Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation. James Stourton
described the visit to Berenson: ‘We had Fry down to lecture in Oxford (in the face of bitter opposition) and he developed violent influenza which the doctor feared would turn to pneumonia. He was staying with us. We had to send away Alan and call in two nurses … we were fully prepared for him not to recover. However he did, in a fortnight. And no sooner had he left us than Jane had a motoring accident. She ran into a lamp post, when driving her small car, at such a speed that she upset the lamp post, and overturned the car. The car was smashed to atoms and it is a miracle that she came out alive.’28
The Clarks entertained a good deal at their new house, and according to Alys Russell kept a staff of ten. Isaiah Berlin recalled to Clark’s daughter Colette, ‘I used to be invited to marvellous evenings at Shotover, and there met gifted and delightful people by all of whom I was dazzled and some of whom were sympathetic.’29 Jane was a perfect Oxford wife, entertaining Clark’s friends and being charming to the elderly university grandees. In that world she cut a very striking figure. Edward Croft-Murray described her driving her car up to the main entrance of the Ashmolean and appearing in a round white hat and riding breeches, ‘looking frightfully smart’.30 Jane, however, was always more complicated than she appeared to be, and anybody who knew her well soon realised that she could adopt several very different personalities. She had a destructive side which became more apparent later in life, with frequent temper tantrums and a growing dependency on alcohol. The first manifestation of these rages took place one night at Shotover, when she made such a violent scene that Clark had to leave the house. He spent the night walking the streets of Oxford wondering whether he had made a terrible mistake in marrying her.31 This was the beginning of a pattern of difficult behaviour. It was widely believed later that Jane’s erratic temper was a response to Clark’s infidelities (which had not yet begun), and no doubt they were a stimulant, but the Shotover episode suggests that long before there was any evidence of her husband’s affairs, her personality was unstable.
Clark’s ambitious book projects – other than the Windsor catalogue – had by now stalled, and he found a collaborator for what he referred to as ‘a history of classicism in European art’. Roger Hinks was a highly intellectual art historian whom Clark later described as ‘the rudest man in the world and very clever’.32 (Hinks was later to take the blame for the controversial cleaning of the Elgin marbles at the British Museum.) Clark characterised the plan – with echoes of Riegl and Wölfflin – as ‘our Antike-Mittelalter-Renaissance project’. This was almost certainly Motives by another description. Hinks asked Clark to subsidise three years’ research, but Clark’s funds were fully stretched in advancing the money for the new gallery at the Ashmolean. In the meantime, Owen Morshead was already beginning to plot Clark’s next move, writing in confidence to advise him that Charles Collins Baker would soon retire as Surveyor of the King’s Pictures.33 Ellis Waterhouse was generally considered the front-runner to replace him, but it is evident that Morshead preferred Clark.34 In the event Collins Baker took a great deal longer to retire than Morshead expected, but it was a marker for the future.
During the autumn of 1932 it was family matters that took up most of Clark’s energies. Jane was pregnant again, this time with twins, and his father’s health had finally collapsed through cirrhosis of the liver. Clark had visited him in August at Shielbridge, where his father mistook him for his own brother, Norman, who had died thirty-two years before. Clark told Jane that he ‘spoke much of his death and disturbed my mother terribly’.35 By October, the time of the expected birth, his father was dying. Clark went north to be with him, rushing back to the nursing home in London for the arrival of the twins on 9 October, then returning once more to Scotland to be with his father at the end.
Clark’s father lived to hear of the birth of the twins. ‘That’s good,’ he said, ‘but there’ll never be another …’ He meant to say ‘Alan’, but in extremis muttered ‘Roddy’, the name of his ghillie. They were his last words. He died on 19 October, aged sixty-four. The widowed Alice Clark was inconsolable and, no longer able to repress the feelings she had bottled up for so long, became hysterical. As her son (who hated scenes more than anything) was to point out, her life’s work was over. She had been left the Scottish estate, and now she relied on Kenneth to make all arrangements for her. The net value of his father’s personal estate in England was £100,780, and in Scotland £414,830, which included Ardnamurchan and no doubt his Coats shares. He left his son the income from £100,000 in trust, and his personal effects. Clark already had an income of £2,000 a year from Coats shares that his father had given him.36 While he was never as rich as people believed him to be, it is possible that Clark could have maintained his lifestyle (including the acquisition of works of art) on this income, combined with his salary and his father’s bequest. He was also soon to receive further capital funds from his mother’s share. The only contemporary reference to his father’s will comes in a letter from C.F. Bell to Berenson in the sneering tone that he now adopted when referring to his old pupil: ‘I have heard nothing direct of the K. Claques but he is announcing that he has inherited 5 houses and no money.’37
The arrival of the twins caused a minor sensation. Clark went to lunch on the day of their birth with the hostess Lady Cunard.38 Feeling understandably elated, he bounced into the room announcing, ‘Emerald, we’ve just had twins.’ ‘Oh Kenneth,’ she replied, ‘how wicked of you to bring more people into this world.’ The architect Edwin Lutyens enquired, ‘Boys or girls?’ ‘A boy and a girl,’ Clark answered triumphantly, to receive the response, ‘Always means two fathers …’39
The twins were named Colin and Colette – a conceit that Colin later thought reflected a rare lapse of taste on his parents’ part – and would be known in the family as ‘Col’ and ‘Celly’ (pronounced ‘Kelly’). They were christened in Clark’s old college chapel at Trinity, and the choice of godparents reflected old and new friendships. Colin MacArthur Clark was given the novelist Edith Wharton, Nicky Mariano, Owen Morshead and the Oxford Classical scholar Roger Mynors. The last proved so negligent that he was later replaced by the composer William Walton. Colette Elizabeth Dixon Clark was assigned Maurice Bowra, John Sparrow and also Nicky Mariano (who was thus godmother to both children). The only person who did not greet the arrival of the twins with pleasure was their brother Alan. Having previously been the sole object of adoration, he had no intention of allowing attention to be diverted. He yelled and screamed, and ‘if he scratched his leg he had to say it had been cut off’.40
Perhaps the most surprising of the godparents was the seventy-year-old Edith Wharton. Clark had met her at I Tatti, where at first she had ignored him, as she sometimes did upon meeting new people. But once The Gothic Revival had been published, she bestowed her friendship upon him. Maybe, as Clark suggests in his memoirs, she recognised a fellow craftsman. He was an admirer of her novels, although he found it difficult to reconcile their pessimism with her fundamentally warm-hearted personality. Soon the Clarks were regular guests at her pretty villa at Hyères in the south of France, where, as he later told her biographer, Edith was a terrible fidget: ‘She couldn’t bear anyone to sit down without a little table beside him, and I used to say that “little tables” should be her telegraphic address.’41 Clark hated writing letters, but he always took especial care when he wrote to Edith Wharton.*
In December 1933 the Clarks went to Paris for a break. They spent most of their time at the Louvre, and Clark wrote to Wharton, ‘what an inexhaustible old junk shop it is’. He referred to Jane’s purchases at Lanvin, but was much more animated by