Authors: Ian Buruma
From heart of Mittel-Europe
I make der little trip
to show der english dummkopfs
some echt-deutsch scholarship
Viel Sehenswürdigkeiten
by others have been missed
but now comes to enlighten,
der Great Categorist
.
Another was called “A Period Piece,” which spelled out the difference between the English poet, Betjeman, and the foreign “pedant,” Pevsner, most clearly:
POET
:
A Poet-part-Victorian
part topographer—that’s me!
(Who was it tipped you Norman Shaw
in Nineteen Thirty-three?)
Of gas-lit Halls and Old Canals
I reverently sing,
But when Big-Chief-I-Spy comes round I curse
like anything!
Oo-oh!
PEDANT
:
A crafty Art Historian
of Continental fame,
I’ll creep up on this Amateur
and stop his little game!
With transatlantic thoroughness
I’ll note down all he’s missed
Each British brick from Norm. to Vic.
You’ll find upon my list!
The mock German accent (in fact, Pevsner’s was only slight), the foreign “spy,” the “transatlantic thoroughness,” (whatever that means; I’m not sure I want to know), the Mittel-European pedant wrecking the English poet’s song: Clarke might have meant it all in the gentle spirit of good clean English fun. From what I gather, however, Pevsner wasn’t amused. Underlying these mocking lines is the suggestion that a true understanding of English art is given only to the native born. The foreign professor might know more than we do, and work harder, in his rather absurd scholarly way, but he will never “get” it—the poetry, that is, of the sheer Englishness of England.
Poor N.P. No matter how hard he tried to be English, with his tweeds and woolly waistcoats and his membership in the Victorian Society, he was never allowed to forget his German provenance. Long after Pevsner died, the art historian John Harris, who assisted him on
The Buildings of England
, attacked him for being a “German authoritarian” and a “Prussian soldier” who had no sense of humor: “Achieving the
Buildings of England
was rarely accompanied by a giggle.” Driven by his German efficiency, his eyes always fixed on his watch, Pevsner had missed the “remoter parks and gardens.” He was prejudiced against classical styles of Edwardian and post-Edwardian architecture. He wouldn’t bother to read such periodicals as
Country Life
. Worst, or at least most un-English, of all, Pevsner was “utterly uninterested in genealogy and would describe vast houses without mention of the families who lived in them.”
It is probably true that N.P. was not a giggler, like Betjeman. And although he was proud of his knighthood and took a certain delight in
ceremonial occasions, he did not fawn on the British upper classes (and in any case, family histories were not part of his project). It is also fair to say that Pevsner thought Edwardian classicism was a debased form of “historicism,” a timid cop-out just when Britain was leading Europe into the modernist age. But if Pevsner’s main flaw was not to be a Betjemanesque amateur, that would be a minor one, if indeed it can be called a flaw at all. A far more wounding attack was launched from a place that is in some ways about as far removed from modernism as it is possible to be: Peterhouse, Cambridge.
Founded in 1284 by the bishop of Ely, Peterhouse is the oldest Cambridge college. The buildings are a splendid architectural mishmash: a thirteenth-century hall, decorated by William Morris and other Victorians, a seventeenth-century Gothic-Renaissance chapel, fifteenth-century rooms behind an eighteenth-century facade, eighteenth-century Palladian chambers, a nineteenth-century Tudor-Gothic court, a 1930s addition, and a modernist tower, erected in 1964. Pevsner’s own description of Peterhouse is a perfect example of his views. The windows and tiles by Morris are pronounced “charming.” The Palladian style of the new chambers is praised for its purity. The nineteenth-century Tudor-Gothic is “remarkably unimaginative.” The neo-Georgian hostel “might be a post-office.” The 1930s building is good, because it is frankly “in the style of its date.” And the 1964 tower is “excellent.” Purity of zeitgeist is clearly of the essence.
The zeitgeist at Peterhouse has often been as eccentric as the
Geist
of some of its most prominent dons. In the 1930s, the prevailing High Table spirit is said to have been in sympathy with developments in Italy and Germany. One well-known historian, Ernest Barker, lectured in Hitler’s Germany, comparing the führer, favorably, with Cromwell. But such Continental sympathies aside, the Peterhouse atmosphere was marked before the war by a militant conservatism. Humanism, secularism, socialism, and Whigish reformism were held in contempt. A romantic nostalgia for order, hierarchy, and faith perfumed the Peterhouse air like stale incense.
Postwar Peterhouse has been dominated by dons whose right-wing views varied from radical Thatcherite libertarianism to ecclesiastical campery. They were united, however, in a common hatred of liberalism in anything but the economic sphere. Although such Peterhouse gurus as the historian Maurice Cowling extolled the English nation,
their ideal of England was very different from those qualities Pevsner identified as typically English. If the typical Englishman is, as Pevsner—or Orwell, for that matter—supposed, a compromising, reasonable, moderate, tolerant, gentle club man or pigeon-fancier, then, in Peterhouse terms, the typical Englishman is odious.
David Watkin is a Peterhouse art historian, and a Roman Catholic aesthete, consumed by a loathing of modernism. He wrote a ferocious attack on Pevsner entitled
Morality and Architecture
. Like Pevsner, who was once his teacher, Watkin takes the politics of art seriously. He sees Pevsner, or at least Pevsner’s modernist ideology, as a kind of wrecking ball, smashing everything that Watkin holds dear: not only old buildings, but all that they represent for him: tradition, religious faith, classical order, reverence for the past, nobility of birth, and so on. His criticism of Pevsner’s dogmatic views on zeitgeist and
Volksgeist
is harsh, but not unjust. The idea that art must, by some iron law, be determined by the economics or politics or “spirit” of an age is indeed nonsense. What interested me about Watkin, however, was his passion, which, in Pevsnerian terms, seemed rather “un-English.” His hatred of modernism appeared to surpass by far Pevsner’s contempt for “historicism.” I decided to pay him a visit.
Watkin’s sitting room was decorated in a vaguely eighteenth-century style, with some camp touches here and there: burgundy wallpaper, prints of eighteenth-century grandees, including a rather sour-looking pontiff, leather-bound volumes of Pope and Swift, a well-used
Debrett’s Peerage
, everything by Nancy Mitford and Ronald Fir-bank, and antique tables bearing obelisks and statuettes of Greek gods—more than one Hermes, daintily lifting one leg, like a dog peeing. Watkin, a tall, slim man with the manner of a slightly precious priest, was dressed in a cream silk suit. We discussed the architecture of Albert Speer, whose neoclassical order Watkin admired.
Watkin described Pevsner as “chilling,” “joyless,” “bleak.” He speculated on the interior of Pevsner’s house: no doubt sober, modernist, bleak. This was typical, he said, of foreign art historians, whose interest in art was mostly intellectual. Ernst Gombrich, for example, whose views Watkin rates more highly, probably lived in equally uninspiring quarters: “You know, the wrong side of Finchley Road.” There was a slight purse of the lips.
We continued to talk about this and that, drinking sherry. Then
Watkin told me he had hated modernism since he was eighteen: it had done such terrible damage everywhere, especially in Cambridge. He spoke about the evil of Pevsner’s joyless, Hegelian, determinist views, which continue to be quoted by town planners and other destroyers of tradition. He explained how he favored the restoration of old buildings, from scratch if necessary. He said that Pevsner never really understood English life, especially the social life shared by students and dons. Nor did he understand the way patrons and architects intermingled: “You see, he never met patrons, or people with money, or style, or birth.” Watkin’s long, thin hands folded, like a precious fan.
I looked around the room, at the obelisks, the antique furniture, the prints of aristocrats and popes, and I felt a sudden wave of sympathy for Pevsner. Watkin’s fierce yearning for the fixed order of the past did not strike me as joyful. Perhaps in a way he had more in common with some of the modernists than Pevsner did. If too many modernist buildings suffer from rigor mortis, the same is true of too great a longing for tradition and hierarchy. Both suffer from a deadly absolutism. After all, the borderline between Albert Speer’s monumental, stripped-down architecture and modernist blocks is not always that clear. Speer and Gropius even claimed similar antecedents: the classic nineteenth-century tradition of Karl Friedrich Schinkel—who, by the way, was a great enthusiast, like Pevsner, of British industrial architecture. But unlike Speer, the best modernist architects, such as Loos or Berlage, were humanists. And humanism is what right-wing Peterhouse dons despise. Pevsner, whatever his faults, was a humanist, which is why he fell in love with a sentimental idea of the English character.
Watkin, I think, misses the point of Pevsner’s Anglophilia, which was often in contradiction to his modernist ideology, but perhaps more passionately felt. Why else would Pevsner have helped to found the Victorian Society, which championed buildings a modernist would despise? It is, of course, easy to make fun of his Anglophilia.
The Englishness of English Art
is in many respects an absurd book. The notion that some essense of Englishness, running from the Middle Ages to the present time, can be identified in the national language is dubious, to put it mildly.
The short, snappy English word “chop,” as in “pork chop,” instead of the florid Italian
costoletta
, shows, in Pevsner’s view, the English feeling for understatement. The square towers of medieval English
churches, the pure lines of Georgian terraces, and the simple horizontals and verticals of English Palladian houses are all typical expressions of English reason, moderation, and compromise—“of
chop
and not
costoletta
.” There is also much talk scattered through the book of English liberties and English hospitality to foreigners, evident from the many Continental artists who made their homes in England. This shows, I think, that Pevsner’s heart, if not always his head, was in the same émigré’s English Arcadia that captivated Hayek.
The Englishness of English Art
was Pevsner’s tribute to his adopted country. Just as Pinder, his teacher, wanted to make Germans aware of their native genius, Pevsner tried to do the same for the English. It was, in the case of Pevsner’s England, a singularly conservative genius.
Despite its outlandish passages, however,
The Englishness of English Art
is a fascinating document, particularly where the author tries to reconcile his heart with his head. For example, Pevsner was fascinated by eighteenth-century English gardens. Without mentioning the classical European (or Chinese) inspirations of English garden-parks, Pevsner describes the picturesque, the serpentine lines, the follies, and other irregularities as typically English. Like others before him, Pevsner connects this quasi-spontaneous, informal style to English liberties. There is nothing wrong with this; the designers and owners of the parks did so themselves. But then he gets carried away. Palladian houses set in rolling parklands are examples of typically English compromise: an edifice of reason in nature, uniformity surrounded by spontaneity, formality blending with eccentricity—what Pevsner calls the “spirit of place.” He pushes this concept further and points out how leafy London squares of the early nineteenth century are extensions of the picturesque. From there it is but a small step to Hampstead Garden Suburb and other pseudo-rustic Arcadias on the edges of town.
As a good modernist, he cannot quite bring himself to praise the suburbs. But in a remarkable leap of the imagination, Pevsner claims that the English genius for informal, picturesque, irregular arrangements must be harnessed to modernist city planning. From the Palladian house in the countryside to informally arranged tower blocks, with or without lawns: it is an ingenious idea. And it explains why Pevsner can praise Sir William Holford’s brutish concrete blocks around St. Paul’s, or the housing estates in Roehampton, as “picturesque.”
All Anglophiles, from Voltaire to Hayek, wanted England to show Europe
the way to liberty. Pevsner was no exception. He writes: “… what has been said about English character shows that no country is aesthetically better provided to solve [urban problems] and thereby leave its imprint on other countries than England. If English planners forget about the straight axes and the artificially symmetrical facades of the academy, and design functionally and Englishly, they will succeed.” Englishly, that is, according to Dr. Pevsner’s idea of the English: polite, picturesque, moderate. Pevsner’s Anglophilia drove him into the camp of “modernism with good manners.” The compromising character that had stopped British modernism in its tracks around 1900 was now held up as a model for the rest of Europe to follow.