Anglomania

by Ian Buruma

  Pevsner never used the word “dull” in his descriptions of the English character. But his explanation for the lack of “greatness” in English art certainly suggests as much. “England dislikes and distrusts revolutions,” he wrote in his Englishness of English Art. “That is a forte in political development, but a weakness in art.” He returns to this theme often: “A decent home, a temperate climate, and a moderate nation. It has its disadvantages in art.” England, he says, just to give an example, has no Rembrandt. This is perfectly true. But Rembrandt’s Holland was as temperate, as decently housed, and as moderate as England, in fact, more so: Cromwell’s Roundheads were rampaging across England while Rembrandt was painting in peaceful Amsterdam. But, as with Auden’s remark, you know what he meant.

  Particularly in his younger years, Pevsner tried his best to rectify the situation by preaching to the English about their lack of taste. He tirelessly promoted modern architecture, design, town planning, and art education. He championed the new age, carried by Italian futurists and German socialists, an age of speed, mass building, mass communication, and mass art. But his own dogmatic theories would have made this a somewhat quixotic enterprise, for however much he would have liked to modernize the English, their supposedly matter-of-fact, middle-of-the-road, stick-in-the-mud character would always ensure that any new departure would be watered down by compromise and nostalgia.

  Even though Pevsner regarded himself as a socialist, and always voted Labour, he was naïve about political affairs. So naïve that he sent his children on holidays to Germany as late as 1939. A British citizen without a drop of Jewish blood would have been foolish to do the same thing. Yet here was Pevsner, a Jewish refugee without a British passport, allowing his children to go back to Hitler’s Reich. His son, Dieter, just managed to escape in September 1939. But by the time his daughter, Uta, applied to the British embassy for a visa, the last British diplomats had already left Berlin. So she was stuck for the rest of the war. Her parents’ anguish can only be imagined. But it shows that Dieter was right: Pevsner must have felt more German than Jewish.

  Art and design, not politics, were Pevsner’s true domain. He saw politics in terms of design. He thought it was his “moral duty” to improve society, as a critic of art. Art should serve the people, be socially useful. He wrote: “Not one of the subjects is less essential, not one can be neglected, neither slum clearance nor the renovation of school buildings, neither the levelling up of class contrasts nor the raising of standards of design.” In 1935, as a research assistant in the Department of Commerce at the University of Birmingham, he set off on a survey of British industrial art, 90 percent of which he dismissed as rubbish. Many firms refused to see him. One manufacturer thought he was a foreign spy.

  There were other signs that alien modernists were not always welcome. The German architect Peter Moro received a commission in 1938 to design a house near Chichester. Being near Portsmouth, it was in a restricted zone, and Moro had to report to the police every time he visited the site. One day, a photographer for the staunchly modernist Architectural Review (to which Pevsner contributed many articles) took pictures of the house. He was oddly dressed, looked a bit “foreign,” and was immediately picked up as a possible spy. Some months later a land mine was dropped near the house and blew out the windows. Soon everyone was whispering the news that a German architect had deliberately built the house in the shape of half a swastika, to help Luftwaffe bombers find their way to Portsmouth.

  Pevsner was interned as an enemy alien and almost put on a transport ship to Australia. He was fortunate; one of these ships was sunk by German torpedoes. After his release, Pevsner took a job clearing bomb debris in London. But then his luck turned. In 1941 he was asked to edit the Architectural Review, and he resumed his efforts to modernize and elevate British taste. He did this—and would continue to do so all his life—by implementing German ideas, both practical and philosophical, in Britain.

  Germany excelled in cheaply produced books on history and art. There were the Georg Dehio guides to German architecture, and the richly illustrated Blue Books, and the handy Insel paperbacks on all manner of subjects. The Ministry of Information, in charge of British propaganda, took the first cue from German publishing by modeling its Britain in Pictures series on the Blue Books. Several Viennese refugees were hired to design and produce them. Allen Lane’s Penguin paperbacks were based on the Insel books. When Lane asked Pevsner, during a weekend in the country, what he wanted to do after the war, Pevsner didn’t hesitate for a moment. He would do a complete series of guides to the buildings in England. They would be the British version of the Dehio guides. Lane took a puff on his cigarette and told Pevsner to proceed. To ease the traveling, he provided him with a 1933 Wolseley Hornet.

  Pevsner’s method was both simple and efficient. First his assistants would dig around in libraries, making notes of everything they could find about the buildings of a given county (Cornwall was the first). These were transcribed on sheets of paper and tagged onto clipboards. Then Pevsner’s secretary would mark all the buildings on Ordnance Survey maps. And finally, Pevsner and his wife, Lola, with one or two assistants, would board the Wolseley, armed with clipboards, maps, and county histories, and cover sixty to eighty miles a day, every day, for two months, April and August, from eight-thirty in the morning till six-thirty in the evening. Pevsner drove the car once, but loathed it. So Lola became his regular chauffeur.

  The Buildings of England books would have been dry without Pevsner’s opinionated voice. You always know where he stands. He approved of things that are now regarded as modernist disasters. The dull, minimalist, concrete development around St. Paul’s Cathedral, by Sir William Holford, is praised as “a brilliant essay in the English tradition of informal planning.” Only a critic whose Anglophilia was as blinding as his modernism could possibly say that. He is dismissive, on the other hand, of the quirky decorative talents of Lutyens. Number 68 Pall Mall with its eccentric columns and pediments, is “irritating.” Nonetheless, a finer appreciation of the English character could temper such feelings. Six years before entering Number 68 Pall Mall in his guide, he discussed it in the Architectural Review. The first time he saw it in 1930, he had found the building not just irritating, but “silly.” Then, in time, he began to understand the English love of follies. To appreciate folly, he said, “a degree of detachment is needed which is only accessible to old and humane civilizations. Sir Edwin Lutyens was without doubt the greatest folly builder in England.”

  The main thing about The Buildings of England, however, is its art historical rigor. N.P. was impatient with English amateurism. Until the opening of the Courtauld Institute, art history had never been taught as an academic subject in Britain. Writing about art and architecture was, often in the best sense of the word, an amateur’s occupation. Foreigners, mostly from Germany and Austria, would change all that. Sir Ernst Gombrich, Rudolf Wittkower, Edgar Wind: the list is long. But in the case of Pevsner, the amateurs sometimes liked to hit back. John Betjeman, who rather cultivated the image of the flâneur carried along by his enthusiasms, ridiculed Pevsner in private. Some of Betjeman’s friends, such as Peter Clarke, a founding member of the Victorian Society, did so in public. Punch, a magazine that was singularly unsympathetic to modernists, and foreign modernists in particular, gleefully published his poems. One was entitled “Lieder aus der Pevsnerreise.”

  From heart of Mittel-Europe

  I make der little trip

  to show der english dummkopfs

  some echt-deutsch scholarship

  Viel Sehenswürdigkeiten

  by others have been missed

  but now comes to enlighten,

  der Great Categorist.

  Another was called “A Period Piece,” which spelled out the difference between the English poet, Betjeman, and the foreign “pedant,” Pevsner, most clearly:

  POET: A Poet-part-Victorian

  part topographer—that’s me!

  (Who was it ti
pped you Norman Shaw

  in Nineteen Thirty-three?)

  Of gas-lit Halls and Old Canals

  I reverently sing,

  But when Big-Chief-I-Spy comes round I curse like anything!

  Oo-oh!

  PEDANT: A crafty Art Historian

  of Continental fame,

  I’ll creep up on this Amateur

  and stop his little game!

  With transatlantic thoroughness

  I’ll note down all he’s missed

  Each British brick from Norm. to Vic.

  You’ll find upon my list!

  The mock German accent (in fact, Pevsner’s was only slight), the foreign “spy,” the “transatlantic thoroughness,” (whatever that means; I’m not sure I want to know), the Mittel-European pedant wrecking the English poet’s song: Clarke might have meant it all in the gentle spirit of good clean English fun. From what I gather, however, Pevsner wasn’t amused. Underlying these mocking lines is the suggestion that a true understanding of English art is given only to the native born. The foreign professor might know more than we do, and work harder, in his rather absurd scholarly way, but he will never “get” it—the poetry, that is, of the sheer Englishness of England.

  Poor N.P. No matter how hard he tried to be English, with his tweeds and woolly waistcoats and his membership in the Victorian Society, he was never allowed to forget his German provenance. Long after Pevsner died, the art historian John Harris, who assisted him on The Buildings of England, attacked him for being a “German authoritarian” and a “Prussian soldier” who had no sense of humor: “Achieving the Buildings of England was rarely accompanied by a giggle.” Driven by his German efficiency, his eyes always fixed on his watch, Pevsner had missed the “remoter parks and gardens.” He was prejudiced against classical styles of Edwardian and post-Edwardian architecture. He wouldn’t bother to read such periodicals as Country Life. Worst, or at least most un-English, of all, Pevsner was “utterly uninterested in genealogy and would describe vast houses without mention of the families who lived in them.”

  It is probably true that N.P. was not a giggler, like Betjeman. And although he was proud of his knighthood and took a certain delight in ceremonial occasions, he did not fawn on the British upper classes (and in any case, family histories were not part of his project). It is also fair to say that Pevsner thought Edwardian classicism was a debased form of “historicism,” a timid cop-out just when Britain was leading Europe into the modernist age. But if Pevsner’s main flaw was not to be a Betjemanesque amateur, that would be a minor one, if indeed it can be called a flaw at all. A far more wounding attack was launched from a place that is in some ways about as far removed from modernism as it is possible to be: Peterhouse, Cambridge.

  Founded in 1284 by the bishop of Ely, Peterhouse is the oldest Cambridge college. The buildings are a splendid architectural mishmash: a thirteenth-century hall, decorated by William Morris and other Victorians, a seventeenth-century Gothic-Renaissance chapel, fifteenth-century rooms behind an eighteenth-century facade, eighteenth-century Palladian chambers, a nineteenth-century Tudor-Gothic court, a 1930s addition, and a modernist tower, erected in 1964. Pevsner’s own description of Peterhouse is a perfect example of his views. The windows and tiles by Morris are pronounced “charming.” The Palladian style of the new chambers is praised for its purity. The nineteenth-century Tudor-Gothic is “remarkably unimaginative.” The neo-Georgian hostel “might be a post-office.” The 1930s building is good, because it is frankly “in the style of its date.” And the 1964 tower is “excellent.” Purity of zeitgeist is clearly of the essence.

  The zeitgeist at Peterhouse has often been as eccentric as the Geist of some of its most prominent dons. In the 1930s, the prevailing High Table spirit is said to have been in sympathy with developments in Italy and Germany. One well-known historian, Ernest Barker, lectured in Hitler’s Germany, comparing the führer, favorably, with Cromwell. But such Continental sympathies aside, the Peterhouse atmosphere was marked before the war by a militant conservatism. Humanism, secularism, socialism, and Whigish reformism were held in contempt. A romantic nostalgia for order, hierarchy, and faith perfumed the Peterhouse air like stale incense.

  Postwar Peterhouse has been dominated by dons whose right-wing views varied from radical Thatcherite libertarianism to ecclesiastical campery. They were united, however, in a common hatred of liberalism in anything but the economic sphere. Although such Peterhouse gurus as the historian Maurice Cowling extolled the English nation, their ideal of England was very different from those qualities Pevsner identified as typically English. If the typical Englishman is, as Pevsner—or Orwell, for that matter—supposed, a compromising, reasonable, moderate, tolerant, gentle club man or pigeon-fancier, then, in Peterhouse terms, the typical Englishman is odious.

  David Watkin is a Peterhouse art historian, and a Roman Catholic aesthete, consumed by a loathing of modernism. He wrote a ferocious attack on Pevsner entitled Morality and Architecture. Like Pevsner, who was once his teacher, Watkin takes the politics of art seriously. He sees Pevsner, or at least Pevsner’s modernist ideology, as a kind of wrecking ball, smashing everything that Watkin holds dear: not only old buildings, but all that they represent for him: tradition, religious faith, classical order, reverence for the past, nobility of birth, and so on. His criticism of Pevsner’s dogmatic views on zeitgeist and Volksgeist is harsh, but not unjust. The idea that art must, by some iron law, be determined by the economics or politics or “spirit” of an age is indeed nonsense. What interested me about Watkin, however, was his passion, which, in Pevsnerian terms, seemed rather “un-English.” His hatred of modernism appeared to surpass by far Pevsner’s contempt for “historicism.” I decided to pay him a visit.

  Watkin’s sitting room was decorated in a vaguely eighteenth-century style, with some camp touches here and there: burgundy wallpaper, prints of eighteenth-century grandees, including a rather sour-looking pontiff, leather-bound volumes of Pope and Swift, a well-used Debrett’s Peerage, everything by Nancy Mitford and Ronald Fir-bank, and antique tables bearing obelisks and statuettes of Greek gods—more than one Hermes, daintily lifting one leg, like a dog peeing. Watkin, a tall, slim man with the manner of a slightly precious priest, was dressed in a cream silk suit. We discussed the architecture of Albert Speer, whose neoclassical order Watkin admired.

  Watkin described Pevsner as “chilling,” “joyless,” “bleak.” He speculated on the interior of Pevsner’s house: no doubt sober, modernist, bleak. This was typical, he said, of foreign art historians, whose interest in art was mostly intellectual. Ernst Gombrich, for example, whose views Watkin rates more highly, probably lived in equally uninspiring quarters: “You know, the wrong side of Finchley Road.” There was a slight purse of the lips.

  We continued to talk about this and that, drinking sherry. Then Watkin told me he had hated modernism since he was eighteen: it had done such terrible damage everywhere, especially in Cambridge. He spoke about the evil of Pevsner’s joyless, Hegelian, determinist views, which continue to be quoted by town planners and other destroyers of tradition. He explained how he favored the restoration of old buildings, from scratch if necessary. He said that Pevsner never really understood English life, especially the social life shared by students and dons. Nor did he understand the way patrons and architects intermingled: “You see, he never met patrons, or people with money, or style, or birth.” Watkin’s long, thin hands folded, like a precious fan.

  I looked around the room, at the obelisks, the antique furniture, the prints of aristocrats and popes, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for Pevsner. Watkin’s fierce yearning for the fixed order of the past did not strike me as joyful. Perhaps in a way he had more in common with some of the modernists than Pevsner did. If too many modernist buildings suffer from rigor mortis, the same is true of too great a longing for tradition and hierarchy. Both suffer from a deadly absolutism. After all, the borderline between Albert Speer’s monumental, stripped-down ar
chitecture and modernist blocks is not always that clear. Speer and Gropius even claimed similar antecedents: the classic nineteenth-century tradition of Karl Friedrich Schinkel—who, by the way, was a great enthusiast, like Pevsner, of British industrial architecture. But unlike Speer, the best modernist architects, such as Loos or Berlage, were humanists. And humanism is what right-wing Peterhouse dons despise. Pevsner, whatever his faults, was a humanist, which is why he fell in love with a sentimental idea of the English character.

  Watkin, I think, misses the point of Pevsner’s Anglophilia, which was often in contradiction to his modernist ideology, but perhaps more passionately felt. Why else would Pevsner have helped to found the Victorian Society, which championed buildings a modernist would despise? It is, of course, easy to make fun of his Anglophilia. The Englishness of English Art is in many respects an absurd book. The notion that some essense of Englishness, running from the Middle Ages to the present time, can be identified in the national language is dubious, to put it mildly.

  The short, snappy English word “chop,” as in “pork chop,” instead of the florid Italian costoletta, shows, in Pevsner’s view, the English feeling for understatement. The square towers of medieval English churches, the pure lines of Georgian terraces, and the simple horizontals and verticals of English Palladian houses are all typical expressions of English reason, moderation, and compromise—“of chop and not costoletta.” There is also much talk scattered through the book of English liberties and English hospitality to foreigners, evident from the many Continental artists who made their homes in England. This shows, I think, that Pevsner’s heart, if not always his head, was in the same émigré’s English Arcadia that captivated Hayek. The Englishness of English Art was Pevsner’s tribute to his adopted country. Just as Pinder, his teacher, wanted to make Germans aware of their native genius, Pevsner tried to do the same for the English. It was, in the case of Pevsner’s England, a singularly conservative genius.