Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation

4
Oxford

The most valuable thing about college life is the infection of ideas which takes place during those years. It is like a rapid series of inoculations. People who have not been to college catch ideas late in life and are made ill by them.

KENNETH CLARK to Wesley Hartley, 19 February 19591

In October 1922 Kenneth Clark entered Trinity College with an honorary scholarship, ready to enjoy what he later called the hors d’oeuvres of life. The attractions of Oxford in the 1920s have often been described; the city still breathed from its towers the last enchantments of the Middle Ages, and the suburbs barely encroached on its borders. Clark was part of the famous generation of Oxford undergraduates who came up confident in the jingle

Après la guerre,

There’ll be a good time everywhere.

And yet in that brilliant and colourful gallery which included Harold Acton, Evelyn Waugh, Graham Greene and Anthony Powell, Clark hardly registers at all. By his own account the reason was his shyness, but he was never likely to be part of the aesthetes’ set which congregated around Christ Church, with its homosexual clubs and flamboyant behaviour. Clark’s own college, Trinity, was small, not especially distinguished, and had a hearty and sporting reputation. A recent president,2 eyeing the alumni portraits in the President’s Lodge, observed that on one wall were all those who had won the colonies, and on the opposite wall were all those who had lost them. If history chiefly remembers Oxford in the twenties for the antics of a few conspicuous undergraduates, it has forgotten that most were ordinary beer-drinking, pipe-smoking sportsmen, and it was these who would generally have confronted Clark in his own college. Clark was faced with the same problem he had had at Winchester of fitting in, and his ‘first feelings at Oxford were of loneliness and a lack of direction’.3 He never joined the Oxford Union or any of the conventional clubs where alliances were forged. Nevertheless, he was to make most of the friendships that carried him through life at the university.

Clark was rescued from loneliness by the pink-faced dean of Balliol, F.F. Urquhart, always known as ‘Sligger’. He was a medievalist who as a young man nearly became a Jesuit and remained a devout Catholic, the first don of that persuasion in the university since the seventeenth century. Sligger – who reminded some of a prim maiden aunt – never wrote a book. Instead he made it his life’s work to bring undergraduates together. He kept open house – without alcohol – for serious-minded undergraduates each evening, and you were as likely to meet minor royalty as budding poets in his rooms. For Clark these occasions were ‘a reservoir of kindness and tolerance and I went there most gratefully’.4

It was in Sligger’s rooms that Clark met two Etonian scholars destined to be among his closest university friends – Bobby Longden at Trinity and Cyril Connolly at Balliol. Longden, ‘that rare and irresistible combination, an intelligent extrovert’,5 was a red-headed Apollo whose gaiety and charm captivated Clark. Connolly he described as ‘without doubt the most gifted undergraduate of his generation’ – he was certainly the best-read, well versed in French poetry, Silver Latin and the Church Fathers. For his part, Connolly described Clark as ‘a polished hawk-god in obsidian’, but their relationship was complicated by Connolly’s melancholic temperament, possessiveness over Longden, and Clark’s didactic nature.* Connolly was a gifted letter-writer, and wrote Clark a series of letters which he described as ‘erudite, original, observant and so perfectly phrased that they could have been published as they stood’.6

But the man who blew away Clark’s shyness and gave him the courage to be himself was Maurice Bowra, later Warden of Wadham. Bowra, an Oxford titan who had a profound influence on many of Clark’s generation and later, was the nodal figure of that liberal generation of intellectuals and educators that Noel Annan called ‘Our Age’.7 Bowra had served in the trenches during World War I, and gained a lasting dislike of officialdom. Isaiah Berlin said of him, ‘he was emotionally with the poachers, even when he officially crossed over to the gamekeepers’.8 His chief weapon was wit, which he used to disinhibit young men with what he called his ‘Trumpets, and kettledrums, and the outrageous cannon’.9 All Clark’s priggish fears and inhibitions were blown to smithereens under a barrage of bravura teasing. Bowra enjoyed being outrageous and shocking the prim – he was at the centre of a homosexual-leaning world he referred to as ‘the immoral front’, ‘the homintern’ or ‘the 69th International’. He loathed prigs and cold fish, and it is greatly to his credit that he was able to see beneath Clark’s shyness, especially as Clark remained entirely heterosexual in his tastes.

Part of Bowra’s technique was to draw undergraduates out about their parents – ‘What does Major Connolly think of L’Après-midi d’un Faune?’10 In Clark’s case he invented a mythical personality for his father, outrageous and funny, which ‘lifted from my shoulders a load of shame and resentment’. Bowra had a booming voice, and came out with truths that no one else would dare speak. To his friends he was the most affectionate and warm-hearted man, but woe betide his enemies. In his autobiography he described Clark at Oxford: ‘In exhilarated moments he would sing snatches of Opera; he liked good food and drink, and knew about them … he had a keen sense of absurdity, told excellent stories of strange characters whom he had met, and was always ready to laugh at himself. This essential gaiety was at war with his appearance and manner.’11 Bowra’s wide culture spanned ancient and modern, and he extended Clark’s range of authors: the poetry of Yeats, Rilke and Edith Sitwell, the works of Turgenev. Clark later admitted that ‘I use a great many expressions, intonations and inflexions I derive from Maurice.’12 They also shared socialist politics. Clark would often refer to Bowra as his greatest friend, and they would spend Christmas together until old age. Clark would always be what later became known as a ‘Bowrista’.

If Clark’s literary education took place mainly in Maurice Bowra’s rooms, there was also the matter of his undergraduate course, or History Schools. The Oxford practice of producing a weekly essay, he later thought, ‘leads to a certain amount of facility in condensing and arranging ideas … it teaches one to write of everything at a certain length … about the length of a newspaper article, and so this bad habit continues in after life … I suffer from it very much.’13 Clark liked to give the false impression that he took a relaxed view of his studies, and as he laconically observed to Connolly, ‘If anyone will not take the trouble to read history, Maurois and Lytton Strachey are amusing enough.’14 In fact his reading at this time was deep, and his learning struck his contemporaries. His college tutor at Trinity was a booby, a hangover from Gibbon’s Oxford who was invariably indisposed, but Clark did have two great teachers, the economist F.W. Ogilvie and the economic historian G.N. Clark – the latter ‘taught me the little about historical method that I know’.* His borrowings from the college library, such as Ranke’s History of the Popes, occasionally foreshadow later references. He claimed that he only went to lectures in the hope of sitting next to a pretty undergraduate named Alix Kilroy (later Dame Alix Meynell), but as usual he was devising his own course of studies, and had begun the reading that would enable him one day to make Civilisation. When he came up to Oxford he had already read Carlyle’s Past and Present and Michelet’s History of France. At the university he started reading economic history with Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism, the bible of the Labour Party and the book that crystallised the socialism that Ruskin had first stirred in him. Clark has described how at Winchester social questions were far from his mind, and when a debate was organised with the local working men’s club, ‘they seemed to belong to a different species and we regarded them as figures of fun’.15

The change in Clark’s outlook was gradual, and there is no doubt that the main influence was reading Ruskin’s Unto This Last, a book that also made a deep impression on Gandhi. What was it about Ruskin that stirred Clark? Ruskin revealed a unique combination of artistic and moral sensibility. His perceptions on art and nature were often contradictory and unexpected, but were based on unrivalled power of observation and expressed in luminous prose. He was a preacher who believed that art, beauty and morality were indivisible, and that ugliness was wicked. Henry James observed of Ruskin’s approach to art that it was as if an assize court was in perpetual session governed by Draconic legislation. Clark perfectly well saw the many inconsistencies in Ruskin’s position, but nevertheless was captivated by his credo that beauty was everyone’s birthright. He was never to adopt a moral position about art and beauty, but what he took from Ruskin was not only his descriptive power but the belief that art should belong to all. The counterpoint to Ruskin was the Swiss Jacob Burckhardt,16 whom Clark believed was the most intelligent and best-equipped of art historians: ‘where Burckhardt is calm and detached, Ruskin is excited and engaged; where Burckhardt is sceptical, Ruskin credulous, where Burckhardt is sure-footed and economical, Ruskin plunges into one extravagant irrelevance after another’.17

Clark’s other Victorian household god was Walter Pater, who preached the gospel of aestheticism. Pater’s famous ‘Conclusion’ to his book on the Renaissance exhorted Oxford youth ‘to burn always with a hard gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, [that] is success in life’. Clark certainly understood that a passion for art made him spiritually indestructible, but Pater to him was much more than a brilliant stylist. He later made the case that Pater was a philosopher of sorts: ‘the aim of his best works was to suggest ways of achieving the ideal life’.18 There would be many echoes of Pater in Clark’s own work, particularly Leonardo and the unfinished Motives.

If Clark thought that the infection of ideas was the most useful education at Oxford, he was lucky in having another education which would determine the course of his life. On arrival at the university he had gone in search of artistic company, first at the Dramatic Society and then at the Uffizi Society, but came to the conclusion that ‘it would have been difficult to find more than three or four people’ in Oxford interested in art.19 Any examination of student magazines and exhibitions of the time reveals this statement to be untrue, but Clark wanted nothing to do with the aesthetes’ herd, and was rarely seen at undergraduate parties. Instead he went in search of art itself. He began to inspect, systematically, the collection of drawings at the Ashmolean Museum, one of the greatest assemblages in the world, under the guidance of the Keeper of Fine Art, C.F. Bell.20 Small and slightly hunched, Charles Bell was as different from booming Bowra as can be imagined. If Bowra liked to fire the big guns – Socrates, St Paul and Tolstoy – Bell’s interests were narrower and more parochial, English watercolours and Italian plaquettes. He was a man of taste who ran his department as a grand private collection. Prickly and possessive, Bell almost certainly fell in love with Clark, who played Charles Victor de Bonstetten to his Thomas Gray.*

C.F. Bell was to have a profound influence on Clark’s life in three ways: he introduced him to Bernard Berenson; he suggested the subject of his first book; and he allowed him free run of the drawings by Michelangelo and Raphael in the Ashmolean. He gave Clark a copy of J.C. Robinson’s 1870 catalogue of the drawings, and instructed him to annotate it, which was ‘the finest training for the eye that any young man could have had’.21 Clark always professed that Bell, more than anybody else, was responsible for his education in art, by forcing him to look at drawings. Bell also took Clark to visit private collections such as that of Dyson Perrins,* where he could inspect the Gorleston Psalter. But all this came at a heavy price: Bell wrote Clark long letters that he felt incapable of answering adequately. Later the relationship was to sour, and Bell became Clark’s most vociferous critic both in private and in public.

If Clark was still more at ease with older men, he did make some effort with his contemporaries at his own college, and to be part of university life. He joined the Gryphon Club, the Trinity paper reading club, and soon became its secretary – he appears in a 1925 club photograph. Bobby Longden and John Sutro22 were also members, and Clark attended the annual dinners. He also wrote lively art reviews for the university periodicals the Cherwell and the Oxford Outlook.23 He was still sporty, and enjoyed playing tennis and golf.24 However, there were two distinctive features of Clark at Oxford that drew him away from university life: he owned a motor car, and as Bowra observed, ‘he cultivated young women when there were few about, but kept them from his friends, since they did not yet form part of the Oxford scene and he was not sure how they would be received’.25 Where women were concerned, Clark was already starting to compartmentalise his life.

What sort of impression did Clark make on his contemporaries? He spent his first year at Trinity in the New Building, designed in the Jacobethan style of 1885 by T.G. Jackson. Colin Anderson26 was on the same staircase: ‘As you got up to his floor, it was not Shangri-La exactly, but it was detached from the world’: the furniture had been changed, the pictures were real paintings (including a ravishing Corot), and the room was strewn with beautiful objects. Clark had an up-to-date gramophone on which he played Bartók, Mozart and Beethoven – all his visitors were struck by his enormous record collection, in which he was helped by Eddie Sackville-West, an aristocratic musicologist with a fin-de-siècle disposition.27 ‘He was cocooned in a civilisation of his own up there,’ noted Anderson, adding, ‘he took very little part in the life of the college’.28 At some point Clark’s rooms suffered the attentions of college hearties, and were wrecked in a manner not unusual for an aesthetically-minded undergraduate to suffer.*

Anthony Powell remembered Clark at Oxford as ‘intensely ambitious, quite ruthless … he was a ready bat for a brilliant career … he was one of those persons with whom one never knew whether he would be quite genial or behave as if he had never set eyes on one before’.29 Peter Quennell, the most admired undergraduate poet in the university, described this as Clark’s ‘Curzonian superiority’. One contemporary who became a close friend for life was the Cambridge medieval historian David Knowles. Sligger Urquhart owned a chalet in the Savoy Alps, to which he would take reading parties, and he invited Clark alongside Knowles in the summer of 1924. Clark did not enjoy these Spartan visits any more than he enjoyed holidays with his parents in Scotland. Knowles’ impression was that he was ‘incredibly learned, fastidious, almost cold’.30

During that summer Clark turned twenty-one, and for the first time we have surviving letters to and from his parents which provide a window into his home life. His father paid for him to receive a newspaper, but Clark had to admit, ‘I am afraid my “Times” has not been a success. There is no time to read it and for that matter very little of interest. It goes straight into the waste paper basket.’31 This surprising lack of interest in newspapers was to endure all his life.

Around the time Clark first went up to Oxford his parents moved from Bath to Bournemouth, which was thought to be healthier. They bought a large, featureless villa, ‘The Toft’, which is a hotel today. Despite considerable losses from his properties, boats and (as we shall presently see) industrial investments, Clark’s father was still able to afford to buy the Ardnamurchan peninsula on the west coast of Scotland, consisting of seventy-five thousand barren acres of land and a large, gloomy lodge at Shielbridge. Clark went there out of duty, and began a lifelong habit of going for long solitary walks. During these walks he would often soliloquise, and it was to this that he attributed his later ease at lecturing. Through force of habit Clark senior kept a boat on Loch Sunart, which brought one unexpected benefit for his son – the numinous pleasures of the nearby abbey of Iona. This was always to remain a sacred place for him, to be compared with Delphi, Delos and Avila, where he felt the vibrations of the past; emanations that he communicated in the first episode of Civilisation.

Clark described the Oxford summer term to his mother as ‘a charming vision of white trousers, river-picnics, long shadows in the parks, bathers in the stripling Thames’.32 His parents were already complaining about the vagueness of his future plans, and distressed that he chose to spend the long vacation improving his French rather than with them at Shielbridge. He wrote a rather sanctimonious letter to his mother from the Hyde Park Hotel by way of justification: ‘I cannot pretend that it is going to be any fun being by myself in France. But as I have explained before … and as we have to impress upon the Labour Government (which I shall one day adorn) the vacations were intended to provide time for quiet, independent work and the study of foreign languages. One’s schools depend entirely upon the amount of work done in one’s last long vac.’33 Perhaps this letter reveals more about his mother’s newly formed ambitions for him. She appears to have belatedly discovered her son’s brilliance, and wanted him to become prime minister, or at least a diplomat. Clark spent most of the summer vacation at St Avertin on the Loire, under a tough but brilliant French teacher, ‘Madame’, whom he both loved and loathed. He placed photos of objects from the V&A in his room, and enjoyed the local golf course when he had time off. His father recommended that he should fall in love with a pretty French girl.34

Normally Clark would have left Oxford after graduation at the end of his third year in June 1925, but he decided to stay on for a further year. He informed his mother that he might catalogue Michael Sadler’s collection of modern pictures35 or study one of the great Italian painters, but the project that he actually adopted for his fourth year was suggested by Charles Bell in the week before his final examinations. It was as unexpected as it was original: ‘Write a book on the Gothic Revival.’ Bell had become interested in the topic as librarian of the Oxford Architectural Society. It was an inspired idea. Here was a subject that surrounded Clark at Oxford, and played to his interest in Ruskin. Moreover, ‘these monsters, these unsightly wrecks stranded upon the mud flat of Victorian taste’ required explanation.36 As Clark said, the Gothic Revival was seen as a sort of national misfortune – like the weather – and he was expected to write something satirical in the manner of Lytton Strachey. He described how undergraduates and young dons would break off their afternoon walk to go and have a good laugh at the quadrangle of Keble, which it was universally believed was designed by Ruskin rather than Butterfield.

With so many distractions, Clark was doubtful about the likelihood of his achieving a first in his finals. He wrote to his mother, ‘you must prepare for a steady second’ – which was in fact what he received. He was sanguine about the result, claiming to believe that ‘I have not got a first-class mind’ – but nobody at the time or since has accepted that explanation. Sligger Urquhart reminded him that John Henry Newman and Mark Pattison37 both got seconds, and Clark reminded himself of Ruskin’s honorary fourth. A consoling Bowra wrote: ‘I am so sorry about the schools. I am afraid it will mean your family driving you into the business and that would be terrible. Otherwise it has no importance as experts always get seconds and journalists usually get firsts … nobody else will think the worse of you for not being officially regarded as a master of a subject which bores you to death.’38 It certainly made no difference to Clark’s career, and if it dented his confidence nobody noticed – but it may have curbed his conceit. He undoubtedly had a powerful belief in his own superior gifts, but this was an early indication that these might not lie in a purely academic sphere. The failure to achieve a first may have had a greater influence on his outlook than was apparent at the time, and he eventually became impatient with scholarship for its own sake.

At Oxford Clark had addressed himself most effectively to senior members of the university – he had made a deep impression on older men, all bachelors; but he was now about to exercise his Wunderkind charm on somebody as attached to feminine company as himself.

* ‘I see mainly Bobbie and Piers with a good deal of Roger and Maurice and a bit of K. Clark – who is usually bearable for the first three weeks.’ Letter from Cyril Connolly to Noel Blakiston, 25 January 1925 (Connolly, A Romantic Friendship: The Letters of Cyril Connolly to Noel Blakiston).

* G.N. Clark was interested in the seventeenth-century Netherlands, and there are echoes of his influence in Civilisation episode 8, The Light of Experience.

* Towards the end of his life the poet Thomas Gray (1716–71) fell in love with the young Swiss aristocrat Bonstetten, who lived near his lodgings in Cambridge.

* Perrins was a distinguished books and manuscripts collector. Years later, when Clark was at the Ministry of Information, he wrote to Perrins, who lived near Malvern, stating that if London was bombed the ministry would be evacuated to Malvern, and asking if in that event he could be billeted at Perrins’ house, where ‘I would be less likely than some other evacuees to do violence to your early printed books and pictures.’ Apart from giving away confidential information, the request was highly irregular. Letter to Dyson Perrins, 17 May 1940 (Tate 8812/1/1/6).

* See a letter of protest from Josslyn Hennessy (3 February 1975) about a curious incident when Clark turned on him at a Beefsteak Club lunch after Hennessy had mentioned their first meeting at Oxford: ‘For you said with what, in contrast to your previous manner, struck me as studied politeness, “Now that you remind me of it, I remember it perfectly,” adding after a pause, “That was the time that you were one of the gang who wrecked my room.”’ (Tate 8812/1/4/36.)