Charmed Lives

...This was followed by a first-rate chronicle, The Literature of the Spanish People, and by South From Granada, a charming account of the superstitions, feudal mores and courting customs of Yegen...

...One jumps back and forth, comparing the portraits of such leading actors in the English family romance as Clive and Vanessa Bell, Cyril Connolly, Virginia Woolf, Arthur Waley, Desmond MacCarthy, Lytton Strachey, Augustus John, and Roger Fry, whose death was a painful personal loss to each man...

...There are subtly veiled hints throughout the book that the author's shift from doing to judging still rankles...

...During the wretched years that he was caught in Carrington's psychopathic web of guilty prevarication (she committed suicide soon after Strachey's death in 1932), Brenan consoled himself with the exogamous favors of tarts he picked up in the London demimonde...

...New York has never been the irresistible magnet for American intellectuals that London is to the English, and the denizens of Greenwich Village have been too transient to form a Bloomsbury, where a cohesive loyalty was nourished by a common class and school background, and by similar trajectories of career...

...After he took his degree from Oxford, the manna of blessed fortune seemed to pour out of a limitless heaven...

...founded on exploitation" is too smoothly perfunctory...

...In time he came to support the Left, and in England, for two years before Franco's victory, he was a tireless counterforce to the pro-Fascist hysteria of the British upper classes...

...The words 'work of art' had never been spoken in my presence.'' Despite the lavish philistinism of his family, Clark discovered at the precocious age of seven that he had a gift for "pure esthetic sensation," and it was soon refined into an unfaltering self-confidence at judging pictures...

...Settling in the primitive and barely accessible Andalusian village of Yegen, he proceeded to educate himself by reading systematically through 2,000 books he brought from England...

...Similarly, Lord Clark is addicted to the word "hideous," which is called upon for scornful emphasis on every other page...

...Born in India in 1895, the son of a narrow-minded and tyrannical Army major stationed there, Brenan became one of nature's bohemians, though he spent four years at a repressive public school and served as an officer in World War I. In an earlier volume, A Life of One's Own, he recounted his formative years...

...Although he wrote some novels in the stalking years, it was not until World War II, when Brenan was almost 50, that he received any substantial literary recognition-and then not for his fiction but for The Spanish Labyrinth, a history of Spain up to the Civil War...

...Its tiny intellectual elite is densely concentrated in London, with the great universities forming a penumbra around the capital...

...At Winchester and later Oxford, though "my friends and I belonged to the socially irresponsible, postwar generation which was to be succeeded, a year or two later, by the Leftist poets," he filled in the gaps of learning, and briefly hoped to become a painter himself...

...This provides a neatly elegaic finale to a neat and witty story that also seems as glib and elegantly patronizing as Clark's this-isn't-going-to-hurt-a-bit art lectures on TV...

...This Schnitzlerian round of eros made for some hilariously nimble footwork when, as happened astonishingly often, all four wayward lovers were under the same country roof...

...At 36, steadied by a generous legacy, he ended this chaotic roving with his marriage to an American writer, Gamel Woolsey, who died a few years ago...

...An unpolitical person, with Spanish friends in both camps, he was appalled at the slaughter committed by the Republicans as well as the Nationalists...

...Regrettably, Brenan's Personal Record, for all its first-hand abundance of Bloomsbury gossip, is tediously over-detailed, indulging the prolix candor of a very long memory with numbing effect...

...Until he was shipped off to school, life was an opulent cream puff, with all the diversions money could buy: yachting on the Riviera, shooting in Scotland, breaking the bank at Monte Carlo...

...The Great Clark Boom, as he calls it, was on...

...Clark, like Brenan, stumbled into the worlds of art and literature entirely on his own...

...All those rootless women, all those inert anecdotes and tiresome letters of youth, quoted with such undeserved piety...

...Into each life and into every autobiography, some pain must fall...

...the other by Kenneth Clark, the art historian and critic who brought "Civilization" to the masses on television, and who will soon be 72...

...Much of the time he was trapped in a lacerating romance with that strange vestal of Bloomsbury, Dora Carrington, who loved the homosexual Lytton Strachey but could only be his adoring domestic slave...

...Nonetheless, the same names keep appearing in both books, so that reading the autobiographies together induces an odd sort of double vision...

...they have pursued disparate careers, chosen opposite styles of life, and are of decidedly alien temperaments...

...If Gerald Brenan has had more than his share of pain and disappointment, Kenneth Clark would seem from his self-portrait, Another Part of the Wood (Harper & Row, 278 pp., $11.00), to have been the pampered darling of the gods...

...Yet most of the artfully planted barbs of self-disparagement sound more than a little disingenuous, just as his censure, in passing, of a "social system...

...These volumes were all highly praised, yet as Brenan sadly observes, "In the case of only two of my books have I earned as much for the time I spent on writing them as the compositor who set them, and in some I have earned far less...

...The only child of eccentric and wealthy parents-his great-great-grandfather invented the cotton spool, and the fortune remained-he was raised, as he dryly remarks, in "the vulgar, disgraceful, overfed, godless social order that we call Edwardian and I enjoyed it...

...Now, in Personal Record: 1920-1972 (Knopf, 375 pp., $12.50), he tells a less familiar story, beginning with his adventurous move to Spain at the age of 25, in revolt against his family's stifling middle-class orthodoxy...

...My whole life," he writes, not altogether facetiously, "might be described as one long, harmless confidence trick...

...In the course of a brief meeting with Bernard Berenson, Clark was invited by the Grand Authenticator of Italian Renaissance painting to assist him in revising his pioneer work on Florentine drawings...

...To compound the libidinous confusion, Carrington was married to Brenan's friend Partridge, who had the steadiest of mistresses yet was violently jealous of his wife's trysts with Brenan...

...Brenan and Clark, I would guess, are only acquaintances...

...Brenan's entree was made through his Army friend, Ralph Partridge...

...It is the finest vignette in the book...

...Brenan records everything with a perfectly straight face...

...Brenan got no further in the British social hierarchy than Bloomsbury (nor would he have wanted to), but the Clarks now became frantically sought-after favorites in the most hallowed drawing rooms of Mayfair, Downing Street, and the great country houses...

...The happenstance demonstrates yet again how much the English intelligentsia, particularly between the wars, formed an extended family of the mind (and sometimes not just of the mind) that would be scarcely conceivable in the United States...

...Writers & Writing CHARMED LIVES BY PEARL K. BELL By coincidence, two radically dissimilar English autobiographies have been published simultaneously in America this spring: one by Gerald Brenan, the novelist and impressionist historian of Spain and its literature, who is now 81...

...When he realized this was not to be, he settled for second-best-the criticism and history of art...

...The future Lord Clark of Saltwood was drawn toward Bloomsbury by Oxford cronies...

...He is a good man...

...From this experience Clark has acidly sketched II Bibi, full of vituperative and shamelessly pretentious arrogance and "perched on the pinnacle of a mountain of corruption...

...The one chapter that rises magnificently above the maundering shuffle of trivia is Brenan's graphic and shocking recollection of the first months of the Civil War in Malaga...

...England is a very small country...

...Whatever the country, Brenan was equally systematic in his pursuit of women...

...Nevertheless, on the whole he thinks himself lucky: There was always enough money, and he now shares his late years with a pretty English girl, 50 years his junior, who makes him sublimely happy...

...The closing chapters of Another Part of the Wood are a positive orgy of name-dropping, ending with the outbreak of war and Clark anxiously shipping the national treasures to safety away from London...

...With a small allowance from a doting great-aunt, he divided his time in the next decade between the hermitic seclusion of rural Spain and the frenetic, poverty-ridden claims of friendship and literary apprenticeship in England...

...Back from his stint with Berenson in Italy, Clark was first appointed Keeper of Fine Arts at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, and then, at the dizzying age of 30, became director of the National Gallery...