‘Kennington and John: both hag-ridden by a sense that perhaps their strength was greater than they knew. What an uncertain, disappointed, barbarous generation we war-timers have been. They said the best ones were killed. There’s far too much talent still alive.’
T E. Lawrence to William Rothenstein (14 April 1928)
‘[Edward] Wadsworth, along with Augustus John and nearly everybody, is drilling in the courtyard of the Royal Academy, in a regiment for home defence,’ wrote Ezra Pound that autumn to Harriet Monroe. It was the last occasion John would find himself so precisely in step with other artists. His letters soon grew more portentous, nearer in tone to those of his father: full of the stuff to give the troops. Already in the first month, the sight of fifteen hundred Territorials plodding up Regent Street swells him with pride: ‘they looked damn fine.’1 And by the end of the war he was anxious lest the Germans be let off too lightly. ‘The German hatred for England is the finest compliment we have been paid for ages,’ he assures Quinn. To some extent he seems to have fallen victim to war propaganda, though never to war literature. ‘The atrocities of the Germans are only equalled in horror by the war poems of the English papers,’ he writes to Ottoline Morrell in 1916. ‘What tales of blood and mud!’ In addition to what he reads in the papers, he absorbs confidential whispers from his various khaki sitters, repeating stories of lunatic generals on whom he fixes the blame for early defeats. ‘As for the men, they are beyond praise.’2 By the spring of 1916 he is looking forward to being able to ‘swamp the German lines with metal’.
John’s attitude to the war remained consistent: but his emotions, as he lived through it, veered hectically. At first he is excited; by the end it has aged him, and he is no longer quite the same person. Starting out smartly in step, he was left behind struggling to find a world where he could be at ease. From the beginning he wanted to ‘join in’ – ‘it’s rather sickening to be out of it all.’3 His predicament is set out in a letter (10 October 1914) to Quinn:
‘I have had more than one impulse to enlist but have each time been dissuaded by various arguments. In the first place I can’t decide to leave my painting at this stage nor can I leave my family without resources to go on with. I feel sure I shall be doing better to keep working at my own job. Still all depends on how the war goes on. I long to see something of the fighting and possibly may manage to get in [in] some capacity. I feel a view of the havoc in Belgium with the fleeing refugees would be inspiring and memorable. Lots of my friends have joined the army. The general feeling of the country is I believe quite decent and cheerfully serious – not at all reflected by the nauseating cant and hypocrisy and vulgarity of the average Press. There is no lack of volunteers. The difficulty is to cope with the immense number of recruits, feed and clothe and drill them. There are 20,000 near here, still mostly without their uniforms but they have sing-songs every night in the pubs till they are turned out at 9 o’clock.’
The war intensified John’s sense of exclusion. There was his deafness ‘which is very bad now’, he wrote in 1917. ‘I can’t hear anything less than an air-raid.’4 By curtailing freedom of movement, the war also aggravated his tendency to claustrophobia.
He was being badgered by their old friend Ursula Tyrwhitt to make sure Gwen was all right. Gwen had written to Ursula describing the bombing raids on Paris and the cattle trucks at the Gare Montparnasse ‘crammed with frightened people’. But though she became a little frightened herself by what she was to read in the newspapers, especially by the massacre at Ypres, she felt ‘more and more disinclined to go’.5 The Germans of course were ‘brutes and vandals’ and it would be ‘dreadful’ if they won; yet England had become ‘quite a foreign country to me’. In a sense she had no country outside the dark first-floor room she now inhabited at 6 rue de l’Ouest and the flat she had rented on the top storey of an old house near the bois de Meudon, in the south-west suburbs of Paris.
In December 1914 Gus came striding up the rue Terre-Neuve in Meudon, ‘tall and broad-shouldered’, Gwen’s biographer Susan Chitty writes, ‘wearing a loose tweed suit with a brightly coloured bandanna round his neck’.6 After having registered as an alien, Gwen told him, she was doing work as an interpreter for English officers; and Gus approved. ‘The soldiers must be glad of your help as an interpreter. I suppose even the officers don’t know a word of French.’ He suggested she might try Red Cross work – certainly any sustained painting seemed ‘impossible’ for both of them during the war. He also explained why he could not join a fighting regiment (his ‘establishment would go bust if I did’); and Gwen understood. ‘Will the world be very different afterwards?’ Gus was brimful of confidence. ‘It might do people a world of good,’7 he asserted. In any event he was certain Britain would benefit. For Gwen, who had feared Britain would be invaded, there was comfort in the feeling that the English would ‘come up to the mark’.
Gus’s invitation to England remained open; and Gwen remained in France. ‘Ici tout va bien, surtout la petite fille,’ he wrote to her from Alderney.8 ‘…The children obstinately keep up the Xmas traditions. They are all flourishing & Dorelia too… Don’t let yourself get frozen dearest. Take exercises. Love from Gus.’9 Dorelia sent over some money and clothes; Gus sent Sanatogen tonic wine and copies of A. R. Orage’s New Age. He could tell Ursula Tyrwhitt, and also his father, that he had done what was possible; and old Edwin John could pass the news on to Winifred and Thornton.
Winifred had made her final visit to Europe shortly before Ida’s death. In January 1915 she married – and Thornton, perhaps the loneliest of all these Johns, returned to England. In a letter to Gwen, Winifred had described Thornton as a ‘thought reader’.10 But though he could trespass into her secret thoughts he never seemed to know what other people were thinking and he was, she told Gus, ‘very unlucky in his partners’.11 His twelve years in North America had been disappointing. He worked hard at mining gold in Montana, but found only hostility among the farmers, who disliked the holes he dug in their land and threatened him with writs. Then he got a job ploughing with three horses in British Columbia, but had fallen ill. After that he built a boat which he sailed on Lake Kinbasket, planning to make good wages washing the gravel for gold. He loved his boat and the work suited him, but there was only gravel. By now he had run out of partners and eventually spent his solitary days on his boat, fishing. He was fishing near Lasquet Island when war broke out. He had been so long alone, and the world had changed so much, he was astonished by the news when he went to buy provisions in Vancouver. He applied to join the Canadian Army – nearly all the Canadian troops, he believed, were English-born – but was rejected on account of his broken foot.
Winifred was now a United States citizen, settled in California and pregnant with her first child, a daughter who was to be born in November 1915. She had begun a new life, but there seemed no more life for Thornton in North America – he hated peddling his fish for money. So he came back, paying a duty call on his father in Tenby, walking in the woods with Gwen at Meudon, seeing Gus at Alderney and in London. ‘The little girl Poppet and I are good friends and I hauled her about the studio on a mat,’12 he wrote to Gwen. This was the one of the few gleams of happiness in his letters. He was to spend part of the war in a munitions factory at Woolwich Arsenal. Working along with conscientious objectors and rejects from the armed services was ‘an abomination, but there is nothing to do but hold on grimly,’ he told Gwen. ‘I try to do as much as I can with as little thought of reward as possible… I know I am not liked.’13 Eventually he found work as a shipwright at Gravesend, and there at last he was in the open air. His boat lay afloat in a basin near by and he managed to work on it nearly every day.
‘The war probably makes France impossible for holidays,’14 Augustus had written to Dorelia, whom he advised to plan as if for a siege. After his visit to Gwen he did not return to France for more than three years. ‘I feel the nostalgie du Midi now that there’s no chance of going there,’ he told Ottoline. ‘…I commence the New Year rather ill-temperedly.’15 There was no easy escape from these dark days of civilian incarceration, and he began to develop symptoms around the head and legs that ‘put me quite out of action’.16
Ireland now took the place of France. He made several visits to Dublin, to Galway and Connemara. ‘John was a good friend of Ireland,’ Christine Longford remembered. ‘We bobbed our hair because Augustus John girls had short hair; and anyone who had red hair, like the picture of Iris Tree in Dublin, was lucky… He knew Galway well, “the shawled women murmuring together on the quays, with the white complex of the Claddagh glimmering across the harbour”.’17 The men were going off ‘to fight England’s battles’, and there was a great wailing on the platforms as their women saw them off. They were consoled by government grants, and ‘the consequence is an unusually heavy traffic in stout,’ Augustus told Dorelia when inviting her over, adding that she ‘would hate it here’. In her absence he was stalked by ‘my double’ who went everywhere spreading legendary rumours. It became all the more important to get himself settled. ‘I have found a house here,’ he wrote to Dorelia from Galway City,18 ‘with fine big rooms and windows which I’m taking – only £30 a year… I had a bad attack of blues here, doing nothing, but the prospect of soon getting to work bucks me up.’ This house was in Tuam Street and owned by Bishop O’Dea, who leased it to John for three years on the understanding that no painting from the nude was to be enjoyed on the premises. John’s plan was to execute a big dramatization of Galway bringing in everything characteristic of the place. He explained this scheme to Dorelia:
‘I’m thinking out a vast picture synthesizing all that’s fine and characteristic in Galway City – a grand marshalling of the elements. It will have to be enormous to contain troops of women and children, groups of fishermen, docks, wharves, the church, mills, constables, donkeys, widows, men from Aran, hookers*1 etc., perhaps with a night sky and all illuminated in the light of a dream. This will be worth while – worth the delay and the misery that went before.’19
He went out into the streets, staring, sketching: and was at once identified as a spy. Bathing – ‘the best tonic in the world’ – was reckoned to be a misdemeanour in wartime; and sketching in the harbour a treason – ‘so that is a drawback and a big one’. In a letter to Ottoline Morrell he complained: ‘There are wonderful people and it is beautiful about the harbour but if one starts sketching one is at once shot by a policeman… It would be worth while passing 6 months here given the right conditions.’
But the right conditions were elusive. Without disobeying the letter of Bishop O’Dea’s injunction, ‘I had two girls in here yesterday,’ he admitted to Dorelia, ‘but they didn’t give the same impression as when seen in the street. I could do with some underclothing.’ He was anxious not to return to Alderney ‘till I’ve got something good to take away’. Every day he would go out and look, then hurry back to Tuam Street and do drawings or pen-and-wash sketches. ‘I’ve observed the people here enough,’ he eventually wrote to Dorelia. ‘Their drapery is often very pleasing – one generally sees one good thing a day at least – but the population is greatly spoilt now – 20 years ago it must have been astonishing… Painting from nature and from imagination spells defeat I see clearly.’
Imagination meant memory. His imagination was kindled instantly: then the good moment went. He had to catch it before it began to fade, rather than recollect it in tranquillity. Yet now there seemed no alternative to a retrospective technique – what he called ‘mental observation’.20 He had found himself painting portraits of the Ladies Ottoline Morrell and Howard de Walden while they were ‘safely out of sight’. But this was not why he had come to Galway. After vacillating for weeks between the railway station and the telegraph office, he left. ‘It was in the end’, he explained to Bernard Shaw, ‘less will-power than panic that got me away.’21
He had been at Galway two months. After his return to Alderney he began to work feverishly at a large cartoon, covering four hundred square feet in a single week. Once again he was racing against time. He wanted to bring all those one-good-things-a-day together in a composite arrangement of the ideal Galway: a visionary city locked deep in his imagination.
War gives some painters an opportunity to record and interpret the extremities of human behaviour. Lamb, Wyndham Lewis, Paul Nash, C. R. W. Nevinson, William Roberts and Stanley Spencer were among the artists who grasped this opportunity. Others, such as McEvoy, succumbed to fashionable portraiture. John, like William Nicholson, also painted commissioned portraits to earn money; but they were erratically fashionable. By 1914, in a hit-or-miss fashion, he was still painting in his best vein. ‘Of course painters as good as John will always sell,’ Sickert assured Nan Hudson, ‘war or no war.’ But the war put pressures on him. ‘I’m afraid we are in for thin times over here,’ he explained to Quinn. ‘No one will want luxuries like pictures for awhile.’22 Nevertheless he continued painting those large decorative groups, such as ‘Galway’, for which, he felt, his talent was best suited: also, for a year or two, those bold and glowing landscapes with figures, often on small wooden panels, sometimes with children, which were inspired by private affections, and which show his talent at its most direct and engaged. In the past he had sold such work better than any of his contemporaries, but after 1914 this was no longer possible. Partly for financial reasons, but also because he did not want his work to be wholly irrelevant to the contemporary business of this war, he began to paint a different sort of picture. ‘I am called upon to provide various things in aid of war funds or charities connected with the war,’ he told Quinn.23 Among his sitters were several staff officers and, in 1916, the bellicose Admiral Lord Fisher who brought in tow the Nelsonically named Duchess of Hamilton24 (‘You won’t find as fine a figure of a woman, and a Duchess at that, at every street corner’), to whom John transferred part of his attentions, while Fisher explained how to ‘end the war in a week’.25 When this portrait was shown at the NEAC, Albert Rutherston noted that it was ‘careless and sketchy’,26 and The Times critic observed that John had really painted a zoo picture of Fisher as a ‘Sea-Lion… hungering for his prey’.27 Yet it has lasted better than the formal portrait by Herbert von Herkomer and the Epstein bust. John’s depiction of Fisher’s face ‘shows it looking wryly over the viewer’s left shoulder,’ wrote Jan Morris,28 ‘its eyebrows raised in irony, its round eyes alert, its mouth mocking, cynical and affectionate, all at the same time. It is a quirky and highly intelligent face.’
But on the whole these public portraits of war celebrities are not satisfactory, perhaps because John could not match his public sentiments to private feelings. In his correspondence he is often approving of these statesmen and soldiers; but when he actually came face to face with them he felt unaccountably bored. He did not think it proper to caricature them as he had done the Lord Mayor of Liverpool. Some satire, in a muted form, does come through: but seldom convincingly.
Perhaps the most biographically interesting of these war pictures was that of Lloyd George, who had ‘introduced himself to me’ at the Park Hotel in Cardiff in the early summer of 1914. Towards the end of 1915, having recently been appointed Minister of Munitions, he agreed that John should paint him. A suitable canvas had been bought by Lieutenant-General Sir James Murray, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, in aid of Red Cross funds, the arrangement being that John would paint whomever Murray designated. Like a marriage broker, Murray settled the agreement between them, then discreetly retired, confident that the two Welshmen would hit it off like fireworks. In fact they seem to have had just the wrong things in common and did not take to each other. The poetry of their natures was rooted in Wales: England had magnetized their ambitions. But their ambitions were different. Happy as a child, pampered by his family, Lloyd George was greedy for the world’s attentions. John in his childhood had felt deprived of love, and now grasped at it while seeking to evoke a romantic world set in those places of natural beauty politicians call the wilderness. ‘I feel I have no contact,’ Lloyd George told his mistress Frances Stevenson. John too had no contact by the end: but he had been reaching for other things.
In public, John admired Lloyd George. He was ‘doing good work over Munitions’ and would surely have made a better business than Asquith, then the Prime Minister, of leading the country to victory. ‘One feels that what really is wanted is a sort of Cromwell to take charge,’ he told Quinn, ‘having turned out our Parliamentarians into the street first.’29 The Welsh wizard who was to play the part of Cromwell had agreed ‘to sit for half an hour in the mornings’ but, John complained, was ‘difficult to get hold of’.30 The portrait lurched forward in short bursts during December, January and February. On 16 February 1916 John wrote to Quinn: ‘I have finished my portrait of Lloyd George. He was a rotten sitter – as you say a “hot-arse who can’t sit still and be patient”.’ It was a restlessness that consumed them both. Lloyd George may not have appreciated being placed, in order of priority, behind the actress Réjane whom John was then also painting, and indiscriminately shoulder to shoulder with ‘some soldiers’. According to Frances Stevenson, ‘the sittings were not very gay ones.’31 Lloyd George was ‘in a grim mood’, suffering, in addition to toothache, from the latest Serbian crisis. Nevertheless, this cannot wholly account for the ‘hard, determined, almost cruel face,’ Frances Stevenson noted angrily in her diary, ‘with nothing of the tenderness & charm of the D[avid] of everyday life’.32 ‘Do you notice what John says about pictures which he does not like?’ Lloyd George had asked her. ‘Very pleasant!’ He was ‘upset’, she realized, ‘for he likes to look nice in his portraits!’ Another worry was Frances herself. Though professing to find John ‘terrifying’, she acknowledged him to be ‘an uncommon person… extraordinarily conceited… nevertheless… very fascinating’. Lloyd George persuaded her not to have her own portrait painted by John and, to her disappointment, prohibited her from going to his parties. Confronted by John’s ‘unpleasant’ portrait he reverted to nursery tactics, gathering his family round him (much to John’s irritation) in a chorus of abuse over the object, and drawing from ‘Pussy’ Stevenson her most maternal protectiveness. To account for the cunning and querulous expression, he suggested calling the picture ‘Salonika’. Then he affected to forget about it.33 But John remembered. Announcing his first portrait to have been ‘unfinished’, he caught up with Lloyd George nearly four years later in Deauville,34 drew out his brushes and began a second canvas. Under his fierce gaze Lloyd George grew restless again, hurried back to London and, wisely, did not honour his promise to continue the sittings at Downing Street. For John this was a foretaste of how his career as a professional portrait painter would proceed.
In Winston Churchill, whom he drew after the Second World War, John was to observe the same inability to keep still. Under his scrutiny, Churchill seemed reduced to the condition of a child. His concern was for his ‘image’. How else to explain, John wondered, ‘these fits and starts, these visits to the mirror, this preoccupation with the window curtains, and the nervous fidgeting with his jowl?’
A less quick-footed target was Ramsay MacDonald, whom John vainly attempted to paint on a number of occasions. The difficulty here seems to have been that the sitter proved too dim a subject to illuminate the romantic interpretation of a ‘dreamy knight-errant, dedicated to the overthrow of dragons and the rescue of distressed damsels’ which John insisted upon trying to fix on him. ‘I have fallen into troubled waters and I do not know when on earth I shall be able to see you,’ MacDonald wrote from Downing Street on 8 April 1933, two days before the Labour Party moved a vote of censure on the all-party government of which he was Prime Minister over unemployment. A fortnight later, MacDonald admitted in a letter to Will Rothenstein that ‘John’s portrait was a melancholy failure. It really was a terrible production, and everybody who saw it turned it down instantly. He wants to begin again, but I am really tired. The waste of my time has been rather bad. He made two attempts and an earlier one some time ago. In all I must have given between 20 and 30 sittings of 1½ hours’ average, and I cannot afford going on unless there is some certainty of a satisfactory result… ’
The most satisfactory of John’s Prime Ministers was achieved at the expense of A. J. Balfour, who appeared to fall asleep. His philosophy of doubt, which always appealed to John, seemed to reach a culmination in his slumbering posture. ‘I set to,’ John records, ‘and completed the drawing within an hour.’
He relished the prospect of meeting the famous. But invariably the prospect was better than the experience – except in the case of artists and writers. These portraits, especially of writers, comprise a separate section of his work – not private in the same way that ‘Washing Day’ or ‘Woman Knitting’ or ‘The Red Feather’ or ‘The Mauve Jersey’ are private, but not to be classed among what Quinn fretfully described as his ‘colonels and fat women, and… other disagreeable pot-boilers’.35 Among the writers who sat to him in these war years were W. H. Davies,36 Ronald Firbank, the gregarious Gogarty and the ailing Arthur Symons. Perhaps the most celebrated was Bernard Shaw, of whom, during May 1915, he did three rapid portraits in oil.
Shaw was staying at Coole over Easter with Lady Gregory when his industry was suddenly halted by an atrocious headache. ‘Mrs Shaw was lamenting about not having him painted by a good artist,’ Lady Gregory wrote to W. B. Yeats, ‘and I suggested having John over, and she jumped at it, and Robert [Gregory] is to bring him over on Monday.’37 In the event John seems to have travelled more erratically, catching ‘a kind of cold’38 in Dublin, falling into convivial company and arriving ‘in a contrite and somewhat shattered condition’39 a week late. His symptoms deepened on discovering that Lady Gregory (who ‘is just like Queen Victoria] only uglier’) had used Shaw as bait for a portrait of her grandson ‘little Richard’40 whom, until now, he had successfully avoided. Although John made no secret of his preference for little Richard’s sister, Anne Gregory, ‘a very pretty little child with pale gold hair’, Lady Gregory insisted that it must be the son of the house who was honoured. So he began this ‘awful job’, producing what both children found ‘a very odd picture… [with] enormous sticky-out ears and eyes that sloped up at the corners, rather like a picture of a chinaman...’41,42
Meanwhile, in his bedroom, Shaw was preparing himself. He had recovered from his headache to the extent of having his hair cut, but in the excitement, Lady Gregory lamented, ‘too much was taken off’.43 Despite Shaw’s head and John’s cold, both were at their most winning by the time the sittings began.
Each morning John would strip off his coat, prop his canvases on the best chairs and paint several versions at one sitting. But at night he would, ‘like Penelope’, undo the work of the previous day, washing the canvas clean and then starting another portrait in its place. ‘He painted with large brushes and used large quantities of paint,’ Shaw remembered.44 Over the course of eight days he painted ‘six magnificent portraits of me’, he told Mrs Patrick Campbell.45 ‘…Unfortunately as he kept painting them on top of one another until our protests became overwhelming, only three portraits have survived.’
Between sittings John went off for ‘some grand galloping’46 with Robert Gregory, or, more sedately, would row Mrs Shaw across the lake. ‘Mrs Shaw is [a] fat party with green eyes who says “Ye-hes” in an intellectual way ending with a hiss,’ he divulged to Dorelia. Over thirty years later, in Chiaroscuro, John described Shaw as ‘a true Prince of the Spirit’, a fearless enemy of cant and humbug, and in his queer way, ‘a highly respectable though strictly uncanonical saint’.47 In his letters to Dorelia at the time he refers to him as ‘a ridiculous vain object in knickerbockers’ and describes the three of them – Lady Gregory and the Shaws – as ‘dreadful people’. Such discrepancies were odd notes played by John’s violently fluctuating moods, which were agitated at Coole Park by the fact that, though there was plenty to eat, nobody smoked or drank. ‘I smoke still,’ he reassured Dorelia, ‘but only touch claret at meals. In Ireland claret is regarded as a T[emperance] drink.’48 His admiration of Shaw, whom he intermittently thought ‘very pleasant company’, was qualified by the extreme awe radiated towards GBS from the women in the house. This veneration combined with John’s hearty silence to stimulate in Shaw the kind of brilliant intellectual monologues which put John in the shade, and which may have prompted him to paint over the portraits (a sort of silencing) so many times.
‘I find him [Shaw] a decent man to deal with,’ John notified Quinn,49 after Shaw had decided to buy one of these emphatic portraits for three hundred pounds (equivalent to £10,800 in 1996) – the one with the blue background.50 He had been reminded by Wyndham Lewis that Shaw’s beard ‘protrudes for several feet in front of his face’, unlike Darwin’s which ‘grew into his mouth’.51 The head, as Shaw himself pointed out, had two aspects, the concave and the convex. John produced two studies from the concave angle, and a third (with eyes shut as if in aching thought) from the convex – ‘the blind portrait’ Shaw called it; adding in a letter to Mrs Patrick Campbell that it had ‘got turned into a subject entitled Shaw Listening to Someone Else Talking, because I went to sleep...’52 With this sleeping version John was never wholly satisfied. ‘It could only have happened of course in the dreamy atmosphere of Coole,’ he suggested to Shaw.53
Though he had sometimes bridled at having his portrait washed out by John, and rebelled against ‘being immortalised as an elderly caricature of myself, Shaw was generally pleased with these poster-portraits, especially the one he bought and kept all his life – ‘though to keep it in a private house seems to me rather like keeping an oak tree in an umbrella stand’.54 In the regular Irish manner, like Yeats, he boasted that ‘John makes me out the inebriated gamekeeper’; but in later life he would tell other artists wishing to paint him that since he had been ‘done’ by the two greatest artists in the last forty years, Rodin and John, there was no room for more portraits.55
John exhibited the portrait with the blue background at the summer show of the NEAC in May and June 1915; and in February 1916 he held an exhibition of twenty-one paintings and forty-one drawings at the Chenil Gallery.56 It was, perhaps, his last effort to pursue something of what he had been doing before the war, an anthology of past and present, landscape and portrait. Ursula Tyrwhitt made a point of writing to Gwen to say how much she had liked Gus’s drawings. But they had little connection with the war. ‘Mr Augustus John continues to mark time with great professional skill,’ wrote the art critic of The Times. The eyes of critics and painters were now fixed on him to see in what new direction he would go.
‘Mr John, one feels somehow, does not spend all his vitality on painting.’
Manchester Guardian (23 November 1912)
‘A house without children isn’t worth living in!’ John had once pronounced. His sons, no longer to be classed simply as children, now passed much of their time at schools and colleges: but the supply of fresh children to Alderney continued unchecked. In March 1915, in a room next to the kitchen, John presiding, Dorelia gave birth to a second daughter, described as ‘small and nice’,57 whom they named Vivien. By the age of two she had grown into ‘a most imposing personage – half the size of Poppet, and twice as dangerous’.58 Through the woods she liked to wander with ‘a beautiful Irish setter called Cuchulain… he patiently bringing me home for meals at the toll of the great bell’.59 Unlike the boys, neither Poppet nor Vivien was sent to school. ‘We roamed the countryside,’ Vivien recalled, ‘and a tutor cycled over from Bournemouth to teach us. Finally we punctured his bicycle… ’
In 1917 four more children joined the Alderney gang – John, Nicolette, Brigit and Caitlin. These were the son and daughters, ‘robust specimens’ aged between seven and three, of Francis Macnamara who, after seven years of unfaithful marriage, had left home permanently to live with Euphemia Lamb (who had briefly left someone else’s home to live with him). His children had circled slowly in the wake of their mother, who was eventually towed down to Alderney out of range of the German Zeppelins. One of the children, Nicolette, elected John as her second father, conceiving for the John ménage an exaggerated loyalty not wholeheartedly welcomed by them. Yet her feelings, despite some lapses from fact, give an intensity to her memories of Alderney.
‘In my memory the bedrooms were small boxes with large double beds. Poppet and Vivien shared one of these. On occasions, we three Macnamara girls squashed in beside them for the night. In the morning we always woke up with hangovers from an excess of giggling...
…Poppet and Vivien, the younger boys, my sisters, splashed naked in the pond, while my mother and Dodo stood by with their arms full of flowers. Edie held out a towel for a wet child. And like some mythical god observing the mortals, Augustus the Watcher, sat on a bench leaning forward, his long hair covered by a felt hat, his beard a sign of authority
It was in this garden that I first experienced ecstasy… There has never been another garden like it; it excited me in such a way that it became the symbol of heaven.’60
For those who, like the Macnamara or Anrep children, continually came and went, Alderney seemed an Eden; but for the John children themselves it was an Eden from which they needed to be expelled in order to be born into the world outside. While for a third group, a race of demi-Johns, it was also an Eden, but seen from a place of exile.
The first of this race ‘not of the whole blood’ was the daughter of a music student of generous figure and complexion called Nora Brownsword, twenty years younger than John and known, bluntly, by her surname. On a number of occasions she had posed for him mostly for wood panels, and on 12 October 1914 he wrote in a state of some financial panic to Quinn: ‘By-the-bye I’ve been and got a young lady in the family way! What in blazes is to be done?’ Quinn suggested exporting the lady to France. This advice, which arrived safely at Alderney almost five months later, was invalid by the time John read it. Yet the problem remained. What in blazes was to be done?
John explained the position as clearly as he could in another letter to Quinn: ‘Some while back, I conceived a wild passion for a girl and put her in the family way. She has now a daughter and I’ve promised her what she asks: £2 a week and £50 to set up in a cottage. I never see her now and don’t want to, but I’m damned if I see where that £50 is to be found at the moment. Her father is a wealthy man. He has just tumbled to the situation and I suppose he’ll be howling for my blood.’ Dorelia’s attitude was one of sternness and calm. If matters were made too easy, then the same thing might happen many times. So she hardened herself. In John’s letters to her at this time there is a new note of diffidence mingling with reminders that ‘I cannot exist without you for long, as you know.’ He is apologetic too for not meanwhile having painted better. ‘Sorry to be so damn disappointing in my work. It must make you pretty hopeless at times, but don’t give me up yet. I’m going to improve.’ It was, to a degree, for the sake of his work that Ida had died and Dorelia risked her life: for his work and himself and themselves all together.
As a civilian in wartime John felt at the dead centre of a hurricane. It was this awful sense of deadness, this curious uselessness, that tempted him to rush into new lovemaking, as the only means of self-renewal available. Extricating himself from the consequences of his affair with Brownsword seems to have taken longer than the affair itself. She had often visited Alderney during her holidays from music college; but after the birth of her daughter she did not go back there. ‘She must on no account come to Alderney,’ John instructed Dorelia. ‘…For God’s sake don’t worry about it – don’t think about it.’
This advice John made several lusty attempts to pursue himself. It was not easy Brownsword had been anxious to shield the news from her parents – which, since they could far better afford to look after the child than he, dissatisfied John. In due course she went to live in Highgate, where John sometimes turned up – Brownsword hiding herself away at his approach. She had become extraordinarily elusive even when John pursued her with genuine offers of help. He felt deeply impatient. ‘I dined with her and wasn’t too nice,’ he admitted to Dorelia, ‘but tried to keep my temper and it’s no use allowing oneself to be too severe… She showed every sign of innocent surprise when I asked her why she had bunked away without warning.’61 In a less severe mood still, he confided on one occasion to Theodosia Townshend: ‘I’d marry her if necessary – Dodo wouldn’t mind.’ To what extent he believed this it is impossible to be sure: probably a little, once it was out of the question. In any event the ceremony of marriage meant less to him than it did to many people. Besides, there were other more fantastic plans to fall back on. ‘The Tutor’s plan I think the best,’ John had affirmed in another letter to Dorelia. After leaving Alderney, the boys’ ex-tutor, John Hope-Johnstone, had gone ‘tramping to Asia’, as John explained to Sampson, ‘got as far as Trieste, & then was arrested as a spy, spent 8 days in chokey along with a dozen other criminals mostly sexual, & then was liberated. He doesn’t think he’ll go no further.’ Stopped in his tracks by the world war, he reappeared in London and secretly offered himself in the role of the baby’s legal father. ‘I must say,’ John acknowledged, ‘the tutor is behaving with uncommon decency.’ From Brownsword’s point of view this ‘best plan’ contained disadvantages. Although Hope-Johnstone entertained some romantic attachments for young men of under twenty, he was physically attracted to girls of ten or twelve, towards whom he would proffer timid advances, placing his hand on their thighs until, their mothers getting to hear of it, he was expelled from the house. The prospect of having a young daughter in his own house was certainly inviting; and it seems probable that he scented money in this mariage blanc – to the extent at least of making a household investment, ‘a most expensive frying pan’. But Brownsword was not a party to this. The surname she gave her daughter, the painter Gwyneth Johnstone, suggests that no hope had entered this relationship.
In his letters to Dorelia, John makes no reference to Nora Brownsword that can be construed as sympathetic. But then Dorelia was not in the business of easy sympathy. He himself appears to have believed that he offered Brownsword money, but that she accepted nothing. She remembered asking for £4 a week for the baby, not herself: and receiving nothing. That nothing positively changed hands on a number of businesslike occasions appears indisputable. Having a musical degree she was just able to support herself and her daughter, and their independence was complete. It was only casually, years later, that John learnt she had married. As for Dorelia, she provided Brownsword with a ring; and within limits she was kind. But she was not welcoming. She offered to take the baby and bring it up as one of the family, provided Brownsword never saw the girl again. But since that was unacceptable to Brownsword, she took no further interest in the matter.
The Brownsword affair shot a warning across John’s bows.62 Through the deep gloom of war he needed, like pilot lights, a girl to call and a girl to play. After one party at Mallord Street, Dorelia and Helen Anrep could hear him shuffling about in the entrance hall and, with hushed comic intensity, confiding to a procession of female guests: ‘When shall I see you again?… You know how much it means to me… I never cease thinking of you… Relax a little and inspire your poor artist with a kiss… Or shall I drown myself?’ Each time, for a moment, the tone carried conviction. His need seemed, if almost indiscriminate, almost real. Without these girls he was in the dark. He could not stop himself. At the beginning and in the end, he drank: first to make contact, then to forget.
The roll-call reverberated on. Lady Tredegar, with her strange gift for climbing into trees and arranging nests in which polite birds would settle; Iris Tree, with her pink hair and poetry, ‘someone quite marvellous’; Sylvia Gough, with her thin loose legs, whose husband later paid John the compliment of placing his name on the list of co-respondents in her divorce case; Sybil Hart-Davis, nice and apologetic and also ‘determined to give up the drink’;63 a famous Russian ballerina, from whose Italianate husband John was said to have ‘taken a loan of her’: these and others were among his girlfriends or mistresses over these few years. Not all the voluminous gossip that rose up round him was true: but the smoke did not wholly obscure the flames. Even before the war his reputation, along with that of Ezra Pound, had been popularly celebrated in the ‘Virgin’s Prayer’:
Ezra Pound
And Augustus John
Bless the bed
That I lie on.64
Of such notoriety John was growing increasingly shy. ‘The only difference between the World’s treatment of me and other of her illustrious sons is that it doesn’t wait till I am dead before weaving its legends about my name,’ he complained (February 1918) to Alick Schepeler. By becoming more stealthy he did not diminish this legend, but gave it an infusion of mystery. The addict’s spell is written in the many moods of revulsion and counter-resolution, the promises, promises, that chart his downhill flight. Sometimes it seemed as if Dorelia alone could arrest this descent. ‘If you come here I’ll promise to be good,’ he wrote to her from Mallord Street at the end of the war, ‘…I am discharging all my mistresses at the rate of about 3 a week – Goodbye Girls, I’m through.’
‘Do you manage to get any work done in spite of the war?’
Augustus John to Gwen John (18 November 1918)
Alderney was also changing with the war. Visitors no longer floated in and out in such abundant numbers. Henry Lamb had left. ‘We are square enough I suppose,’ he had written to John before the war. But in truth, Lamb never felt square with John. After drawing up his first Will and Testament, and handing it to Dorelia during a farewell party at Alderney,65 he was gone, looking ‘very sweet in his uniform’, to serve as an army doctor in France. Deprived of ‘poor darling Lamb’,66 Dorelia dug herself more deeply still into the plant world. Assured by John that ‘in a week or two there’ll be no money about and no food,’67 she surrounded herself with useful vegetables. They clustered about the house giving her comfort. ‘It’s rather a sickening life,’ she confessed to Lytton Strachey, ‘but the garden looks nice.’68
God came to Alderney less often these days: God was Dorelia’s new name for John. The war had thrown shadows over both their lives, as well as between them. ‘Do you feel 200?’ he asked her, ‘ – I feel 300.’ While Dorelia was immersing herself in the life of the soil, John sought distraction at clubs and parties in London. He went everywhere and belonged nowhere. Though he still drank elbow-to-elbow with poets and prostitutes under the flyblown rococo of the Café Royal, the place was beginning to revolve almost too crazily. There were raucous-voiced sportsmen; alchemists and sorcerers sitting innocuously over their spells; a grave contingent from the British Museum; well-dressed gangs of blackmailers, bullies, pimps and agents provocateurs muttering over plans; intoxicated social reformers and Anglo-Irish jokers with their whoops and slogans; the exquisite herd of Old Boys from the Nineties ‘recognizable by their bright chestnut wigs and raddled faces’ whispering in the sub-dialect of the period; a schlemozzle of Cubists sitting algebraically at the domino tables; and, not far off, under the glittering façade of the bar, his eye fixed on the fluctuating crisis of power, the leader of the Vorticists kept company with his lieutenants. Decidedly the place was getting a bit ‘thick’69 for John.
Throughout London a bewildering variety of clubs and pubs had sprung up offering wartime consolations. There was the Cave of the Golden Calf, a cabaret club lodged deep in a Soho basement where the miraculous Madame Strindberg had been resurrected. As queen of this vapid cellardom, wrapped in a fur coat, her face chalk white, her hair wonderfully dark, her eyes blazing with fatigue, she drifted among her guests diverting their attention from entertainments that featured everything most up to date. Under walls ‘relevantly frescoed’ by Spencer Gore and Charles Ginner, beside a huge raw-meat drop curtain designed by Wyndham Lewis, and watched over by the heads of hawks, cats and camels which, executed by Epstein in scarlet and shocking white, served as decorative reliefs for the columns supporting the ceiling, couples went through the latest dances, the bunny hug and turkey trot. There were also experiments in amateur theatre, foreign folk songs led by an Hungarian fiddler, and the spectacle of performing coppersmiths. Everything was expensive, but democratic. Girls, young and poor, were introduced to rich men on the periphery of the art world; various writers and artists, including John, found themselves elected honorary members ‘out of deference to their personalities’ and given the privilege of charging drinks to non-artistic patrons in their absence. Into its holes and corners slunk the Vorticists, ‘Cubists, Voo-dooists, Futurists and other Boomists’70 for whom it was transfigured into a campaign headquarters. But not for long. As war advanced from the East, so Madame Strindberg went west. ‘I’m leaving the Cabaret,’ she wrote to John. ‘Dreams are sweeter than reality.’ Stripping the cellar of everything she could carry, she sailed for New York. ‘We shall never meet again now,’ she wrote from the ship. ‘…I could neither help loving you, nor hating you – and… friendship and esteem and everything got drowned between those two feelings.’71
Even before Madame Strindberg left, John had absconded to help set up a rival haunt in Greek Street. ‘We are starting a new club in town called the “Crab-tree” for artists, poets and musicians,’ he wrote to Quinn. ‘It ought to be amusing and useful at times.’ The Crabtree opened in April 1914, and for a time it tasted sweet to him: the only thing wrong with it, he hinted darkly, were the crabs. Like the Cave of the Golden Calf it was a very democratic affair, and provided customers with what John called ‘the real thing’. Euphemia Lamb, Betty May, Lillian Shelley and other famous models went there night after night wearing black hats and throwing bottles: and for the men there were boxing contests. Actresses flocked in from the West End theatres to meet these swaggering painter-pugilists and the atmosphere was wild. ‘A most disgusting place!’ was Paul Nash’s recommendation in a letter to Albert Rutherston, ‘where only the very lowest city jews and the most pinched harlots attend. A place of utter coarseness and dull unrelieved monotony. John alone, a great pathetic muzzy god, a sort of Silenus – but also no nymphs, satyrs and leopards to complete the picture.’
Much the same spirit saturated the atmosphere of the Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street which was owned by Rosa Lewis, a suave and sinister nanny, who ran it along the lines of a plush asylum in her own Welfare State. For connoisseurs there was nothing like the Cavendish, with its acres of faded red morocco, and hideous landscape of battered furniture, massive and monogrammed. Beneath every cushion lay a bottle, and beside it a girl. The place flowed with brandy and champagne, paid for by innocent millionaires. Much of this money came from the United States, among whose well-brought-up young men, bitten with the notion of being Bohemians Abroad, Rosa Lewis became a legend. Financially it was the artists, models and other poorer people who benefited: but for those who did not have John’s constitution it was a risky lair.72
In quieter vein, he would appear at the Café Verrey, a public house in the Continental style in Soho; then, for the sake of the Chianti – though he always ‘walked out nice and lovely’ – at Bertorelli’s; and, a little later, also in Charlotte Street near the Scala Theatre, at the Saint-Bernard Restaurant, a small friendly place with an enormous friendly dog that filled the alley between the tables to the exclusion of the single waiter and Signor del Fiume, its gesticulating owner. But of all these restaurants the most celebrated was the Eiffel Tower in Percy Street, ‘our carnal-spiritual home’ as Nancy Cunard called it.73 The story is that one stormy night, John and Nancy Cunard found refuge there, and taking a liking to its genial Austrian proprietor, Rudolph Stulik, transformed the place during these war years into a club patronized chiefly by those who were connected with the arts. Its series of windows, each with a daffodil-yellow half-blind looking wearily up Charlotte Street, became a cultural landmark of the metropolis. The décor was simple, with white tablecloths, narrow crusty rolls wrapped up in napkins beside the plates and long slender wine glasses. The food was elaborate (‘Canard Pressé’, ‘Sole Dieppoise’, ‘Chicken à la King’ and ‘Gâteau St-Honoré’ were among its specialities); and it was costly. For the art students and impoverished writers drinking opposite in the Marquis of Granby it represented luxury. To be invited there, to catch sight of the elegant figure of Sickert amid his entourage; and the Sibyl of Soho, Nina Hamnett, being helped home, a waiter at each elbow; of the Prime Minister’s son Herbert Asquith in poetic travail; of minor royalty slumming for the evening; of actresses and Irishmen, models, musicians, magicians; a pageant of Sitwells, some outriders from Bloomsbury: to be part of this for a single evening was to feel a man or woman of the world.
Those who were well looked upon by Stulik could stay on long after the front door had been closed, drinking into the early hours of the morning mostly German wines known collectively as ‘Stulik’s Wee’. Stulik himself spoke indecipherably in galloping broken-back English, hinting that he was the fruit of an irregular attachment ‘in which the charms of a famous ballerina had overcome the scruples of an exalted but anonymous personage’ – a story that was attributed to the fact that he had once been chef to the Emperor Franz Josef to whom he bore an uncertain resemblance. He was assisted in the running of the place by a team of tactful waiters, a parrot and a dog.
Upstairs lay the private dining-room, stuffy with aspidistras, glowing dully under a good deal of dark crimson. Here secret liaisons took place, grand ladies and raffish men entering by the side door and ascending the hen-roost stairs. Those modestly sitting below could feel tremors of activity and hear scufflings up and down the narrow staircase. Then, on the topmost floors, ‘dark and cluttered with huge articles of central European furniture’,74 lay the bedrooms.
The high prices were partly subsidized by young diplomats on leave, and the tariff was tempered to the visitor’s purse. John was a popular host, sometimes even in his absence. ‘Stulik’s friends could run up enormous bills,’ Constantine FitzGibbon recalled.
‘Augustus once asked for his bill after a dinner party, Stulik produced his accumulated account, and Augustus took out £300 from his pocket with which to pay it… Stulik himself was sometimes penniless. On one occasion when John Davenport ordered an omelette there, Stulik asked if he might have the money to buy the eggs with which to make it. On another occasion, when Augustus grumbled at the size of his dinner bill, Stulik explained calmly in his guttural and almost incomprehensible English that it included the cost of Dylan [Thomas]’s dinner, bed and breakfast the night before.’75
Such bursts of generosity were followed by bouts of financial remorse deepened by the weight of Dorelia’s disapproval. But for John money was freedom, and he could not tolerate being imprisoned by the lack of it. Money worries buzzed about him like flies, persistent though unstinting. A request by post from a deserving relative, if it arrived in the wrong hour, would detonate a terrifying explosion of anger. But he did not covet money. One day at Mallord Street, when he was grumbling about money, his friend Hugo Pitman offered to search through the house and found, in notes and uncashed cheques, many hundreds of pounds.
His generosity was unpremeditated. Money was important to him for his morale, not his bank account. He needed it about his person. All manner of creditors, from builders to schoolmasters, would queue for their bills to be paid, while he entertained his debtors at the Eiffel Tower. In times of war, he would explain severely, it was necessary for everyone to make sacrifices. But he himself did not sacrifice popularity. Among the art students he was now a fabled figure, a king of Chelsea, Soho and Fitzrovia. ‘I can see him now walking… beneath the plane trees,’ recalled the sculptor Charles Wheeler.
‘…He is tall, erect and broad-shouldered… He is red-bearded and has eyes like those of a bull, doubtless is conscious of being the cynosure of the gaze of all Chelsea and looking neither to the left nor the right strides on with big steps and at a great pace towards Sloane Square, focusing on the distance and following, one imagines, some beautiful creature he is intent on catching...’76
Dorothy Brett, the painter, remembers her first sight of him from a bus in the King’s Road ‘with a large black homburg hat at a slight angle on his head, some kind of black frock coat. I think I must have been staring with my mouth open at him, he shot me a piercing look, and the bus rolled away.’77 Later on, he would call at the Slade for Brett and two other students, Ruth Humphries and Dora Carrington, and take them to the Belgian cafés along Fitzroy Street, and once to call on a group of gypsies, ‘beautiful, dark-haired men and women and children, in brilliant-coloured clothes’, Brett recalled, in a room full of bright eiderdowns.
Best of all were the parties in Mallord Street. Invitations would arrive on the day itself – a telephone call or a note pushed under the door or a shout across the street urging one to ‘join in’ that evening. Carrington, in a letter to Lytton Strachey (23 July 1917), gives a voluptuous description of one of these events:
‘It had been given in honour of a favourite barmaid of the Pub in Chelsea, near Mallord St, as she was leaving. She looked a charming character, very solid, with bosoms, and a fat pouting face. It was great fun.
Joseph, a splendid man from one of those cafes in Fitzroy St, played a concertina, and another man a mandolin. John drunk as a King Fisher. Many dreadfully worn characters, moth eaten and decrepit who I gathered were artists of Chelsea...
John made many serious attempts to wrest my virginity from me. But he was too mangy to tempt me even for a second. “Twenty years ago would have been a very different matter my dear sir”… There was one magnificent scene when a presentation watch was given the barmaid, John drest in a top hat, walking the whole length of that polished floor to the Barmaid sitting on the sofa by the fireplace, incredibly shy and embarrassed over the whole business, and giggling with delight. John swaggering with his bum lurching behind from side to side. Then kneeling down in the most gallant attitude with the watch on a cushion. Then they danced in the middle of the room, and every one rushed round in a circle shouting. Afterwards, it was wonderful to see John kissing this fat Pussycat, and diving his hand down her bodice. Lying with his legs apart on a divan in the most affected melodramatic attitudes!!’78
The Mallord Street studio was really a wonderful place for parties. All sorts of creatures turned up there. ‘I suppose they were Bohemians,’ Caspar, on leave from the navy, hazarded. With their old songs, new dances, sudden collapses, unexplained disappearances, these crowded gatherings looked to Caspar like complex experiments conducted in the laboratory of this studio. John would stare at it all with his wild eyes as if trying to discover ‘which way life led’, Caspar observed. ‘I think he was experimenting the whole time, trying to find out what the hell it was all about.’ But despite the activity, it was always the same. ‘How it brought back another world!’ Carrington exclaimed after a later party (2 November 1920).
‘…Dorelia like some Sibyl sitting in a corner with a Basque cap on her head and her cloak swept round her in great folds, smiling mysteriously, talking to everyone, unperturbed watching the dancers. I wondered what went on in her head. I fell very much in love with her. She was so amazingly beautiful. It’s something to have seen such a vision as she looked last night… I had some very entertaining dialogues with John, who was like some old salt in his transparent drunkenness.
“I say old chap will you come away with me?”
D.C. “But you know what they call that.”
“Oh I forgot you were a boy.”
D.C. “Well don’t forget it or you’ll get 2 years hard.”
“I say you are insinuating,” drawing himself up and flashing his eyes in mock indignation, “that I am a Bugger.”
D.C. “My brother is the chief inspector of Scotland Yard.”
“Oh I’m not afraid of him.” But in a whisper. “Will you come to Spain with me? I’d love to go to Spain with you.”
D.C. “This year, next year, sometime.”
John. “Never.” Then we both laughed in a roar together.’
The spirit of artistic London during the war, its spiral of gaiety and recrimination, is well caught by the affair of the Monster Matinée performed on 20 March 1917 at the Chelsea Palace Theatre.79 This jumbo pantomime had been organized in aid of Lena Ashwell’s Concerts at the Front. ‘It was to be a sort of history of Chelsea,’ Lady Glenavy wrote, ‘with little plays about Rossetti, Whistler and others, with songs and dances ending up with a grand finale in praise of Augustus John.’ Everyone in the polite world was soon elbowing his way and hers into this charity rag; a committee of duchesses gave birth to itself; and sub-committees proliferated through many smart houses. During rehearsals fashionable ladies gathered in groups for gossip about the notorious John, vying with one another to tell the most succulent story of his dreadful deeds. But when he appeared, ‘Birdie’ Schwabe noticed, such was his presence that they would all stand up to greet him with their best smiles. The last scene of the show featured ‘Mrs Grundy and the John Beauty Chorus’,*2 in which a band of Slade girls – Dorothy Brett, Carrington, Barbara Hiles and others – shouted out:
How he’s got on!
He owes it, he knows it, to me!
Brass earrings I wear,
And I don’t do my hair,
And my feet are as bare as can be;
When I walk down the street,
All the people I meet
They stare at the things I have on!
When Battersea-Parking
You’ll hear folks remarking:
‘There goes an Augustus John!’80
But not everyone was approving. Peering out from the jungle of the art world, Epstein spied a plot within the matinée, with John its Machiavelli. At the start of the war Epstein had written to Quinn: ‘Everybody here is war-mad. But my life has always been war, and it is more difficult I believe for me here to stick to the job, than go out and fight or at least get blind, patriotically drunk.’81 He seemed determined to be disliked: ‘As an artist I am among the best-hated ones here,’ he boasted, ‘and the most ignored.’82 Perhaps through negligence, John and he seem nevertheless to have remained on good terms. In January 1917 Epstein finished a sculptured head of John. ‘I wanted to capture a certain wildness,’ he explained, ‘an untamed quality that is the essence of the man.’83 Seen from one angle, this head has the aspect of a devil; and this, a little later that year, was what John became. Compulsory conscription had now been introduced and Epstein found himself called up. He saw immediately that it was the result of this monster pantomime.
‘My enemies have at last succeeded in forcing me into the army… John has been behind the whole nasty business ever since the war started, but I first found it out when in a theatrical show got up for charity, he had me caricatured on the stage; he was one of the chief organizers of this dastardly business and ever since then I understand the low, base character of the man. This so-called charity performance was the work of our “artists” mostly hailing from Chelsea, and I was chief butt, partly on account as I take it, of the great public success of my exhibitions.’84
The conspiracy, to the extent that it existed, was a conspiracy of one – the professional joker Horace de Vere Cole. Making a tour of rival sculptors, he had guided their hands in the drafting of some extraordinary letters to the Sunday Herald85 opposing Epstein’s military exemption. Walter Winars, a sculptor of horses, wrote from Claridge’s; Derwent Wood went on record as disliking Epstein personally, and John Bach came up with the notion that there were too many artists in the country anyway. In a sane world, such a correspondence could have done no harm to Epstein. But the world was not sane, it was at war; and this anti-Epstein conspiracy was now rampant. The deeply laid pantomime revealed its leader to be the most popular artist of the day, Augustus John. Nothing less would satisfy Epstein.
Though John was certainly capable, when the mood was on him, of doing ugly things, he had no part in Cole’s joke, and his letters show that he wanted Epstein to escape conscription. Quinn, who gave generous support to Epstein’s fantasy, calling John ‘malicious, for what you describe is pure malice and meanness and dirt’, failed to tell Epstein that John had written to him on 18 August 1916: ‘I saw Epstein lately: he is in suspense about being taken for the army. I sincerely hope they’ll let him off.’
Friends did bring the two artists together and a reconciliation was arranged at a hotel in Brighton. Unfortunately a parrot belonging to the hotel exploded with some abusive remarks just as Epstein entered the restaurant, and he rushed out swearing that John was up to his tricks again.86
Epstein objected to John’s untroubled exemption from conscription. While in Ireland with Gogarty, John had injured his knee jumping a fence. Despite months encased in plaster of paris, the knee had not mended. In exchange for a portrait or two, he consulted Herbert Barker, the specialist in manipulative surgery. ‘The celebrated “bone-setter” having put me under gas… carrying my crutches, I walked away like the man in the Bible.’87 Not long afterwards, with another insufficient leap, he damaged the other knee – ‘bang went the semi-lunar and I nearly fainted.’ Again he sought out Barker, this time at a remote village in North Devon.
‘I invited him to my private sitting-room and examined his knee,’ Barker records. ‘It was swollen, bent to a considerable angle and both flexion and extension were painful even to attempt. It was a typical case of derangement of the internal semi-lunar cartilage.’88 This time there was no anaesthetic and the knee snapped back into place while John smoked a cigarette. ‘I feel rather like a racehorse come down in the world and pulling a fourwheeler must feel,’ he wrote afterwards (18 August 1916) to Quinn. ‘But both knees will get strong again in time.’89
They were not strong enough for the medical authorities who examined him later that year at the barracks in Dorchester and who, while insisting that he be re-examined periodically, rejected him for military service. There followed a year in limbo, with the constant threat of being compelled to do office work – a prospect more alarming than trench warfare. On the bright surface of things he was enjoying a brilliant career in London, admired by the young and pursued by the wealthy. But below this surface, despair was forming. He was petted and flattered; he still roared, but he had been coaxed into a cage and the door was closing behind him. All the sweetmeats poked through the bars he gobbled up at once: he liked them, but they did not satisfy him, so he ate more until they began to sicken him. He was painting less well, and though he could blink away this fact he could not blind himself to it. ‘I wish it were not necessary to depend so much on rich people,’ he confessed to Handrafs O’Grady. ‘They don’t really buy things for love – or rarely’ He had developed a technique of ‘boldly accelerated “drawing with a brush”’.90 Once he had mastered this, he could almost never unlearn it because anything else was slower.
In November 1917, at the Alpine Club, he held the largest exhibition of his pictures ever assembled. He was now, in the words of The Times, ‘the most famous of living English painters’.91 But he had reached a watershed in his career. He did not paint to please the public nor wholeheartedly to please himself, but as if he were simply passing the time. ‘He seems to have, with the artistic gifts of a man, the mind of a child,’ wrote one critic of this show.
‘…Life to him is very simple; it consists of objects that arouse in him a naїve childish curiosity and delight; but he has been artistically educated in a modern, very unchildish, world, and has learnt very easily all the technical lessons that the world has to teach. The consequence is that he is too skilful for his own vision, like those later Flemish Primitives who were spoilt by acquiring the too intellectual technique of Italy. Constantly one feels the virtuoso obtruding himself into a picture that ought to be as naїve in execution as it is on conception; and often, where there is no conception at all, one sees the virtuoso trying to force one.’
The change in his painting may be measured by a differing quality of interest it excited. Shortly before the war Osbert Sitwell had visited the Chenil Gallery,
‘…and saw a collection of small paintings by Augustus John: young women in wide orange or green skirts, without hats or crowned with large straw hats, lounging wistfully on small hills in undulating and monumental landscapes, with the feel of sea and mountain in the air round them… By these I was so greatly impressed that I tried to persuade my father to purchase the whole contents of the room… Alas, I did not possess the authority necessary to convince him...’92
This new exhibition in the autumn of 1917 was also impressive, like a cocktail party with windows on to past countries; the west of Ireland, South of France, North Wales, Cornwall and the Aran Islands. Next to Dorelia in a yellow dress or orange jacket and the children (one of which, of Ida’s Robin, was bought for the Tate Gallery) were allegorical groups of gypsies, tinkers, ‘philosophers in contemplation’; the familiar faces of old friends such as Ambrose McEvoy and Arthur Symons; smart old buffers who appeared indifferently on donated canvases in aid of the Red Cross; the more formal shapes of titled ladies and gentlemen such as Lady Tredegar, Sir Edwin Lutyens and the two somewhat unfinished Howard de Waldens; and various servicemen ranging from the fat artilleryman to a colonel and an admiral. It was an admirably democratic group, a sociological record of types and individuals that would have been invaluable before the age of photography. ‘If you will go to the Alpine Club on Mill Street off Conduit Street you will see an unprecedented exhibition of paintings of Augustus John,’ wrote Lord Beaverbrook (then Sir Max Aitken) to F. E. Smith (28 November 1917). ‘Every picture in the room is painted by John. If you judge for yourself you will conclude that John is the greatest artist of our time and possibly of any time. If you refuse to follow your own judgement you must listen to the comments of your fashionable friends who are flocking to John’s Exhibition. I saw some of the female persuasion there to-day gazing on John rather than on his pictures.’
It was Sickert, the previous year, who had warned his fellow painters against the mistake of inverted snobbery: ‘you are reflecting whether it is not high time to throw Augustus John, who has clearly become compromising, overboard. Take my tip. Don’t!’93 But the war had dimmed John’s imaginative world. The future seemed to be with those who looked for a new art dominated by the functions of machinery rather than the organic forms of nature. Over the last half of his career, there was, as Herbert Read wrote, ‘little in his work to show that he has lived through one of the most momentous epochs in history’94 – a limitation that could also be fixed on Gwen John.
The war was initially seen as the enemy of all artists. They had come together in a profusion of groups and movements: collided: flown apart. Marinetti’s Futurists, Wyndham Lewis’s Vorticists, Roger Fry’s Omega Workshops: all were adjusting to a competitive age, to discord, to the conditions of war. In the histories of modern art, John has no place with these movements. But he did maintain contacts on the periphery. When in the autumn of 1914 Wyndham Lewis’s Rebel Art Centre in 38 Great Ormond Street destroyed itself, another less well-publicized centre at 8 Ormonde Terrace replaced it. This was led by Bomberg, Epstein and William Roberts: and John was asked to be its first president. In their derelict house, leased by ‘a dear old humorist with a passion for vegetables’,95*3 these artists took aggressive refuge from the war, teaching, and employing the rooms as studios. In a letter to the young Evan Morgan (Lord Tredegar), John (who refused the presidency) explained his views in a manner that defines his relation to almost all the new movements:
‘I confess I was always shy of the Ormonde Terrace schemes when approached before… I do still think the idea is a very good one. I only have my doubts of our carrying it to success when hindered by certain personalities – given a nucleus of serious and sensible persons or enough of such to predominate I would not refuse my name for any useful purpose. It was for this reason I was so keen to get Ginner and Gilman on the Committee. They are both able men especially the former and would not be likely to wreck or jeopardize our plans by childish frivolity or lack of savoir-faire. Given such conditions, I say, B[omberg] and the rest could take their chance… I am quite game to go on with the affair and do all I can. But I can’t go and identify myself publicly with a narrow group with which I have no natural connexion. You must see that I have arrived at greater responsibilities than the people we are dealing with. My own “interests” lie in isolation as complete as possible. I have never studied my interests but experience teaches me at least to avoid misunderstandings. I would be quite ready to waive my “interests” damn them! pour le bon motif, but I don’t want a fiasco… It’s impossible for a painter to be also a politician and an administrator. We ought to have [A. R.] Orage as dictator… I was loath to act as captain to a scratch crew and seeing nothing but rocks ahead.’96
This letter points to several developing strains in John: the superstitious fear of failure, of contagious ‘bad luck’, and an impatience with himself for succumbing to this; an apprehension of press and publicity; the film of ‘greater responsibilities’ that was clouding his natural vision; and some common sense. Only isolation could uphold this talent, he believed, but to isolation he was by temperament unsuited. The groups and movements he avoided had, as they exploded, flung their adherents into the forefront of the war where they found inspiration. John too had wanted to hurry to the front.
‘I have had the idea of going to France to sketch for a long while and I have hopes now of being able to do so,’ he had written on 26 April 1916 to Will Rothenstein.
‘But I am still in suspense. I have applied for a temporary commission which I think indispensable to move with any freedom in the British lines where the discipline is exceedingly severe… there’s enough material to occupy a dozen artists. Of course the proper time for war is the winter and I very much regret not having managed to go out last winter. I cannot say I have any personal influence with the powers that be… I have been advised at the same time to keep my business quite dark. You might suppose I could do something with Lloyd George but I fear that gentleman will never forgive me for painting a somewhat unconventional portrait of him...’
Another winter came and went, and John continued to keep his business dark, remaining sombrely at home. During 1917 he began to drift, not altogether gracefully, into the McEvoy world of ‘Duchesses’. One sitter who occupied him that year was Lady Cynthia Asquith, who had sat to McEvoy, Sargent and Tonks. Her diary entries give revealing glimpses of him in this new milieu.
‘Friday 27 April 1917
…His appearance reduced Margot [Asquith]’s two-year-old girl to terrified tears. I like him but felt very shy with him… Mary [Herbert] and I both exhibited our faces, hoping he might want to paint us. He is doing a portrait of Margot and at one time asked her to sit for the “altogether”, saying she had such a perfect artist’s figure...
…Margot once asked John how many wives he really had (he is rather a mythical figure), saying she heard he was a most immoral man. He indignantly replied, “It’s monstrous – I’m a very moderate man. I’ve only got one wife!”
Tuesday 9 October 1917
…He has a most delightful studio – huge, with an immense window, and full of interesting works. The cold was something excruciating… I felt myself becoming more and more discoloured. His appearance is magnificent, straight out of the Old Testament – flowing, well-kept beard, hair cut en bloc at about the top of the ear, fine, majestic features. He had on a sort of overall daubed with paint, buttoning up round his throat, which completed a brilliant picturesque appearance. He was “blind sober” and quite civil. I believe sometimes he is alarmingly surly. Unlike McEvoy, he didn’t seem to want to converse at all while painting and I gratefully accepted the silence. He talked quite agreeably during the intervals he allowed me. He made – I think – a very promising beginning of me sitting in a chair in a severe pose: full face, but with eyes averted – a very sidelong glance. He said my expression “intrigued” him, and certainly I think he has given me a very evil one97 – a sort of listening look as though I was hearkening to bad advice.
Thursday 1 November 1917
Bicycled to John’s studio. John began a new version of me, in which I could see no sort of resemblance to myself. The [D. H.] Lawrences turned up. I thought it just possible John might add another to the half dozen or so people whose company Lawrence can tolerate for two hours. It was quite a success. John asked Lawrence to sit for him,98 and Lawrence admired the large designs in the studios, but maintained an ominous silence as regards my pictures. He charged John to depict ‘generations of Wemyss disagreeableness in my face, especially the mouth’, said disappointment was the key-note of my expression, and that what made him “wild” was that I was “a woman with a weapon she would never use”… He thought the painting of Bernard Shaw with closed eyes very true symbolism.’
‘Come quickly, like Lord Jesus,’ John had urged her, ‘because I’ve got to go away before long.’ After eighteen months at the starting line he was still waiting his call to the front – or, better still, to several fronts with intervals in England during which he would work up the results of his sketching into pictures. ‘I very much want to do a great deal in the way of military drawings and paintings,’ he told the publisher Grant Richards,99 who had proposed a book of these drawings. The authorities, however, held out against granting permanent exemption from military service. Its rule was that artists must be called up, after which the War Office could then apply to the army for their artistic services. Because of his recurring exemption, John was unable to force his way into the army in order to get seconded out of it. He had become a bureaucratic paradox.
On 7 September 1917 he underwent another medical examination. ‘I was not taken on the 7th,’ he wrote to Campbell Dodgson. ‘On leaving, my leg (the worst one) “went out” so I had physical support for spiritual satisfaction.’100 He had already informed the War Office that he had no objection to his work being used for government publications, and had produced for a Ministry of Information book, British Aims and Ideals, a hideous symbolical lithograph, ‘The Dawn’. In a letter to the writer, journalist and politician C. F. G. Masterman, Campbell Dodgson wrote: ‘I am of opinion that it might be the making of John to be brought into contact with reality and the hard facts of warfare, instead of doing things out of his own head as he does at present, except when he has a portrait to paint.’ Impressed by these arguments, and by John’s obvious eagerness, the War Office capitulated, finally inviting him to act as one of its official artists: and John refused.
The invitation had come only just too late. Through the good offices of P. G. Konody, the art critic of the Observer, John had volunteered to work for the Canadian War Memorials Fund, a scheme started by Lord Beaverbrook to assemble a picture collection that would give a record of Canada’s part in the war. The Canadian War Records Office now granted him, with full pay, allowances and an extra three hundred pounds (equivalent to £7,500 in 1996) in expenses, an honorary commission in the Overseas Military Forces of Canada, in return for which John agreed to paint a decorative picture of between thirty and forty feet in length. ‘I had almost forgotten about this project… I had given up hope of it,’ he explained to Campbell Dodgson. ‘…The Canadians would be, I imagine, far more generous than the British Government.’
London that autumn saw the sight of John absorbed in Jane Eyre (‘what a wonderful work!’) and attired as a Canadian major. ‘Yes, I am told I look very beautiful in uniform,’ he wrote to a girl called Kitty. ‘I wish you could see me.’101 But others who did see him were dismayed. ‘I have lunched at the Café Royal with Major John in Khaki!’ exclaimed Arthur Symons in a letter to Quinn. ‘The uniform does not suit him… I never saw John more sombre and grave than to-day. He is brooding on I know not what.’102 The conscientious objector Lytton Strachey, who had observed him looking ‘decidedly colonial’ at the Alpine Club, took a more hostile view of this development. ‘Poor John,’ he lamented. ‘…Naturally he has become the darling of the upper classes, and made £5,000 out of his show. His appearance in Khaki is unfortunate – a dwindled creature, with clipped beard, pseudo-smart, and in fact altogether deplorable.’103
Strachey was one of those who ‘joined in’ a farewell party at Mallord Street. Early next morning, John’s military figure, greatcoated, with leather gloves, a cane, riding boots laced up to the knee, and spurs, picked its way between the prostrate bodies, and strode off to the war.
‘The dawn of peace breaks gloomily indeed.’
Augustus John to John Sampson (1919)
‘John is having a great time!’ William Orpen, now an official war artist, wrote excitedly from Amiens. ‘…in the army [he] is a fearful and wonderful person. I believe his return to “Corps” the other evening will never be forgotten – followed by a band of photographers. He’s going to stop for the duration.’104
He was billeted on the Somme front at Aubigny, a small village that had been designated a ‘bridgehead’. Though there were intermittent shelling and occasional air raids, one of which removed the roof of the hut where he lived, Aubigny was ‘a deadly hole’. Nevertheless he felt ‘overjoyed to be out here’.105 Over the last two years John’s letters had been weighed down with a despair that leaves ‘me speechless, doubting the reality of my own existence’.106 He complained of a ‘sort of paranoia or mental hail-storm from which I suffer continually’,107 and of curious states of mind when he was ‘not myself. ‘I like John,’ D. H. Lawrence wrote in November 1917, ‘ – but he is a drowned corpse.’108 Often he felt ‘horribly alone’,109 knowing that ‘there is no one I can be with for long.’110 In a letter to Cynthia Asquith he accused himself of owning ‘a truly mean and miserable nature. Obviously I am ill since I cannot stand anybody.’ This meanness infected whatever he looked at until he could see ‘no good in anything’.111 While submerged in such moods he had a way of hopelessly shaking his head like an animal in a zoo. Observing him closely one evening at the Margaret Morris Theatre ‘with two very worn and chipped ladies’, Katherine Mansfield had written to Ottoline Morrell (August 1917):
‘I seemed to see his [John’s] mind, his haggard mind, like a strange forbidding country, full of lean sharp peaks and pools lit with a gloomy glow, and trees bent with the wind and vagrant muffled creatures tramping their vagrant way. Everything exhausted and finished – great black rings where the fires had been, and not a single fire even left to smoulder. And then he reminded me of that man [Svidrigailov] in Crime and Punishment who finds a little girl in his bed in that awful hotel the night before he shoots himself, in that appalling hotel. But I expect this is all rubbish, and he’s really a happy man and fond of his bottle and a goo-goo eye. But I don’t think so.’112
He was now in his fortieth year, and age had begun to inflict upon him its humiliations. ‘I am waiting for a magic elastic belt to prevent me from becoming an absolute wreck at 35!’ he had written to Ottoline. ‘It doesn’t sound very romantic does it?’ His deafness too partly accounted for his bravery during bombardments. ‘I’m stone deaf myself,’ he shouted into Dorothy Brett’s hearing aid, ‘besides having a weak knee and defective teeth and moral paralysis.’113 This last condition was aggravated by the war. ‘As for me I can only see imminent ruin ahead – personal I mean, perhaps even general,’ he had confided to Evan Morgan. Inevitably the war, with its regimentation and officiousness, subordinated the individual to the state. In such an atmosphere John was ‘neither fish, flesh, fowl nor good red herring’.114 His work too afforded him little certainty – painting for money, against time: an abuse of his skill. Something had to change. His translation into a Canadian major appeared to offer him a new life, a fresh stimulus for his painting. It had arrived barely in time.
To be caught up by events, to be on the go again was exhilarating. The blood began to move more swiftly through his body. Cheerfulness broke through. With his rank came a car and a melancholy batman. Before long they were patrolling the Vimy front held by the Canadian Corps like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The Canadians were ‘excellent fellows’ though the work of the Canadian painters was ‘extremely bad’. ‘I go about a good deal and find much to admire,’ he wrote.115 After an immense fall of snow everything looked wonderful. He had discovered ‘quite a remarkable place which might make a good picture’. This was a medieval château, converted into a battery position, with towers and a river running through its grounds, at Lieven, a devastated town opposite Lens. Near by were several battered churches standing up amid the general ruin and, further off, a few shattered trees and slag heaps, like pyramids against the sky. It was here, among this strange confusion of ancient and modern, that he planned his big ‘synthetic’ picture, bringing in tanks, a balloon, ‘some of the right sort of civilians’, and a crucifix. ‘There is so much to do out here,’ he wrote to Arthur Symons. ‘All is glittering in the front; amidst great silence the guns reverberate. I shall take ages to get all I want done in preparation for a huge canvas. France is divine – and the French people.’116 The desolation seemed to hearten him. It was ‘too beautiful’, he told Dorelia, adding: ‘I suppose France and the whole of Europe is doomed.’
Also stationed at the château was Wyndham Lewis. For both these war artists it was an untypically peaceful time: guns were everywhere, but for painting not firing. John, Lewis noted with approval, did not neglect the social side of military life and was everywhere accorded the highest signs of respect, largely on account of his misunderstood beard. ‘He was the only officer in the British Army, except the King, who wore a beard,’ Lewis explained. ‘In consequence he was a constant source of anxiety and terror wherever he went. Catching sight of him coming down a road any ordinary private would display every sign of the liveliest consternation. He would start saluting a mile off. Augustus John – every inch a King George – would solemnly touch his hat and pass on.’117
On one occasion, after a successful party, the two war artists commandeered a car and careered off together almost into enemy lines. It was probably the closest John got to the fighting, and Lewis, the ex-bombardier, was soon poking fun at his friend’s mock-war experiences. But John, noticing that Lewis had retreated home following their exploit, pursued him vicariously. ‘Have you seen anything of that tragic hero and consumer of tarts and mutton-chops, Wyndham Lewis?’ he asked their mutual friend Alick Schepeler. ‘He is I think in London, painting his gun pit and striving to reduce his “Vorticism” to the level of Canadian intelligibility – a hopeless task I fear.’
Occasionally John would ‘run over’ to Amiens, Paris or, more surreptitiously, back to London. At Amiens he ‘found Orpen’,118 whose welcome seemed a little agitated. ‘They are trying to saddle me with him [John],’ Orpen protested to Will Rothenstein, ‘ – but I’m not having any! Too much responsibility.’ He also came across the painter Alfred Munnings who was there to ‘do some horse pictures’.
In Paris he put up at the Palais d’Orsay as the guest of Lord Beaverbrook, who had arranged a special entertainment for his ‘Canadians’ in a suite at the Hôtel Bristol.119 At supper, John recalled, ‘the guests were so spaced as to allow further seating accommodation between them. The reason for this arrangement was soon seen on the arrival of a bevy of young women in evening clothes, who without introduction established themselves in the empty chairs.’ These girls, the pick of the local emporium, came strongly recommended: ‘one or two of them were even said to be able to bring the dead to life.’ Beaverbrook, at this critical moment, tactfully withdrew, and was followed by the impetuously cautious Orpen (‘I’m afraid he’s a low lick-spittle after all,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia). Bottles of champagne then appeared and the atmosphere became charged with conviviality. ‘Yet as I looked round the table, a curious melancholy took possession of me,’ John recorded. ‘…I had no parlour tricks, nor did my companions-in-arms seem much better equipped than I was in this line; except for one gallant major, who, somehow recapturing his youthful high spirits, proceeded to emit a series of comical Canadian noises, which instantly provoked loud shrieks of appreciative laughter.’ To keep his melancholy at bay, John also attempted an outburst of gaiety, raising ‘in desperation’ one of the girls to the level of the table and there effecting ‘a successful retroussage, in spite of her struggles’.
Despite all this ‘rich fun’, he felt curiously islanded. Before starting out, he had promised Cynthia Asquith to keep a diary while at the Front, but ‘the truth is I funk it!… I am in a curious state,’ he had explained from Aubigny,
‘ – wondering who I am. I watch myself closely without yet being able to classify myself. I evade definition – and that must mean I have no character… To be a Major is not enough – clearly – now if one were a Brigadier-General say – would that help to self-knowledge if not self-respect...? I am alone in what they call the “Château” in this dismal little town. I am very lucky, not having to face a Mess twice a day with a cheerful optimistic air. When out at the front I admire things unreasonably – and conduct myself with that instinctive tact which is the mark of the moral traitor. A good sun makes beauty out of wreckage. I wander among bricks and wonder if those shells will come a little bit nearer...’
The wearing of a uniform seemed to have imposed another self on him, and he had no centre from which to combat this imposition. The devastation of the fields and trees reflected a devastation within him. At Beaverbrook’s party or in the mess, he could not lose himself; alone, in the château where there was ‘no romance’, he felt characterless. Yet to paint he had to establish a sense of character, and if he could not do this then he felt it might be better to be killed, suddenly, pointlessly, by some shell. A sudden bellicose joy surged through him at the great news that thirty German divisions had been repulsed with ‘colossal slaughter’. There was ‘a wonderful show last night’, he wrote to Dorelia, ‘when we discharged five thousand gas drums at the Boches followed by an intense bombardment. Things are getting interesting out here.’ But this joy quickly passed and he fell into ‘a horrible state of depression’.120
The crisis erupted in a sudden act of self-assertion when he knocked out one of his fellow officers, Captain Wright. ‘The gesture had only an indirect relation to my codpiece,’ he assured Gogarty.121 Captain Wright had said something that, interpreted by John as an insult, acted as the trigger for this explosion. The situation was serious and John was rushed out of France by Lord Beaverbrook. ‘Do you know I saved him [John] at a Court-martial for hitting a man named Peter Wright?’ Beaverbrook complained in a letter to Sir Walter Monckton, the lawyer and politician who had been serving in France (30 April 1941). ‘I cannot tell you what benefits I did not bestow on him. And do you know what work I got out of John? – Not a damned thing.’
John arrived back in London at the end of March ‘in a state of utter mental confusion’.122 There was no chance of getting back to France, and for four months the threat of military punishment hung over him. ‘I think this trouble must be over,’ he eventually wrote to Gogarty on 24 July 1918. ‘The Canadian people seem to think so, and it’s now so long since.’
It remained to be seen whether he could salvage something from his few months at the front. ‘I am tackling a vast canvas,’ he had told Innes Meo (22 February 1918), ‘- that is, I shall do.’ Cynthia Asquith, who saw this canvas on 29 July, recorded her impression in a diary: ‘It is all sketched in, but without any painting yet… it rather took my breath away – splendid composition, and what an undertaking to fill a forty-foot canvas!’ On 18 November he is writing to Gwen: ‘I am hard at work on the Canadian war picture. The cartoon will be finished by Xmas after which there will be an exhibition.’123 This cartoon went on view in January 1919 when the Observer art critic P. G. Konody organized a Canadian War Memorials exhibition at Burlington House showing war pictures by Bernard Meninsky, C. R. W. Nevinson, William Roberts, the Nash brothers and others. ‘Even Mr Paul Nash may grow old-fashioned with the years,’ commented The Times, ‘but it is hard to imagine a time when Major John’s cartoon (not yet finished) “The Pageant of War” will not interest by its masterly suggestion of what war means.’124 In an article for Colour Magazine, Konody described John’s summary of all he had witnessed during his five months in France, and his portrayal of it as a vast gypsy convoy.
‘His picture may be described as an epitome of modern war. In it are introduced crowds of refugees, men, women and children with their carts and cherished belongings, detachments of soldiers in their trench outfits, officers on horseback, trucks carrying soldiers to the front line, wounded sufferers and stretcher-bearers, a camouflaged gun position, bursting shells, an observation balloon, a ruined château, Vimy Ridge, all the movement and bustle, all the destruction and desolation of war. But this astounding accumulation of motives is organized with classic lucidness, with a sense of style unrivalled by any other living painter. Full of animation, movement and seething life, the design is controlled by a rare sense of order.’
Konody, who wrote books on Velazquez, Filippo Lippi and Raphael, as well as a study of C. R. W. Nevinson’s war paintings, believed that John’s prodigious decoration would stand comparison with the work of ‘Michelangelo, Signorelli, Raphael or Leonardo, to whose best tradition John is faithful in spite of his essential modernity… [if he] has the staying power to carry out consistently with the brush what he has so triumphantly accomplished in charcoal’.125 Intermittently during that year John grappled ‘with my Canadian incubus… I must try to get quit of the whole business. No more official jobs for me.’126 He did not have the staying power. The erection of the art gallery in Ottawa, planned to house the entire Canadian War Memorials collection, was postponed, and forty years on Beaverbrook and John were still in correspondence, Beaverbrook asking after the picture, John parrying with inquiries about the gallery.127
But there is one large oil painting, ‘Fraternity’,128 at the Imperial War Museum in London, that seems to justify the time he spent in France. Executed in muted greens and browns, it depicts three soldiers against a background of ruined brickwork and shattered trees, one giving another a light for his cigarette. It is a touching picture, emotionally and literally in the swirl of arms and the two cigarettes held tip to tip. But though the background is an authentic record of what John actually saw in France, the figures are a straight copy of a mass-circulation postcard from the Daily Mail’s Official War Picture Series 2, No. II – ‘A “Fag” after a Fight’. It is a studio artist’s picture.
The fact was that John had little aptitude as a war artist. A caricature by Max Beerbohm that appeared in Reveille in 1918 shows him in his neat uniform and tin hat behind the front lines staring into a field of French peasants in Johnesque attitudes with spades, buckets and hoes, exclaiming: ‘Ah, now there really is a subject.’
*
‘Peace has arrived,’ Gus wrote to Gwen on 18 November. ‘London went mad for a week & Paris too I suppose.’129 He had called on Gwen in December 1917 on his way to the Canadian headquarters at Aubigny and ‘at the fourth call caught her & we dined together’ at the Café de Versailles in Montparnasse. The change in her since he had last seen her four years ago was rather terrible. Before the war Henry Lamb had thought her ‘really quite a gay person who could be full of fun’;130 and Duncan Grant, seeing her ‘living with her cats on the old fortification’,131 did not find a recluse but someone eager to go out picnicking and talk of Rodin. But Rodin had died on 17 November 1917 and Gwen, so Gus reported to Dorelia the following month, ‘has been getting more and more hypochondriac’.132 During these war years she had not seen much of Rodin, though they corresponded and she still thought of herself as his ‘true wife’. But then she did not see much of anyone over these years. The fortifications rose. ‘I don’t like meeting people,’ she explained to Quinn. In 1913 she was admitted into the Catholic Church. As Rodin was a Catholic, she explained, this made no difference to their relationship. ‘I was born to love,’ she had written. The advantage of loving God was that He did not fall ill, get old, die. ‘He loves me,’ she wrote in her child’s hand. But He could not protect her from grief over Rodin’s death. ‘I don’t know what I am going to do,’133 she admitted to Ursula Tyrwhitt five days after he died. ‘I have not seen Gus yet.’
Gus trusted to Gwen’s ‘esprit’ not to get morbid over Rodin. Yet he was bothered by her. ‘I trust you to believe that my infrequent letters don’t mean that I don’t think of you very often,’ he assured her.134 The morning after their dinner, he drove round to her ‘garret at Meudon’ and borrowed five pounds off her. ‘She says my visit did her a lot of good,’135 he assured Dorelia. That sounded like typical bravado, almost comic in its insensitivity. Yet it was true. Gwen confided to Ursula that she had surprisingly enjoyed his visit. Somehow he broke the spell of death and connected her again, however randomly, with living energy. By February 1918 she was feeling ‘nearly normal’ and beginning to paint again. She had particularly liked learning about Gus’s family (and was ‘surprised to hear of Vivien’s existence’).
‘She utterly neglects herself,’ Gus had complained to Dorelia, whom he asked to send Gwen photographs of the children ‘and perhaps a Jaeger blanket as she admits the cold keeps her awake at night. The Lord only knows how she passes her days.’136 He had promised to come back and see her again soon, but after his stand-up fight with Captain Wright and the threat of a court martial, he was not allowed into France for the duration of the war. He seems to have been too embarrassed to tell Gwen the facts. ‘My authorities wouldn’t send me back to France as I expected & wanted,’ he wrote. ‘They preferred to keep me at work here [Mallord Street] which was very silly… I will try to get to Paris early next year [1919]… One will be able to fly over in 2 or 3 hours! I cannot come before.’137
In the last months of the war, as Paris came under bombardment from German and American troops, Gwen had abandoned her room in the rue de l’Ouest and, under ‘balls of fire’ from the planes and the awful ‘Gottas [i.e. Gotha heavy bombers] with torpillos’, she travelled back and forwards on the train moving her possessions to Meudon. Gus had renewed his invitation to Alderney. Dorelia, he said, ‘would love to see you again’. But if he could not lure her into England, he did at least persuade her to go off a few times to Brittany.
During 1918 she found rooms in the Château de Vauxclair, an empty, silent, sixteenth-century house behind tall iron gates, with a neglected garden, near a ‘wild lonely bay’ at Pléneuf. ‘I think I shall be alone there,’ she wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt. ‘I could work.’138 But in the spring of 1919 the house was bought by speculators. Gwen stayed on as a squatter, hoping that Gus might buy it. He tried, but at fifty thousand francs it became too expensive for him. ‘Just at present debts & responsibilities are rather overwhelming,’ he apologized to her that summer.’ ‘…As you say it takes a lot of money to keep my family going.’139 She also appealed to Quinn, but he complicated everything with his businesslike questionnaires and plans to move in Arthur Symons as caretaker. Men always became entangled in money like this.
Before the end of 1919 Gwen returned to Meudon. At last it was business as usual. Winifred had given birth to a second child in the United States. Thornton, after a short stay in Tenby, was mining oil shale at Deer Park in Newfoundland. ‘I suppose later he will live in his boat and catch fish,’140 Gus accurately predicted in a letter to Gwen. He himself was also planning to spend a week or two round Tenby. ‘I wish you were coming too.’141
This concern for her, tinged obscurely with guilt, agitated Gwen. Gus had written to Quinn saying that she ‘wasn’t looking at all fit’. But he wanted things for her that she didn’t want herself, or at least not often, not much. So she made an effort to reassure him, explaining the nature of her independence. ‘When illness or death do not intervene, I am [happy],’ she wrote. ‘Not many people can say as much.
‘I do not lead a subterranean life… Even in respect to numbers I know and see more people than I have ever. (Some of my friendships are nothing to be proud of by-the-bye.) It was in London I saw nobody. If in a café I gave you the impression that I am too much alone, it was an accident. I was thinking of you and your friends and that I should like to go to spectacles and cafés with you often. If to “return to life” is to live as I did in London, merci Monsieur! There are people like plants who cannot flourish in the cold, and I want to flourish.’142
Admiration, exasperation, attraction, temptation confused their feelings. If they could have shuffled the cards, dealt new ones from the pack they both held, then they might truly have helped each other. As it was they could do very little, though that little was sometimes useful. In their separate ways, now that the war was over, Gus wrote to Gwen, ‘one will work better I hope.’143
*
On Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, John made his appearance at a party in the Adelphi ‘amid cheers, in his British [sic] officer’s uniform, accompanied by some land-girls in leggings and breeches who brought a fresh feeling of the country into the overheated room’.144 He seemed to be enjoying himself, and communicating enjoyment, more than anyone. The following month he wrote to Quinn: ‘London went fairly mad for a week but thank the Lord that’s over and we have to face the perils of Peace now.’
He had, he reminded Dorelia, ‘an odd nervous system’. His ‘bad period’, that had begun in France, persisted. ‘Rather dreadful that feeling of wanting to go somewhere and not knowing where,’ he noted. ‘I spend hours of anguish trying to make a move – in some direction.’145 In this sinking uncertainty he grew more dependent on other people. One was Lady Cynthia Asquith. ‘Of you alone I can think with longing and admiration,’ he declared. ‘You have all the effect of a Divine Being whose smile and touch can heal, redeem and renew.’ For Cynthia Asquith, herself close to a nervous breakdown, admiration was a medicine to be swallowed as ‘dewdrops’ – though when it took the form of ‘an advance – clutching me very roughly and disagreeably by the shoulders – I shook myself free and there was no recurrence’.146 What John responded to was the unhappiness below her giddy exterior. He understood her need for such an exterior and found he could talk with her. ‘I bucked up somewhat,’ he told her. ‘Such is the benefit we get from confessing to one another.’
The war was over, but the trappings of war remained. In the spring of 1919 he was invited to attend the Peace Conference in Paris. Lloyd George proclaimed that the conference should not be allowed to pass ‘without some suitable and permanent memento being made of these gatherings’. The British Government had therefore decided to ‘approach two of the most famous British artists and ask them to undertake the representation of the Conference’. The two selected were John and Orpen, and both accepted. They were to get a subsistence allowance of three pounds (equivalent to £62 in 1996) a day, expenses, an option whereby the Government could purchase each of their pictures for three thousand pounds, and a five-hundred-pound option price for the portraits of visiting celebrities. Many of these celebrities, the Government was assured by Sir George Riddell, Chairman of the News of the World, who was acting as liaison officer between the British delegation and the press, ‘are most anxious to be painted’. In John’s case there was an immediate obstacle. Unaccountably he was still in the Canadian Army, and special arrangements were rushed through enabling him officially to be ‘loaned to the War Office’.
He dreamed of being flown to France but, after three days of waiting in foggy weather, went by train. ‘I am over here to paint something to commemorate the Conference. No small job!’ he wrote to Sampson. ‘…This is my first day in Paris and a full one its been… There seem to be ructions brewing in the Conference.’147 He found himself in ‘a delightful apartment’, ‘almost too dream-like’ on the third floor of 60 avenue Montaigne. Here, as the guest of Don José-Antonio de Gandarillas, a charming opium-eater with dyed hair who was attached to the Chilean Legation, he stayed during February and March. The conference hall was just across the river and he went over in search of profitable celebrities. Though he ‘managed to collar a Belgian representative’, he was worried over how he was to get hold of the statesmen for sittings. ‘A certain delay at the start is to be expected no doubt,’ he hazarded in a letter to Frances Stevenson,148 with whom he was angling for a weekly allowance. It was Gandarillas who speeded things up. He knew everyone, and invited everyone to his flat. The parties they gave in the avenue Montaigne were soon the talk of Paris. ‘My host Gandarillas leads a lurid and fashionable life,’ John admitted.149 An orchestra played ceaselessly all night and the spacious apartment was thronged with the beau monde. Rather nervously John began to infiltrate these parties, entering for the first time ‘as dream-like a world as any I had been deprived of’.150
He had not thought of promoting himself – certainly he had no wish to dance: he had come prepared to ‘stand apart in a corner and watch the scene’. What happened astonished him. He talked, he laughed, he danced: he was an extraordinary success. Paris this spring was the vortex of the social and political world; and at its centre this son of a Pembrokeshire solicitor stood out as ‘easily the most picturesque personality’, Frances Stevenson recorded. ‘He held court in Paris.’
All red carpets led to him. The Prime Ministers of Australia, France, Canada and New Zealand submitted to his brush; kings and maharajas, dukes and generals, lords of finance and of law froze before him; the Emir Faisal posed; Lawrence of Arabia took his place humbly in the queue – and Dorelia wrote to inquire whether he had yet been knighted. More wonderful still were the princesses, infantas, duchesses, marchesas who lionized him. His awkwardness departed, and a sudden confidence surged through him. They were, he discovered, these grandiloquent ladies, all too human: they ‘loved a bit of fun’. Under a smart corsage beat, as like as not, ‘a warm, tender even fragile heart’. It was a revelation.
He was born quite suddenly into a new world, but it did not take full possession of him. Even now, at the height of this triumph, his ‘criminal instincts’ reasserted themselves, and he hurried away to ‘my old and squalid but ever glorious quarter… and sat for a while in the company of young and sinister looking men with obvious cubistic tendencies’.151 A few old friends still roamed Montparnasse, but something had been extinguished, something was vanishing for ever. Jean Moréas was dead; Modigliani, addicted to drink and drugs, would die within a year; Paul Fort had become respectable and the cercle of the closerie des Lilas was disbanded. Maurice Cremnitz was there, only slightly damaged by the war; but he, who had once likened Augustus to Robinson Crusoe, now gazed at Major John with suspicion. ‘I was conscious of causing my friends embarrassment,’ John admitted. A doubt sailed briefly across his mind. Was he too becoming respectable?
He was doubtful also about his painting. He had begun the Peace portraits grudgingly, but his accelerated technique worked well. ‘I think I have acquired more common skill,’ he wrote to Cynthia Asquith on 24 July 1919, ‘ – or is it that I have learnt to limit my horizons merely?’ In the immense conference hall he had found a room with a high window niche, and from here he made sketches of the delegates. It was a curious assignment. ‘All goes well,’ he reassured Dorelia, ‘ – except for the poor old Conference.’ Sometimes he felt like throwing a bomb into the chamber. Amid the ghastly talk of reparations and indemnities, the British contingent showed signs of despair, ‘all except L[loyd] G[eorge] who looks bursting with satisfaction’. He and President Woodrow Wilson ‘apparently boss the whole show’. General Smuts from South Africa appeared overcome with misgivings; William Massey, Prime Minister of New Zealand, described the proceedings as farcical; Balfour slumbered; the Prime Minister of Australia, William Hughes, looking like a jugged hare, was learning French. Speech followed speech in a multiplicity of languages: the assembly wilted in boredom. For John, who had arrived with ‘my eyes open and brain busy’, these interminable rows of seated figures offered no pictorial possibilities. But he badly needed the three thousand pounds and decided to attempt a more fanciful interpretation of what he saw. ‘I do not propose to paint a literal representation of the Conference Chamber,’ he promised the Ministry of Information, ‘but a group which will have a more symbolic character, bring in motifs which will suggest the conditions which gave rise to the Conference and the various interests involved in it.’ It did not augur well.
In April he moved from Gandarillas’s apartment to a private house at 3 quai Malaquais belonging to the Duchess of Gramont, whose portrait he was painting. By May he had resolved to quit Paris. ‘I was pretty busy in Paris,’ he told Gwen, ‘& had a queer time.’ He had been spoilt, pampered, dazzled. But now he had had enough: strangers would make better company, or perhaps solitude itself might be best. ‘Life in Paris was too surprising,’ he afterwards confided to Cynthia Asquith. ‘I long for some far island, sun and salt water.’ He had had too much work of the wrong sort. ‘I am very helpless and desolate,’ he confessed.152
He was still in khaki. Until the autumn of 1919, and to everyone’s consternation, he continued to receive pay and allowances from the Canadians, and also for almost seven months from the British War Office. ‘I must drop this commission and get into walking clothes again,’ he told Dorelia. Everyone agreed. ‘Would it not be more satisfactory for you to be demobilized?’ the authorities tactfully persisted. But each time he prepared to return to civilian life a curious reluctance, not wholly financial, overcame him.153 Had he not been ‘going for a soldier’ even before deciding on the Slade? The uniform, which had caused such embarrassment in Montparnasse, had given him confidence in the Champs-Élysées, and he enjoyed the pantomime. Besides, he had two medals.
But his inability to finish either the big Canadian war or Paris Peace Conference pictures made him ‘very unstable’. He tried several methods of restoring this stability. To reimburse the British Government for the expenses it had paid him, he gave the Imperial War Museum eight drawings relating to the war, and allowed the museum to buy at an almost nominal price, one hundred and forty pounds (equivalent to £2,900 in 1996), his painting ‘Fraternity’. He felt better too once he began travelling again. In September 1919, he turned up at the Villa La Chaumière at Deauville as the guest of Lloyd George.
‘What a monde he lives in!’ he exclaimed in a letter to Cynthia Asquith. ‘…My fortnight here has been fantastic… It’s a place I should normally avoid. I have been horribly parasitical. I began a portrait of a lady here which promised well – till I gathered from her that if I made her beautiful, it might turn out to be the first step in a really brilliant career.’154
But he had left many unfinished things in Paris from the conference days and had no idea how to deal with them. ‘Here I have met the Duchesse de Guiche who invites me to store my things in her house,’ he wrote from Deauville to Gwen. ‘You see in what exalted company I move!’
In March 1920, again at the Alpine Club Gallery, John exhibited his war and peace portraits. They were not flattering likenesses, nor were they satirical: with few exceptions they were neutral. The tedium released by the company of this exalted band is very adequately recorded, and to that extent he remained uncorrupted. But he had succumbed to the temptation to waste time. His two exhibitions at the Alpine Club were exercises in the higher journalism of art – commissions that gave little evidence of his special talent. John knew this himself. No amount of social success could conceal the truth for long. His melancholia deepened. In April 1920 he entered the Sister Carlin Hospital for an operation on his nose to make breathing easier. He had been ‘in a state of profound depression’, he told Ottoline Morrell. ‘…I feel always as though practically poisoned and must not shirk the operation. I look forward to it indeed as a means of recovering my normal self.’155 It was essential to keep morale high. ‘It took an uncommon amount of ether to get me under,’ he bragged to Eric Sutton.156 Under the ether, with a deep sigh, he uttered one remark: ‘Well, I suppose I must be polite to these people.’ He recovered with his usual facility and ‘am doing rather brilliantly’.157
For his convalescence he went with Dorelia and some of the family to stay with his father in Tenby. A new era was beginning in Britain, and many were curious to know what part John would occupy in it. He was no longer the leader, as the Observer art critic had reported in 1912, of ‘all that is most modern and advanced in present day British Art’. Nor, in his forty-third year, was he yet a Grand Old Man. To the younger artists he had once been the apostle of a new way of seeing: now he was the embodiment of a way of living. He wanted to start again and be more like Gwen. ‘I want to dig myself up and replant myself in some corner where no one will look for me,’ he declared to Cynthia Asquith. ‘There perhaps – there in fact I know I shall be able to paint better.’
*1 A two-masted fishing-boat of Dutch origin used off the west coast of Ireland. John had a scheme for buying one for fifty pounds.
*2 See Appendix Five.
*3 Stuart Gray, an ex-lawyer, hunger marcher and future ‘King of Utopia’.