e3fc27) Lord Eccles, Tory politician and Arts Minister; Hugh Gaitskell, Labour leader and Chancellor; Cecil King, newspaper publisher; Richard Crossman, Labour politician and diarist; Douglas Jay, Labour politician; Sir Denys Lowson, much-censured City tycoon.
4
Oxford (#ulink_fa01487b-a636-5f40-99c1-69cfa839ce23)
The most valuable thing about college life is the infection of ideas which takes place during those years. It is like a rapid series of inoculations. People who have not been to college catch ideas late in life and are made ill by them.
KENNETH CLARK to Wesley Hartley, 19 February 19591
In October 1922 Kenneth Clark entered Trinity College with an honorary scholarship, ready to enjoy what he later called the hors d’oeuvres of life. The attractions of Oxford in the 1920s have often been described; the city still breathed from its towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, and the suburbs barely encroached on its borders. Clark was part of the famous generation of Oxford undergraduates who came up confident in the jingle
Après la guerre,
There’ll be a good time everywhere.
And yet in that brilliant and colourful gallery which included Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell, Clark hardly registers at all. By his own account the reason was his shyness, but he was never likely to be part of the aesthetes’ set which congregated around Christ Church, with its homosexual clubs and flamboyant behaviour. Clark’s own college, Trinity, was small, not especially distinguished, and had a hearty and sporting reputation. A recent president,2 eyeing the alumni portraits in the President’s Lodge, observed that on one wall were all those who had won the colonies, and on the opposite wall were all those who had lost them. If history chiefly remembers Oxford in the twenties for the antics of a few conspicuous undergraduates, it has forgotten that most were ordinary beer-drinking, pipe-smoking sportsmen, and it was these who would generally have confronted Clark in his own college. Clark was faced with the same problem he had had at Winchester of fitting in, and his ‘first feelings at Oxford were of loneliness and a lack of direction’.3 He never joined the Oxford Union or any of the conventional clubs where alliances were forged. Nevertheless, he was to make most of the friendships that carried him through life at the university.
Clark was rescued from loneliness by the pink-faced dean of Balliol, F.F. Urquhart, always known as ‘Sligger’. He was a medievalist who as a young man nearly became a Jesuit and remained a devout Catholic, the first don of that persuasion in the university since the seventeenth century. Sligger – who reminded some of a prim maiden aunt – never wrote a book. Instead he made it his life’s work to bring undergraduates together. He kept open house – without alcohol – for serious-minded undergraduates each evening, and you were as likely to meet minor royalty as budding poets in his rooms. For Clark these occasions were ‘a reservoir of kindness and tolerance and I went there most gratefully’.4
It was in Sligger’s rooms that Clark met two Etonian scholars destined to be among his closest university friends – Bobby Longden at Trinity and Cyril Connolly at Balliol. Longden, ‘that rare and irresistible combination, an intelligent extrovert’,5 was a red-headed Apollo whose gaiety and charm captivated Clark. Connolly he described as ‘without doubt the most gifted undergraduate of his generation’ – he was certainly the best-read, well versed in French poetry, Silver Latin and the Church Fathers. For his part, Connolly described Clark as ‘a polished hawk-god in obsidian’, but their relationship was complicated by Connolly’s melancholic temperament, possessiveness over Longden, and Clark’s didactic nature.* (#ulink_c13c43ed-df89-52db-881b-bf100efcb734) Connolly was a gifted letter-writer, and wrote Clark a series of letters which he described as ‘erudite, original, observant and so perfectly phrased that they could have been published as they stood’.6
But the man who blew away Clark’s shyness and gave him the courage to be himself was Maurice Bowra, later Warden of Wadham. Bowra, an Oxford titan who had a profound influence on many of Clark’s generation and later, was the nodal figure of that liberal generation of intellectuals and educators that Noel Annan called ‘Our Age’.7 Bowra had served in the trenches during World War I, and gained a lasting dislike of officialdom. Isaiah Berlin said of him, ‘he was emotionally with the poachers, even when he officially crossed over to the gamekeepers’.8 His chief weapon was wit, which he used to disinhibit young men with what he called his ‘Trumpets, and kettledrums, and the outrageous cannon’.9 All Clark’s priggish fears and inhibitions were blown to smithereens under a barrage of bravura teasing. Bowra enjoyed being outrageous and shocking the prim – he was at the centre of a homosexual-leaning world he referred to as ‘the immoral front’, ‘the homintern’ or ‘the 69th International’. He loathed prigs and cold fish, and it is greatly to his credit that he was able to see beneath Clark’s shyness, especially as Clark remained entirely heterosexual in his tastes.
Part of Bowra’s technique was to draw undergraduates out about their parents – ‘What does Major Connolly think of L’Après-midi d’un Faune?’10 In Clark’s case he invented a mythical personality for his father, outrageous and funny, which ‘lifted from my shoulders a load of shame and resentment’. Bowra had a booming voice, and came out with truths that no one else would dare speak. To his friends he was the most affectionate and warm-hearted man, but woe betide his enemies. In his autobiography he described Clark at Oxford: ‘In exhilarated moments he would sing snatches of Opera; he liked good food and drink, and knew about them … he had a keen sense of absurdity, told excellent stories of strange characters whom he had met, and was always ready to laugh at himself. This essential gaiety was at war with his appearance and manner.’11 Bowra’s wide culture spanned ancient and modern, and he extended Clark’s range of authors: the poetry of Yeats, Rilke and Edith Sitwell, the works of Turgenev. Clark later admitted that ‘I use a great many expressions, intonations and inflexions I derive from Maurice.’12 They also shared socialist politics. Clark would often refer to Bowra as his greatest friend, and they would spend Christmas together until old age. Clark would always be what later became known as a ‘Bowrista’.
If Clark’s literary education took place mainly in Maurice Bowra’s rooms, there was also the matter of his undergraduate course, or History Schools. The Oxford practice of producing a weekly essay, he later thought, ‘leads to a certain amount of facility in condensing and arranging ideas … it teaches one to write of everything at a certain length … about the length of a newspaper article, and so this bad habit continues in after life … I suffer from it very much.’13 Clark liked to give the false impression that he took a relaxed view of his studies, and as he laconically observed to Connolly, ‘If anyone will not take the trouble to read history, Maurois and Lytton Strachey are amusing enough.’14 In fact his reading at this time was deep, and his learning struck his contemporaries. His college tutor at Trinity was a booby, a hangover from Gibbon’s Oxford who was invariably indisposed, but Clark did have two great teachers, the economist F.W. Ogilvie and the economic historian G.N. Clark – the latter ‘taught me the little about historical method that I know’.* (#ulink_dd49cb57-332d-58bf-8086-da1652a99aa2) His borrowings from the college library, such as Ranke’s History of the Popes, occasionally foreshadow later references. He claimed that he only went to lectures in the hope of sitting next to a pretty undergraduate named Alix Kilroy (later Dame Alix Meynell), but as usual he was devising his own course of studies, and had begun the reading that would enable him one day to make Civilisation. When he came up to Oxford he had already read Carlyle’s Past and Present and Michelet’s History of France. At the university he started reading economic history with Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, the bible of the Labour Party and the book that crystallised the socialism that Ruskin had first stirred in him. Clark has described how at Winchester social questions were far from his mind, and when a debate was organised with the local working men’s club, ‘they seemed to belong to a different species and we regarded them as figures of fun’.15
The change in Clark’s outlook was gradual, and there is no doubt that the main influence was reading Ruskin’s Unto This Last, a book that also made a deep impression on Gandhi. What was it about Ruskin that stirred Clark? Ruskin revealed a unique combination of artistic and moral sensibility. His perceptions on art and nature were often contradictory and unexpected, but were based on unrivalled power of observation and expressed in luminous prose. He was a preacher who believed that art, beauty and morality were indivisible, and that ugliness was wicked. Henry James observed of Ruskin’s approach to art that it was as if an assize court was in perpetual session governed by Draconic legislation. Clark perfectly well saw the many inconsistencies in Ruskin’s position, but nevertheless was captivated by his credo that beauty was everyone’s birthright. He was never to adopt a moral position about art and beauty, but what he took from Ruskin was not only his descriptive power but the belief that art should belong to all. The counterpoint to Ruskin was the Swiss Jacob Burckhardt,16 whom Clark believed was the most intelligent and best-equipped of art historians: ‘where Burckhardt is calm and detached, Ruskin is excited and engaged; where Burckhardt is sceptical, Ruskin credulous, where Burckhardt is sure-footed and economical, Ruskin plunges into one extravagant irrelevance after another’.17
Clark’s other Victorian household god was Walter Pater, who preached the gospel of aestheticism. Pater’s famous ‘Conclusion’ to his book on the Renaissance exhorted Oxford youth ‘to burn always with a hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, [that] is success in life’. Clark certainly understood that a passion for art made him spiritually indestructible, but Pater to him was much more than a brilliant stylist. He later made the case that Pater was a philosopher of sorts: ‘the aim of his best works was to suggest ways of achieving the ideal life’.18 There would be many echoes of Pater in Clark’s own work, particularly Leonardo and the unfinished Motives.
If Clark thought that the infection of ideas was the most useful education at Oxford, he was lucky in having another education which would determine the course of his life. On arrival at the university he had gone in search of artistic company, first at the Dramatic Society and then at the Uffizi Society, but came to the conclusion that ‘it would have been difficult to find more than three or four people’ in Oxford interested in art.19 Any examination of student magazines and exhibitions of the time reveals this statement to be untrue, but Clark wanted nothing to do with the aesthetes’ herd, and was rarely seen at undergraduate parties. Instead he went in search of art itself. He began to inspect, systematically, the collection of drawings at the Ashmolean Museum, one of the greatest assemblages in the world, under the guidance of the Keeper of Fine Art, C.F. Bell.20 Small and slightly hunched, Charles Bell was as different from booming Bowra as can be imagined. If Bowra liked to fire the big guns – Socrates, St Paul and Tolstoy – Bell’s interests were narrower and more parochial, English watercolours and Italian plaquettes. He was a man of taste who ran his department as a grand private collection. Prickly and possessive, Bell almost certainly fell in love with Clark, who played Charles Victor de Bonstetten to his Thomas Gray.* (#ulink_1ad82f9f-c2da-582f-ab16-54d5a13a3463)
C.F. Bell was to have a profound influence on Clark’s life in three ways: he introduced him to Bernard Berenson; he suggested the subject of his first book; and he allowed him free run of the drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael in the Ashmolean. He gave Clark a copy of J.C. Robinson’s 1870 catalogue of the drawings, and instructed him to annotate it, which was ‘the finest training for the eye that any young man could have had’.21 Clark always professed that Bell, more than anybody else, was responsible for his education in art, by forcing him to look at drawings. Bell also took Clark to visit private collections such as that of Dyson Perrins,* (#ulink_41617884-cd8d-5418-9897-88cc513aa79e) where he could inspect the Gorleston Psalter. But all this came at a heavy price: Bell wrote Clark long letters that he felt incapable of answering adequately. Later the relationship was to sour, and Bell became Clark’s most vociferous critic both in private and in public.
If Clark was still more at ease with older men, he did make some effort with his contemporaries at his own college, and to be part of university life. He joined the Gryphon Club, the Trinity paper reading club, and soon became its secretary – he appears in a 1925 club photograph. Bobby Longden and John Sutro22 were also members, and Clark attended the annual dinners. He also wrote lively art reviews for the university periodicals the Cherwell and the Oxford Outlook.23 He was still sporty, and enjoyed playing tennis and golf.24 However, there were two distinctive features of Clark at Oxford that drew him away from university life: he owned a motor car, and as Bowra observed, ‘he cultivated young women when there were few about, but kept them from his friends, since they did not yet form part of the Oxford scene and he was not sure how they would be received’.25 Where women were concerned, Clark was already starting to compartmentalise his life.
What sort of impression did Clark make on his contemporaries? He spent his first year at Trinity in the New Building, designed in the Jacobethan style of 1885 by T.G. Jackson. Colin Anderson26 was on the same staircase: ‘As you got up to his floor, it was not Shangri-La exactly, but it was detached from the world’: the furniture had been changed, the pictures were real paintings (including a ravishing Corot), and the room was strewn with beautiful objects. Clark had an up-to-date gramophone on which he played Bartók, Mozart and Beethoven – all his visitors were struck by his enormous record collection, in which he was helped by Eddie Sackville-West, an aristocratic musicologist with a fin-de-siècle disposition.27 ‘He was cocooned in a civilisation of his own up there,’ noted Anderson, adding, ‘he took very little part in the life of the college’.28 At some point Clark’s rooms suffered the attentions of college hearties, and were wrecked in a manner not unusual for an aesthetically-minded undergraduate to suffer.* (#ulink_116191b9-191b-50cf-abd7-bfe12fb9e5b5)
Anthony Powell remembered Clark at Oxford as ‘intensely ambitious, quite ruthless … he was a ready bat for a brilliant career … he was one of those persons with whom one never knew whether he would be quite genial or behave as if he had never set eyes on one before’.29 Peter Quennell, the most admired undergraduate poet in the university, described this as Clark’s ‘Curzonian superiority’. One contemporary who became a close friend for life was the Cambridge medieval historian David Knowles. Sligger Urquhart owned a chalet in the Savoy Alps, to which he would take reading parties, and he invited Clark alongside Knowles in the summer of 1924. Clark did not enjoy these Spartan visits any more than he enjoyed holidays with his parents in Scotland. Knowles’ impression was that he was ‘incredibly learned, fastidious, almost cold’.30
During that summer Clark turned twenty-one, and for the first time we have surviving letters to and from his parents which provide a window into his home life. His father paid for him to receive a newspaper, but Clark had to admit, ‘I am afraid my “Times” has not been a success. There is no time to read it and for that matter very little of interest. It goes straight into the waste paper basket.’31 This surprising lack of interest in newspapers was to endure all his life.
Around the time Clark first went up to Oxford his parents moved from Bath to Bournemouth, which was thought to be healthier. They bought a large, featureless villa, ‘The Toft’, which is a hotel today. Despite considerable losses from his properties, boats and (as we shall presently see) industrial investments, Clark’s father was still able to afford to buy the Ardnamurchan peninsula on the west coast of Scotland, consisting of seventy-five thousand barren acres of land and a large, gloomy lodge at Shielbridge. Clark went there out of duty, and began a lifelong habit of going for long solitary walks. During these walks he would often soliloquise, and it was to this that he attributed his later ease at lecturing. Through force of habit Clark senior kept a boat on Loch Sunart, which brought one unexpected benefit for his son – the numinous pleasures of the nearby abbey of Iona. This was always to remain a sacred place for him, to be compared with Delphi, Delos and Avila, where he felt the vibrations of the past; emanations that he communicated in the first episode of Civilisation.
Clark described the Oxford summer term to his mother as ‘a charming vision of white trousers, river-picnics, long shadows in the parks, bathers in the stripling Thames’.32 His parents were already complaining about the vagueness of his future plans, and distressed that he chose to spend the long vacation improving his French rather than with them at Shielbridge. He wrote a rather sanctimonious letter to his mother from the Hyde Park Hotel by way of justification: ‘I cannot pretend that it is going to be any fun being by myself in France. But as I have explained before … and as we have to impress upon the Labour Government (which I shall one day adorn) the vacations were intended to provide time for quiet, independent work and the study of foreign languages. One’s schools depend entirely upon the amount of work done in one’s last long vac.’33 Perhaps this letter reveals more about his mother’s newly formed ambitions for him. She appears to have belatedly discovered her son’s brilliance, and wanted him to become prime minister, or at least a diplomat. Clark spent most of the summer vacation at St Avertin on the Loire, under a tough but brilliant French teacher, ‘Madame’, whom he both loved and loathed. He placed photos of objects from the V&A in his room, and enjoyed the local golf course when he had time off. His father recommended that he should fall in love with a pretty French girl.34
Normally Clark would have left Oxford after graduation at the end of his third year in June 1925, but he decided to stay on for a further year. He informed his mother that he might catalogue Michael Sadler’s collection of modern pictures35 or study one of the great Italian painters, but the project that he actually adopted for his fourth year was suggested by Charles Bell in the week before his final examinations. It was as unexpected as it was original: ‘Write a book on the Gothic Revival.’ Bell had become interested in the topic as librarian of the Oxford Architectural Society. It was an inspired idea. Here was a subject that surrounded Clark at Oxford, and played to his interest in Ruskin. Moreover, ‘these monsters, these unsightly wrecks stranded upon the mud flat of Victorian taste’ required explanation.36 As Clark said, the Gothic Revival was seen as a sort of national misfortune – like the weather – and he was expected to write something satirical in the manner of Lytton Strachey. He described how undergraduates and young dons would break off their afternoon walk to go and have a good laugh at the quadrangle of Keble, which it was universally believed was designed by Ruskin rather than Butterfield.
With so many distractions, Clark was doubtful about the likelihood of his achieving a first in his finals. He wrote to his mother, ‘you must prepare for a steady second’ – which was in fact what he received. He was sanguine about the result, claiming to believe that ‘I have not got a first-class mind’ – but nobody at the time or since has accepted that explanation. Sligger Urquhart reminded him that John Henry Newman and Mark Pattison37 both got seconds, and Clark reminded himself of Ruskin’s honorary fourth. A consoling Bowra wrote: ‘I am so sorry about the schools. I am afraid it will mean your family driving you into the business and that would be terrible. Otherwise it has no importance as experts always get seconds and journalists usually get firsts … nobody else will think the worse of you for not being officially regarded as a master of a subject which bores you to death.’38 It certainly made no difference to Clark’s career, and if it dented his confidence nobody noticed – but it may have curbed his conceit. He undoubtedly had a powerful belief in his own superior gifts, but this was an early indication that these might not lie in a purely academic sphere. The failure to achieve a first may have had a greater influence on his outlook than was apparent at the time, and he eventually became impatient with scholarship for its own sake.
At Oxford Clark had addressed himself most effectively to senior members of the university – he had made a deep impression on older men, all bachelors; but he was now about to exercise his Wunderkind charm on somebody as attached to feminine company as himself.
* (#ulink_3762cb0e-d812-51f5-b399-59d4b8173c0d) ‘I see mainly Bobbie and Piers with a good deal of Roger and Maurice and a bit of K. Clark – who is usually bearable for the first three weeks.’ Letter from Cyril Connolly to Noel Blakiston, 25 January 1925 (Connolly, A Romantic Friendship: The Letters of Cyril Connolly to Noel Blakiston).
* (#ulink_2b67e86f-1d4e-5e35-8b3b-d76c7cf3b197) G.N. Clark was interested in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, and there are echoes of his influence in Civilisation episode 8, The Light of Experience.
* (#ulink_d350f9f5-9acf-5f9d-bd72-d317fb95c46f) Towards the end of his life the poet Thomas Gray (1716–71) fell in love with the young Swiss aristocrat Bonstetten, who lived near his lodgings in Cambridge.
* (#ulink_0efdba2c-95ce-501a-84fa-c55b86efe5ab) Perrins was a distinguished books and manuscripts collector. Years later, when Clark was at the Ministry of Information, he wrote to Perrins, who lived near Malvern, stating that if London was bombed the ministry would be evacuated to Malvern, and asking if in that event he could be billeted at Perrins’ house, where ‘I would be less likely than some other evacuees to do violence to your early printed books and pictures.’ Apart from giving away confidential information, the request was highly irregular. Letter to Dyson Perrins, 17 May 1940 (Tate 8812/1/1/6).
* (#ulink_9b349394-5c4a-5948-ac8c-2216f059e2ac) See a letter of protest from Josslyn Hennessy (3 February 1975) about a curious incident when Clark turned on him at a Beefsteak Club lunch after Hennessy had mentioned their first meeting at Oxford: ‘For you said with what, in contrast to your previous manner, struck me as studied politeness, “Now that you remind me of it, I remember it perfectly,” adding after a pause, “That was the time that you were one of the gang who wrecked my room.”’ (Tate 8812/1/4/36.)
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