Kenneth Clark: Life, Art and Civilisation - James Stourton

Скачать книгу

to see how Kenneth admires B.B. Nothing is lost on that boy, he is so marvellously cultivated that he can follow intelligently almost every path that B.B. opens.’11 Clark did everything he could to be useful. I Tatti was much more than an education in art for him. Florence became an emotional centre for the rest of his life, and BB a father figure. At I Tatti Clark found for the first time a family and a community to which he felt he belonged. Many years later he wrote rather wistfully to Janet Stone, ‘Celly* rang from Litton Cheney12 and said “we are a little community”, which gave me a pang, I would so much love to be a part of it. Perhaps I was part of the community of I Tatti, but never since.’13 Charles Bell had been right to warn of the virulence Berenson expressed at every meal about friends and colleagues, especially Roger Fry, but Clark found this merely tiresome.

      Mary Berenson mysteriously left the party to disappear back to I Tatti. On their return the reason became apparent. She felt that the unpretentious architecture of I Tatti needed something more assertive, and had instructed Cecil Pinsent in BB’s absence to install a central clock on the garden façade. Berenson’s invariable reaction to Mary’s follies was to faint, take to his bed and demand their removal, but it was usually too late. Her elevated clock is still there, and much admired.

      All the inhabitants of I Tatti were puzzled by Clark’s romantic life – or the seeming lack of it. Mary had hoped he might marry one of her granddaughters, BB that he would find a great lady in Florence, but the suspicion dawned on the household that they had misunderstood his proclivities, and that Clark was drawn to boys. Mary, with her usual naïve optimism, decided that he should move out of I Tatti to share a house with the obviously gay Cecil Pinsent. ‘Driven into a corner by this bizarre proposition,’ Clark relates that ‘I had no alternative but to come out with the truth, “Mary, I want to get married.”’15 This announcement, made in December, pleased nobody, as it would change the fragile dynamic of the I Tatti court. It was the end of the apprenticeship as the Berensons had conceived it, with Clark as the solicitous, ever-available bachelor.

      Clark claims that after this conversation with Mary he wired Jane, asking her to marry him and proposing a date, 10 January 1927 – which suggests that they already had an understanding on the subject. She immediately wired back her acceptance. Mary, with her strong sense of family, set about finding a house that would be suitable for them when they returned together as a married couple. Clark wrote to John Sparrow announcing his arrival in England, but made no reference to the wedding. This was characteristic of his peculiar attitude to the event: ‘I shall be living at St Ermins for a few weeks trying to finish the Gothic Revival. Probably Jane will be living with me, but you must try not to mind that. I have a morbid dread of living alone out here.’16 He left I Tatti after Christmas, and all that BB said when he went to say goodbye was ‘I don’t mind.’ But he did, and he felt that Clark had betrayed him.

      Clark had disengaged from C.F. Bell to work at I Tatti, and by marrying Jane he had taken the first step towards independence from Berenson. Although he came to have doubts about BB, Clark was always clear about his debt to him. He said it best in the Sunday Times piece he wrote on Berenson’s death: ‘His fear of pedantry made him unwilling to give the generations of young men who frequented I Tatti any sort of formal instruction. But I think we were his pupils: for at almost every meal, and on those unforgettable walks, our eyes were opened and our minds were filled. At first we might resent the hard knocks administered to local gods. But as we came to realise that neither Oxford nor Bloomsbury nor Cambridge Mass. had established the ultimate boundaries of civilisation, we found ourselves entering a larger inheritance. We were educated as few young men since the Renaissance … for we learned to think of civilised life as catholic and apostolic … and we came to believe that love of art is only a part of the love of life. I owe him more than I can say and probably much more than I know.’17

      Clark’s wedding was one of the oddest events he ever described. After leaving I Tatti, instead of going home to see his fiancée or help with arrangements, he went to Rome. The closest he got to a stag night was his last dinner in Rome, in the company of Lytton Strachey, the orientalist Arthur Waley and his partner the dancer and critic Beryl de Zoete. He arrived in London on the eve of the wedding, organised by Jane’s mother, who had been supplied with his draconian instructions: no wedding dress, no bridesmaids, no reception and no church. He wanted the ceremony to take place in a register office, but Jane and her mother insisted on a church. It is perfectly possible that Clark had never actually been to a wedding before. The dismal event took place at St Peter’s church in Eaton Square. Clark gave as his occupation ‘art critic’, the one thing he had assured his father he would not become. His former travelling companion Leigh Ashton was best man, and the few guests – consisting mostly of Clark family servants – dispersed after the service. The bride and groom had lunch alone with his parents at the gloomy St Ermin’s Hotel.

      Clark described the event to Mary Berenson: ‘We were married in a hideous church – not even Gothic Revival. But it only took fourteen minutes, so I can’t grumble. Everyone seemed satisfied except the pew opener who refused to believe that two such drab and youthful people could be bride and bridegroom. No organ, no champagne and only half-a-dozen handshakes: I call that a success.’18

      Whatever was he doing? Clark claims that it was his mother’s Quakerish fear of ritual that overcame him, but why did Jane – who loved all the things he denied her on her wedding day – put up with this? There is no clear answer. Clark could certainly be selfish, as Mary Berenson divined, and Jane was probably still in awe of his family.

      But there was an alarming rite of passage to be faced, the thought of which made Clark feel ill: ‘less than a mile away loomed two ogres’ castles, I Tatti

Скачать книгу