Kenneth Clark

by James Stourton

  What of Clark’s other girlfriends? Colette maintained, ‘My father was a compulsive charmer; he was very put out if women did not fall in love with him.’ He would take his ladies to first nights at the theatre or opera and to exhibition openings, as well as to see works of art in galleries; one remembers, ‘He worked really hard at special treats and his pleasure was to see us hang on his every word.’56 There were a great many who did, and they all offered him something slightly different. Perhaps on Janet’s account, Myfanwy Piper eventually went off Clark, who noticed without undue concern: ‘A happy visit. John entirely unchanged. Myf no longer anxious to please – or at any rate to please me – which is a trifle less nice for me, but she is a dear all the same.’57 The relationship would suffer a further knock when Myfanwy wrote a play, The Seducer, based on a novel by Kierkegaard, which Clark didn’t like. She wrote him an angry but affectionate letter which had little effect, as he told Janet: ‘She wouldn’t have liked it any better if I said this is boring nonsense, which is actually what I thought.’58 Clark continued to correspond with Mary Potter over Aldeburgh happenings, and in keeping with his dictum that all his girlfriends’ names began with ‘M’, during his Arts Council period he had an affair with a London University lecturer, Maria Shirley, whom the art historian Giles Waterfield remembers as ‘an engaging maiden lady’. The actress Irene Worth was another faithful adorer, but their association became too much for her, and a period of estrangement followed.

  Clark was playing with fire when he indulged in a romantic friendship with Jayne Wrightsman. She and her very watchful multi-millionaire husband Charles were the main benefactors of the Metropolitan Museum in New York. She was clever, very pretty, and one of the queens of New York society; he was a forceful oil executive, and together they collected art at the highest level, from Vermeer to David. Clark met Jayne (according to her recollection) at I Tatti in the late 1950s,59 and was smitten at once. She displayed an extraordinary curiosity about the arts, and nothing escaped her. ‘Jayne Wrightsman was a great love,’ thought Catherine Porteous, ‘and K fancied her very much. One day he said, “Charles is very jealous of me, and not without reason.” On another occasion he said to me that “Jayne Wrightsman and I stood in front of the Polish Rider at the Frick and I never felt so close to anybody as at that moment.” ’60 Colette had heard her father mention Jayne casually as ‘a little old lady’, and was quite unprepared for the glamorous figure she encountered by accident on the steps of Albany. His love was reciprocated, judging from a set of postcards Jayne wrote at about the time Clark was giving the Wrightsman Lectures in 1965. One refers to every obstacle being in their way.61 Clark’s feelings for Jayne probably presented the greatest threat to his marriage since Mary Kessell, but good sense was to prevail. By 1968 he could confide roguishly to Janet: ‘Every spare minute was taken up by the famous Wrightsmans. Thank heaven they only come once a year and they have to be treated like Royalty. I must say they have been very kind to me. Poor old Charles isn’t nice at all, but Jayne is adorable. Seventeen years ago she was the prettiest thing in the world and he was an old man. Now he is in the pink, and she looks as if she were dying…don’t worry – we only meet once a year and Charles never lets her out of his sight.’62

  Clark also had a discreet affair with Margaret Slythe, the unpaid archivist/librarian for twenty years at Saltwood, and otherwise a tutor librarian at Bournemouth College of Art. She became very fond of both Clarks, and found herself ‘complicit in supporting them at a number of different levels’.63

  Clark once told a journalist that he had received sweetness and forgiveness from all except one of his lady friends. The exception was probably the Hythe interior designer and art dealer Elizabeth Kirwan-Taylor. An opinionated, glamorous redhead who enjoyed literary company and claimed friendship with Vita Sackville-West and Noël Coward, she was divorced with four grown-up children, and believed that Clark would marry her; she was not inclined to go quietly when he failed to.64

  There is no doubt that Clark got himself into an extraordinary mess with his declarations and promises. It is true that such affairs within marriage were handled with greater urbanity in those days, and did not customarily lead to divorce. That was certainly never Clark’s intention. He enjoyed these alliances precisely because he was married, and in a sense safe. Sex no doubt played its part, but it is unlikely to have been the motivating force. Clark liked to write to his girlfriends, and to meet them only occasionally. Writing letters in this context meant a great deal to him; it gave a sense of reality to what might otherwise have been a mere passing fancy. Colin summed it up: ‘What my father really loved was to have an intimate dinner with an intelligent, beautiful lady…But sometimes it did lead him into indiscretions and because he was a writer he wrote letters which he later regretted. He once told me, “I can’t go for walks alone in the countryside, I’ve just got too many of those letters hanging around in my head.” He was unable to forget the fact that he had been so indiscreet and so often, and with so many people, sometimes on the same evening.’

  —

  Apart from writing letters to his girlfriends, Clark’s greatest relaxation was reading. ‘I am not a novel reader,’ he once told an audience. ‘Perhaps the habit of reading history has led to the feeling that I must check every statement to see if it is true.’*6 Under pressure from Janet he tried the novels of her friend Iris Murdoch: ‘After my adventure in reading I. Murdoch, I am now trying Durrell Alexandria Quartet; not my sort of book.’65 Colette was puzzled by his reading: ‘At some stage Papa must have read a few books. I never saw him work or read. One day I was reading War and Peace and he turned to me and asked, “Is it any good?” ’ She was surprised to discover that he had never read it, although he later called Tolstoy’s novels ‘marvels of sustained imagination’.66 Colette remembered, ‘He had read Anatole France, but on the whole my mother had read much more.’67 Secretaries recall his fondness for detective novels and whodunnits when travelling or waiting. But Clark’s preferred reading was poetry, the Early Church Fathers and history. When he made a radio programme about his literary tastes, With Great Pleasure, he described the seventeenth century – from Donne to Dryden – as his favourite period of poetry.68 He presented readings from Herbert, Cowley and Vaughan, and also included pieces from Homer, Wyatt, Wordsworth, Keats and Burns. He ended with poets he knew: Yeats, Edith Sitwell, and Arthur Waley’s translations of Po Chu-i. When he asked John Betjeman which of his poems he should use, Betjeman wrote back that all his poems were terrible, and enclosed a piece of prose entitled ‘Winter at Home’.69

  Clark’s reading of the Church Fathers is unexpected, and raises the question of his faith, or lack of it. His parents were not churchgoers, and his introduction to the Church of England at prep school and Winchester left no obvious imprint apart from the aesthetic pleasures of ritual. At Oxford Sligger Urquhart was a devout Roman Catholic, but the influence of Maurice Bowra was much stronger. Bowra was an unbeliever who accepted the outward trappings of the Church of England and the framework of a Christian community, useful for rites marking the passage of life. Although Clark took his cue from Bowra, he felt that something was missing: ‘I cannot get it into my head that the C of E is not concerned with God, but with good fellowship, cricket, flowers etc. My lecture was full of references to the Passion, the liturgy and so forth, which made everyone wince. The trouble is that my notions of religion are derived either from the medieval saints or the 17th century preachers, and I don’t realise how things have changed.’70

  Perhaps more important, at various stages in his life Clark was touched – or so he believed – by the divine. The most notable example of this was an experience at San Lorenzo in Florence: ‘for a few minutes my whole being was radiated by a kind of heavenly joy, far more intense than anything I had known before. This state of mind lasted for several months, and wonderful though it was, it posed an awkward problem in terms of action.’71 He knew that his life was far from blameless, and felt unworthy
of receiving this flood of grace. While he was sure that he had ‘felt the finger of God’, it did not make him a believer, but ‘it still helps me to understand the joys of the saints’.72 He was particularly sensitive to certain ‘holy places’: Sanchi, Delphi, Iona and Assisi – he would celebrate the sense of the numinous of the last two in Civilisation.

  Clark’s position was not unlike that of Walter Pater, of whom he wrote: ‘although he passed through a phase of positive atheism, [he] was constantly brooding on the mystery, both doctrinal and historical, of the Christian religion’.73 Clark had a nebulous respect for the idea of the immortal soul, and believed in God-given genius – but whose God? His position was closest to the Deism of the Enlightenment, and a belief in nature and natural law, although he felt the attempts by Teilhard de Chardin to link the two were ‘subtle but incomprehensible’.74 He told Janet – the daughter of an Anglican bishop: ‘I am not a Christian because I cannot accept the doctrine of the Atonement, even symbolically…I am not a moralist – and have been a man of frivolous and irregular life – so I cannot get in on the John Reith–[Malcolm] Muggeridge ticket…there is no such thing as primitive ie pre-Pauline Christianity. It is no more than a personal selection from the Gospels, leaving out all the unpleasant, ie Judaic parts. As you see Theology (and drugs) are my chief preoccupation.’75

  His feelings may be gauged by his conditions for the renewal of his annual £50 covenant to Saltwood parish church: ‘I do not wish any of this money to be used for Missions abroad, and I am particularly opposed to the Parish Korean Mission.’76 However, he liked to sit and contemplate in an old church, and claimed to have crossed the road and entered St James’s Piccadilly every day when he was in London.77 In the evenings he would read theology or the lives of the saints: a book on St Teresa of Avila or the Everyman Thomas Aquinas. He wasn’t always impressed, as he told Janet: ‘Have just finished reading the Penguin Acts of the Apostles. Paul that tireless, terrible, heroic, horrible little dynamo. What was he like – a mixture of Montgomery and Beaverbrook, but harder headed in spite of being so emotional.’78

  If Clark’s religious attitudes were puzzling, his political beliefs are probably clearer to us today than they were to his contemporaries. Everybody, as we have seen, always thought he was on their side, and he usually played his cards close to his chest (except over matters of principle like Suez). His Ruskinian heart lay with socialism, but his head was happy to collude with a Conservative establishment over, for instance, Independent Television. He was careful not to antagonise the Tories, and entertained many of their grandees: Churchill, Anthony Eden, and Rab Butler. Very few socialist politicians had reached the Clarks’ table since Ramsay MacDonald. When he ran into his old school friend Hugh Gaitskell, by then leader of the Labour Party, he told Janet: ‘Little Hugh has grown rather heavier looking – far more of a cavalier than a roundhead. But he remains more one of us than other politicians. Whether or not that will be a good thing for the country I don’t know.’79

  There is a letter from Isaiah Berlin about Turgenev which neatly describes Clark’s position: ‘He spent his entire time apologising to everybody and explaining to the right why he was slightly left-wing and to the left why he was not quite right-wing.’80 Clark’s socialism was Wykehamical and à la carte; he remained all his life an elitist and a believer in wealth. His socialism was motivated by his veneration for Ruskin, and to a lesser extent by a mistrust of the Tory establishment. He evinced no special sympathy for the working class, but a fierce belief that ‘art is not the prerogative of nobs and snobs, but the right of every man’.81 Professionally, he usually favoured left-of-centre technocrats like David Webster and Bob Fraser. He always voted for the Labour Party in elections (Jane remained a Tory), and when Edward Heath won a surprise victory for the Conservatives in 1970 he told Janet, ‘I am absolutely shattered by the result of the election…I never realised how strong my Labour sympathies were till I went down to breakfast this morning. Of course everybody else here is jubilant! They will soon be wringing their hands!’82

  However he voted, Clark was never at home in either political establishment; he wished to maintain his independence, and the right to be a Cavalier among Roundheads and a Roundhead among Cavaliers. When he joined the House of Lords in 1969, appointed by the Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, he sat on the non-party cross benches.

  * * *

  *1 Letter to Janet Stone, 5 May 1955 (Bodleian Library): ‘A very depressing interview with my financial advisor. I had been far too careless, and if it wasn’t for my pictures I should be BROKE.’

  *2 ‘Morgan Forster was adorable. We loved every minute of his visit, he could have stayed for weeks and we should have been glad. He is the only moral force I have encountered since Bishop Gore.’ Letter to Janet Stone, 24 February 1960 (Bodleian Library). Of David Knowles’ visit, Clark wrote: ‘a great and holy man, but so unassuming that one finds oneself doing all the talking and pushing him around’. Letter to Janet Stone, 7 August 1962 (Bodleian Library).

  *3 Alan Pryce-Jones, The Bonus of Laughter (p.187). This was a recurring theme: Jane once told the decorator Nicky Haslam, apropos of nothing: ‘The last time I was reading the Bible was to the King of Sweden’ (Financial Times, 5 June 2014).

  *4 Clark’s secretary Audrey Scales recalled to the author: ‘Every Monday morning a small square white envelope with neat italic handwriting in black ink marked “Personal” would arrive, addressed to KC, and I would place it on his desk, unopened.’

  *5 Slightly misquoted: ‘Quatro passi fra le nuvole’ (four steps in the clouds) – also the title of a 1942 Italian film.

  *6 Talk on Edith Wharton to PEN Club, 12 July 1978. See also letter to Leonard Cutts, 10 June 1950: ‘I am afraid I am not a novel reader. In fact I have not read one for years’ (Tate 8812/1/4/6).

  30

  Public Man: The 1960s

  I fear we are lost – not economically, but mentally bankrupt. We listen only to the negative and destructive – Sartre, Beckett, Pinter etc and if anyone is positive he sounds disgustingly smug…of course every age has thought that things were going to pot, but this time they jolly well are.

  KENNETH CLARK TO Janet Stone, 1 July 1967

  Clark celebrated the birth of the sixties in an improbable fashion, as he told Janet Stone: ‘I did such a ridiculous thing last night. I was asked to do an interview on the last day of the year etc on a TV programme which I had never seen. I thought we would just be sitting around like sick sheep – but the producer had the bright idea of situating us in a nightclub (at least I suppose it was a nightclub, as I have never seen one). There I sat surrounded by jiving sluts and a comic barman, and two pop singers and a jazz band, and finally had an interview with a character called Lady Lewisham,*1 who never stopped talking. I enjoyed the absurdity of the situation immensely – in fact got the giggles. Jane said, quite truly, that it was disgusting, vulgar and undignified.’1

  During the 1960s Clark found himself increasingly siding with the forces of reaction. The Queen had invested him as a Companion of Honour in 1959, the highest award for achievement in public life after the Order of Merit.*2 However, the world that Clark had come to represent and the values of the culture he so fervently projected were to be challenged throughout the decade, with its generational upheavals. It was an extraordinary piece of luck that towards the end of the sixties he was afforded the opportunity to make, in Civilisation, an eloquent defence of everything he stood for; but until that series transformed his life the decade was to be a depressing time. His ATV programmes had never been more popular, yet he felt his powers were waning, and he was still unable to grasp his ‘great book’. As he told Janet: ‘Sleeping so badly. I used to sleep like a mole, but now I worry, and, absurd as it seems, think of all the mistakes I have made in my life, especially the people I have let down. They go round and round in my head. Every day I plan to do more work, and then a thousand things happen. Really what is wanted is more energy and will power.’2 He also found t
hat he was becoming less responsive to works of art – feeling tired and guilty about the work to be done, he wrote to Janet from Rome: ‘I had the miserable feeling of not reacting to things I know to be beautiful!’3

  As if to increase Clark’s sense of loss, the man who, Maurice Bowra apart, had been the greatest influence on his life died in October 1959. Clark wrote a piece for the Sunday Times in which he tried to convey what Bernard Berenson had represented to Anglo-Saxon intellectual life and for him personally. It was a heartfelt tribute, which drew praise from some unexpected quarters, including Sydney Cockerell and Hugh Trevor-Roper.*3 Despite the warmth of this paean, Clark was beginning to change his ground about his old mentor. John Walker records Clark telling him: ‘After 1938 I believed myself to be on comfortable and affectionate terms with B.B., and after the war he behaved to me with the utmost kindness and sympathy. It was only later on that I discovered to my surprise that B.B. did not really like me. A friend of mine who looked up my name in the index of [BB’s published post-war diaries] Sunset and Twilight, said to me: “Heavens! How Mr Berenson disliked you!” It was a great shock, and it proves how sweet he was that he never let me feel it when I was in his company.’4 There can be no doubt that Clark would have been hurt by the revelation. For most of his life he had closed his mind to much that was questionable about Berenson – the early unkindness to Jane, the habit of vituperation about all his friends, and his questionable association with Duveen. Berenson’s death released these buried feelings, and in future accounts Clark admitted a great deal more ambiguity in his descriptions of the man.