LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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