A good Read but a dull book
Richard Shone
THE LAST MODERN: A LIFE OF HERBERT READ by James King
Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £25, pp.364
So dull an impression of Herbert Read does this biography give that it is difficult, at first, to know who is at fault, if fault there is. Although the outline of Read's life is unsensational, the importance of his writings on art and culture was sufficiently recognised to accord him enormous influ- ence. Anyone, for example, in the 1960s interested in contemporary art and its evolution is likely to have read his Concise History of Modern Painting (1959 and still in print) and the earlier The Meaning of Art, stock student reading and constantly re-issued and revised. Read knew and corresponded with an impressive range of artists, writers and thinkers, a correspond- ence on which this book is largely based. For over 40 years he had a fastidious finger in every pie of the art world — from the V & A to the ICA , from The Burlington Magazine to the Arts Council. But his wish to be remembered as poet rather than pundit and the frustrating recognition that this was not to be, provide the tension of this biography. Unfortunately, James King has made what is potentially an interesting story of failure into one of tedium as well.
In 1942 the sculptor Naum Gabo wrote to Read 'an art critic shall have no friends if he has opinions; or he shall have no opinions if he has friends — but he may not have both.' This bald statement of a common dilemma defines the limitations of Read's position. At the same time, the antithetical nature of his thought and the frequent lunges in different directions brought him neither resolution nor seren- ity. The push and pull of tradition and innovation, of classic and romantic, cere- bral and sensual made his mind a battle- ground of every warring notion in contem- porary culture. It weighs many of his books on art with the now faded trappings of passe enthusiasm. There was a fatal lack of personal sensibility in Read which pre- vented both his coming to grips with actual works of art and, in its turn, the creation of any himself. His poetry rarely catches fire, remaining Georgian sentiment plastered with modernist imagery. Some of
the verses liberally quoted by King are touchingly embarrassing. The dissociation of form and content could hardly be more complete.
Inevitably, the forces at work in Read's early life conditioned this saga of dissatis- faction. His Yorkshire background and service in the first world war inflected his thought and directed his taste. Yorkshire was childhood, legend, romance, a gloomy beneficence glowing from moor, wold and vale. It formed the subject of his best book, The Innocent Eye, an account of his youth published in 1933. The war, in which Read was awarded the Military Cross and the DSO, confirmed his pacifism and non-violent anarchism from then onwards. Much of his early poetry was coloured by what he had experienced; and that side of him which preferred the serene and 'clas- sic' modernism of Nicholson, Hepworth or Mondrian probably had its roots in a subconscious reaction against the 'raging hell' of the trenches.
Read's rise to the status of pundit, defender of the avant-garde in general and of Thirties Hampstead in particular, was both rapid and roundabout. The civil service provided a temporary home after the war until he entered the Ceramics Department of the Victoria & Albert Museum. There followed a curious inter- lude in Edinburgh as Professor of Fine Arts (where he courted his second wife against the background of a disintegrating first marriage). In 1933 he accepted the editorship of The Burlington Magazine, a post he held until 1938. Oddly enough though characteristically — Read's in- volvement in contemporary art was kept separate from his editorial policy, with the result that the Burlington lost much of the prestige it had gained under Fry and others as a commentator on modern art as well as the old masters.
To supplement his income, Read's mobilised intelligence produced a score of critical books on art, literature, society, education. That part of him determined to be 'modern' caught him in the whizzing crossfire of interwar cliques, allegiances and movements (`Seven and Five', 'Unit One', 'Circle'). The 'gentle nest of artists' in NW3 turns out to have been an eyrie of ruthless egotisms. Read was scalded and scolded on numerous occasions — in Hampstead, Bloomsbury, Euston Road and Cork Street. About the only fun to be had from this otherwise depressing book is the detailing of Read's quarrels with Wyndham Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Geoffrey Grigson, Douglas Cooper. The last- named's letters in particular add a grotesquely acerbic comedy. Read's mea- sured retaliations contain an element of naive surprise that anything he might have done or written could possibly have had an effect. On the whole, however, Read's cool reserve and Yorkshireman's economy of speech maintained several wobbly friendships. There are harsh words for and from Stephen Spender, for example, but we find Read glad to see him at his own 70th birthday party. Only Wyndham Lewis was a lost cause, early hero-worship turn- ing to acrimony. Eliot concurred: 'There had been few people whom he had found it impossible to like, but Lewis was one of them.'
Knighted and hung about with doctor- ates, spokesman for culture at internation- al conferences, father of Piers Paul, Sophie, Thomas and Benedict, Herbert Read died at his grimly-named Yorkshire home, Stonegrave, in 1968. That he was a good and generous man is clearly appa- rent; his faults were minor; idealism fuel- led his enthusiasm; a misty private belief in 'human glory' gave warmth to his some- times frigid speculations.
Unfortunately, he has been ill-served by his biographer. James King's narrative is jolting and fragmentary. I suspect a com- puter in the background, continually fed morsels of fact and quotation like a packet of Allsorts thrown to a monkey. One brief paragraph, for example, begins with Hit- ler's assumption of the German Chancel- lorship and ends with Barbara Hepworth crying because triplets would interrupt her work. Life, yes, but not biography. We jump from literary criticism to personal gossip to historical scene-painting so that everything takes on the same ultimately trivial emphasis. In the end there appears no distinction between what Read felt at the time and what his biographer thinks he ought to have felt. Turn instead to The Innocent Eye and Read's only novel The Green Child to gain a sense of his consider- able qualities.
Previous page
