Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation. James Stourton
All Clark could answer was that he ‘came from an undemonstrative family and my feelings are as stiff as an unused limb’.32 He confessed to his friend John Walker that he was never entirely at ease with Berenson, and towards the end of his life he became critical of his commercial shenanigans. BB, for his part, on a walk one day with one of his pupils, Willy Mostyn-Owen, stopped ‘and turned to me and said regretfully “I love K, but, you know, I am not sure if I like him.”’33
Berenson’s imprint remained all over Clark. He was always to see things in terms of their origins, which he learned from BB. They both harboured lifelong ambitions to write ‘the great book’, which by their own lights neither achieved. They both adored women and cultivated sentimental attachments, occasionally even pursuing the same prey. Later in life Clark would spend the evenings as Berenson did, writing to his current amours. Saltwood in the eyes of many was Clark’s own I Tatti – when his son Alan was first taken up to Settignano and saw the familiar combination of Renaissance pictures and bronzes with Eastern works of art, he exclaimed, ‘Now at last I understand Papa.’34 Both Clark and Berenson had a love–hate relationship with their own tribe, and both believed (probably wrongly) that they had steered away from their true path – in Clark’s case pure scholarship. Their differences were as striking as their similarities. Clark devoted much of his life to administering the arts, mostly pro bono committee work. Berenson had no such compulsion, although he left I Tatti with its art collections and library to Harvard for use by scholars. He never gave a public lecture in his life, whereas this became the lifeblood of Clark’s reputation. Berenson once prophetically said that Clark would not be able to resist the wish to become ‘un grand vulgarisateur’.35 What he would have made of Civilisation nobody can say – yet by his range and his example he was in many ways responsible for it.
* Clark, ‘Aesthete’s Progress’ (John Murray Archive). Caroline Elam points out that this statement is very questionable – apart from the faulty chronology (this was 1926, and BB didn’t start until the 1890s) – and perhaps reflects Clark’s old-age view of the matter. BB had invested so much of his scholarly capital in the project that it is unlikely that he was not interested.
* Clark’s daughter Colette.
* Two fashionable concepts at the time, the first offered by Berenson and the second by Clive Bell, to explain the aesthetic value of works of art.
* According to this letter (Cumming (ed.), My Dear BB, p.12), Clark was planning to take Jane to Sospel. A less romantic place could hardly be imagined.
* Years later he told Janet Stone: ‘The Scots are really odious, so noisy and tactless, no sense of privacy. They grasp one with one hand and point over emphatically with the other, and shout in one’s ear. I loathe them – but I love Edinburgh, and I recognize that their lack of restraint is partly due to warm-heartedness.’ Letter to Janet Stone, 9 August 1955 (Bodleian Library).
* Clark was to depend on shares from the family cotton business, Coats, all his life. Letter to Jane, 10 November 1927 (Saltwood).
7
‘Blessed are those who have taste,’ said Nietzsche, ‘even although it be bad taste.’
Quoted by KENNETH CLARK in The Gothic Revival 1
Kenneth Clark’s first book, The Gothic Revival, was completed on almost exactly the same day that his first child was born, 13 April 1928. Jane had been taken to hospital the night before, and at first all seemed well. However, it turned out to be a difficult birth on account of the baby’s enormous head, and Jane suffered accordingly. Clark made light of the matter when he wrote to Mary Berenson: ‘I believe she is much better today, though still stiff & weak. As for the baby, no one seems to bother about it, so I presume it is perfectly normal. It seemed to me abnormally ugly, but people with more experience assure me that it’s beautiful. School of Baldovinetti, anyway, and very close to the one in the André picture.’2
The baby was christened Alan Kenneth Mackenzie Clark, and to everyone’s amusement ‘hiccoughed gently while we gave solemn promises that he would shun the flesh’.3 Alan certainly never heeded this undertaking. His godparents were two of Clark’s Oxford friends, Bobby Longden and Tom Boase,4 the latter a curious choice who does not even rate an entry in Clark’s autobiography. He and Boase had met at Sligger Urquhart’s chalet, and perhaps Boase’s mild, uncompetitive character – Maurice Bowra later ridiculed him as ‘a man who has no public virtue and no private parts’ – made him an acceptable choice of godfather to Jane, who may have been alarmed by the alternatives.
The boy was taken back to St Ermin’s Hotel. It was not until the following year that the Clarks bought their first house, at 56 Tufton Street in Westminster. This joyless dwelling, paid for by Clark’s father, was furnished with many of the heavy left-over pieces of furniture and pictures from Sudbourne. Clark wrote with his usual breeziness to the Berensons: ‘This house is very much to my taste. The decorations are quite unadventurous, and of a kind most unpopular just now – mahogany furniture & large gold picture frames of the kind called Edwardian. But I grew up among such surroundings & would not be comfortable in the shiny rooms now fashionable … Jane is very well, despite a great deal of work and worry … Our first experiment in servants was a failure, the cook refusing to attempt an omelette, owing to the complicated nature of the dish.’5 Jane had their bedroom redecorated with William Morris wallpaper – this was to become a feature of all their future houses – and Kenneth commissioned the then comparatively unknown Bernard Leach to make tiles for a fireplace. He hung his drawings in the study and bragged to the Berensons, ‘They include an enchanting Correggio & a ravishing Beccafumi which I managed to snatch out of the teeth of the dealers here. Soon I shall believe I own Leonardos & Michelangelos.’6 Despite having a setting for their things, neither of the Clarks liked what he later referred to as ‘a nasty little house in Westminster’, and within a year it was sold.
The Gothic Revival was published the following year by Constable, a firm recommended by Logan Pearsall Smith.7 Its genesis was the result of C.F. Bell compiling material on the subject for a study of the ethics of the Revival. He had a habit of collecting notes which he would sometimes hand over to a favoured pupil, and had offered the idea, along with his notes, to Clark for presentation as a B.Litt. to enable him to spend a fourth year at Oxford. The university was still overcrowded owing to the after-effects of the war, and the board of studies required reassurance that Clark would stay the course. Bell, who had volunteered to act as his supervisor, duly told the board that Clark was a serious student and would not default.8 Part of his later bitterness about Clark arose from the feeling that he had cavalierly tossed the B.Litt. to one side, thus causing him embarrassment with the board and ‘concealing the circumstances in which [the book] was in the