The first serious row over a proposed production at the National Theatre arose in 1964 over a plan to stage Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, a tale of repressed adolescents that the censor, the Lord Chamberlain’s office, had banned (the Royal Court had circumnavigated the problem with a licensed performance). Clark was in favour of staging the production with some alterations, believing that ‘the adolescent sexuality [was depicted] with great feeling but the poetic passages were mawkish’.42 The theatre board overruled him, and the play was not produced. Two years later Clark was on the other side of the argument over the Spanish playwright Fernando Arrabal’s The Architect and the Emperor of Assyria. Clark felt bound to tell Olivier, ‘We all thought it was pretentious nonsense and inexpressibly tedious. It is a mixture of Beckett, Ionescu and Anouilh; gimmicks from all three and odiously clever, but without a spark of conviction.’43 The play went ahead, but Chandos at least was relieved to have an ally in Clark: ‘I have a suspicion that you don’t find the Drama Panel an entirely agreeable occupation, but I don’t know how we should have got on without you, and if you had said [no]…I feel that I should have emigrated.’44 Clark wrote a reflective response to Chandos, wondering why things ‘had taken a direction so very different from what most of us had anticipated. Apart from our director’s [Olivier’s] obsessive fear of being thought old-fashioned, there are two factors I had not reckoned on: first that producers would feel themselves incapable of putting on straightforward productions, and secondly that famous actors would refuse to repeat their great performances of the past…perfectly incomprehensible to all the great actors of France.’45 The Mermaid, the Chichester Festival and the RSC at the Aldwych were all putting on an increasing number of classic productions, and Tynan, Olivier and the National Theatre management wanted to associate themselves with new-wave drama and the younger type of dramatists who were writing for the Royal Court.
The climactic row came in 1967 with the German playwright Rolf Hochhuth’s Soldiers, the plot of which implied that the recently deceased Winston Churchill (a friend of Chandos) was responsible for the death of the Polish hero and patriot General Władysław Sikorski. This premise was wildly speculative and unhistorical – but for Tynan it was the perfect tease, and he hoped that with it he might be able to force Chandos’s resignation. Even Olivier privately thought it was a bad play, and told his wife Joan Plowright, ‘I don’t like the bloody thing – but if you think I am frightened of doing new stuff, you’ll despise me, won’t you?’46 The dispute erupted in public, and it fell to Clark to restore peace. Preparing for the showdown meeting, he told Janet: ‘Tynan deserves to be sacked twenty times over, but it would be a great mistake to do so. I shall have to try and smooth O. Chandos and [his] understandably enraged feelings.’47 The board refused to stage the play, which in Chandos’s view ‘grossly maligned’ Churchill. Olivier declined to sack Tynan – ‘I had chosen golden youth,’ he later remarked – but Tynan’s power at the National Theatre was diminished by the affair. Clark had now had enough, and needing to concentrate on Civilisation he resigned from the board the following year, telling Kenneth Rae that he now rarely came to London, and was out of touch: ‘It distresses me to feel that I am in a false position and cannot give a proper service to the National Theatre.’48 To Janet he was more frank: ‘Isn’t it lovely to have left the National Theatre. I hated it.’49
—
Since 1964 Clark had been a trustee of the British Museum, frequently intervening on matters of both policy and acquisition.50 John Pope-Hennessy, the museum’s director from 1974, rated him ‘the best Trustee that I have ever known. It was natural that he should be so, because of his immense breadth of knowledge and generosity of character, and he was always the one Trustee I would look to for advice.’51 As soon as Clark was appointed, each of the departmental keepers offered to take him for a walk around their collection, in the hope of making an ally for future acquisitions; but as he wrote to a friend, ‘it is quite clear to me that what is most needed in the British Museum in almost every Department is money spent on installation and display’.52 Although space was the fundamental problem, Clark believed that the greatest challenge of the museum was to resolve the tension between visual pleasure and visual record. If the National Gallery existed to give pleasure as a museum of art, he observed that the British Museum was a museum of societies, and aesthetic considerations often came second. He described a trustees’ meeting to Janet, followed by ‘agonising buffet lunch…then we go round one or other of the depts, exhausting on an empty tum, and actually v. depressing, as they all have such masses of stuff in store, enough to furnish 40 museums, all waiting for the hypothetical student who never comes’.53
When Sir John Wolfenden was appointed director of the museum in 1968 he produced what Clark thought was ‘a deplorable paper’ called ‘Trustees’ Policy on Acquisitions’. Clark pointed out to the chairman, Lord Eccles, that ‘documents of this kind if they are not answered or debated, are sometimes invoked by the author at awkward moments’,54 and wrote a fascinating response questioning the desirability of the museum having any formulated policy at all at this stage of its development. The problem, he thought, lay with the changing directions the museum had followed in the course of its history, starting as a visual accompaniment to natural philosophy but then diverting to encompass some of the highest achievements of the human imagination, such as its Michelangelo drawings. He believed that some departments would always have a documentary emphasis, while others would incline to artistic values, and that therefore no general acquisitions policy was possible.55 While he recognised the necessity for a museum of classification, ‘in a room containing several thousand Greek vases, your faculties are numbed’.56 Despite his seeming preference for the ‘art’ departments, Clark told Eccles that what the museum needed was more archaeologists on the board of trustees. Even more surprisingly, he recommended the talents of his old enemy Geoffrey Grigson: ‘he has been continually offensive about me for forty years but I have a good deal of respect for him’.57
There was one point on which Clark was certainly divergent from museum policy: the Elgin marbles. He was in favour of their return, although he never said this in public. As early as 1943 he had written to the museum director Thomas Bodkin: ‘I am, quite irrationally, in favour of returning the Elgin marbles to Greece, not to be put back on the Parthenon, but to be installed in a beautiful building on the far side of the Acropolis, which I think the British Government should pay for. I would do this purely on sentimental grounds, as an expression of our indebtedness to Greece.’58
* * *
*1 Later to be better known as Raine, Countess Spencer – the stepmother of Diana, Princess of Wales.
*2 Edith Sitwell wrote, ‘Companion of Honour is the best name for you, the exact name,’ and Reynolds Stone thought it ‘sounds to me the most romantic of honours, and suggests long and intimate conversations with Royalty!’
*3 ‘A few bouquets from unexpected quarters – Sydney Cockerell, Gerald Kelly, Hugh Trevor-Roper!!! All people I never see, and except for old Cockerell don’t much like.’ Letter, 11 November 1959 (Tate 8812/1/3/3252–3300). Trevor-Roper hailed the piece as ‘by far the best thing I have read on him’.
*4 Moore was always at the top of Clark’s holiday postcard list. Clark enjoyed sending and keeping postcards: ‘In a collection of postcards you have, in the cheapest and handiest form, what Mr. Malraux has called an imaginary museum, which you can arrange and discard at your pleasure.’ Talk given at the Royal Albert Hall to the National Federation of Women’s Institutes, 30 May 1962, to help save the RA Leonardo cartoon for the National Gallery.
31
Civilisation: The Background
My idea of Civilisationcould not have been more cloudy and was very much that of a controller trying to establish colour television on BBC2. I pulled the trigger but did not make the explosion.
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH, March 20131
When David Attenborough, the controller of BBC2,
invited Kenneth Clark for lunch in September 1966 ‘to discuss a project’, nobody could have imagined the success of the series of thirteen programmes that would result. Attenborough’s motivation was strategic – to launch colour TV in Britain. He had been controller of BBC2 for a year, and it was decided by BBC management that colour would be introduced on the new ‘highbrow’ channel. Colour television had a very bad reputation; it had been introduced in America in 1953, and was, in Attenborough’s view, a catastrophe: ‘The colour was garish and the variability between sets was horrible.’ BBC technicians had been quietly working on producing an acceptable level, comparable to what audiences could enjoy at the cinema. Attenborough had the task of trying to convince people to buy the extremely expensive new colour television sets of the upgraded 625 lines standard. He decided that ‘in order to do that I thought I needed to convince people and opinion-formers that colour was worth having, I had the notion to create a series which would look at all the most beautiful pictures and buildings that human beings in Western Europe had created in the last two thousand years and put them on television with appropriate music that had been written at that particular time’.2 Crucially, he was supported in this ambitious project by Huw Wheldon, the BBC controller of programmes.
There was no doubt in the minds of senior staff at the BBC that Clark should be approached. As Attenborough put it: ‘I wanted someone those opinion-formers would watch and respect – and K was the obvious choice. We had not met, and he had a daunting reputation. We had his books in the house, and he was one art historian who was read by non-specialists. There were younger presenters, but they were mostly modernists, and this series would hardly touch contemporary art – and the only other popularly known art historians all had German accents!’3
Attenborough and Stephen Hearst (assistant head of music and arts) invited Clark to lunch at BBC Television Centre in order to sell the idea. Attenborough outlined his plan, and Clark described how he was munching his smoked salmon rather apathetically when Attenborough used the word ‘civilisation’, and ‘suddenly there flashed across my mind a way in which the history of European civilisation from the dark ages to 1914 could be made dramatic and visually interesting’.4 He later said that he felt what used to be known in books of devotion as ‘a call’.5 At this point Huw Wheldon burst through the door and asked in a cheerful manner, ‘How’s it going, chaps?’ But Clark had detached himself from the conversation, and was no longer listening to the rest of the party talking amongst themselves. In his mind he already pictured himself standing on the Pont des Arts in Paris, at the very heart of European civilisation. He was mapping out the series in his head, and later claimed that it all came to him, in its final form, during that lunch. According to his memoirs, by the end of the lunch he had agreed to do the series, and that he would do it alone – but this seems unlikely from the evidence.
Shortly after the lunch, Humphrey Burton, the BBC’s head of music and arts, wrote to Clark suggesting the BBC’s approach: ‘We would like to have you as General Editor of this series. We would like you to lay down the principles upon which the series should be built, define the areas to be covered etc.’6 This letter crossed in the post with one from Clark to Attenborough which expressed his doubts about the project. Firstly, he said that he would ‘have to vet almost every picture sequence and probably edit the scripts’. Having established his bid for control of the material, he pointed out that he was ambitious to finish a number of books before he was seventy. Attenborough shrewdly guessed that there were also family reservations, but by the end of the letter Clark was keeping the door open, enclosing ‘a sketch of how I was thinking of treating the programmes’.7 This document is missing, but we can follow Clark’s early steps through his notebook at the Tate archive.8 He planned fourteen episodes – which the BBC reduced to thirteen, to fit into its three-month schedules. At an early stage his dilemma about Spain surfaced; he was uncertain whether to make the Rome of the Popes the centrepiece of the Counter-Reformation, or the Escorial, ‘which would be a perfect focus for the whole programme’. As we shall see, his decision to exclude Spain altogether would lead to ruffled Hispanic feathers.
Clark could not make up his mind about the project, as he confided to Janet: ‘Should I do it? It would mean a year’s work (of course I wouldn’t write it all, only plan it, and perhaps introduce each episode)…the programmes would be rather a potted world history affair – on the other hand it could have a slight value at a time when the standards of European culture are being forgotten – which can’t be a good thing.’9 One of his main concerns was the BBC itself, or what he referred to as ‘current BBC policy’. By this he meant the corporation’s reputation for innovative, occasionally zany arts programmes, exemplified by Monitor, a fortnightly arts magazine on which several young directors and presenters cut their teeth, notably Ken Russell and John Berger. The trendiness of the BBC worried Clark, who feared that his version of the subject, without any fashionable sociology, might seem hopelessly out of date to a young director – and he was almost right.
Clark’s notebook has an interesting coda: ‘Warn BBC not Marxist, not a history of economics, nor of political ideals…religion will play a bigger part than economics.’ He did actually sketch out an episode called The Cash Nexus – a departure from this scheme: ‘But it must be made clear at some point how far some of the most valuable things in Civilisation are made possible only by fluid capital.’10 This was an echo of his old Oxford teachers F.W. Ogilvie and G.N. Clark, but economics was not in the end to play a major role in the series, partly because Clark knew very little about it, and as he told Humphrey Burton: ‘I have forgotten any history I ever knew, but I seem to have a good memory for visual images and these would really be the basis of my programmes.’11 Although Clark was clear from the beginning that the series would not be a history of art, the story was always going to be told through the art. Burton reassured him that ‘we are not interested in a neo-Marxist approach. What we want is your view, and with great respect I don’t believe that there is anything old-fashioned about what you say.’12
Monitor may have seemed to Clark too experimental for his purposes, but there was another nascent model at the BBC. In 1964 the corporation had broadcast a twenty-six-part series, The Great War, narrated by Michael Redgrave, each programme one hour long, but without an authorial voice. The true parents of Civilisation are perhaps Mortimer Wheeler’s mini-series The Glory That Was Greece (1959) and Compton Mackenzie’s The Grandeur That Was Rome (1960), or indeed Clark’s own series for ATV on Temples. These programmes represented the birth of the ‘authored’ series with which we have become so familiar. Wheldon and Attenborough saw the future when they envisaged Civilisation with an informed talking head on the screen every week for three months. As Attenborough realised, ‘Talking heads can be the very best television ever. Secondly, there was a scholarly reason why it was important – we were anxious that K Clark should make assessments of these things.’13 He points out that ‘Although ambitious and expensive, Civilisation was not as brave a series to launch as people imagined. The BBC in those days did a lot of things that had tiny audiences, like hours of opera at huge expense. There were no penalties for failure, so it was not as brave as people thought. Radio 3 was doing highbrow stuff for years and nobody cared. All part of the Reithian BBC.’14 What was unprecedented was the scale and budget of the projected series, with £15,000 initially allocated to each episode.
The choice of director, made by Wheldon, Burton and Attenborough, was Michael Gill – who was everything that Clark most feared about the BBC. Gill was close to the Monitor world, with many notable contemporary art film credits behind him and a hankering to push boundaries. As his wife, the actress Yvonne Gilan, explained: ‘We were hedonists and both very left-wing and belonged to CND and had a mission. We lived in a hip artistic world of creators. Michael didn’t think the barbarians were at the gate, and Michael would have probably wanted to be the barbarian at the gate.’15 Gill liked
the idea of Clark even less than Clark liked the idea of him. He had heard him talk on The Brains Trust and at Edinburgh University (where Gill read psychology and philosophy), and thought him ‘cold and self-satisfied’. In fact the two men were more similar than they realised: both had had an isolated lonely childhood; they were both introverted, intellectual and left-leaning. Although Gill was the son of a bank manager and lived in Kensington, production assistant David Heycock recalls, ‘Michael pretended he was working-class…he told me that his wife was a Trotskyite.’16 When he was introduced to Clark over coffee at BBC Television Centre, the impression Gill received was one of disdain. It was mutual. Their first private meeting, at which Clark outlined his vision of a series of lectures delivered in a studio while the camera travelled without him to locations, was no more successful. Gill wanted Clark on location for every scene, and to change the way television was done.
Clark reported his worries to Janet: ‘The administrators who have called me in are charming, but alas, my producer is painfully anti-pathetic – an ectoplasmic emanation from the New Statesman correspondence columns. I don’t know what to do, I hate to say anything, as it seems “prima donnaish” but a year’s work with someone like that, at my time of life, is no joke. I suppose I must ask him to lunch alone, and make sure that I am not mistaken.’17 Both Clark and Gill confided to Burton that their partnership was unlikely to work. Gill asked to be taken off the project: ‘I felt that Clark was too senior and inflexible in his ways.’18 At the same time Clark told Burton, ‘My style and content might be a bit too square and stuffy,’ and suggested that John Berger might be more sympathetic to Gill.19 Burton likened the situation to the difficulties of mating pandas.
Kenneth Clark Page 43
