Page 16 - Studio International - November 1973

coloured the whole of my later development, what I wanted to call an Art Society, but was
From Bloomsbury and because we lived in such a peculiar told that if an Art Society was to be founded the
to Marxism atmosphere that it's worth trying to reconstruct. art-master would found it, so we changed the
Marlborough was a notoriously tough school.
name to the Anonymous Society, which gave no
But let me say at once that it was not quite as offence, and continued our plans of attacking
nthony Blunt
bad as John Betjeman makes it out to have ben traditional views.
in his autobiography. He was in fact - though he But what was much more important, what
I have never had the slightest desire to write my might not like me to say it - rather happy at really dominated my life at Marlborough was
autobiography; but some years ago a member of the Marlborough. He had a brilliant way of dealing the extraordinary luck I had in the people who
Courtauld Institute staff pointed out to me that it might
be of interest to my students if I would talk to them with the toughs. He pulled their legs and were my contemporaries. John Betjeman I have
about the art world-in the late 192os and 1930s , since laughed at them, and really he had a far more already mentioned, but by far my closest friend
many things that were to me personal experiences were enjoyable time, apart from physical discomfort, and the strongest and most important figure in
to them matters of history. I tried to do this and it than you would gather from his autobiography. the school at that time was Louis McNeice, who
appeared to arouse some interest.
I still have no desire to write my autobiography, and However, it was very unpleasant. was already a person of extraordinary vivacity,
this will not be one. In this talk I shall only attempt to The generation just before mine had started imaginative force, brilliance and charm. I
trace my intellectual development, in so far as it reflects
the influences which were active in England while I was a sort of revolt against the toughs, against the shared a study with him for my last year, and we
growing up — when I was an undergraduate and a young absolute dominance of games. They had a pretty formed the centre of a group of slightly
don — and my subsequent, and perhaps slightly more rough time of it. They survived, and one of bloody-minded rebels working along the lines
independent development. I do not claim to be typical of them, John Edward Bowle, is now a of the generation before our own. Louis has
any group or any type, but at certain periods of my life
I was deeply influenced by one or other of the dominant distinguished historian. They started the described life at Marlborough so vividly in his
movements of the time. affirmation of liberty for the intellectuals and unfinished autobiography, The Strings are
one must also, I think, use the word aesthetes, False, that it is unnecessary, I think, for me to
for we were extremely precious. In 1924 John add very much to what he said, except that I
I must begin at the beginning. I was born in Bowle, Philip Harding and I founded a paper want to emphasize a slightly different angle
1907. My father was a parson, and at the age of called the Heretick which was planned to because although we shared interests to a very
four an event took place which I think express our disapproval of the Establishment great extent naturally, he was more interested
undoubtedly coloured the whole of my later generally, of the more out-of-date and pedantic on the literary side, I was more active on the
development: my family moved to France. My masters, of all forms of organized sport, of the side of the visual arts. He describes very clearly
father was appointed chaplain at the embassy Officers' Training Corps and of all the other and intensely the curious mixture of
church in Paris and I spent the next ten years features that we hated in school life, not so much seriousness and slightly wilful whimsy with
there, almost entirely living in Paris, and - the physical discomforts - they were almost which we acted. We read avidly and extremely
therefore developed a very strong French taken for granted - but, as you might say, the widely but in a very eccentric manner. As Louis
leaning which has coloured my whole attitude intellectual discomforts of the school. I wrote himself says, our reading was either 'stark and
towards things ever since. I was brought up for it my first defence of Modern Art. It wasn't a realistic or precious remote and
from a very early age, really almost very good or a very original article, but I was two-dimensional', and he quotes Tolstoy,
unconsciously, to look at works of art and to only sixteen. The motto on the outside of the Dostoievski, Thomas Hardy on the serious side,
regard them as of importance. This was partly Heretick Was 'Upon Philistia will I triumph' and and he, because he was a better classical scholar
due to my father and my mother, but more that was really our great battle. The Heretick than I was, also read Lucretius and Apuleius and
particularly due to my elder brother, Wilfrid, was suppressed after the second number, he had a passion for late Latin poetry and
who was six years older and was becoming a owing, I am sorry to say, to an article which I mediaeval poetry, Norse mythology and
painter by the time I was growing up, and had wrote on the theme that all art is amoral, This. Malory - the Morte d'Arthur was one of the
far closer contacts, naturally, with the artistic was provoked by a row with my housemaster things he chanted most frequently. We also read
world than I had and undoubtedly influenced who thought that the reproductions of Matisse the Elizabethan poets. I am sorry to say that we
me throughout my life. My earliest recollection and Rouault which I had in my study were were thoroughly wrong on Shakespeare, who
connected with works of art is that I can just indecent. The article was apparently regarded as was of course part of the Establishment. We
remember going to the Louvre before the so shocking that one parent threatened to thought Marlowe and Webster far more
1914-18 war. I cannot remember any of the remove his boy from the school. interesting and we read the Elizabethan poets,
pictures, I can merely remember the fact. Then We had very little support from the masters. more than the dramatists. Louis organized a
of course during the war everything was shut; Most of them, though not all, were perfectly reading at the Anonymous Society of Vernal and
there were no pictures to look at at all; only very competent at teaching, but they were singularly Amorous poetry at which he read the
occasional exhibitions, and therefore if one unhelpful in anything to do with the arts or Pervigilium Veneris, much of which I can still
wanted to look at works of art one was anything outside the school curriculum. There recite from memory - and I read Sir Philip
automatically compelled to look at architecture were however two. One a very learned but Sydney and Ronsard - all you see a little affected
and it was perhaps for that reason that I remote and Olympian classics master, who was but done still with a perfectly genuine
developed an interest in architecture which I an expert on the Italian Renaissance and if one enthusiasm. We had, by the way, already got
have never lost. At that time my taste was could come to know him he was a great through Shelley and Keats by that time. Then
extremely conventional. My father was a strict inspiration, but it was extremely difficult to do on the other side, half way between the serious
Ruskinian and I really was not encouraged to so. The other was an ebullient parson, a man and the frivolous, came the 18th century; we
look at anything later than mediaeval full of enthusiasm for everything, a sort of read Voltaire, Crébillon fils and Beckford (we
architecture, but that I did look at with great natural rebel, or at any rate a natural had a passion for Vathek) and then on the
enthusiasm, and even with a certain amount of encourager of rebels - which we all, of course, completely fancy side - and this went with the
independent judgment. at that time were - who protected us, and-who cult of the childlike and the childish which we
Then in 1921 I went to a public school. I went even protected us, I am glad to say, from the art all had - we read Edward Lear, Lord Dunsany's
to Marlborough and I want to talk about that in master, who believed that all art ended with the fairy stories and Grimm; Andersen we thought
some detail, partly because of the people I came Pre-raphaelite movement and that anything after rather smug and we preferred Grimm as being
to know there, and partly because I think that it was wicked and wrong, and who wished to more vivid. We found the child cult a very
the intellectual influences I underwent, there impose these views. In counter-attack I founded useful way of exasperating the other boys in the

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