Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Taking a respite from the Duveen and revisiting Spalding's Roger Fry. I should have written this book since I was on the track in the 60s andknew Pamela and Micu Diamand (stayed at Bourchernes many times). Why did I not? The Acknowledgments reads like a list of old memories: I met and talked with Forster, Marie Mauron, Philip Troutman, Arthur Waley's widow (now that's a story--her house had just been ransacked and the Waley papers later turned up at Rutgers; she blamed it on a dealer called Peter Eaton), charming rogue Denys Sutton of course (I gave him a letter from 1916 fro RF to include in his collection) and so on. More later.

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

I must be a masochist to try Secrest's latest, Duveen. It reads like a romance novel with a dizzying number of facts (the card catalog school of history we always called it) and unfortunately the subject not as endearing as Clark.

But how comforting to see a roster of familiar names like Francis Haskell whom we knew in Cambridge. I will never forget that dinner with Michael Jaffe and FH at the Cocke's; it was my first introduction to the high snobbery of shameless name dropping and one upsmanship in knowledge of FACTS!!!!!! Perhaps it is what put me off becoming a professorial type.

Say what one might Secrest's achievement is considerable and She Did It!

Monday, September 27, 2004

The fact that Clark liked Fry so much and edited his posthumous Last Lectures makes me like him. (This book was the last one my dear father was reading. ) Even without that personal fact the fact he liked whisky and women appealing and was an all around "regular guy." I also identify with his his irritable aloofness.

Secrest really seems to despise Berenson, always calling him The Great Man. We all know he and Duveen were 30% con artists but they provided entertainment for the rich and that is what the middle class arriviste does au fond ( Capote : "the lapdog of rich heterosexuals.")

Friday, September 24, 2004

Reading Meryle Secrest's tome on Kenneth Clark; she has a snail's eye view of the universe. Years ago I wrote a derisive article on KC's Civilization series which I thought simplistic and in absurd awe of Western culture. Now I agree with him rather regarding the obvious superiority of the Great Tradition in our era of third world tribalism.

A propos of nothing I see the Independent has an interview with Norman Sherry in this centennial year of Graham Greene.I spoke to NS 6 months ago in San Antonio and he seemed to remember me from Lancaster U. where we often fraternized with his small nervous self. Had no idea he was such a baroque character.


Wednesday, September 22, 2004

Vanessa's Sketches in Pen and Ink and her recollections of Fry; what I liked best is her observation, "The world of dealers was open to me now and though they are a race I quickly grew to detest and have never seen any reason to like better, still Roger had a way of making them disgorge things one wanted to see."

When I first discovered Bloomsbury in my 20s this was an affectation I quickly assumed which was not practical since unlike Roger or Vanessa I had no means of support, no trust fund, however meager, to sustain these opinions. Spiritual superiority needs to be fed by bread and wine which of course they never understood but which makes the whole rarified state of mind syndrome so enchanting.

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

It has been awhile and frankly I saw no point in continuing in that mode. While in Montauk over the weekend I read Michael Holroyd's Autobiography Part II and Eureka it came to me that, like returning home, I should resume my intellectual interest in Bloomsburyish matters. I remember how we scorned Lytton Strachey but now MH's endeavors seem admirable. Will see where this emerges at the end of the tunnel.

I was too restless to be an author or an academic. In 1964 I started my Roger Fry pursuit, taking me from the Bibliotheque Nationale where I read all the old Burlingtons to Cambridge where I met Quentin Bell and then wrote the thesis at Leeds. For some reason I did not want to spend my life talking about the lives of others, but now I see it as a form of art, second tier art but art nonetheless.