This is Installment XXXII of Transgressions
May 22, 1935
Mother has agreed to the Venice plan!?We are to go down to London to visit Jack and Livia for a few days, traveling on to Paris and then Venice, where I will?spend the Long Vacation. All very Grand Tour, tut tut, and all that , but . . . Venice!??When I told him, Haxton started one of his Durer things about Vienna and all, then gave it up, seeing how excited I was, and offered to give me some introductions. He said one of the Professors owns a house there and is just the person to gain one the entrée to the real Venetian society.
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May 25, 1935, Saturday
Down to London to hear Haxton lecture at the Courtland Institute. The Institute is a grand building in Portman Square with a wonderful Adam double staircase, seemingly floating in the air, and a glass domed roof. (Is it the setting for the opening ball in Point Counter Point?)?Impressionist & Post-Impressionist paintings, etc. Haxton was?falling all over himself in praise of Clark’s catalogue of the Leonardo drawings at Windsor Castle. It would be odd if most of Leonardo’s drawings were in this damp country.
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I bought a copy of an anthology of new poetry called New Country, which came out a year or two ago, and read Day Lewis’s “Letter to a Young Revolutionary” on the train. He says one should cultivate “the will to obey.”?Is that revolutionary??It sounds like something one would hear on a Sunday in Woodstock. Spender, on the other hand, says that art serves the revolution by its very nature, by telling the truth about reality. That sounds very fine, but does it?
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May 31, 1935
Jack writes that he has been seeing a lot of the Prince of Wales and his friend Mrs. Simpson, a married woman from Baltimore. He says Mrs. Simpson has an extraordinary hold over the Prince. She, like the Prince, is pro-German. Haxton, who is oddly proud of his family connections with the Royals, disapproves of the relationship between the Prince and a divorcee. I don’t see how that fits in with his politics. Shouldn’t he want the Prince of Wales to be disreputable?
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June 1, 1935
There’s a show of bronzes from Benin at the Burlington Fine Arts Club that I would like to see.
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June 5, 1935
Mother has arrived for May Week. There are races on the river, concerts, and plays—a complete change from the last few weeks when everyone was invisibly beetling away at their Triposes. The Handel Festival was quite wonderful. And, just in time for Venice, ADC is putting on Goldoni’s “Servant of Two Masters”.
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Mother and Jack between them have fixed me up with a place to stay in Venice. Jack convinced Mother that it would be best to rent a room in a family house, arguing that such an arrangement would be better than a pension and Mother then contacted the American Consul for a recommendation. The family is called Dorigato—Mr. Dorigato is a lawyer, which makes Mother comfortable. She thinks he will know what to do “if there is any trouble.”
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I picked up an anti-war pamphlet everyone is reading, “Cambridge University and War.”?Some people here are on the Right, some on the Left:??everyone is against war.
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Haxton has reviewed an exhibition of 19th Century French Painting at Wildenstein. He particularly likes Renoir’s Mme. Caillebotte and the “glory” of the Cézannes and Gauguins. There was a?sad/amusing Country Life column in the same New Rambler, giving an account of the death of a hedgehog, frozen on May 17 despite the best efforts of a gardener, who wrapped it in hot cloths and tried to give it some hot milk. Poor creature.
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June 10, 1935
Down to London, then, to St. James Place, where Jack has put mother into the nicest of the guest rooms and I have “my” old room back and we were swept into Chalmersville with dinners and parties and talk of Parliament. I have made a plan to see as many paintings of the Venetian school in London as I can, by way of preparation for the summer. Haxton says I should be systematic, start with the Byzantine gold paintings and work forward, mainly because the later painters can really only be appreciated in situ. This afternoon I went to the National Gallery and looked at Veneziano’s Madonna, who wears a nice blue robe with a gold clasp, Saint Mark on the left & John the Baptist, dressed like Hercules, on the right. There was also a curious Vivarini of Saint Mark and Saint Francis, with a black background & flowers. St. Mark is a good figure to have in a painting, as one can almost always recognize him by his pet lion. (Unless it is St. Jerome, with his pet lion.)
The Ivor Romillys came to dinner. Livia says that one looks at her and listens to him. Lady Romilly talked to Mother about Boston. Romilly and Jack talked about politics. Romilly says that Britain should base its policy on an alliance with France and Italy, as in the long-run Germany is the primary threat to peace and the British Empire. This, according to Romilly, is complicated as Mussolini is ambitious and might have to be placated with bits of North Africa and the French government is both unstable and distasteful to the British governing class. Jack, who is very pro-German, said that Germany “is a fact” and not a South American republic about which the whims of the Stock Exchange matter. He mentioned, in a rather guarded way, a letter from Hitler to Lord Rothermere, outlining an Anglo-German alliance:?guaranteeing the Empire in exchange for Germany having a free-hand in the Danube region. “The Chancellor is a great admirer of Britain.”
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After dinner Jack gave me Berenson’s book about Venetian painters, which was very thoughtful and nice of him.
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June 12, 1935
Two more days at the National Gallery and my head is filled with Venetian saints and their emblems. Jack and Livia are planning their move to a very grand place in Belgrave Square. Mother doesn’t quite approve, but of course won’t criticize. Jack has taken her shopping to Fortnum’s and Galeries Lafayette for traveling clothes, an exercise that consists of her saying that she needs only a single dress and a sensible pair of shoes and Jack saying “nonsense” and insisting on ensembles for each day and evening and then they compromise on what seems to mother to be unbelievable extravagance and what Jack says is the bare minimum he will allow. They make an amusing pair to look at; Jack, not tall, but well-dressed in a style midway between London and Paris, his black hair parted very high and slicked back; Mother, slightly taller, dressed in such fashion as to appear to be a Quaker matron to the English, but wearing her pearls, which in Woodstock would be show.
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To-day, for a change, I went to Hertford House to look at the Wallace Collection. No old gold Venetians, but wonderful pictures by Guardi and Canaletto, which give one some idea of what to expect from Venice, although it doesn’t seem possible that it will look like what they describe.
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Clay reports that he is to spend next month writing?a report on the condition of the Brixham fishing fleet. His uncle, if concerned, would simply have bought it.
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June 15, 1935, Saturday
Hard rain.
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Jack took me to Peals, where I ordered two pair of shoes. Terribly expensive (two pounds; yes Dot, a week’s pay for a salesgirl), but Jack says they will last forever. Afterwards we went to Tomas Harris’s gallery in Bruton Street to look at an exhibition of Early Flemish art. Haxton says that the development of Flemish painting follows that of the growth of trade in the Flemish cities. I’m not sure what he means by that, other than that painters are likely to go to places where there are collectors with the funds to buy their paintings. Harris seems actually to specialize in Spanish art. He had some remarkable Goya prints on hand.
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Mother and I went to dinner at the Kenneth Clarks. They live in a house filled with Cézanne watercolors and paintings by Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant (which looked like purple grey mud next to the Cézannes). Jane Clark is very grand in a Bohemian way, her hair lacquered, her scarves Japanese, her gown Schiaparelli, her conversation perhaps a bit too self-consciously original. The Clarks were very nice to Mother, carefully not asking her about “her prosperous cousin,” except for a reference to the wedding pictures that were in the papers. When Clark heard that I was going to Venice he talked about Giovanni Bellini:?which paintings I really must see and where to find them. I made a list. He also mentioned the Titian exhibition that is to take place. Apparently Haxton is going to be there for the New Rambler.
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Clark was a bit taken aback when Mother mentioned her interest in African sculpture. He quite cross-examined her about her recent purchase from Pierre Matisse in New York. “Just a little figurine.”?One could see him trying to fit this exotic piece of information into his preconceptions about Vermont matrons. Mother was amused & rather pleased with herself.
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Clark said that the experience that changed his life, that turned him to the history of art, was a lecture by Warburg he had attended at the Hertziana in Rome. “He talked for hours, pointing to features on photographs that were fastened on a screen. Of course one could not see the photographs. Nonetheless one was directly inoculated, as it were, with the conviction that the essence of our civilisation is the image, the history of the image as it comes down to us from the ancient world.”
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Someone at dinner said that in Paris at the moment there’s a conference of anti-Fascist intellectuals organized by M. Malraux (“a very bright fellow”). The British delegates include Forster, Aldous Huxley and John Strachey. Clark called it “Bloomsbury at the Barricades,” along the lines of the Church of England being the “Tory Party at Prayer,” I suppose. Mother, thinking that they were suggesting we attend, said that she was afraid we had not been invited. Clark said that it was a pity I wasn’t going to Amsterdam, where next month there is to be a wonderful Rembrandt exhibition. “But,” he said, “You’re probably not quite old enough for Rembrandt.”?That was said in the nicest possible way. Clark and Haxton and their friends seem to spend a lot of time traveling around Europe from one exhibition to the next, which sounds like a pleasant way to spend one’s time.
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London was particularly beautiful tonight; everything fresh and clean; a gleaming metropolis—the Metropolis. The West End squares were glowing with white light, the streets picked out with yellow light; all very impressive; very “soigné,” as someone said, as if it were Paris, where we go tomorrow.