My father was often absent. Every other week he went to London to work at Routledge, attend meetings of the Arts Council, the British Council, the Tate Gallery and the ICA, which he had founded in 1947 with Roland Penrose. He was often abroad, lecturing in the US and South America, judging international art competitions, going each year first to confer with C.G. Jung at his home in Küsnacht (he was the general editor of his collected works) and then crossing the Alps to be lionised in the suitably named Palazzo Venier dei Leoni in Venice by Peggy Guggenheim. In deciding to withdraw to Yorkshire, Read had given little thought to the human landscape. His remaining relatives were thin on the ground; a couple of cousins would occasionally pay visits but because of the size of our house and our private education, we were befriended by neighbours whose passion was for field sports and thought all modern art was tosh. If they respected my father, it was not for his reputation as an intellectual but for the decorations he had received during World War I. They would address him as Captain Read until he was knighted in 1953 when he became Sir Herbert.
His acceptance of a knighthood was a source of disillusion to many of his anarchist friends. He liked to blame the decision on my mother but I suspect he was quietly delighted by this official recognition of what he had achieved. However, despite the knighthood and his world-wide reputation, my father became somewhat melancholy in his later years. His accomplishments had been prodigious: he was the author of more than 60 books and a thousand essays, lectures, prefaces and reviews on anarchism, syndicalism, poetry, psychoanalysis, education, design and, of course, modern art.
However, he had not become the creative writer as he had once hoped be. He had never written a second novel and his reputation as a poet had been overshadowed by that of his friend Eliot. Always indifferent to the pecuniary value of works of art, he was somewhat dismayed to find that the struggling artists he had championed were now all multi-millionaires — the works of Moore and Hepworth a necessary accoutrement to public buildings throughout the world; and, with advent of Pop Art, he felt that the cause to which he had devoted his life had been hijacked by charlatans. He also remained pessimistic about the future of Western civilisation, and suffered from his lack of any religious belief. "All my life I have found more sustenance in the work of those who bear witness to the reality of a living God than in the work of those who deny God . . . In that state of suspense, ‘waiting on God', I still live and shall probably die." In 1966 he was diagnosed with cancer and, after two years of suffering, died in his bed at Stonegrave — not precisely between the Ricall and the Rye, but close enough.
His acceptance of a knighthood was a source of disillusion to many of his anarchist friends. He liked to blame the decision on my mother but I suspect he was quietly delighted by this official recognition of what he had achieved. However, despite the knighthood and his world-wide reputation, my father became somewhat melancholy in his later years. His accomplishments had been prodigious: he was the author of more than 60 books and a thousand essays, lectures, prefaces and reviews on anarchism, syndicalism, poetry, psychoanalysis, education, design and, of course, modern art.
However, he had not become the creative writer as he had once hoped be. He had never written a second novel and his reputation as a poet had been overshadowed by that of his friend Eliot. Always indifferent to the pecuniary value of works of art, he was somewhat dismayed to find that the struggling artists he had championed were now all multi-millionaires — the works of Moore and Hepworth a necessary accoutrement to public buildings throughout the world; and, with advent of Pop Art, he felt that the cause to which he had devoted his life had been hijacked by charlatans. He also remained pessimistic about the future of Western civilisation, and suffered from his lack of any religious belief. "All my life I have found more sustenance in the work of those who bear witness to the reality of a living God than in the work of those who deny God . . . In that state of suspense, ‘waiting on God', I still live and shall probably die." In 1966 he was diagnosed with cancer and, after two years of suffering, died in his bed at Stonegrave — not precisely between the Ricall and the Rye, but close enough.
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