LITMIR.BIZ

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They asked me to go and have lunch with them.’6

      Clark’s autobiography does not mention the dinner, but describes this lunch as the first meeting: the guests were assembled, when ‘At the last, perfectly chosen moment [Berenson] entered, small, beautifully dressed, a carnation in his button-hole. There was an awestruck silence.’ In this account, Clark took a great dislike to Berenson because of the conceit and vituperation that formed a large part of his conversation. After lunch they moved to the limonaia for coffee, and the great man summoned Clark to come and sit next to him. This was evidently successful, because as Mary was beckoning her husband over to the car to leave he turned to Clark and said, ‘“I’m very impulsive, my dear boy, and I have only known you for a few minutes, but I would like you to come and work with me to help me prepare a new edition of my Florentine Drawings. Please let me know.” He thereupon jumped nimbly into the palpitating vehicle and drove away.’7

      Berenson’s offer aroused considerable emotions in Clark. This was the realisation of his Winchester dream, and the greatest prize for any young man with his interests, but he felt sure his parents would object. He was not even certain that he would enjoy I Tatti, or BB’s personality. Broaching the subject with his father, he put the offer in rather different terms: ‘I want a secretary; would you care for the job? … please assure your father … that I am not going to make you into an art critic. I am going to give you the chance of seeing people and places that you would not otherwise have seen.’ Clark told his father that ‘the prospect simply stupefied me’, adding, ‘I think I should be mad to refuse it. But it depends on what you think.’8 He had of course already made up his mind, as is clear from a letter he wrote to his mother shortly afterwards.

      Clark and Bell remained at Poggio Gherardo for several more weeks. Bell planned Clark’s sightseeing in Florence from his sickbed. He was first directed to the Bargello, and Florentine sculpture was to be the main theme of his first week, as Bell saw this as the foundation of quattrocento art in the city. ‘Can’t I go to the Uffizi?’ became Clark’s constant refrain. ‘No, not yet, today you must go to Santa Maria Novella …’ Finally he was given permission, but he found it a dismal experience until he came upon Piero della Francesca’s portraits of the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. Piero’s Baptism was already his favourite painting in the London National Gallery, ‘but nothing prepared me for the brilliance and sparkle of the Urbino diptych. I fell to my knees.’9 Clark was often to react with nervous tension to works of art. He could be reduced to tears or shaking knees by poignant situations, overcome by a kind of afflatus of emotion or inspiration. Anthony Powell linked this to his belief that he was going to die of paralysis before the age of thirty, and his recurrent agonies at feeling he was wasting his life.10

      After two weeks of sightseeing in the Val d’Arno, Clark was despatched with a protégé of Mary Berenson to southern Tuscany and Umbria, still under Bell’s instruction. By the time he returned to Florence, ‘I felt as if I had lived in Italy all my life. The echoing corridors of Poggio Gherardo were no longer alarming; the coarse damp sheets were like my daily bread; the idea of a bath before dinner ridiculous. In a few days I had to leave and my only thought was how to get back.’11 As he wrote to his mother: ‘What an extraordinary holiday it has been! I have had rather a debauch of loitering among beautiful things and quite look forward to getting down to hard work again.’12 On the way home he mentioned Berenson’s offer to Bell, who commented, ‘You wouldn’t like it, you know. You’d hear nothing but abuse of your friends. They are like crows picking over the bones of everybody’s reputation.’13

      Clark’s parents – reluctant to see their only child leave Britain – strongly objected to him giving up his fourth year at Oxford. He therefore wrote to Berenson offering to come to I Tatti at the end of the academic year – with a trial month in January – although he realised that this might jeopardise the offer.14 Mary Berenson, who managed her husband’s commitments, wrote back accepting the arrangement and agreeing that Clark should improve his Italian and German language skills in the meantime.

      On his return to Oxford Clark settled down to work on The Gothic Revival. His final year at the university, from October 1925 to June 1926, is a rather shadowy affair, and marked by a return of his hypochondria. He lived out of college, in rooms in Beaumont Street, and rarely went in for meals, except on Sunday evenings when Oxford’s restaurants were closed. He was by now president of the Gryphon Club, and in February 1926 he read a paper about Ruskin in which he described ‘the continual struggle that went on in Ruskin’s mind to make his likes and dislikes agree with his theories of art’.15 His motivation in giving the paper – as he explained to Mary Berenson – was to help clarify his ideas on Ruskin’s relationship with the Gothic revivalists. Clark told her that although he was depressed about Oxford the work on the book was going well, and he already had more material than he could use.

      One of the pleasures of working on The Gothic Revival was that it brought him enduring friendship with one of the most original undergraduates in the university, John Betjeman. They met at Maurice Bowra’s, and as Clark later told Betjeman’s biographer, ‘as a young man he cast himself in the role of the nineteenth-century man. He loved life and he loved jokes, and he laughed more than anybody else I knew. His discovery of the merits of the Gothic Revival coincided with mine and went a little further. He had the merit of seeing through fashionable styles.’16 Clark and Betjeman remained friends for life.

      Clark occasionally returned to his parents’ house in Bournemouth. One evening in November 1925 when he happened to be staying at The Toft, his father appeared – ‘I shall never forget his face’ – holding a newspaper with the headline ‘WELSH DAM DISASTER, Whole Village Washed Away’. Clark senior had invested a considerable part of his fortune in an aluminium plant powered by water from a large dam near the village of Dolgarrog. The dam, woefully inadequate to its task, had burst, destroying the village with the loss of sixteen lives. Clark’s father had only been there once, but he recognised his responsibilities, and covered the resulting compensation claims. To his embarrassment, young Clark was put on the company’s board, but it never recovered and the plant was sold shortly afterwards at a loss. Clark senior reckoned that he had lost over a million pounds. This was probably half his fortune, but there were still sufficient funds to ensure that no immediate consequences were felt by the family. Clark spent what must have been a melancholy Christmas with his parents in Bournemouth, and then headed back to the pleasures of Italy.

      The ‘trial’ three weeks at I Tatti in January were an evident success. Clark wrote to Mary Berenson that they were ‘the most delightful I can remember. Walking in the hills, shuffling Bellinis in the library or simply browsing amongst the books were all a great joy to me; and above all to be with people who understand … my enthusiasms, was a new and enchanting experience.’17 Mary’s brother, the belle lettrist Logan Pearsall Smith, was staying, and wrote to their sister Alys (the ex-wife of Bertrand Russell): ‘It is just like a little court here with favourites … Clark is the new great favourite now and he seems to deserve his favour – his knowledge and his reading and his power of expressing himself are certainly prodigious for his age. He likes it here immensely, loves the good talk and appreciates the humour of the situation and his own to the full, and being rich and popular and independent, he is not much concerned as to what happens. I have just left him sitting with the B.B.’s over a portfolio of photographs, emitting opinions about them which they seem to listen to with respect.’18 On the other hand, Nicky Mariano, BB’s librarian and mistress, who was adored by all, especially Mary, found Clark ‘rather standoffish and cutting in his remarks, also not free of conceit

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