Clark's Pique

By Melvin Maddocks

ANOTHER PART OF THE WOOD by KENNETH CLARK 287 pages. Harper & Row. $11.

The Kenneth Clark known to millions of television viewers (Civilisation; The Romantic Rebellion) is the very portrait of composure. His U voice and elegant gaze--aimed levelly at the masterpieces and just slightly down upon his culture-hungry audience--seem capable of expressing anything but doubt. Who could guess that behind this aplomb a second Kenneth Clark lurks, irreverent, funny and tortuously complex? Another Part of the Wood, in effect, is an autobiographical ambush brilliantly staged by this Clark against his camera ego.

Born in 1903, the only child of idle-rich Edwardians ("many people were richer, there can have been few who were idler"), young Clark basked off the Riviera on the new yacht his father bought more or less annually. The Clarks had the sort of wealth to maintain on their estate a nine-hole golf course complete with pro, even though neither parent played the game. The boy's only sport was walking about the family bogs soliloquizing, a practice he claimed prepared him for television.

The Wrong Turning. At age seven, when he was visiting an exhibition of Japanese paintings, he discovered the important secret about himself--"I am a born visualizer." Roughly in this order he began to paint in the style of Hokusai, Degas, Gauguin, Whistler and Matisse. By the time he reached Oxford, he knew he was not an artist; but he was irrevocably attached to the scale of the masterpiece--what a friend, Classicist Maurice Bowra, called "big stuff."

After Oxford, Clark became a protege of the art collector and critic Bernard Berenson. (His devastating vignette of B.B. in these pages is a small classic by itself.) Before he was 30 he had been appointed director of the National Gallery, and was on his way to becoming Lord Clark of Saltwood, the most influential tastemaker in the London art world.

By almost any standards, here is a story of privilege and deserved success. But there are more than cracks in Clark's golden bowl--the usual hint of sublime dissatisfaction successful men feel obliged to point out. A vein of self-contempt--sometimes but not always playful--runs throughout the book. Clark speaks of "the evasions and half-truths" encouraged by the lecture form. Reviewing his decision to become a museum director, he concludes: "I took the wrong turning." The London art world he compares to "a battlefield at nightfall," and seems to despise himself for surviving it: "I learnt adaptability and what is known in boxing as footwork."

The "Great Clark Boom," he calls his pre-World War II years of making it.

He possessed a town house with painted ceilings and marble fireplaces that he rather hated and a charming wife in Schiaparelli originals whom he loved, and he showed off both. Parties the Clarks gave and attended were exercises in name-dropping: Noel Coward, Max Beerbohm, Arthur Rubinstein, T.S. Eliot, Winston Churchill.

Confidence Trick. Still, a kind of sour weariness marks even these engagement-book recitations. Clark writes sardonically of "stuffy members of the government and their mem sahib wives," and snaps at "rich and respectable men" as if born to dislike his own class. He closes his story on the eve of World War II, looking at the darkened silhouette of London and thinking with "a curious feeling of elation" that "these featureless flocks" and the social system they symbolize constitute "a worn-out monster founded on exploitation," and perhaps better destroyed. What and whom does Clark love? The answer is unequivocal: art and artists. Yet there is oddly little about either here. Henry Moore, whom he calls a genius and one of his two dear est friends, gets only a cursory page. He nominates John Ruskin "the greatest member of my profession" and declares that the few passages in his own criticism "in which I feel I have been lifted off my feet are the things which (except for my family) have given me the most pleasure in my life." But in the end, Clark the critic is self-critically musing:

"The odd thing is how many people have accepted my judgment. My whole life might be described as one long, harmless confidence trick."

For Clark, there can be no second best. He had to be an artist or he was nothing. His compensation is to know what "big stuff" is. His torment is to know how far he and most of his contemporaries are distant from it.

Melvin Maddocks

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