Augustus John to Bill Duncalf
(23 May 1959)
Fryern Court had originally been a fourteenth-century friary which, in the early nineteenth century, was converted into a farmhouse. Later a Georgian-style front had been stuck on to the old farm building, and it was transformed into a manor house.
It was on the edge of the New Forest, a mile from Fordingbridge. A porch ‘like a nose’1 divided the windows that reached almost to the ground. At the rear of the house stood a whitewashed courtyard with a figtree and stables, a garage and outhouses stretching away into garden and meadow. The sitting-room and dining-room, the dark pantry with its slate floor and a fourteenth-century kitchen with carved stone heads (then heavily painted over) protruding from the walls – all had their floors level with the ground. The cellars were crammed with wine, apples and cobwebs. Upstairs there was more the feel of the old farmhouse than the manor, the passages rambling crookedly past eight bedrooms.
They moved there early in 1927. Augustus descended from London and ‘like the traditional clown’2 busily did nothing. Everything that could be prised from Alderney was taken. Poppet and Vivien, in great excitement, rode over on their horses; the old vans and carts, soon to be embedded as garden furniture, set out on their last rusty journey; cats, dogs, pigs joined in the stampede past the large copper beeches, magnolias, yellow azaleas up the curving gravel drive to their new home.
The routine and rituals at Fryern were to be arranged as a supportive background for John: but, as with Alderney, it was Dorelia’s arrangement and far removed from the wild emptiness that stimulated his painter’s imagination. He saw, with despair, all round a beauty he could not use. ‘Here’, exclaimed Cecil Beaton,3 a frequent visitor, ‘is the dwelling place of an artist.’ The irony seemed invisible, though the changes that were made to Fryern, in particular a mammoth new studio, on stilts like a child’s playhouse and ‘entirely based on mathematical calculation’,4 were expressions of John’s discontent. In an agony of guilt, disappointment, incomprehension, suddenly released in thunderous bursts of temper, he worked on amid these tranquil surroundings.
Meanwhile Dorelia ‘busies herself in the garden’, John noted. She spent hours studying horticultural catalogues, ordering plants and bulbs. It was a grander garden than at Alderney, and more formal. The avenue of dark yew trees was neatly clipped; the lawn, with a pond converted from a tennis court at its centre, was enclosed by hedges; in the orchard, the pear and apple trees were hung with little bags against the wasps. Up the walls of the house roses and clematis twined, the matted stems making nests for cats; and on the north side, a hazard for drivers, bunched the holly and laurels. There were garden seats, tables of stone and teak, a hammock strung between the Judas and an apple tree, medlars, and little chequered fritillaries in the grass. It was a place for animals and children to play, a place to relax in and read.
It was also a place to be used for keeping the house replenished with fruit and herbs, bright yellow goat’s butter, quince and raspberry jam, grape juice from the vine in the greenhouse, sweetcorn, lavender, flowers. During the 1930s Dorelia was helped by two gardeners. One, a fine man, landed up in hospital. The other was Mr Cake. He and his wife, Mrs Cake the cook, had been brought from Alderney and, though often promising to leave, remained with the family for over thirty years. Old Cake was a small man with a limp and a bright buttonhole who would go swinging off each evening to the pub over a mile away. He seldom spoke, and his wife, who ‘did wonders’ with fish, could not read. Larger and more voluble than her husband, and always grinning, Mrs Cake appeared (on account of her wall eye) a fearsome creature. ‘Trouble with ’im’, she was heard to say of John, ‘is ’e’s got too many brains and they’ve gone to ’is ’ead.’ Mrs Cake was immensely proud of her hair, which was long and thick and washed, she would explain, in juice of rosemary. She spoke with a strong Dorset accent. ‘Old Cake was very lucky to get me,’ she would say. ‘All the boys were after me. It was my hair.’ Old Cake, pursued by several goats, said nothing.
There were the same smells of beeswax, pomanders and lavender, wood- and tobacco-smoke, coffee, cats as at Alderney; the same disorder of vegetables, tubes of paint, nuts from the New Forest, saddles, old canvases, croquet mallets, piles of apples. The furniture was not grand nor the pictures specially valuable: it was the opposite of a museum. Alongside those paintings of John’s which had eluded fire and finish were some lovely Gwen Johns, including one of her paintings of Dorelia at Toulouse, a watercolour by Augustus’s son Edwin, a Henry Moore sketch, small Wilson Steers and Conders, an Alvaro Guevara, a beach scene by Boudin and some Matthew Smiths. An Epstein head of a small child stood on a table, and in the hall, crowned with a cactus, one of the two Modigliani stone heads John had bought in Paris. In her bedroom, Dorelia hung some tinfoil pictures by Carrington and two drawings by Augustus of Pyramus. Then there were paintings by friends: Eve Kirk, Adrian Daintrey and a passing number of gypsy artists.
It was not a smart house, and it had much of the farm about it. The colours were rich, the atmosphere lavish yet shabby. ‘There is no beguiling, ready-made impact of beauty,’ wrote Cecil Beaton; ‘rather, an atmosphere of beauty is sensed. No intention to decorate the house ever existed. The objects that are there were originally admired and collected for their intrinsic shape. They remain beautiful… the colours have gratuitously grown side by side. Nothing is hidden; there is an honesty of life which is apparent in every detail – the vast dresser with its blue and white cups, the jars of pickled onions, the skeins of wool, the window sills lined with potted geraniums and cacti… ’5
Fryern was the most open of houses, a mandatory first stop between London and the west. Many were invited, many more came. But the informality was testing and the welcome to strangers deceptive. Hugo Pitman remembered every window of the house lit up (though it was still light) when he first approached: ‘It was like arriving at a stage set’. Through the long windows of the dining-room, he saw two figures sitting by a blazing fire. On the other side of the front door, some children moved about in the drawing-room. ‘Upstairs, Augustus could be seen in bed...’ The bell did not work, so they rattled the front door. ‘Instantly every light in the house went out, except Augustus’s – and his blind came down immediately.’6
John was emphatic about people enjoying themselves. He liked anyone who was good-looking, anyone who made him laugh. Though quickly bored he was a keen listener, shooting out scornful comments and darting from subject to subject in search of relieving entertainment. His speech was somewhat formal, old-fashioned, full of rounded phrases, though he was a good mimic and could give a wonderfully fruity impersonation of Oscar Wilde during his last years in Paris. Up in London, his deep laugh volleying round the Eiffel Tower; or seen striding about the sunlit gymkhanas where Poppet and Vivien loved to ride; or picnicking with the family on the phallic giant of Cerne Abbas; or in the evenings, seated at one end of the long scrubbed oak table opposite Dorelia, with twenty people between them, and candles, bottles of wine, he seemed lit up by joie de vivre. Broad-shouldered, athletic still in his fifties, capable of princely gestures, there was yet ‘a touch of tragedy in his appearance’, Adrian Daintrey observed.7
Parties were conspiracies of self-forgetfulness. At Fryern someone would put on the gramophone or begin playing the guitar, then singing and dancing would break out round John’s Jove-like figure. Fierce fits of depression had made him dependent upon the momentary gaiety of a clamorous public whom he did not honestly admire but whom he allowed to play him out of his gloom. Hating publicity, he had become an object of this gala-world’s ‘image-making’. But the praise was counterfeit: fan-club hot air. As numerous letters of apology testify, he could behave rudely when drunk, but there was some integrity in this rudeness. The good things they said about him he did not believe. He could suspend disbelief, but never for long. ‘La bonne peinture is all the praise I want!’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein (26 May 1936). ‘I am painting better than ever before,’ he growled one day to Lady Waverley. But when she congratulated him – ‘How happy you must be’ – he snapped back: ‘You have never said anything more silly!’
That it became, with time, more difficult to flatter him stood awkwardly to his credit. But it did not make him easier. False praise, like alcohol, was ultimately a depressant, allowing him briefly to ‘take off while it drilled a deeper cavity into which he fell back. Among his family who, reflecting only distorted versions of himself, provided no escape, he was often most hostile. ‘Daddy has returned to the scene so it will be gloom, gloom, gloom,’ Vivien wrote in one of her letters from Fryern. Meals could be ‘absolute killers’ with the silence and fear that had filled his father’s dining-room at Tenby. When the going was bad, John would sit, a crazed look on his face, his eyes staring. Something odd was going on inside him as he sat watching the gangway of brooding children. Almost anything they did could provoke him – the way a knife was held, the expression of a face, a chance sentence. To others he spoke in a mild cultivated voice, volunteering academic speculations about the birth of language or the origin of nomads. Then he would relapse into silence, and again something nameless appeared to be torturing him. But sometimes, when he thought no one was observing him, his whole body quivered with silent laughter.
The house was controlled by these moods. Intrigues and hostilities moved through the rooms, threatening, thundering, blowing over: and all the time something within John was shrinking. His generosity, the largeness of his attitude, these he still communicated. ‘I never met any man who gave me such an immediate effect of being a great man,’8 remembered Lord David Cecil. He was a big man: but inside the magnificent shell his real self was diminishing. One sign of this was his handwriting, which had been wild in youth, handsome and expansive in middle-age, and from the 1930s began to contract until it grew tiny – a trembling crawl across conventional small-scale writing-paper. Fryern remained a beautiful cobweb spun by Dorelia round John. Like a fly, suspended, exposed, he buzzed and was silent, buzzed and grew smaller.
Dorelia was caught too. After the war, Henry Lamb had been invalided back to England ‘in a desperate state’.9 From the General Hospital at Rouen he was sent to a hospital in London where Dorelia went to see him. ‘He’s not allowed more than one visit a day so it’s very maddening,’ she had written to Lytton Strachey (11 December 1918). ‘…His heart and nerves are in a very bad state. He’s in a very comfortable place [27 Grosvenor Square] which is a blessing, and being looked after properly for the first time.’ In so far as she could – though ‘it’s very difficult for me to get away’ – Dorelia had helped him back to health. He was often at Alderney, and to be near her he set up house at No. 10 Hill Street in Poole. To the children he had been an uncle; to Dorelia he was still her other artist, the theoretical alternative reconciling her to actual life. But for John, who knew his clever criticisms, Lamb was a sparrow imitating an eagle.
There were not many opportunities for Lamb and Dorelia to escape together. After a few precious hours, ‘that old tarantula Augustus’ would reappear ‘in his customary nimbus of boredom, silence and helpless gloom’. Dorelia would then step back into the shadows and Lamb retire bitterly alone. A drawing he did of her in 1925 shows the poignant feelings she aroused in him, and his letters to Carrington (who was herself very close to Dorelia) declare them.10 Her sexuality trapped him. A photograph he took of her with an inviting expression, sitting naked on the wooden edge of a bath, still had the power to startle the novelist Anthony Powell over sixty years later. ‘I saw at last her charm,’ he wrote,11 ‘sexual attraction, hitherto hidden from me, as a force people used to talk about.’ She continued to absorb Lamb’s waiting life. When she fell ill he felt ‘terrified’, blaming John for thoughtlessly loading her with work. He tried to extricate her from the ‘cataract’ of hangers-on in the country, to rescue her when ‘bemallorded with the old monster’ in London. ‘I find her quite inaccessible,’ he sighed to Carrington (12 September 1925), ‘and of course she makes no effort.’ But there were glimpses of her, secret times when she would slip away to him, bringing plants for his garden or accompanying him to concerts.
He thought her ‘as supreme as ever’. A letter from her would make him ‘more éperdument [madly] amoureux than ever’; and after a telegram telling him to meet her at the station ‘imagine the volcano in my soul’. It was amazing how, after a few days in his company, she would recover from ‘that old wreck of a millstone round her neck’. When conducting her home to ‘a very copious bed’ and spending four nights with her while John was away, he felt ‘some tremendous affirmation of that Spring that glimpsed on me with curious rays...’
Then there would be the prolonged anguish of separation. What aggravated everything was his sense that, by making Dorelia one of the most famous icons in twentieth-century British art, John had forever tied her to him. ‘I have had some glimpses of her,’ Lamb wrote. ‘But in spite of some occasional gleams I cannot escape from the terrible feeling of a great cloud descending – dark & immoveable.’12
Still he persisted in the hope that she would come to him, ‘and then perhaps part of the day dream could be realised… when that strange woman is less perplexed and all our nerves less raging.’13 Seeing her with John’s friends, it was inexplicable to Lamb why Dorelia ‘willingly inflicts herself with such trials’. But by the summer of 1926 it seemed as if she were finally ready to leave. He came for her and they set off together. But ‘it was no use,’ Lamb wrote afterwards, ‘the rain & the hopelessness of the houses seemed to penetrate her and she wanted to turn back at Salisbury. Although I carried out the plot to programme, waiting till the last minute at Upavon before springing it on her she flatly refused.’ It was not until the next day that she gave Lamb the reason why she would not run off with him: ‘we should never have been able to get away,’14 she said. It would have been like her escapade with Leonard all those years ago in Bruges.
Lamb’s hopes were finally extinguished by the move to Fryern. ‘I think she [Dorelia] is already pretty well bored there,’ he wrote sourly to Carrington not long afterwards. He had managed at last to get a divorce from Euphemia, and the next year, 1928, he married Pansy Pakenham, the eldest daughter of the sixth Earl of Longford, springing the news on Dorelia a few days beforehand.
Dorelia’s life with John had been growing more difficult. She made at least two attempts to leave. Once she got so far as the railway station. A pony and trap was sent off in scalding pursuit, arriving just before the train, and she was persuaded to return. The letters John wrote whenever he was abroad reveal his dependence on her, and it was this need that held her back. Finally it was too late, too unthinkable that ‘Dodo’, as everyone now called her, should not always be there. She grew more fatalistic, relying on the swing of her pendulum – a ring harnessed to a piece of string – to decide everything from the wisdom of a marriage to the authenticity of a picture. From anything that might cause pain she averted her attention, though she might seem to stare at it without emotion. The range of her interests narrowed. She had stopped drawing, now she read less, and eventually would give up the piano. Nothing got on top of her, nothing came too near. She grew more interested in the vegetable world. The sounds at Fryern matched her equanimity: no longer the jaunty duets with Lamb, but a softer noise, the purring, amid the pots and plants, of the sewing-machine as she sat at it, for life as it were.
‘They don’t give it a name, but it seems to me rather like Winston [Churchill]’s complaint.’
Augustus John to Caspar John
In the first four years at Fryern a physical change came over John. ‘He had aged very much in those years,’ Diana Mosley remembered. ‘…John was fifty-three in 1931, but he seemed old, his hair was grey, his eyes bloodshot, and he already looked almost as he did in the cruelly truthful self-portrait he painted after the war.’15
The immediate cause of this change was alcohol. ‘I drink in order to become more myself,’ he stated once to Cecil Gray.16 At Fryern he was king of the castle; but outside this castle he felt ill-at-ease. He remained loyal to one or two places – Stulik’s, or the Queen’s Restaurant in Sloane Square – he had made homes-from-home.
Drink changed him into a different person. It was the passport that enabled him to go anywhere, giving him the gift of tongues. After a glass or two the terrible paralysis lifted, and the warmth that had been locked up within him flowed out. But then there was a third stage, when the geniality and amorousness gave way to senseless aggression – such as punching out a cigarette on someone’s face – about which he would afterwards feel baffled and ashamed.
Though he nowhere laments his mother’s death when he was six, his obsessive theme as a painter – a mother with her children in an ideal landscape – illustrates the lasting effect this loss produced. If his father represented the actual world, the deprivation of his mother became the source of that fantasy world he created in its place. It was an attempt to transmute deprivation into an asset. He was still haunted by those ‘delectable regions’ into which Ida had disappeared. To recreate this miraculous promised land in his large-scale imaginative work – a simple, self-sufficient, tribe-like way of living, vital and primitive – within the pressure of the contemporary world, with its bureaucracy and bombs, soap kings and tax inspectors, was a lonely struggle. But alcohol, which blurred the distinction between dream and reality, lessened this sense of loss. Ida ‘will always live on in your drawings’,17 Will Rothenstein had assured him. About her death, as about his mother’s, he was reticent, but she had been a casualty in the warring of these worlds, committing him, if he were to find any justification for it, more deeply to the fantasy of his art.
But alcohol fulfilled another function: it screened the truth. It did so in many ways, numbing his disappointment, leading him into moods of self-deception. In the fictitious jollity of the bar, he acted happy and almost felt so. Acting, which had begun as a means to self-discovery, became a method of self-forgetfulness. It was this remoteness that people sensed about him. ‘I’m sure he has no human heart,’ noted Hugh Walpole in his diary (3 July 1926), ‘but is “fey”, a real genius from another planet than ours.’18 But if he was not of this planet, he did not now belong to any other. ‘Sometimes one feels positively the old horror vacui overwhelming one,’ he admitted to Christabel Aberconway.19 Although alcohol promoted a temporary sense of well-being, John had long recognized it as an enemy. ‘I have never really been captured by alcohol,’ he had told John Quinn in 1910, ‘and I’m not going to run after it. I think any sport can be overdone; and I’m taking a real pleasure in dispensing with that form of entertainment. In a short while I shall be able to get as drunk as I like on green tea.’ He made many of these ‘experiments in temperance’, but his drinking had got worse in the war, and worse still during his trips to the United States which seemed to prohibit temperance. Driving home in the pink light of dawn, he had been shocked to see a small herd of elephants, not realizing that they belonged to a travelling circus. He tried to pull himself together, but towards the end of the 1920s he began to have attacks of delirium tremens and appeared to be suffering from some sort of breakdown. Lamb believed these were ‘some of his melodramatic methods’ for stopping Dorelia from leaving him. ‘I think Augustus’s threatened breakdown is all fiddle dedee,’ he wrote to Carrington, ‘…though I suppose he is quite plainly, though slowly, breaking up if not down.’ Treatment was made difficult because John never admitted his addiction to alcohol. He prevaricated, referring to ‘Neurasthenia’ or even (to account for his unsteady walk) ‘water on the knee’. ‘There’s nothing the matter with me except occasional “nerves”,’ he diagnosed in a letter to Ottoline Morrell (8 June 1929). On this matter of nerves he consulted Dr Maurice Wright who was ‘very eminent in his own line – psychology, and he is already an old friend of mine’.20 According to Leonard Woolf, Wright was ‘an exceptionally nice and intelligent man’. He had failed to cure Leonard of his trembling hands and Virginia of her suicidal troughs of depression, though he was a man of high principle who ‘knew as much about the human mind and its illnesses’21 as any of his contemporaries – which, Leonard Woolf adds, ‘amounted to nothing’. Discussing his difficulties with Wright, John used a rich supply of euphemisms, inviting the psychologist to treat symptoms which, masking the real complaint, he saw as diseases in themselves. Some of them were so bad, he joked, they could drive a man to drink. ‘You are quite right,’ he wrote to Dr Gogarty, ‘catarrh makes one take far more drink than one would want without it.’ Pretending to treat a variety of sicknesses, from lumbago to sinusitis, while achieving a cure for alcoholism, was too stern a test for even so eminent a psychologist, and these consultations came to nothing. But by the end of March 1930, on the advice of Ottoline Morrell, John was attending her doctor. ‘Dr Cameron has done me worlds of good,’ she assured him. ‘He is the only really honest doctor I have found, and I have tried so many!… So do, dear John, give Cameron a trial.’22
Dr Cameron, ‘nerve specialist’, was fairly knowledgeable about alcohol. When drunk one day he ran over a child, and was sent to gaol. But he was a persuasive man, with a nice bedside manner, and many of his patients returned to him. Later, after a number of them had died from his drugs, he committed suicide.
John took to Cameron at once. ‘I shall bless you to the end of your days for sending me to Dr Cameron,’ he thanked Ottoline. ‘Would that I had seen him years ago. He put his finger on the spot at once. Already I feel happy again and ten years younger.’ The treatment involved no surrender of pride, and John’s relief came from having escaped a long process of humiliation. Both he and Cameron knew that alcohol was the real cause of his ‘nerves’, but they entered a conspiracy to gloss over this truth. ‘The defect in my works has been poisoning me for ages,’ John reported. ‘It explains so much...’23 Cameron’s diagnosis was delivered with a vagueness very dear to alcoholics. John had been ‘overdrawing his bank account’ and should go to a convalescent home where (though expensive in terms of money) he would make a sober investment. Under the guise of tackling a rigorous rest cure, John allowed himself to be sent to Preston Deanery Hall in Northampton, a briefly fashionable private nursing home full of fumed oak, leatherette, beaten copper and suburban mauve walls, that had opened in 1929 and was to close in 1931. Here, as if by accident, he was removed from all alcohol though permitted to equivocate as much as he liked. He was ‘travelling in the midlands’ or suffering from a ‘liver attack’ or undergoing ‘a thorough spring-cleaning’ because ‘my guts weren’t behaving harmoniously’. His friends were generally optimistic. ‘Any place apart from the world is a good idea for a bit, and it will do no harm to try it,’ Eve Fleming wrote to him. ‘You must get well, & I do hope this will do the trick.’24 Expressing her gratitude for Ottoline’s ‘great brain wave’, Dorelia wrote on 5 May 1930: ‘Of course J. would be perfectly well without wine or spirits. Many a time I’ve managed to keep him without any for weeks and then some idiot has undone all my good work in one evening. He may be impressed this time. All the other doctors have said the same, Dr Wright included. One can only hope to do one’s best… ’
What Dorelia did not perhaps appreciate was that the first phase of a successful cure must be the patient’s admission that he needs special treatment for alcoholism. This admission John was never required to make. He stayed at the nursing home a month, and his treatment appears to have been largely custodial, with a few vitamin supplements, nuts, caraway seeds and some tranquillizing drugs served on silver platters by footmen. ‘They are making a good job of me, I feel,’ he announced.25 ‘…I am a different being and they tell me in a week or two I’ll be as strong again as a horse.’ He was allowed out with another inmate for a ‘debauch of tea and toast’ and by himself to Cambridge for a drink ‘of coffee with Quiller-Couch and a bevy of exquisite undergrads’, as well as for walks to the church and, more recklessly, drives in his car. In the absence of gypsies, he made friends with ‘some nice animals’, cows and sheep mostly; while indoors there were erotic glimpses of a remarkable chambermaid. He read voraciously, but was sometimes ‘rather forlorn’. ‘If I were not beginning to feel as I haven’t felt for years I might be bored,’ he threatened in a note to Ottoline, who had entered the nursing home herself for a few days, ‘ – as it is – I am smiling to myself, as at some huge joke.’
The presence of Ottoline helped to reconcile John to Preston Deanery Hall. He insisted that she came and sat by his bed and, after his morning exercises on the ‘electric belly-waggler’, photographed his new etherealized figure. Ottoline was likewise convinced that she looked ‘much younger since I went to Dr Cameron. Everyone exclaims so.’ It was, she added, ‘so depressing to look like a wreck’. John gallantly affirmed that she was ‘more paintable than ever’, at which she suddenly took fright. So they discussed other people such as Henry Lamb, who was said to be curing himself of his Augustus John ‘infection’ in the company of Stanley and Gilbert Spencer, but whose case (so Dorelia had told Ottoline) ‘was more serious than John’s’.26 As for John himself, Ottoline couldn’t help reflecting ‘how like he has become to Asquith, who had his two failings, drink and women.’ Every day he entreated her to keep him company, and when Philip Morrell arrived to fetch her away, he came down to the front door to wave them off. He looked, she thought, ‘like the boy who had been left behind at the school gate’.27
After Ottoline had gone, John could not stay there long. Instead he ‘had it out with the doctor’ and left a week earlier than planned. ‘No doubt I’ll have to follow a regime for a while,’ he warned Dorelia. ‘They say I’ll be marvellously well in about 10 days after leaving.’28 His aftercare came in the form of a diet. ‘Unfortunately I have lost that almost ethereal quality which I had so welcomed,’ he told Ottoline (23 May 1930). ‘…I blame the cook for giving me unauthorized potatoes and beef steak.’
‘You’d be all right if you lived sensibly,’ Eve Fleming instructed him. ‘You’re as strong as twelve lions by nature.’29 But sense of this sort was unavailable to him: ‘I who always live from hand to mouth and have so little practical sense.’30 He was awash with optimism. His strong constitution, with its extraordinary powers of recovery, quickly misled him. Austerity, he claimed, had made him ‘much more like myself’ – though he had also bought a new hat which was making him ‘a different person and a better’. One way or another he felt like ‘a giant refreshed’.31
It was not long before he relapsed into drinking, and the deterioration went on. ‘John is in ruins,’ T. E. Lawrence noted in 1932, ‘but a giant of a man. Exciting, honest, uncanny.’32 He never quite became a chronic drinker – ‘I was never a true alcoholic,’ he admitted to Mavis Wheeler. From time to time he went back to doctors who tried to remove him from alcohol altogether. But Dorelia’s tactics worked better. She rationed him with lock and key at home, and in restaurants would furtively empty his glass. Without drink he tended to avoid people: ‘I find my fellow-creatures very troublesome to contend with without stupéfiant,’ he told Christabel Aberconway. He still retreated into the comforting womb of pubs ‘to get alone for a bit’.33 A solitary figure in a muffler, booted and corduroyed, he sat quietly in a corner, drinking his beer. Latterly he consumed far less, because his tolerance to alcohol had diminished. Conger Goodyear, who had been so struck by his capacity at the Saturn Club in the 1920s, was regretting by the 1940s that ‘his ancient alcoholic prowess had departed’, and after a few drinks ‘Augustus did not improve’.34
The loss of confidence, the upsurges of temper, the tremulousness of his hands, his inability to make decisions – all grew more pronounced. He knew the truth, but would not hear it from anyone. But it amused him sometimes to make people connive at his inventions – then, with disconcerting relish, come out with the facts. ‘I have heard of a new treatment for my complaint – it consists of total abstention from liquor.’35 At other times he would innocently complain of Dodo that she smoked too much; or of J. B. Manson (who was dismissed as Director of the Tate Gallery) that ‘the fellow drinks’, deliberately slurring his words as he spoke.
Intermittently between bursts of renewed effort, he drank to destroy himself. If he could not paint well, and could not disguise his inability to do so, then he was better dead. But Dorelia, who had tolerated so much, would not tolerate this. Her watchfulness, care, relentless programme of regular meals and early nights, propped him up and pulled him through – the ghost of an artist he had once been.
‘I still draw a little.’
Augustus John to T. E. Lawrence
The first test came that summer of 1930. He had been invited by Gogarty to assist at the opening of his hotel, Renvyle House, in Connemara. Yeats was also coming, and Gogarty arranged for John to do a ‘serious portrait’ of him. ‘I would think it a great honour,’ Yeats had murmured. But standing before the mirror, he began to examine himself with some apprehension, ‘noticing certain lines about my mouth and chin marked strongly by shadows’, and to wonder ‘if John would not select those very lines and lay great emphasis upon them, and, if some friends complain that he has obliterated what good looks I have, insist that those lines show character, and perhaps that there are no good looks but character.’36
Early that summer Yeats learnt that the city of Cork had rejected John’s earlier portrait of him ‘because of my attack on the censorship & my speech about divorce’, choosing instead ‘as an expression of Cork piety and patriotism’37 a picture of the Prince of Wales by the Irish painter James Barry. At about the same time he received a letter from Gogarty saying that John wished to paint a portrait of him in his maturity. ‘John is to paint me at Renvyle,’ he wrote from Italy to Lady Gregory (27 June 1930), ‘and I will try to go there at once...’ The sittings began in the third week of July, and Yeats himself was soon writing that it ‘promises to be a masterpiece – amusing – a self I do not know but am delighted to know, a self that I could never have found out for myself, a gay, whimsical person which I could never find in the solemnity of the looking-glass. Is it myself? – it is certainly what I would like to be.’38
But a couple of days later, John ‘somewhat spoiled that portrait & has laid it aside’, so Yeats reported; adding, ‘ – I like him will endow it later with vice or virtue according to mood… He started another much larger portrait to-day which is more “monumental” – his word – [and] has less comedy. It is a fine thing.’39 It was at this point that John laid down his brushes and, joined by Caspar, who had flown over in his little Avro Avian, went off for three days to ‘Galway races & attendant activities’ where the enjoyment rose to such a level they ‘had the ambulances out’.40
John seems to have been in two minds about Yeats. He noticed, with surprise, that Yeats had made the mistake of growing older, and was ‘now a mellow, genial and silver haired old man’.41 He had put on weight, seemed vaguely distrustful and, despite the vastly poetical manner, looked somehow less Yeats-like. Yeats himself had noted ‘marks of recent illness, marks of time, growing irresolution, perhaps some faults that I have long dreaded; but then my character is so little myself that all my life it has thwarted me.’ This was a development very close to John’s own, explaining why observers such as Robert Graves could dismiss them both as poseurs. ‘Lord and Lady Longford had fetched him [Yeats] over to be painted,’ John remembered.
‘The conversation at dinner consisted of a succession of humorous anecdotes by Yeats, chiefly on the subject and at the expense of George Moore, punctuated by the stentorian laughter of his Lordship and the more discreet whinny of his accomplished wife. I was familiar with most of these stories before, or variants of them: for the Irish literary movement nourished itself largely on gossip… My difficulties while painting Yeats were not lightened by the obligation of producing an appreciative guffaw at the right moment, and I fear my timing was not always correct.’42
It was Yeats’s melancholy that John recognized, and shied away from. ‘The portrait represents the poet in his old age,’ Gogarty records. ‘He is seated with a rug round his knees and his broad hat on his lap. His white hair is round his head like a nimbus, and behind him the embroidered cloths of heaven are purple and silver. It is the last portrait of Yeats.’43
Once this portrait was finished, John was free to do whatever he wanted. What he wanted was to go to Galway City. Denouncing Renvyle as too ‘new and raw’, off he went. From O’Flaherty’s bar and from parties flowing with barmaids on and around Francis Macnamara’s boat Mary Anne, he was eventually fished up and carried back to Renvyle where an admiring entourage had assembled – the painters Adrian Daintrey and George Lambourn, and any number of painterly girls including ‘the ladies Dorothea and Lettice Ashley-Cooper’, and their sister Lady Alington who ‘has been posing for him and does not confine it to that’.44 To this number a beautiful American, Hope Scott, added herself, arriving in Dublin straight from Pennsylvania and being rushed across Ireland in a hearse. Her first sight of John, his beard caught by the sun, his eyes gleaming with anticipation, was at a ground-floor window. The hearse door was flung open, and ‘I fell out on my head.’45
John painted most days, Adrian Daintrey and George Lambourn acting as pacemakers. But every evening there were parties, and the effect of these began to infiltrate the day. His seclusion in Preston Deanery Hall seems to have precipitated two reactions: a greater urgency in his pursuit of girls, and a crippling anxiety over his work. ‘Though I was sitting, I did not lack exercise. Most of Augustus’s models found themselves doing a good bit of sprinting round the studio,’ recalled Mrs Scott, the original for the heroine in Philip Barry’s play The Philadelphia Story (later refilmed as High Society), into whose bed John was prevented from blundering by the presence of a bolster he angrily mistook for Adrian Daintrey. But Hope Scott also noticed: ‘He was enormously concentrated, at times he seemed actually to suffer over his work.’
Dodo and Poppet, who had gone with him to Ireland, left early. To them, arranged as a compliment, he confided his depression: ‘J’étais dans un gloom affreux quand tu et Dodo êtes parties. Tu pourrais bien m’avoir embrassé...’
To shed this black mood in some new climate became the theme of this decade. He travelled to the Hebrides, to Jersey, Cornwall and, for short visits, back to Wales. Now that he no longer had the Villa Ste-Anne, he stayed during part of two winters at Cap Ferrat with Sir James Dunn ‘the friendly financier’.46 But John failed to please Dunn. ‘Dunn’s quarrels with John over the various portraits were furious,’ Lord Beaverbrook wrote, ‘and much tough language was tossed to and fro, without reaching any conclusion… John, however, gave as much as he got.’47 These fashionable pleasure grounds, full of millionaire property owners flying like migratory birds of prey back to Big Business after the season was over, increased John’s depression. ‘I could find nothing in Cap Ferrat to excite me, and with a violent effort of will we pulled ourselves together and decamped.’
Other journeys were rather more productive. In October 1930 he set off with Dodo to see a ‘tremendous’ Van Gogh exhibition in Amsterdam, and from there went on alone to Paris, where he polished off some drawings of James Joyce. ‘He sits patiently,’ John noted in a letter to Dodo. A photograph of the two of them, in which John appears the more anxious to take part, shows Joyce as upright and foursquare, his head rigidly tilted back and with dark glasses (‘his mug is largely occluded by several pairs of powerful lenses,’ John told T. E. Lawrence) – and John gripping him, brandishing his pipe, apparelled in a pugilist’s dressing gown. Joyce wanted a drawing for what John called his ‘quite unsingable “Pomes”’, which had been set to music by various composers and edited for the Sylvan Press by Herbert Hughes under the title The Joyce Book. But had John done justice to the lower part of his face? Some of the drawings were so spare, so ‘School of Paris’, that Joyce could hardly make out the lines at all. ‘Praise from a purblind penny poet would be ridiculous,’ he later wrote when thanking John for the portrait in the book. ‘…Do you remember that you promised my wife one of the others you made – the one that made her cry?’48
All these places – France, which he loved; Wales, where he belonged; Ireland, which had once suggested great pictures to him – recalled a past John could not re-enter. What he now sought was somewhere without associations. It was this need that persuaded him, in December 1932, to try what he described as a ‘health trip’49 to Majorca. But there had been rain and heavy air. The island might have been what he was looking for, but ‘big operations’ were going on ‘with screeching rock-drills and a general banging of machinery’. The developers had arrived; he was too late. Feeling ‘like death’, he returned with the news that Majorca was ‘not paintable’.50
Back in the mellowness of Fryern Court, he racked his brains, consulted maps, looked up trains and boats, and, retrieving a plan from the spring of 1912, settled on Venice. His last illuminating weeks in Italy had been nearly twenty-two years ago. Now, entering at another great centre of Italian painting, he seems to have tried a similar experiment. With him travelled his daughter Vivien, aged eighteen, ‘to keep an eye on the money’.51 John, ‘determined to see all the famous paintings’, spent hours in the Venetian churches, looking at the Tiepolo frescoes at San Francesco della Vigna, the Titians and the Bellini triptych at the Frari, the huge works by Tintoretto at Santa Maria dell’Orto, the Veronese ceiling in San Sebastiano. He was curious about the Ferrarese painters of the fifteenth century with their unusual dry style, and made expeditions to Ferrara to study Pisanello and Piero della Francesca, and the grand fantasies of Francesco del Cossa with their vivid naturalistic detail. There was much to enchant him, but past masterpieces no longer seemed capable of reviving his own work. ‘I rather felt I was a few centuries late for Venice,’ he wrote, ‘but all the same it was wonderful.’ Possibly these pictures showed up his limitations too painfully; or perhaps he had cast a shadow over the past, or simply let trivialities and enjoyments get in the way. ‘I saw many pictures but left many unseen,’ he wrote, ‘and I met a lot of people I knew there some of whom I would prefer to have avoided.’52
On landing at the steps of his hotel the first day, he had been hailed from a passing gondola by Sacheverell Sitwell’s wife, Georgia. From that moment, word getting round, he was sucked into ‘the maelstrom of Venetian society’, he wrote to Dodo (29 August 1933). ‘…the place is full of bores, buggers and bums of all kinds. Vivien is greatly in request and there are various optimistic members of the local aristocracy on her tracks. Conditions are not favourable for painting and money goes like water, so I think an early return is indicated.’ Much of this time Vivien was in tears, and John, though generally protective, burst into sudden fits of anger, complaining that her clothes were too smart. ‘The air of Venice was getting me down,’ he acknowledged. ‘I became more and more indolent… it was the people I tired of most. My God, what a set!… I was seeing less of Vivien… but at last even my daughter agreed it was time to depart.’53
He had done little painting. What eluded him lay in his receding imagination. A yearning for distant scenes and the impulse towards flight overwhelmed him. They overwhelmed him, but he could not act on them. Like a giant ship stranded in shallow water, its propellers gyrating in the air, he stayed.
But one last voyage awaited him – had awaited him, by the time he embarked, for twenty-six years. ‘I think Jamaica would be a nice place to go and work,’ he had written to Dorelia. That was in September 1911. ‘I think of going to Jamaica,’ he repeated in a letter to Vera Stubbs on 4 June 1929. By 1936, the effects of his renewed drinking had led him to consult an occultist who proposed casting John’s horoscope. This exercise led to the prediction that he would turn up soon in one of the British colonies. ‘I would have been sorry to leave the astrologer’s forecast unfulfilled and his prophetic gift in dispute,’ John wrote. ‘…I decided [on] a visit to Jamaica.’
Dodo was set on joining the adventure. With them went Vivien, Francis Macnamara’s daughter Brigit, now ‘une grosse blonde… très aimable’,54 and a mysterious child called Tristan, also blond but aged two and a half, who ‘imagines himself to be the Captain of this ship’.55 The tropics suited John. Though the island was ‘altogether too fertile’, parts of it reminded him of North Wales. The internal conflict he carried wherever he went externalized itself in Jamaica very satisfactorily. The enemy were the bridge-players, golf club members, and the management of the American United Fruit Company. His allies were the natives. There were similar distractions to those in Venice, but he controlled them better. ‘We are in some danger of being launched into the beau monde of Jamaica. Nobody believes I am serious when I tell them I am only interested in painting the coloured people,’ he wrote to Tristan’s mother, Mavis de Vere Cole (10 March 1937). ‘…I shall have a mass of work done before I am finished.’ Jamaica activated him more than Italy had done, perhaps because the past could speak to him more immediately through these living models than through the pictures of Renaissance Venice. It appeared to him that these Jamaicans still inhabited a freer, more natural world than the embattled, illiberal, over-policed states which modern industrialized countries had created and were attempting to impose on them.
To gain extra time for himself, Jamaica being so expensive, he dispatched ‘the females and Tristan’ back to England after a month, and continued working alone until the rains came six weeks later. ‘I hated leaving you,’ Dorelia wrote on board the SS Aciguani, ‘but doubtless you are getting on very well and doing the work you wanted to.’ In Chiaroscuro, where he devotes over ten pages to this time,56 John records that he felt ‘anything but satisfied’ with his painting. Like gypsies, the native Jamaicans were elusive. In a perfect world he would have built a ‘house of mud, mahogany and palms’ and lived there as one of them. Instead – the ultimate degradation – he was taken for a visiting politician. Yet, the place ‘suits me and stimulates me’, he decided. ‘I am painting with a renewal of energy quite remarkable and will not cease till I have accomplished much.’57
With the rains ‘a great gloom descended upon me, almost depriving me of volition’. He returned on a banana boat to England and Fryern and struggled to work up these pictures before his memories slid behind an invisible screen of habit. His portraits of ‘Aminta’, ‘Daphne’, ‘Phyllis’ and many others delighted London when they were exhibited at Tooth’s Gallery in May and June 1938. The show, Dudley Tooth noted in his diary, ‘has been a tremendous success, nearly everything having been sold at prices between £200 and £550’ [equivalent to between £5,700 and £15,600 in 1996]. Among the purchasers were J. B. Priestley, Mrs Syrie Maugham, Vincent Massey, Oswald Birley, Sir Lawrence Phillips and Sir Stafford Cripps, the announcement of whose purchase was, to his horror, splashed across the Evening Standard.
These Jamaican pictures, constructed rather as a modeller builds up his clay to make shapes, represent the most vigorous body of John’s work over the last thirty years of his career. The exhibition gave art critics an opportunity to reflect upon the curious narrative of his career and find reasons for its decline.
The most hostile critic was Clive Bell. ‘If only Augustus John had been serious,’ he wrote in the New Statesman,58 ‘what a fine painter he might have been.’ Bell’s review was an attempt to reconcile his early admiration for John’s paintings with this later disappointment. In a few of the Jamaican portraits, where the ‘impression though banal is vivid, the execution telling, and the placing happy, one finds the ghost of that great talent with which Augustus John was blest,’ Bell argued. ‘As a rule, however, there is less talent than trick; and there is no thought at all.’ Bell’s conclusion was that John lacked the intellectual powers of composition that were the mature test of an artist’s ability. Undoubtedly he scored some successes, but they had ‘the air of a fluke’.
In the Spectator,59 Anthony Blunt confronted the same question with more difficulty. ‘Everyone is agreed on the fact that Augustus John was born with a quite exceptional talent for painting – some even use the word genius, – and almost everyone is agreed that he has in some way wasted it,’ Blunt began. ‘…[But] it is extremely hard to see just where John’s paintings fail. For myself I find it impossible to put my finger on the point.’ Instead of a point, Blunt drew a line of gradually lessening vitality and concentration along John’s career. For him the great work, akin to that of masters from the past, was ‘represented by the portrait heads in two coloured chalks which date from the turn of the century.
‘In these drawings John gave proof of a quality which does not seem to reappear in his work, namely, humility in the face of nature. He is not prepared to take nature as the basis for a technical experiment, but is willing to follow her in all her tiresome intricacies. These early drawings have a sort of industrious observation which distinguishes them from all the later productions. For even in the oil sketches of the next period John is already letting himself go in a sort of mannerism, though the mannerism is so brilliant that one is at first willing to accept it as a serious basis for painting.’
John portraits, Blunt argued, were based on a sound technical brilliance that ‘will stand the most minute study, and even study over a long period, without becoming thin. It is only in his methods of dealing with the psychological problems presented by his sitters that his shorthand appears. Even in such a masterly work as the Suggia one grows tired of the over-emphatic gesture before one has finished admiring the brilliance of the drawing and the brush-work.’
John’s recent work, his portraits and figure-studies, were solidly constructed, Blunt acknowledged, but had lost the brilliance of his earlier paintings without regaining the meticulous care of his initial drawings. Blunt likened his last landscapes to work by Matisse and Derain: ‘to Matisse in the insubstantial flatness of the objects, to Derain in much of the colour.’
Blunt ended his review more handsomely than Bell. ‘It is only because his gifts are so great that one is forced to judge him by the very highest, that he seems to fail.’ Both Bell and Blunt were attempting to come to terms with the corrosion of a predominantly lyrical talent which had interpreted landscape, and figures in landscape, or the solitary figure drawn in preparation for placing in the landscape, through poetic or visionary eyes. But as Richard Shone later pointed out, ‘this lyrical mode belongs essentially to youth (as so often in poetry) and it is rare… for the artist to effect a successful transformation as he grows older’60 – though this was the transformation Yeats had achieved.
To his old sparring partner Wyndham Lewis, John appeared to have briefly regained something of his youth, and he gave these Jamaican pictures a splendid celebration in the Listener:
‘As one passes in review these blistered skins of young African belles, with their mournful doglike orbs, and twisted lips like a heavyweight pugilist, one comes nearer to the tragedy of this branch of the human race than one would in pictures more literary in intention...
Mr John opens his large blue eyes, and a dusky head bursts into them. His… brushes stamp out on the canvas a replica of what he sees. But what he sees (since he is a very imaginative man) is all the squalor and beauty of the race – of this race of predestined underdogs...
Nature is for him like a tremendous carnival, in the midst of which he finds himself. But there is nothing of the spectator about Mr John. He is very much a part of the saturnalia. And it is only because he enjoys it so tremendously that he is moved to report upon it – in a fever of optical emotion, before the object selected passes on and is lost in the crowd.’61
Over thirty years earlier, in the second issue of Blast,62 Lewis had faulted his friend for his fin-de-siècle leanings, lack of discipline and premature artistic impotence. In a letter written shortly afterwards he went on to accuse him of dropping into the rather stagnant trough that followed the heights of Victorianism. ‘You begin by shipwrecking yourself on all sorts of romantic reefs,’ he had written. ‘…Whether a craft is still sea-worthy after such buccaneering I dont know. But lately you have not, to put it mildly, advanced in your work. That you will enter the history books, you know, of course! Blast is a history book, too. You will not be a legendary and immaculate hero, but a figure of controversy, nevertheless.’63
It was John’s place in art history that Lewis now began to re-examine. When looking back along ‘a narrative of my career up to date’ in Rude Assignment, he told a story from the Great War. ‘When Mars with his mailed finger showed me a shell-crater and a skeleton, with a couple of shivered tree-stumps behind it, I was still in my “abstract” element. And before I knew quite what I was doing I was drawing with loving care a signaller corporal to plant upon the lip of the shell-crater.’64 In other words, he was doing a John drawing and placing John’s work in the margins of Vorticism.
Four years later, in The Demon of Progress in the Arts, Lewis drew a lesson from this experience in a passage that explains how John’s example at its worst – the attitudinizing properties of ‘your stage-gypsies… [and] your boring Borrovian cult of the Gitane’ – off which Lewis had ricocheted into Vorticism in 1913, later helped him in its better aspects to escape from the inhumanity of prolonged abstraction. ‘What I was headed for, obviously,’ he wrote, ‘was to fly away from the world of men, of pigs, of chickens and alligators, and go to live in the unwatered moon, only a moon sawed up into square blocks, in the most alarming way. What an escape I had!’65
John had long ceased to be a champion of the young. To them he appeared a figure without modern interest, someone who had ‘made a pact with social success at the expense of painting’, though he barked beautifully before parties of lion hunters. But when Lewis’s young disciples such as Geoffrey Grigson questioned his good opinion of such a ‘vulgar art-school draughtsman with a provincial mind’,66 Lewis found it difficult to make them understand what John represented to artists of his generation. He had buried ‘the mock naturalists and pseudo-impressionists’ and, as the legitimate successor of Beardsley, had contributed a new vitality to the last few years of the nineteenth century and the first dozen years of the twentieth.
No one cared very much in the last twenty-five years of John’s life how he drew and painted: it was what he stood for, as the most celebrated British artist in the first part of the twentieth century, that counted. This was why, for example, he was formally associated (along with John Nash, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant) with a new school of drawing and painting, started in 1937 by Claude Rogers, Victor Pasmore and William Coldstream to free the study of drawing and painting from the teaching of the applied arts and commercial and industrial design. He had become somewhat ludicrously what Yeats called ‘a public event’: the sort of famous person for whom admirers liked to knit ‘tortoiseshell earflaps’ or a ‘pair of blinders’ to wear ‘when Ladies invite you to teas’; someone asked to paint the portrait of a dog (‘I could bring him to see you at any time’), or to judge the Fordingbridge Cricket Club’s Beauty Competition (‘select at your leisure among all the ladies in the room, during dances and intervals’).67
This comic celebrity irritated young people, but amused Lewis. In the course of their teasing and testing relationship, Lewis often mocked John for having become ‘an institution like Madame Tussaud’s’, inquiring at one point if he was yet ‘a Futuriste’ or whether he planned to advance on the Louvre and ‘put your foot through the Mona Lise’. And John would intermittently acknowledge that such thrusts were ‘salutary and well-deserved’.
In Rude Assignment Lewis pays tribute to John’s intelligence and wide reading. Yet John’s art was curiously unallied to his intelligence. He was, Lewis told Grigson, ‘an Eye’ and if the Eye ‘happened to fall on the right object’ the results were good. Both of them did too many potboilers, too much undistinguished work for money – John more than Lewis. But for all their quarrelling, this patriarch and his cadet were kindred spirits with a common ‘Enemy’ in the previous generation, and they reinforced in each other Oscar Wilde’s belief that ‘it is only shallow people who do not judge from appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.’
*
As if to avoid comparison with past work, and bring about a rebirth of his talent, John occasionally tried out new genres. In 1929 the theatre producer C. B. Cochran had agreed to employ him as designer for the controversial second act of Sean O’Casey’s play The Silver Tassie. John had got to know O’Casey through a Belfast friend of Gogarty’s called William McElroy (‘a kind of minor Horatio Bottomley’, John called him), who occupied himself as coal merchant, impresario and part-racehorse owner (‘the left hind leg, I think it was’). The three of them would dine together at the Queen’s Restaurant off Sloane Square, and despite the fact that both John and O’Casey liked to dominate the conversation, they got on well. ‘He’s a splendid fellow, & utterly unspoilt,’ O’Casey wrote in 1926. ‘Says I’m a great Dramatist & slaps me on the back for breaking every damned rule of the Stage.’68 That year John painted two portraits of O’Casey, one of them completed in an all-day sitting between eleven o’clock in the morning and half-past four in the afternoon. ‘Uncanny, powerful, embarrassingly vivid,’ O’Casey described it: ‘an alert concentration wearing a look of (to me) shuddering agony’.69 O’Casey already owned a John ‘Head of a Gitana’ and, on his marriage to the beautiful Eileen Reynolds, John gave the couple one of his portraits – ‘a princely gift’ which they hung in their sitting-room over the mantelpiece.70
It was Eileen O’Casey who had put forward John’s name for The Silver Tassie. She called on him at Mallord Street like ‘an angel rushing in where a devil feared to tread’.71 There was, she noticed, ‘a debutante trying to get in, ringing the bell, appearing at various windows’. John ignored this as they talked over the project. The play was fine, but he had qualms. ‘I have never done one before; I don’t really think I could.’ He was, Eileen remembered, ‘extremely shy, though as ever courteous and complimentary, for he liked good-looking women. This helped me to plead my cause.’ At the end of the afternoon, she asked: ‘Have I persuaded you?’ ‘I’m afraid you have,’ he replied.72
Everything seemed to go with surprising ease. ‘I have the Silver Tassie with me,’ he had written from Cap Ferrat on 3 February 1929, ‘and I don’t see much difficulty about the second act’. O’Casey had described this act in detail: a War Zone, its ‘jagged and lacerated ruin of what was once a monastery’, the life-size crucifix, stained-glass window, and great howitzer with ‘long sinister barrel now pointing towards the front at an angle of forty-five degrees’. In a note he had added: ‘Every feature of the scene seems a little distorted from its original appearance.’ All this approximated closely to what John had wanted to depict as a war artist and, given this new impetus, he turned to his sketchbooks of France. But when Raymond Massey, who was directing the play, called on John in September, he found him distracted and nervous, with ‘not only an open mind but a blank one’. He was shown some of the large charcoal drawings John had done as a war artist, and they settled on one of a ruined chapel as the basis of the design. Massey gave a number of John’s war sketches – ‘frightening, grizzly and jagged, O’Casey’s scene was there’ – to the scene painters and builders, but he wanted John himself to paint the Madonna for the stained-glass window. His hopes ran out on set-up day when he made alternative arrangements for a scene painter to do the work – at which point John, ‘his great black hat cocked over his forehead’, lurched into the theatre, sauntered down the aisle, climbed unsteadily on to the stage flooded in harsh work-lights, and silently surveyed the bone-yard scene. Then he took up a stick of charcoal, moved towards the window frame lying on the floor, and made a firm stroke on the oiled silk.
‘He worked as though possessed and for more than two hours he never looked up,’ Raymond Massey remembered. ‘…the crew watched in fascination. At last it was done. He moved to the side of the stage and stood waiting. Without a word, two stagehands lifted the window piece and braced it in position. The master electrician connected the cable and set the lights for act 2. And there shone the Madonna of The Silver Tassie… We cheered Augustus John. He did not hear us; he just stood there looking at his scene. He was pleased with it. He left, swaying slightly.’73
O’Casey too was pleased. He had been nervous of Eileen’s impetuosity, then anxious over John’s commitment to his play. But the overpowering74 effect of the design delighted him, – and also Bernard Shaw, who pronounced ‘the second act a complete success for both of you’.75
John also felt excited by what seemed a new arena in which to exercise his talent. He was starting to design the sets of Constant Lambert’s ballet Pomona for the Camargo Society, when he went into Preston Deanery Hall. In the following years there were many rumours of his re-entry into the theatre, but all came to nothing until, in 1935, at Cochran’s suggestion, he agreed to do the scenery and costumes for J. M. Barrie’s The Boy David.
The changes that had overtaken John in the seven years between the two plays are very clear. On 25 October 1935, Cochran sent John a letter confirming the details of their arrangement. Less than two months later, he was sending out an SOS for Ernst Stern, who had been the chief designer to Max Reinhardt and was the most professional artist in the theatre of his day. With the exception of Barrie, everyone in the production had taken to John at once. ‘John, in his extraordinary innocence of the theatre, was never too proud to defer to their expertise,’ recorded Malcolm Easton. ‘On them, and on all Cochran’s brilliant band of technicians, he smiled benevolently. From the benevolence, however, proceeded few practical results… John’s efforts to envisage Barrie’s characters rarely got further than the upper half of the body. When it was a question of the precise cut of the skirt of a tunic, exact length of a cloak, or clothing of the legs, it seemed that, like Byron, he never looked so low.76 These tactics had driven the needlewomen to despair, given Barrie a high temperature and aggravated Cochran’s arthritis for which, at rehearsals, he wore a splint. It was to everyone’s relief, John’s included, that Stern took over these costumes.
To Barrie’s irritation, John had depicted Bethlehem as a Provençal village, decorated with terraces, boulders and cypress trees. The principal set, and John’s main contribution to the play, was the Israelite outpost of Act II, scene ii. For this he provided ‘a dark and lowering sky, with immense rocks in the foreground, from which descended a slender waterfall, giving rise to the brook from the bed of which David chose the pebbles he was to sling at Goliath’.77 Although attending a few rehearsals – ‘an impressive figure splendidly sprawled across two stalls’78 – he did not travel up to see the opening night at Edinburgh. The greatest problem that night had been how to force the actors on and off stage. ‘Having delivered their exit line,’ John Brunskill, the scenery builder, remembered, ‘they were forced to clamber over a number of rocks before getting off stage.’ By the end of the scene the stage was crowded with these bruised and scrambling actors attempting to reach or retire from their lines. In a desperate move to halt these gymnastics, Cochran again called on Stern, this time to redesign the set. Numbers of rock units were scrapped, the sky was replaced with a white canvas cloth, the inset scenes altered and, worst of all, John’s waterfall – ‘how charmingly it glittered and fell!’ – dried up. Stern, who respected John, describing him as ‘the typical painter, and we understand one another’, hated this work which, he felt, went against the ‘artists’ freemasonry’. Such was the guilt that no one dared to tell John of the alterations. He arrived at His Majesty’s Theatre for the London première on 12 December 1936 happily ignorant of the fearful mutilations.
The change to Act I had been minimal, and John sat through it undisturbed. But when the curtain rose on Act II, he rose from his seat, left the auditorium, and stayed for the rest of the performance in the bar, pondering this betrayal. ‘This play was a complete flop from the start, and I wasn’t sorry.’ But later, having been handsomely paid by Cochran, he admitted: ‘It dawned on me too late that I had neither the technique nor the physical attributes for this sort of work, apart from the question of my artistic ability.’ Stern’s final comment, which achieves unconscious irony, corroborates this: ‘How I envy John, as he stands in front of his easel, palette and brushes in hand.’
Alone with his easel, palette and brushes, John could only point to failures in geography, to weather and viruses. Also studios. ‘A sympathetic studio is very hard to find,’ he admitted to Lord Duveen’s daughter, Dolly. In June 1935 he borrowed Vanessa Bell’s studio; by November that year he had moved into Euphemia’s house at 49 Glebe Place, Chelsea (later owned by Gerald Reitlinger and by Edward Le Bas); and in March 1938 he rented the ‘cottage’ in Primrose Codrington’s estate, famous for its garden, at Park House in South Kensington. From these places he came and went, tampering with their lighting then leaving them for good. In 1940, when bombs began falling on London, the top windows of Park Studio, fantastically illuminated in the night sky, were smashed, and John moved on to 33 Tite Street, in Chelsea, where Whistler and Sargent had lived, and where he rested in battered comfort throughout the Blitz.
‘My life seems to get more and more complicated,’ he wrote wonderingly.79 The multiplicity of studios, reflecting this confusion, extended beyond England. In 1936 Dorelia had rented, ‘for the large sum’ of twelve pounds a year, the Mas de Galeron, a little farmhouse ‘au ras des Alpilles’ behind ‘les Antiques’ at St-Rémy-de-Provence.80 Though it was merely a modest grey old building, ‘I really couldn’t resist it,’ she wrote to him from Cannes. ‘There are 3 large rooms and one smaller one,’ she added. ‘One would make a good studio for you. It is quite isolated with a rather rough track… There are grey rocks on one side, vines and olives and an immense view from the north… Why not come down?’
John went down for the first time in September 1937 and, despite his worst fears (imagining Dorelia might have gone mad), he loved it. The house was built into the hillside, its floors uneven, with small surprising rooms turning up round corners and down steps. Outside, a hot aromatic terrace, flanked by pine trees, overlooked a field of stones, olives and euphorbias. Above ran the chain of rocky Alpilles, dotted with green scrub and the plumes of cypress trees – ‘an endless sequence of exquisite landscapes’.81 Anyone who knows and likes this landscape will enjoy John’s paintings of it, recognize how accurately he has observed it. Yet these paintings lack the inspirational quality of his early landscapes, and he confessed to his neighbour there, Marie Mauron, that ‘ces Alpilles attendent encore leur peintre – mais ce n’est pas moi. Regardez! Ces jeux de gris, de bleu, de rose, ces touffes de plantes aromatiques, en boules, taches, traits sur le roc de toutes couleurs insaisissables, me désespèrent.’*182
The next year he went again, and once more in July 1939 with Dorelia, Vivien, Zoë and Tristan, intending to stay there three months. ‘Il n’y aura pas de guerre,’ Derain scoffed as the two artists sat peacefully drinking on the terrace of the Café des Variétés and watching the soldiers and horses crowd through the streets. ‘C’est une blague.’ But it was becoming, John suspected, ‘necessary to make a decision’. Eventually, responding to urgent telephone calls from Poppet (‘I told them there was a man called Hitler...’), Dorelia decided they must leave. They set off, John gaining maximum delay with the aid of dictionaries, by sending a long telegram to England in very correct French. ‘C’est la guerre! C’est la guerre!’ the farmers greeted them, as they fumed and thundered through the villages in a furious convoy of two cars. At Orléans they put up for one night, and while Dorelia and Tristan slept, John escorted Vivien and Zoë to a club run by a couple of spinsters from Kensington, and full of the jolliest girls. ‘And what do you do, sir?’ one of them asked John. ‘I am a ballet dancer,’ he replied.
Le Havre, which they reached on 2 September, was in terrible confusion. There were no porters, the last boat was preparing to leave and passengers were told they must abandon their cars and take only what luggage they could carry. John’s car had now run dry of petrol and rested on a rival passenger’s baggage. Money changed hands, and somehow the cars were hauled on board. John, in a huge chequered overcoat, was the last to embark, tugging a large travelling rug out of which splashed a bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape. ‘Really it was a magnificent exit,’ wrote Vivien, ‘if one hadn’t already been overdosed with similar rich occurrences...’83
They motored back to Fryern. Next morning John was painting ‘plump little’ Zoë in the orchard studio. During a rest, he switched on the radio and they listened to Chamberlain’s speech announcing that Britain and France had declared war on Germany. Then he turned it off and without a word went on painting until the bell rang for lunch.
‘[Augustus’s] varnish was cracking visibly.’
Dylan Thomas to Henry Treece
(1 September 1938)
‘The disastrous decade’, Cyril Connolly called the 1930s.84 For John, if in no other way a thirties figure, it was truly disastrous – ‘the worst spell of my bloody life’, he called it.
The world around him, as it plunged towards war, had grown horrific, and in its place he had created little. Once the early lyricism had faded, his flashing eye, searching for new wonders, found little on which to focus. The happy accident, travelling through the dark, came to him less often. And beyond this dark, lending it intensity, rose the shadows of fascism and Nazism. In such circumstances John’s pretty girls, wide-eyed and open-legged, his vast unintegrated and unfinished compositions, his vacant landscapes, gaped irrelevantly.
Yet he worked hard. Reviewing his exhibition at Tooth’s in 1938, The Times critic had expressed ‘admiration for what is achieved and regret, with a touch of resentment, that so great a natural talent for painting, possibly the greatest in Europe, should have been treated so lightly by its possessor… This is not to accuse Mr John of idleness… As everybody knows there is a kind of industry which is really a shirking of mental effort… ’85
In the opinion of the poet and artist David Jones, who admired John, it was the company he kept that finally ruined him: in particular ‘that crashing bore’ Horace de Vere Cole. John had known Cole since before the Great War. He was a commanding figure, with needle blue eyes, a mane of white hair, bristling upswept moustaches and the carriage of a regimental sergeant-major. This exterior had been laid on to mask the effects of having only one lung, a shoulder damaged in the war and, like John himself, encircling deafness. Fighting pomposity was what he claimed to be doing, repunctuating life with absurdity so that it no longer read the same. His whoops and antics were often better to hear about than be caught up in. When John learnt how Cole, dressed as ‘the Anglican Bishop of Madras’, had confirmed a body of Etonians, he laughed out loud. But when Cole took some of John’s drawings, sat in the street with them all day in front of the National Gallery, and, having collected a few coppers, came back with the explanation that this was their value on the open market, John was less amused. Cole liked to ruffle John’s feelings, ‘for I think he gets too much flattery’. Rivalry and rages interrupted their friendship, but the bond between them held. John used Cole as his court jester; while Cole ‘seemed to have no friends – except John’, the painter A. R. Thomson noted. ‘People who knew him avoided him.’
In the autumn of 1926 they had set out together on a walk through Provence. ‘Horace was a famous walker in the heel and toe tradition,’ John recorded, ‘and, with his unusual arithmetical faculty, was a great breaker of records, especially when alone.’86 Their expedition quickened into a fierce walking match and, in the evenings, contests for the attentions of village girls. It was an exhausting programme and Thomson, who joined them for part of this competitive tour, remembered, ‘in the bright moon, Horace flanked by John and I marched along the bridge over the Rhône – swinging arms, hats tilted, cigars. John’s swaggers were natural, not put on. I watched Horace impersonating John. His plenty white hair, busy moustaches, fierce eyes. He was “Super-John”.’87 A caricature that Thomson drew, ‘John and Super-John’, catches much of their pantomime relationship – John leading, Cole an extravagant shadow behind, mocking, but needing John to parody.
It was a fantasy friendship they enjoyed, part of a make-believe life; and when it collided with the actual world there was trouble. In 1928, at the Café Royal, Cole had met Mabel Wright. ‘Mavis’, as she was always to be called, was a strikingly tall girl of nineteen with big brown eyes, curly blonde hair, wonderful legs and a forthcoming manner. About her background she was secretive, confiding only that her mother had been a child stolen by gypsies. In later years she varied this story to the extent of denying, in a manner challenging disbelief, that she was John’s daughter by a gypsy. In fact she was the daughter of a grocer’s assistant and had been at the age of sixteen a scullery maid. During the General Strike in 1926, she hitchhiked to London, clutching a golf club, and took a post as nursery governess to the children of a clergyman in Wimbledon. A year later she was a waitress at Veeraswamy’s, the pioneer Indian restaurant in Swallow Street.
John was one of those that night at the Café Royal who had witnessed Cole break through a circle of men and make an assignation with Mavis. ‘To a great extent we get on splendidly… but our pitched battles are devastating affairs,’ Cole later wrote to John. Nevertheless, ‘Mavis and marriage is the only logical outcome.’88 For two years they lived together and in January 1931, after Cole obtained a divorce from his first wife, he did marry Mavis. From that time on everything went wrong for him. But not for Mavis. On coming to London she had learnt the astonishing power of sex. She had an extraordinary talent for it. Already a winner of beauty contests, she was naturally affectionate and liked touching people. But sex appeal, she felt, was not enough; she must acquire education, and she selected Cole to play Professor Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle. To have married him was a triumph, for was he not a famous Old Etonian, a cousin of Neville Chamberlain (who in 1937 was to become Prime Minister), and a cultivated aristocrat whose ancestor Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, had written all Shakespeare’s plays?
Cole, now fifty and a sufferer from what John called ‘pretty-girl-itis’, was very possessive of his twenty-two-year-old wife. But Mavis had no wish to be restricted, and their marriage was full of plot and tension. Under this strain, Cole’s antics grew more extreme. After a hard day’s joking, he would set out late at night to haunt houses. Then, a last bad joke, he had lost almost all his first wife’s money in an unlikely Canadian venture and was obliged to leave Mavis immediately after their marriage to live in France.
It was soon afterwards that John stepped forward to help. ‘You must be frightfully lonely I fear,’ he sympathized with Mavis, who was spinning back and forth across the Channel. In 1934, she became his mistress and on 15 March 1935 she gave birth to a son, Tristan Hilarius89 John de Vere Cole. ‘What a whopper!’ John exclaimed in delight. One thing was certain: Horace, disconsolately exiled in France, could not have been Tristan’s father. John himself immediately brushed aside other candidates and assumed that role. In a letter to Wyndham Lewis, he explained: ‘Tristan is not Cole’s son, though born in wedlock… at my last meeting with Cole, before he departed for France, he stung me for £20 which, of course, he never repaid. So when Mavis deserted him after four years of matrimonial bliss, I felt no compunction in taking it out in kind.’90
But the initiative was less with John than he cynically suggests. Mavis was not only affectionate, she was shrewd. She knew how potent her attractions were for John. She was his ‘sweet honey-bird’, eye-catching and easy going. She brought a zest to his life, made him feel young again. He sent her ‘tasty poems’ about orgasms, did drawings of her with legs kicked high and wide. ‘She is really a good wench,’ he urged Dorelia, ‘and has a good deal of gumption.’ But Dorelia saw a different Mavis: someone who was using her sex appeal to lure John away from Fryern. One of the guests there, Andrea Cowdin, remembered Mavis playing on the floor with Tristan, rolling about and laughing and ‘being delightful’, but always with an eye on John who sat there gloomily without a word or sign. If only for the sake of his ‘nerves’, John wished Mavis and Dodo to be friends. But they were never more than outwardly polite.
Mavis was not ‘mysterious’ but she could be elusive. She would disappear down to her cottage in the west and suddenly stop answering letters. In her absence John became an old man. There were weeks of suspense, and ‘I cannot bear it’. He knew she had affairs with other men and would imagine her in bed with all manner of travellers. The trouble was that everyone liked her. ‘She seemed so amiable and gay and I was rather taken by her,’ admitted Carrington. But so too was Carrington’s lover Beacus Penrose. There was no telling in what plot or story Mavis would land up. ‘Try to hold yourself in till our next,’ John would beg. Then she would return to London, generous, beautiful, irresistible; so the sun would shine again and he was young.
Nevertheless, though Mavis pulled hard, and John wobbled a little, she could not pluck him from Dorelia. By 1936 she had switched tactics. Putting Tristan into a children’s home, she went down to Cornwall from where she announced her impending marriage to a man she called ‘the Tapeworm’, six feet seven inches tall, who ‘looks as if he has come from another planet’.91 Dorelia’s response was an offer to bring up Tristan at Fryern.
Because of Mavis’s indecisiveness, John proposed legally adopting her son. ‘Are you clear about adopting Tristan?’ he asked Dorelia (September 1936). She was. But Mavis was not clear, and when Tristan went to Fryern in 1937 it was under an informal arrangement. Mavis herself was now free to cast her eyes on a target even loftier than her tapeworm. One day in the summer of 1937 John had taken her to Maiden Castle, where the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler was working. ‘I was wandering about at the eastern end of Maiden Castle when I saw a curious entourage on its way towards me,’ Mortimer Wheeler recalled. ‘It consisted of Augustus John and his party, in the odd clothes they always wore. Mavis was skipping in front on long legs; very distinctive that skipping walk of hers – I was greatly taken with her straight away. All work stopped as the cavalcade arrived.’92
The following year Mavis elected to marry Mortimer Wheeler and let him ‘run in harness’ with John. ‘It will be like an amputation to let you go,’ John protested. ‘…I felt you were part of me.’ He did not accept this operation without a fight. Now in his sixtieth year and seeing himself in loco parentis, he declined to give Wheeler his consent: ‘You must wait. I haven’t finished with her yet.’ On one occasion, reduced to ‘a mass of nerves and brandy’ by Wheeler’s ‘grinning mask’, he most alarmingly lost his temper. Next day he sent an apology. ‘I was in a wrought-up state and have been for some time… Do write and say you will be friends again.’ In a desperate moment, after Wheeler had climbed into Mavis’s room at Fryern, John had challenged his rival to a duel. ‘As the challenged party,’ Wheeler related, ‘I had choice of weapons. Being a field gunner I chose field guns.’93 John, declaring this to be ‘very ungentlemanly conduct’, bowed to the inevitable, and, putting the best face on it, advised Mavis to accept this ‘distinguished personality’ as her husband. He might be a cad, but at least he had been Director of the National Museum of Wales. They were married in March 1939,*2 occasioning a brief interlude in John’s relationship with Mavis.
But there was an awkward corollary. In many of his letters to her, John assures Mavis that Tristan is ‘full of beans’, ‘in the pink’, ‘incredibly beautiful’ and ‘eating well’. ‘Don’t disturb yourself,’ he urges her. ‘Dodo seems absolutely stuck on him.’ But Mavis was never reconciled to leaving Tristan at Fryern, and one day in January 1941 she abducted him. John at once sent off an indignant letter protesting at this ‘Rape of Tristan’ to Mortimer Wheeler who in his tactful reply (31 January 1941) explained: ‘Mavis has always regarded Fryern Court as her real home and you and Dodo as an integral part of her life. This little episode is entirely subordinate to that overwhelming factor… The fact is, Mavis does not want to feel that T’s destinies are completely beyond her control and that she is merely a name in the visitors’ book.’
‘The Battle of Fordingbridge’, as Wheeler called it, was quickly over. John and Dorelia had no legal rights and in any case Tristan continued to spend numerous holidays at Fryern. ‘The violent offence which you will give’, Wheeler had advised Mavis, ‘…will disappear in time.’ And so it turned out. ‘The incident is closed,’ John assured Mavis. Almost at once they were back on friendly terms. But he remembered – this and much else that he tried to banish into oblivion.
*
Mavis was John’s chief mistress-model in these years. ‘Soon I will be ready to paint you off in one go,’ he had written to her. ‘That is what I live for.’ But though he drew and painted her often, this ‘supreme picture… which I know would come off at the right time’ never did come off. On almost any occasion, in taxis or at dinner parties, she rejoiced in flinging off her clothes. She would strike provocative attitudes before John who, when severe, restricted his drawing to her face. In Cornwall or Provence he led her out into the country, posed her achingly against some expert expanse of rocks and trees, then painted landscapes without a figure. Yet he needed her company: she still gave him the ‘authentic thrill’. ‘I cannot forget that last marvellous embrace,’ he was still writing to her in the 1940s. ‘A real wonder! How was it possible?… I don’t know what I should do without you.’ His feelings were intensely sentimental. Though Mavis could disguise the fact, the pictures proclaim it: he was losing his sexual drive. At the beginning of the war he was in his sixty-second year. His age, the psychological uncertainty of his work, and alcohol which ‘provokes the desire and takes away the performance’ had left their mark. His letters to Mavis, with their vigorous signing off, ‘Yours stiff and strong’, urge a degree of potency that she alone could summon up. ‘I drink but I am not a “Boozer”. I have affairs of the heart but I do not womanize,’ he wrote to the art critic D. S. MacColl. ‘Drinking helps (for a time) to overcome the horrors of a world into which I rarely seem to fit; love renews (alas for a time) the divine illusion of beauty. By which you may perceive that my soul is sick.’94
A pessimistic sentimentality was replacing the lyrical romanticism of his early years and the ‘hectic sexuality’ of the 1920s. His portraits of women between the 1930s and late 1940s are sweet and feeble echoes of eroticism. Far better were his paintings of exotic flowers which did not agitate him.
His emotionalism over Mavis became one reason ‘why I haven’t had much success painting of late’. Other models were sometimes less unsettling. Two of them were daughters of his old friend Francis Macnamara.
John’s involvement with the Macnamara family was working steadily through the generations. ‘I love him above all men,’ Francis Macnamara had declared. This hero-worship was a guiding force in Macnamara’s life as he took on several mistresses including, it was rumoured, Euphemia Lamb, and also Alick Schepeler’s friend Frieda Bloch. The most extraordinary of these women was Erica Cotterill, who had previously chosen Rupert Brooke and then Bernard Shaw as ‘the gorgeous thing I have to live for and love with every atom of my soul’. But Francis Macnamara was not so gorgeous, and in her anonymous book Form of Diary (1939) Erica laid a trail of clues pointing to his cruelty before he left her to marry Dorelia’s sister Edie.
John himself had incidentally enjoyed a brief affair with Macnamara’s first wife Yvonne, and indeed with her sister Grace. Both of them were, he assured Dorelia, ‘beyond praise’.95 But this intermingling was so indiscriminate and comprehensive that the Macnamara children sometimes wondered whether they were actually John children. The eldest daughter Nicolette, on her visits to the family, had certainly ‘adopted’ Augustus as her father – going on to the Slade School and later marrying two artists, first Anthony Devas, then Rupert Shephard who had been in love with her sister Caitlin.
John seems to have grown fonder of Caitlin Macnamara and her sister Brigit as they grew into their late teens. Everyone trusted Brigit. She was good with animals, good with children (Mavis was always happy to leave Tristan in her care), and especially good to John. In his portrait of her she appears, clasping a tankard of ale, as a companion fit for Falstaff.96 She seemed in some respects rather a masculine countrywoman, yet was shy, sensitive, oddly reliable for a Macnamara, and the repository of many secrets. She felt an instinctive sympathy for John, independent of words. ‘An intonation, a pause, a movement from Brigit’s… hand was answered by Augustus with a smile that started slowly all over his face and faded in his beard,’ Nicolette observed. ‘…In this shorthand of long-term sympathy, the eaves-dropper might catch a hint or two, yet the depth of the meaning was a secret kept between them.’97
Brigit saw the terrifying glare, the tremendous male arrogance: but she saw through them to someone more complex and interesting. Intermittently over many years they kept up a love affair. Even at sixty, she remembered, his body was good – well-shaped hands and feet, narrow hips, small bones. Unfortunately Brigit was also engaged to Augustus’s son Caspar – at least, everyone expected them to marry. In the late 1930s Dorelia, who was fond of Brigit, wrote to ask Augustus why the marriage ‘seems indefinitely postponed’.98 There is no record of his answer, though the probable reason was Caspar’s inability to accept Brigit’s sexual intimacy with his father. According to Brigit herself, she and Caspar were in bed ‘at the home of one of his sisters when, two days before the wedding, he told her he couldn’t or wouldn’t marry her’.99
Caitlin, the youngest sister, was also caught between father and son. Augustus did several nude drawings of her, some unfinished oils, and a couple of completed portraits, the best of which shows a sparkling eyeful of a girl, pink and precocious.100 But she failed to entrap Caspar John even when, ‘all dolled up and ready’ at the age of fifteen, she came to his bed wearing her special négligé.
Remote, handsome, a powerful man who would subdue her to his will, Caspar stood in her imagination as a prince in the fairy tale of her life. Only her life was not a fairy tale. Having been neglected by her father, and then being cut off from her mother (who was absorbed in a lesbian relationship), Caitlin needed attention – the dramatic attention of a romantic rescuer. She wanted to give herself to Caspar, but he had only thoughts of the navy in those days. Besides, she was too young.
She was not too young, however, for Augustus. Unlike Nicolette, Caitlin did not treat Augustus as a father: she physically hated her father. But having been rejected by Caspar she turned to Augustus, flirting with him, enjoying the glamour of his fame. She was a luminous girl, spectacular, and he could not stop staring at her. She led him on; and, as she bitterly remembered in the leftover years of her life, then or later he raped her.
‘Caitlin’s relationship with John is important and difficult to unravel,’101 wrote her biographer Paul Ferris. Unlike Brigit, she was not trustworthy, and her later memories of John were opposite to those of her sister: he was simply an ‘old goat’, a ‘hairy monster’, ‘a disgusting old man who fucked [everyone]’. And of course it was true that he did ‘pounce’ on attractive girls. ‘I felt a frisson whenever he came into the room,’ Kathleen Hale remembered of the 1920s. ‘…Sometimes there would be mock battles between us, when he would try to “rape” me, scuffles that always began and ended in laughter – hardly the atmosphere for passion. I have always found laughter as good as a chastity belt. Once, though, out of curiosity, I allowed him to seduce me. The sex barrier down, this aberration only added a certain warmth to our friendship.’102
But such sophisticated laughter did not come naturally to very young girls like Chiquita and Caitlin. And perhaps, in any case, there was less laughter in the 1930s. As late as 1929 Augustus still appeared an attractive man. Describing a party given in June that year by the writer Arthur Machin and his wife, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote:
‘Then Augustus John came, and I could have no other eyes. He is very long and lean, his hair is grey, his eyes are bright, he was rather drunk, he is the Ancient Mariner… He is perfectly young still, and with a sad drunken youthfulness and guileless-ness he embraced my waist in the taxi, and begged me to go to Wales with him… I loved him terribly, he is so simple, intent in the true world, astray in the real. It is awful to think that this youth must go down quick into the pit of senility.’103
This descent accelerated after he left Preston Deanery Hall, and his pouncing on women seemed to grow cruder. ‘Not the best introduction to the carnal delights of the marriage bed,’ wrote Caitlin – for she was perhaps sixteen and he was over thirty-five years older. In his poem ‘Into her lying down head’, written almost three years after he married Caitlin, Dylan Thomas conjures up the priapic figure of John:
A furnace-nostrilled column-membered
Super-or-near man
Resembling to her dulled sense
The thief of adolescence.
The affair continued spasmodically over several years, each using the other, neither very happy about it. John seems to have felt some affection for ‘my little seraph’, especially when, in his confusion, he ‘thought she was his daughter as well’.104 Caitlin later denied any feeling for John, claiming only one ‘luridly vivid memory… pure revulsion… and inevitable pouncing… an indelible impression… of the basic vileness of men’.
She was, John noted, ‘apparently in a perpetual state of disgust with the world in general’.105 But he had no sense of contributing to that disgust. She came to see herself as ‘the Avenger of wrongs’. The ‘merciless vengeance’ she had sworn on Francis Macnamara embraced John and almost all men.
It was John who introduced Caitlin to Dylan Thomas. In Constantine FitzGibbon’s version John had met Dylan at the Fitzroy Tavern and it was at another pub, the Wheatsheaf, that he brought the two of them together: ‘Come and meet someone rather amusing.’ Caitlin, ‘quite mute’,106 nervously approached Dylan and ‘within ten minutes’ they were in bed together, spending several days and nights at the Eiffel Tower and charging everything to John’s account. But however ‘deaf and obtuse’ John might be, Caitlin explained, there was a danger he might find out. So they parted, Dylan for Cornwall, she back to Fryern Court.
They met again in the summer of that year, 1936, in the novelist Richard Hughes’s castle at Laugharne, Dylan in the interval having contracted gonorrhoea.
Caitlin, Hughes remembered, was very pretty and gauche and, though now twenty-two years old (she concealed her age from Dylan), impressed him as being about ‘the equivalent of eleven years of age’.107 She arrived with John in July and during their stay there was much giggling and kissing in the passages, and no visible evidence, at least to his eyes, of Caitlin disliking this. One morning John (possibly at Caitlin’s prompting) suggested that the Hugheses invite Dylan (who had written to say he was ‘passing awfully near Laugharne’) over for lunch. He came, and stayed the night. Dylan and Caitlin gave no sign of knowing each other.*3
John was judging a painting competition at the National Eisteddfod in Fishguard, and motored there next day in his six-cylinder Wolseley, ‘the Bumble-Bee’. Dylan and Caitlin went too; but when John arrived back at Laugharne that night he was alone with Caitlin who looked, Hughes noticed, ‘like a cat that’s been fed on cream’. ‘Where’s Dylan?’ Hughes asked. ‘In the gutter,’ drawled John, slurring his words horribly as he lurched in. ‘What happened?’ ‘I put him there. He was drunk. I couldn’t bring a drunk man to a house like this.’
It transpired that at Carmarthen there had been a fight. All day John had felt irritated by Dylan and Caitlin’s lovemaking. It may also have been that, knowing of Dylan’s gonorrhoea, he felt justified in protecting Caitlin. At Carmarthen, Dylan had insisted that John drive him back to Laugharne. But John refused and, tempers rising, they raised their fists in the car park.
Caitlin remembered John being ‘on top of me’ that night. The following morning as John was stepping outside into the sunlight, Dylan turned up and the stage was set for a spectacular castle farce. Laugharne, though somewhat roofless, had a good cellar, a watchtower, plenty of surrounding shrubbery which was said to be haunted, and three entrance doors. No sooner had Dylan gone out by one of these doors than John would appear through another. Though the plot was confused, a tremendous atmosphere of melodrama built up. Caitlin was on stage for most of the performance, but when the exigencies of the theatre demanded it, she would make a quick exit, while the two men made their entrances. The timing throughout was remarkable, and there were many rhetorical monologues in the high-flown style. To the spectators, wiping their eyes, the outcome appeared uncertain. But, a year later, Caitlin married Dylan at Penzance Register Office; and when their first child was born, Richard Hughes and John were godfathers.*4
They had then moved, the Thomases, to Laugharne and, as neighbours of Richard Hughes, were understandably ‘nervous’ of John’s visits there. John too seemed nervous. He put up at their house, Sea View, for a night or two ‘in circumstances of indescribable squalor’.108 It had been to relieve this austerity that he gave them some furniture, including ‘a wonderful bed’. At night, when he went up to his room, Mervyn Levy remembered, John ‘used to stuff ten-shilling notes and pound notes in his pockets, rich sort of reddy-brown notes, and hang this vast coat of his over a chair. Then we would creep upstairs and nick a few, because it was the only way of gaining any money from Augustus.’109 Though ‘bloated and dumb from his deafness’110 John was well aware of these raids. In Finishing Touches he remarks that Dylan had once been a Communist, and ‘could always be relied upon as a borrower...’111
There is a grudging tone to everything John wrote of Dylan who, he owns, was ‘a genius’ – though his shove-ha’penny was superior to Under Milk Wood, in which ‘there is no trace of wit’. Such sallies were themselves attempts at wit which misfired. ‘There is no rancour,’ he explained to D. S. MacColl, ‘only a little playful malice.’ The affection between them, much enlivened by this malice, lurked behind a prickly barricade of gibes. ‘Dylan has a split personality of course,’ he wrote to Matthew Smith’s mistress Mary Keene. ‘He can be unbearable and then something else comes out which one loves.’
Of the two oil portraits John did of Thomas in the late 1930s one, now in the National Museum of Wales, is possibly his best painting of this period – a ‘diminutive masterpiece’, as Wyndham Lewis described it, that matches his pen-portrait in Finishing Touches: ‘Dylan’s face was round and his nose snub. His rather prominent eyes were a little veiled and his curly hair was red, or auburn rather. A pleasant and slightly sardonic smile registered amusement and, I think, satisfaction. If you could have substituted an ice for the glass of beer he held you might have mistaken him for a happy schoolboy out on a spree.’
Both John and Dylan were ‘bad Welshmen’ whose ruin was hastened by their visits to the United States, where they broke records in drinking. There are passages in John’s essay on Dylan in Finishing Touches that could equally well refer to himself since, perhaps unconsciously, he identified himself with the younger man. Having passed on some of his own traits in this way, he is able to deplore them more wholeheartedly. It was a technique he often used to pep up his writing, and accounts for his sharpest sallies being directed towards those with whom he had most in common.
‘Tottering under the burden of parental responsibilities.’
Description of Augustus John by Trelawney Dayrell Reed (1952)
When walking the streets of Chelsea, so the story goes, John had a habit of patting local children on the head ‘in case it is one of mine’.*5 Calculations over the number of these children floated high into fantasy, reaching, in James Laver’s autobiography, three figures at which, in the opinion of Max Beerbohm, John stopped counting.112
He was never quick to deny fathering a child. Improbable rumours, incapable of proof, seethed around him, agitated by the readers of newspapers in which he featured as an archetypal father figure. Adolescents with a liking for art or a connection with Wales, as they grew up and away from their parents, sometimes speculated over their hidden kinship with Augustus John. One middle-aged woman in North Wales has written in a Welsh magazine the elaborate story of John’s friendship with her mother, ingeniously tracing her own family connections with the Johns to show that, in addition to being her father, John was a cousin. Every detail that can be checked pushes this narrative further into invention.
Another example is sadder and more revealing. In about 1930, Sheila Nansi Ivor-Jones, a schoolgirl, was sent by her parents to see a Dr Clifford Scott. Although she was not unintelligent, Sheila had done badly at school. She could not stick to any routine. Her father, Robert Ivor Jones, headmaster of West Monmouth School at Pontypool, and his wife Edwina Claudia Jones (née Lewis) were worried. But Sheila did display some artistic ability and, after going up to an art school in Tunbridge Wells, her troubles seemed over. In October 1937 she transferred to the Slade and by the 1940s had become an art instructor at the Chelsea School of Art. Then, on 15 February 1948, she again consulted Dr Scott, complaining of terrible nightmares about horses, fighting and hysterical love scenes; and adding that she had discovered herself to be the illegitimate daughter of Augustus John – to which she attributed this trouble. The nightmares and delusions persisted throughout this year, growing worse. She seems to have neglected herself, lost her job, and in February 1949 was admitted to West Park Mental Hospital, Epsom, where on 28 February she died. The cause of her death was recorded as bronchial pneumonia and acute mania.
Sheila Ivor-Jones (she hyphenated her name in London) had been born at Llanllwchaiarn in Montgomeryshire on 28 September 1912 and, from the evidence that exists, it seems most unlikely that John could have been her father. If, then, this was fantasy, it seems to have taken possession of her after the death of her real father. She may have seen John fairly frequently in Chelsea, since she lived round the corner from Mrs Fleming’s house (and no distance from John’s various studios) at 77 Cheyne Walk above the Cheyne Buttery – tea and supper rooms and a guest house run by a man called Stancourt, whose christian names were John Augustus.
Whatever the source of her delusion, it represents, in an extreme form, a tendency that was surprisingly widespread. The irony was that, as an actual father, John was extraordinarily difficult. ‘I have no gifts as a paterfamilias,’ he admitted.113 For all his children self-help was the only salvation – the key for entry into, as to liberation from, the powerful John orbit. Fryern Court ‘wasn’t my home’, wrote his daughter Amaryllis Fleming, ‘but it was the only place I ever felt utterly at home in’.114 Another daughter who was not at Fryern felt her exclusion to be a paralysing deprivation of love, leaving her ‘doubting my own validity as a human being, a boring thing to feel’. But the magnetic field rejecting her threatened to devour others, Ida’s sons and the son and daughters of Dorelia, who needed supreme willpower to escape.
John was like a Victorian father. Children were to be seen and not heard, painted and glared into silence. An incorrectly pronounced syllable would provoke pedantic wrath. ‘I apologise for my poor handwriting, syntax, spelling (probably) and faults of style and punctuation,’ David ended a letter written when in his early fifties. One morning when Poppet arrived at breakfast wearing her dress the wrong way round, she was picked up, deposited behind some curtains, and left. Another time when Vivien was at fault, John refused to speak to her and all communication had to pass via a third party. ‘As a child I can only say I feared him greatly,’ Vivien wrote, ‘and if spoken to by him would instantly burst into tears.’ But he was proud, if a little disturbed, when his two daughters, aged seventeen and fourteen, saved a young man from drowning. ‘They dived into the river at Fordingbridge and fished him out and applied artificial respiration and kissed him so frantically’, Ralph Partridge told his friend Gerald Brenan, ‘that he returned from unconsciousness to find he had an erection.’115
John was even more severe with the boys. The tension between them was sometimes agonizing. Edwin had a habit of smelling his food before starting to eat, and this infuriated Augustus so much that he pushed the boy’s face hard into the plate. His son retaliated by flinging the plate out of the window, but Augustus made him go out, collect every morsel from the gravel and eat it. It was a battle of wills and Augustus, with all the advantages, won. As for Dorelia, she ‘had a mysterious way of disappearing when anything troublesome cropped up’.116
Augustus’s silences could last thirty hours or more and were echoed back at him by his pack of brooding sons. ‘Why don’t you say something?’ he growled at David, whose silence darkened. But it was the quality of Robin’s silence, grimmer than any of the others’, seeming to accuse him of something literally unspeakable, that maddened Augustus most. ‘He hardly utters a word and radiates hostility,’ he wrote to Mavis. ‘I fear I shall reach a crisis and go for him tooth and nail. That happened once here and I soon floored him on the gravel outside.’ He affected to believe that all his sons were slightly mad. Should he hire straitjackets? ‘Do you think it would be a good idea’, he asked Inez Holden, ‘to have the lot of them psycho-analysed?’
‘As children,’ Romilly acknowledged, ‘we made no allowances for, since we had no conception of, the despairs of an artist about his work.’ Augustus’s glooms, charged with an intense hostility to those near by, cut him off from easy companionship. Yet he resented not being confided in, and wanted in a discreet way to be loved by all of them. ‘On rare occasions when Augustus and I talked, it was almost invariably about Sanskrit,’ remembered Romilly, ‘a subject neither of us knew much about.’ When another of his sons wrote to him in personal distress, Augustus confined his reply to matters of prose style which ‘I find overweighted with latinisms’, and to the envelope itself upon which ‘you have, either by design or carelessness, omitted to place the customary dot after the diminutive Hants. In an old Dane Courtier this seems to me unpardonable but I put it down to your recent bereavement.’ Nothing intimate could be spoken. At the end of a letter to a Dartmouth schoolmaster (a retiring bachelor of thirty-eight) Augustus had added a timorous postscript suggesting something might be mentioned to his son Caspar about sex: ‘Boys of Caspar’s age stand particularly in need of help and enlightenment on certain subjects, don’t you agree?’ The best he could do was to use conversation as a neutral territory where he and his sons might guardedly meet without giving anything away. It was a tragedy, Caspar thought, that, by the time they could talk on easier terms, his father was so deaf that everything had to be shouted.
To his severity Augustus added a bewildering generosity and freedom. He gave all his sons good allowances into their twenties and thirties when he could not well afford it. He also allowed them at the ages of ten or twelve to choose their own schools. If ‘all that is learned at public schools is football, cricket and buggery’, he wrote to Dorelia after reading Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth, ‘I cannot see that these accomplishments need be so expensive myself even if they are indispensable.’117 Nevertheless he always stumped up the fees. David had gone to Westminster, Caspar to Osborne, Robin (‘the slackest youngster I’ve ever come across’) briefly to Malvern and then to Le Rosey in Switzerland, Edwin and Romilly to a strange school, the College de Normandie, near Rouen. As for the girls, when asked at the ages of nine and seven whether they would like to go to school, Vivien again burst into tears and Poppet said ‘No’. A procession of tutors and governesses (one of whom Romilly married) were erratically employed, but the two sisters passed more of their time with ponies than people. Augustus showed interest only in their art work, though when Vivien went up to the Slade she was under specific orders that there was to be no instruction. ‘Little’, she remembered, ‘came of this.’
The sisters had served almost as stern an art apprenticeship as the boys. ‘I had to look at him,’ wrote Poppet, ‘and if I caught his eye he would ask me very politely to come and pose for him, and this would mean the whole morning gone… all our plans for swimming at Bicton or riding in the forest with Vivien...’ These ‘gruellings’, as Vivien called them, continued until the girls married, ‘then ceased abruptly’. A considerable number of nude drawings of them both were hurried off to Australia, Canada, Japan.
As they grew up their relationship with their father became more complicated. Vivien, like Caitlin Macnamara, wanted to be a dancer. In 1930 the two of them caught the Salisbury bus to London, hoping to start their careers with C. B. Cochran’s ‘Young Ladies’ on the revue stage. Arriving at the door of Ethel Nettleship’s house, they sent a reassuring telegram to Augustus and Dorelia back at Fryern: ‘DON’T WORRY, WITH RELIABLE FEMALE’. But Augustus objected to Vivien going on the stage, and it was a relief to him when she took up painting. She received some help from Matthew Smith and the Euston Road artists William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore before going on to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. ‘You can do it,’ Augustus wrote encouragingly.
Towards both Poppet and Vivien he was jealously possessive. No boyfriend was good enough. ‘Why should you bother with boy-friends when you have such a magnificent father?’ he once asked Mollie O’Rourke, and this appeared to be his general attitude. After Poppet’s wedding to Derek Jackson, he hopped into the car at Fordingbridge beside his daughter and, happily acknowledging the cheers, was driven off with her while Jackson took his place disconsolately next to the chauffeur.118 ‘He was like an old stag,’ Poppet’s second husband Villiers Bergne observed, ‘with his herd of women and children round him. Interlopers were beaten off.’119
It had been hard for boyfriends, and it was harder still for husbands. Vivien’s husband, a distinguished haematologist, was known as her ‘medical attendant’. At least, Augustus reminded the family, he could congratulate himself on not having gone to their wedding. Why such a gorgeous girl as Vivien, or an enchanting creature like Poppet, who had given exquisite relief after the death of Pyramus, should want to end up as a hausfrau was inexplicable to him. At meals, he would sometimes draw caricatures of his in-laws, passing them round for comic appreciation; and his letters to all the family contain many invitations to disloyalty between his sons and daughters, their wives and husbands who, at one time or another, were ‘revolting’, ‘villainous’, or ‘repulsive little swine’ and who would generally learn this through some third party. His daughters-in-law (‘no oil-paintings’), who he affected to believe had been chosen for their plainness so that his sons ‘need fear no competition from me’, had a scarcely easier time of it. A recurring question was how to do away with all this proliferating family. He had a double-barrelled gun ready in the house, but was open to other suggestions. ‘I know little of toxicology but have heard the merits of ratsbane well recommended. The only question is: should the whelps be included in the purge? Personally I am all for it.’120
Possessive over his daughters, he was fiercely competitive with his sons; and it was with them that the most bitter battles were fought. One developed an eczema that would visibly spread over his skin during a quarrel. ‘He is quite insupportable. I shall kill him soon,’ Augustus promised Dorelia. In certain moods this did not seem an exaggeration. He genuinely wanted all of them to succeed yet could not prevent himself putting obstacles in their path.
Outside the family, the sons were treated like a branch of the nobility. When they were due to arrive at a party, the news was buzzed about, Augustus John’s sons are coming! They grew anxious to disguise themselves, to avoid this vicarious limelight, play down the possession of the awful name John. The eldest son David, for example, never referred to ‘my father’ but always to ‘John’ as if to underline his detachment.
All of them were good looking and all of them had talent but, in the shadow of the Great Man, they dwindled. At Dane Court, David had been considered ‘a dreamer’. But his dreams of becoming an aviator like his brother Caspar (a ‘regular boy’) flopped. Influenced by the Nettleships, he took up music and played the oboe in several orchestras before giving it up and becoming a postman. ‘David has not been in the public eye recently,’ Augustus commented to his brother Edwin.
Romilly, who had joined Francis Macnamara on the River Stour for philosophical explorations of Robinson Crusoe and the Book of Genesis, later became apprentice to a farmer, then a teetotal innkeeper at John Fothergill’s public house the Spread Eagle at Thame, before ‘commencing author’ with a volume of poems, some detective works and a minor masterpiece of autobiography, The Seventh Child, which Augustus advised him not to publish.121 When Romilly pressed for a reason, his father looked harassed and, after casting round for several minutes in silent agony, thundered out that Romilly had misspelt the name of a Welsh mountain. Besides, the title was of dubious accuracy. To which Romilly replied he would be ‘the last to assert that my book is perfect’.122 His book did not make much money and he sometimes felt ‘rather a lout having to be subsidised’. But he was the humorist in the family, and in the company of literary friends – Gerald Brenan, Gamel Woolsey and the Powys brothers – he began to feel better. ‘It’s a wicked world, and yet, well, is it?’ he asked Augustus. ‘Personally I’m beginning to enjoy it.’123
‘But for the sobering presence of Robin,’ Augustus wrote to one of his brothers, ‘we might all go, momentarily, off the rails.’124 Robin, it was held, achieved the most bizarre reaction against their father. After leaving school he became assistant to Sir Charles Mendel, Press Attaché at the British Embassy in Paris. Despite his dislike of the press, Augustus accepted this as a fairly honourable beginning. When Robin gave it up to study painting, Augustus was still obstinately delighted, believing that his son had a talent for drawing. Robin, however, concentrated on the study of colour, especially blue, ‘from the scientific or purely aesthetic angle’,125 eventually making ‘an important discovery on the mixing of blue and yellow’ about which he thought of writing a book. It was this apparent neglect of natural ability, infuriating to Augustus, that Robin appeared to perfect. He travelled widely, mastered seven languages, and was silent in all of them. Maddened by this misuse, as he saw it, of ‘linguistic genius’ Augustus struggled to find him employment – with Elizabeth Arden. Indeed he took up the matter of Robin’s future with everyone, ‘even with the Prime Minister’.126 Appropriately Robin took a job ‘in the censorship’, about which he ‘held his tongue’. He was transferred to Bermuda and Jamaica where (care of the Royal Bank of Canada) he farmed fruit and flowers in the hills, dabbling on lower levels in real estate. Over the years he wandered invisibly from place to place and job to job (architecture, publishing and, as a ‘more immediate means of earning money’, films). Back in England during the war, he spent much of his time, according to his brothers David and Edwin, ‘gazing intently at a pot of marmalade’. Then he was off again and in 1956 he married. By this time he was working as a travel agent in Spain where the papers reported him as having formerly been a matador. ‘He has kept this very dark hitherto,’ Augustus commented. ‘I’m sure he [Augustus] regretted our inability – as I did – to achieve a friendly and easy relationship,’ Robin wrote. ‘But the main obstacle was that he – fundamentally – was a rebel against established society and most conventions, while I hated Bohemianism and yearned for a normal life – which made me in my turn also a rebel – but in reverse.’127
Then there was Edwin. His gift, in his father’s eyes, was for clowning, and the stage (which had been forbidden Vivien) was recommended. ‘I feel strongly you yourself could make a great success on the stage,’ Augustus advised. ‘You have a good voice and ear and an unusual comedic sense.’ After studying art in Paris, Edwin accidentally fell into professional boxing, winning, as ‘Teddy John of Chelsea’, seven of his first nine fights. ‘Edwin fought a black man last Monday and beat him,’ his father wrote proudly to a friend. On one occasion Augustus entered the ring himself, squared up opposite his son and had his photograph taken, bulging with satisfaction. ‘I like him [Edwin] immensely,’ he wrote to his son Henry. ‘…He has become a tall hefty fellow full of confidence, humour and character.’ His delight at Edwin’s success was redoubled by his own father’s horror. Old Edwin John, he told David, ‘is outraged in all his best feelings that Edwyn has adopted the brutal and degrading profession of prize-fighter but everybody else seems pleased except some Tenbyites who, according to Papa, have decided that my little career is at an end in consequence of Edwyn’s career in the Ring.’ But one other person disapproved: Gwen John. She told her nephew he was wasting his time boxing and should become a serious artist – and to Augustus’s dismay Edwin threw in the towel. Gwen’s influence was to fall awkwardly between father and son, multiplying their many misunderstandings.
Caspar, the one who, from earliest days, had kept away, was the exception. By 1941 he was a naval captain; by 1951 a rear-admiral; by 1960 First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff; and by 1962 he had become Admiral of the Fleet Sir Caspar John, GCB. Of his son’s enthusiasm for aeroplanes, ships and the sea Augustus understood nothing: but he understood success. ‘My son Caspar hasn’t done too badly,’ he remarked to Stuart Piggott. Of course he would make fun sometimes of ‘the gallant admiral… looking like a Peony in full bloom’, but such sallies had no poison in them. He often proposed painting Caspar ‘with all your buttons’, but never caught him decked in his ‘stripes and all’. Their relationship remained a staccato affair, neither giving ground, but the more senior Caspar became the more his father thawed. ‘Still in the navy?’ he would ask when Caspar returned on leave. But though he took this success lightly, seldom embarrassing Caspar with compliments, it gave him satisfaction. ‘You can’t go any further without damaging the ceiling,’ he pointed out. He even gave grudging approval when in 1944, after a larky wartime courtship on two bicycles, Caspar married Mary Vanderpump, known as ‘Pumpy’ (she was an ambulance driver and also worked on the Grand Union Canal). ‘I disliked P[umpy] less than I expected,’ he wrote to Poppet’s second husband, whom he was beginning to dislike rather more. ‘Caspar at any rate looks better on it which is something.’128
There was another son, Ida’s fifth child, Henry: the odd one out who had become separated from the others after the chase round London Zoo in the summer of 1908. He had been brought up by a cousin, Edith Nettleship, in the village of Sheet, near Petersfield. It was an energetic upbringing: long walks in the open, long prayers indoors. (‘She prays an awful lot,’ Henry complained.) While serving as a nurse during the Great War, Edith had been converted to Catholicism, and had then sent Henry to Stonyhurst College, a superior Catholic school. Sometimes in the holidays he would climb on to the backs of lorries and be driven to Alderney and to Fryern, entering for a week or two the amazing world of his brothers and half-sisters. ‘He had an adventurous, not to say reckless, spirit just below the surface,’ observed his schoolfriend Tom Burns,129 which these visits brought forth. Vivien was ‘great’, Poppet a ‘great flirt’, and the two of them together were ‘perfect sisters’. ‘What more perfect sisters could one deserve?’ He longed to see more of them. Among his brothers he particularly envied David with his oboe and his country dancing. Henry didn’t play a musical instrument and ‘I can’t dance even the one-step yet. I always used to be occupied at Stonyhurst when they danced.’130 His holidays with the Johns were like a dream – the riding and tree-climbing; the invention with his half-brother Romilly of a machine that thought; the urgent swopping of stories, information, books; the pictures, the endless talk of love and philosophy that continued in Henry’s illustrated letters and included his poem about Eden in the style of Edward Lear and a complicated theological essay on ‘Girls’ Bottoms’, much criticized for its inaccuracy. He was a strangely attractive figure to the Johns, with striking good looks, a vehement personality, his laugh fierce, his manner harsh and precise. As William Rothenstein noticed, he was ‘startlingly like Ida’. ‘Henry is a wonderful boy,’ Augustus told Gwen.131 He was particularly pleased when Henry showed an interest in Romany matters. At Stonyhurst he had gained a reputation as a brilliant scholar, actor and orator, and at weekends would mount a platform at Marble Arch to argue dramatically on behalf of the Catholic Evidence Guild. But he was too unconventional to be a popular boy. The problem was: with all his energy and gifts, what should he do? He wanted to ‘have a shot at being a Jesuit’, he told Augustus. ‘But I would like to go to China first.’ Father Martin D’Arcy, who had been a pupil and teacher at Stonyhurst, was sent to interview him and, if he judged him sufficiently remarkable, groom him for the Jesuit priesthood. ‘I was captivated by Henry John,’ he wrote. ‘…He was an absolute genius… handsome, looking like an angel (except he was dark)… absolutely irresistible… I had very close to a father’s feeling for him, an affection such as I don’t think I’ve ever had for any other boy.’ In Father D’Arcy’s opinion and that of Father Cyril Martindale, the prominent Jesuit hagiographer, Henry was a miraculous boy ‘devastating for the enemies of the faith’.132 In 1926, Father D’Arcy carried him off to Rome, where he lodged at the Beda College and attended lectures at the Jesuit university, the Gregoriana. Henry’s letters from Rome to his father show how his Catholic training and John-like paganism were fusing into fantasy.
‘Another thing which is absorbing is how I am going to bring up my children and how I am going to spend my honeymoon (supposing I don’t become a p[riest]). I think the most awful thing that could happen to anybody would be to have horrible children… I should bring them up in some sunny place by the sea, pack their heads with fairy-stories and every conceivable pleasant Catholic custom, be extremely disciplinary when need arose, and make them learn Japanese wrestling, riding, prizefighting (i.e. not boxing), swimming, dancing, French, Latin, and acting from the cradle. We would have the most glorious caravan expeditions (like you used to do, didn’t you?) in Devonshire and France and Wales. The catechism lesson, once a week, given by myself, would be a fête. At Christmas – Xmas tree, stockings, crib, miracle-play, everything. I would take them somewhere where they could play with poor children… on at least one day of the week they would be allowed to run about naked and vast quantities of mud, soot and strawberries etc. would be piled up for their disposal. All the apostolic precepts would have to be encouraged… Tell me… what amendments you suggest. Quick, else I shall be having them on my hands. The first Communion of the ten small Johns will be a magnificent affair; if possible it will be on the sands in the sun, and afterwards the whole family will sit round having great bowls of bread and milk. Then we shall go out in sailing ships and have dances when we come back and a picnic with a terrific stew ending up with Benediction and bed.’133
Henry had not liked Rome, but everywhere he went there at his side was Father D’Arcy, ‘who is the paragon,’ he told Augustus, ‘ – he sees every conceivable point of view without being the least bit vague or cocksure, and allows himself to be fought and contradicted perhaps more than is good for me.’ In an ejaculation of enthusiasm he invited Augustus swiftly to ‘come to Rome’ so that he could ‘cheer up D’Arcy and paint the Pope (green) and the town (red)’.134
Father D’Arcy, with his ‘blue chin and fine, slippery mind’,135 was already famous for his brilliant converts, the best known of whom was to be Evelyn Waugh (who portrayed him as Father Rothschild in Vile Bodies). On his return from Rome, Henry decided to ‘do a D’Arcy’ and commit himself to the priesthood. In 1927 he entered as a novice the Jesuit House, Manresa, at Roehampton as the first stage of thirteen years’ training. He suffered and survived this noviceship, but it altered him. By the time he went up to Heythrop College he had become a passionate theologian. No longer did the worlds of the two fathers, D’Arcy and Augustus, mingle in happy fantasy; they frothed within him in a continuous chemical antipathy. ‘You are like Fryern,’ he wrote to Vivien. ‘Fryern is a sort of enchanted isle – very beautiful and nice and kind and fantastic; but nobody ever learns anything there.’ It was strict neo-Thomist learning that, like a missionary gospel, he strove to implant there. Summoning up all the resources of Farm Street, the English Jesuit headquarters in Mayfair, he rained on them books, pamphlets, words. With time these proselytizing exercises grew more frantic. ‘Acquaint yourself with Romilly,’ he ordered Father D’Arcy. ‘Write to him. Save him from Behaviourism… send him something on psycho-analysis… Start on immortality.’ And then: ‘There is no reason why David should travel separately. Therefore get hold of him on the platform and talk to him all the way. [Christopher] Devlin can go to the W.C. Hint forcibly to him that he should seek companions among the other youths...’ But for conversion, the Johns seemed very unripe fruit, and the only result of his efforts was that ‘our vocabularies have increased’.
Top of this Tree of Ignorance was Augustus himself, a mighty plum. This ‘great character’ with his ‘thunderous voice’ appeared to Father D’Arcy ‘a wholly fantastic figure’. He was ‘never a Catholic’, Father D’Arcy admitted, ‘though I always felt there was a chance he might become one’. If anyone could perform this miracle it was Henry. He did not hesitate.136 At times, it even seemed to him he was gaining. ‘Daddie says there might be “some small corner” for him in the Church,’ he hopefully advised Father D’Arcy. But hope sank eternal. ‘I’m afraid though we’re at a deadlock. He spurns revelation entirely – says he’s just as religious as we are.’
Nevertheless, Henry wanted to provoke a continual discussion with Augustus over what he believed or condemned. ‘You seem so aimlessly erudite, so irresponsibly appreciative,’ he challenged him, ‘…you never think – you just observe things aesthetically – you like the sound and colour of theories. In you Beauty has not travailed into truth, nor diversity into unity.’137
These philosophical speculations jostled with offers to buy his father ‘a penis-ring after the fashion of the Brazilian Tupis’, and advice to ‘tattoo your privies and migrate to the South Seas’.138
Henry’s career bewildered the Johns. ‘They all seem to miss Henry a lot & cannot, I think, understand much of what took him to Man[resa], & what makes him happy there,’ Tom Burns wrote to Gwen John. ‘I told Augustus to write to him: because I [don’t] want him – or any of them to become all embittered by what must seem to them an inhuman thing – this isolation.’139
But Augustus regarded the Catholic Church in history as a reactionary power. He retaliated to Henry’s sermonizing by trying to undermine his faith. ‘What do you believe in?’ he demanded.
‘What you’re told I suppose. It would be a grand training for you to get out of your church and take your chance with common mortals. When I’m well and sane I detest the anti-naturalism of religiosity and become a good “Pagan”. Chastity and poverty are horrible ideals – especially the first. Why wear a black uniform and take beastly vows? Why take your orders from a “provincial”, some deplorable decrepit in Poland. Why adopt this queer discredited premedical cosmogony? Why emasculate yourself – you will gradually become a nice old virgin aunt and probably suffer from fits which will doubtless be taken for divine possession. Much better fertilize a few Glasgow girls and send them back to Ireland – full of the Holy Ghost.’
In the expectation of miracles, and with the encouragement of Father Martindale, Henry persuaded John to paint him in the robes of a Jesuit saint, Aloysius Gonzaga, to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of his canonization. ‘Do not discover in this Jesuitical suggestion a conspiracy to baptize you (by immersion),’ he adds.140 But neither Jesuitically nor aesthetically was the experiment a success.141 The struggle between them, for all its ludicrous aspects, was serious. ‘I am a person of absolutely feverish activity… I am madly impatient and madly irritable and appallingly critical… yet I have an immense desire to be exactly the opposite of what I tend to be,’ Henry had written. The Jesuit training, he believed, would teach him the secret of self-renunciation, the absolute submission of his rebellious spirit to the Will of God as manifested in Superiors. Was this not similar to what his aunt, Gwen John, had done? Yet while the rest of his family remained blatant ‘bloody fools’ basking in ‘flashy old paganism’, they were an intolerable irritant. He had elected to read philosophy at Campion Hall where Father D’Arcy was the new Master, but he could find nothing to calm his turmoil. His letters, written in a shuddering hand, and relentlessly illegible, are saturated with violence, page after page of it, like a protracted scream. Watching him, Father D’Arcy (who had advised against philosophy) was increasingly worried by what he called ‘your periods of heats… the temperature you rise to, the complications...’
At the end of his time at Campion Hall, Henry gained Second Class Honours in philosophy. But this was not good enough. ‘I often long very greatly to see you and the others,’ he wrote to Augustus from Campion Hall. ‘…There is such an enormous amount I can learn from you.’142 Should he ‘stick to the J[esuit]s or no’? He needed advice. He was reacting against the scrupulous discipline of his training, but feared he would be misunderstood. ‘He had not lost his faith,’ one of his friends remarked, ‘but maybe he had a bit lost his head.’143 In the summer of 1934, he submitted a dispensation of his vows. ‘The Jesuit life is not any longer my cup of tea’, he wrote. ‘I am not leaving for intellectual reasons but for physical ones i.e. I do not think I am meant to lead a life of books only… nor can S.J. [Society of Jesus] Superiors, generous as they are, be expected to cater for a permanent eccentric… Having had a determined shot, I failed. I don’t think the chastity question comes into it very much at all – at any rate disinclination for a life of chastity is not a prominent reason in my mind, though of course it is present… I should not mind if people said I was funking disobedience – for that’s quite plausible.’
This letter, far more controlled than anything he usually wrote, was sent to Augustus via Henry’s Provincial ‘to make sure things are quite clear’. But other writings, that sit less politely upon the page, affirm a different truth. Henry appears to have been ‘girl-shy’ but highly sexed. At school there had been a devastating infatuation for another boy; and during his noviciate he seems to have become painfully involved, though in a more sophisticated way, in another unrequited passion. But he was not homosexual: it was simply that he was always in the society of other men. His correspondence to his Provincial and Superiors was preoccupied with birth control and questions of sexual ethics; while to others, such as his friend Robert McAlmon, it was ‘one long wail about carnal desire… and the searing sin of weakening’.144 Henry also did a series of drawings, harshly pornographic, depicting a Jesuit entering heaven by violently explicit sexual means.
He had won the high opinion of G. K. Chesterton and of Wyndham Lewis, but to follow them would be once more to ‘lead a life of books only’. To Augustus, he insisted: ‘I have got to make what amounts to a fairly big fresh start, do a lot more “abdicating”.’ This took the form of plunging into the East End of London among the poor. ‘He seems as mad as a hatter,’ was Augustus’s verdict. ‘…He is studying dancing – for which he shows no aptitude – and the price of vegetables.’145 In the newspapers it was announced that, like his brother Edwin, Henry had become a boxer and would wear the papal colours on his pants. Augustus was not pleased. In the past he had often urged his son to ‘quit this stately Mumbo Jumbo’. Yet he had not relished the manner of his quitting: it reeked of failure. Now he poured scorn on Henry for not discovering ‘your own Divinity’, and for still carrying out to the letter the injunction of Loyola by failing to look ‘directly at any female’.146 The novelist Julia Strachey, who saw him in November 1934, also observed this curious obliqueness:
‘Henry John to tea… Sitting down in the small chair – which he placed sideways on to me – beside the bookcase, he conducted the whole conversation – metaphysical almost entirely – with his face turned away, and looked round at me only three times, I counted, during the whole session, which lasted from 4.30 till 7. What lies behind this habit? Is it, as with Ivor Novello and Owen Nares, to display his profile, which is beautiful, the shape of his head as in a Renaissance painting. It would be pleasant to indulge my daydreams about him, inhibit my critical faculties and concentrate on – say – his profile, forgetting that his full face is disappointing and makes a certain impression of insensitiveness… He refused both butter, and jam, for his scone.’147
His experiments at moving from the metaphysical to the physical world over the next six months were unhappy. His chief girlfriend at this time was Olivia Plunket-Greene, a disconcerting creature with bobbed hair, ‘pursed lips and great goo-goo eyes’.148 She belonged to a generation that had found in the 1920s a new emancipation; but her crazy party goings-on overlaid a character that was strange, snobbish and secretive. She was more fun-loving than loving, more intimate with crowds than single people, a sexual adventuress and religious fanatic with a love of drink, whose mute white face and slim figure dressed in black captivated many men. Among them, most unhappily, had been Evelyn Waugh. But she played him off against a formidable rival, the black singer Paul Robeson, and then sent him for religious instruction to Father D’Arcy. For she had recently ‘gone over’ to Roman Catholicism herself, unable to resist its ‘great, tremendous and dazzling lure’. It was said that, one evening, as she was dressing for a party, the Virgin Mary dropped in with instructions to pursue an anguished life of chastity. This experience, in Waugh’s judgement, was to make her ‘one third drunk, one third insane, one third genius’.149 She still appeared a fun-loving, party-going raffish girl. But she was now a saint too, who read St John of the Cross as well as Vogue. Whenever she began taking off her clothes she would hear the Virgin Mary’s voice, and dress again. It was with her that Henry now sought to make his ‘big fresh start’.
They held hands; she wrote poems; they talked; she let him kiss her: and then there were her love letters.
‘You are rather a darling with your long legs, and your jerky sensitive notions and your mind busy with acceptance, I would like to give you breasts and knees and curved embraces… Wish you hadn’t made me think of loving. I need to be loved, charms and skin and embraces soft and strong… But if I let you hold me in your arms, it is for a variety of reasons… Your embraces are lessons, but most enjoyable, like lessons in eating ice-cream or treacle.’
They had planned to spend part of June at a bungalow belonging to Henry’s aunt, Ethel Nettleship, near Crantock in Cornwall. In the first week of June he received a six-page letter from Olivia explaining some of the reasons why she could not have sexual intercourse with him. ‘I never knew how anti-birth control I was before but evidently I am.’ He argued abstractedly; she promised to write again. He drove down to Cornwall; she did not come. On the evening of 22 June 1935 he bicycled to a desolate stretch of the cliffs. He was seen walking along, swinging a towel, his aunt’s Irish terrier at his heels. Then he vanished.
Within forty-eight hours police were methodically searching the cliffs; scouts were lowered down on ropes to explore the caves, aeroplanes circled round, and motor boats manned by coastguards with binoculars patrolled the seas. Augustus, who had rushed down, joined in the hunt. ‘I’m searching for my blessed son who’s gone and fallen in the sea,’ he explained to Mavis. ‘I have no hope of finding him alive. His corpse will come to the surface after nine days. A damn shame you are not hereabouts… I suppose I’ll be here a few days although corpses don’t interest me.’ The description of these few days he gave in Chiaroscuro has been criticized for its callous tone. Partly this was the result of press reporters tracking him for a ‘story’; and their melodramatic accounts of the artist ‘speechless with grief’ and Henry’s ‘disconsolate terrier’ that went on appearing in the newspapers. Augustus never revealed grief or guilt; he buried it away to reappear as other things. ‘Henry was a wonderful fellow,’ he wrote to Michel Salaman. ‘…As Ida’s last child I thought of him as compensating somehow for her loss – and now...’150 That the son Ida had died giving birth to should so recklessly have lost his own life troubled him, but he resolved to force the matter from his mind. For the sake of appearance, he stayed in Cornwall a week exploring the coast, but directing much of his attention to the cormorants, puffins and seals. There was some cheerful weather for the search, and almost without thinking he took a pad of paper and began sketching...
On 5 July, thirteen days after his disappearance, Henry’s body was washed up on the beach at Perranporth, dressed only in a pair of shorts. ‘Though it was without a face, from the attention of birds and crabs, I was able to identify it all the same.’151
In the press Father D’Arcy was quoted as saying that there could be no possibility of Henry’s death having been anything other than an accident. ‘In many ways he was a cheerfully irresponsible young man, and I only wonder that he has not had a serious accident before. He always took risks and loved adventure.’152 His old schoolfriend, Tom Burns, agreed. ‘Suicide was suggested. But to me that was totally out of the question: he was a lover of life if ever there was one, but from his schooldays he had been madly reckless.’153
John suspected otherwise. In 1943, travelling from London to Salisbury, the train being held up by an air raid, he suddenly became very talkative with the young man sharing his compartment about ‘the suicide’154 of his son. Otherwise he showed his thoughts little enough, even when a fantastic figure from the past, Mrs Everett, wrote from the Portobello Road urging him to ‘send for Mr Littlejohn of Exeter, the greatest Psychic we have’. To many people who wrote offering their sympathy he replied it was a tragedy that, having climbed out of the Society of Jesus, Henry should have fallen into the sea. Dorelia too stayed calm. ‘It’s perfectly all right,’ she assured Lady Hulse. ‘Henry wasn’t mine.’
They invited Father D’Arcy to say a requiem mass. ‘I feel very much the cutting short of so much promise,’ he wrote to Augustus. ‘He & I were such friends when he was young, and I thought the world lay at his feet. He changed much & I did not for a while see eye to eye with him. But only at Whitsuntide did he come to see me. It looked as if he were beginning to recover that spontaneous & happy character with all its brilliance which he had seemed at one time to choke… You have had some wonderful children & he was not the least.’155
‘As to “going slowly” don’t we all have to sooner or later?’
Augustus John to Charles Reilly
‘In spite of all,’ a friend noted in her diary, ‘he wasn’t dead yet.’ It was the others, family and friends, who kept ‘popping off. ‘People seem to be dying off like flies,’ he complained.156 In December 1932 it was Mrs Nettleship. Over the years John and she had reached some sort of understanding – particularly strong when they could unite in disapproval of something, such as Henry’s Catholicism. As she lay dying at her home, John burst in with two of Ida’s sons and a supply of beer. He settled down by the fire in her bedroom, Ursula Nettleship remembered, ‘and talked about his life in France, about French literature, what he had read, about the quayside at Marseilles and the people he’d known there, all night replenishing our glasses from the beer bottles, watching mother… had she been conscious she would have vastly appreciated both his presence and the completely unconventional Russian play atmosphere. And somehow, again in all simplicity, proving a very real support… a good memory to treasure up.’157
The previous year it had been his old crony, the gypsy scholar John Sampson. ‘It’s a ghastly blow to me,’ John wrote to his widow Margaret Sampson, ‘for the Rai was so much part of my life.’ In his will, Sampson left John ‘as a small memento of long friendship my Smith and Wesson Revolver No. 239892’. He was cremated on 11 November 1931 and ten days later his ashes were carried to Wales. In those ten days mysterious messages passed between the gypsies, and the private ceremony was crowded with Woods and Lees, Smiths and Robertses, the men wearing red bandannas, the women in tattered dresses, their hair jingling with spangles and coins. Farmhands and village girls mingled with illustrious members of the Gypsy Lore Society: judges, architects, professors, ladies in fur coats and gentlemen in plus-fours, and then that other great Rai, Scott Macfie, ill but indefatigable, mounted on a Welsh pony. ‘There is no one I have quarrelled with more often,’ he wrote to Sampson’s son, ‘and nobody whose loss I feel more.’158 The straggling procession, trailed at a cautious distance by a platoon of pressmen and British Movietone News, was overtaken along the way by John in his ulster and scarlet-spotted scarf, who had been chosen to act as Master of Ceremonies. He led them panting up the slopes of Foel Goch, a mountain where Sampson had often rallied his crew. Here, eyes fixed in the distance, in his hand a smouldering cigarette, he delivered his eulogium.159 It was a blue day, his words rang out over the bright green fields, the brown woods below. After this oration, a powerful silence. The Rai’s son, Michael Sampson, expressionless, scattered handful on handful of the ashes which swept in showers of fine white dust down the mountainside. The sun shone, the wind lifted their hair a little, blew the ashes round to land, like dandruff, on their shoulders. Then John, ‘with his right hand out-stretched in a simple gesture as if actually to grasp that of his old friend’,160 spoke a poem in Romany. Everyone murmured the benediction Te soves misto (‘Sleep thou well’) and, as the words died away, the music began – first the strings of the harp, then the fiddles, mouth organ, clarinet and dulcimer. Someone lit a match, started a pipe; and ‘we each found our own way down the hilly slopes,’ Dora Yates remembered, ‘…I myself saw the tears rolling down Augustus John’s cheeks as he tramped in silence back to Llangwm.’161 Then they gathered for the funeral feast at the White Lion at the hilltop town of Cerig-y-Drudion, and there was dancing, merriment and singing. ‘Wouldn’t the Master have been pleased with the scene in that oak-beamed kitchen afterwards?’162 Dora Yates asked John. But they both knew that with Sampson dead, ‘half or more of the fun has gone out of Gypsying’.163
In 1935, Horace Cole died in exile at Ascaigne. ‘I went to his funeral,’ John wrote, ‘which took place near London, but I went in hopes of a miracle – or a joke. As the coffin was slowly lowered into the grave, in dreadful tension I awaited the moment for the lid to be lifted, thrust aside, and a well-known figure to leap out with an ear-splitting yell. But my old friend disappointed me this time. Sobered, I left the churchyard with his widow [Mavis] on my arm.’164
Shortly afterwards Mavis, in silver fox furs, turned up at 11 Downing Street, the official residence of the Chancellor of the Exchequer, then Neville Chamberlain, to collect Horace’s belongings from his sister Annie Chamberlain – fighting her way through the crowds that had assembled next door to find out what the Cabinet were doing over the King’s threat to marry a divorced American commoner.
But there was one who refused to die, obstinately, year after year: John’s father. Often he had given notice of doing so; and, summoning his courage, John would journey across to Wales. He liked on these death trips to make use of Richard Hughes’s castle as an advance base, inviting himself to tea, arriving shortly after closing time and stabling himself there for ten days or so. ‘My father’, he would say, ‘is on his death-bed, but refuses to get into it.’ Every morning he set off for Tenby in his ‘saloon’ car with a bottle of rum, stopping on the way to sketch and then, after a telephone call, arriving back at Laugharne. Hughes, watching these forays, concluded that he must fear his father. Then, one day he would finally reach Tenby, find old Edwin John miraculously recovered, and at once motor back to Fryern, his duty accomplished.
‘My father writes of the uncertainty of life and his Will – so I suppose he is thinking of moving onwards,’ John notified Dorelia. That had been in 1925. Shortly afterwards the old man added by way of postscript that ‘he would prefer to wait till Gwen and I have returned.’ No obstacle, John considered, should be put in his way.
Augustus and Dorelia regularly invited Gwen over to stay with them, urging her to come and see, if not her father, then ‘our Siamese cats’ or even the children before they all grew up and went their ways. But when, after seventeen years, Gwen finally returned to England in the summer of 1921 it was to stay with Arthur and Rhoda Symons at their cottage in Kent. ‘I wish you had agreed to stay with us in Dorset – where there is much more room and we would have made you quite at home,’165 Gus wrote on learning that she was coming over.
But there was an exceptional reason for Gwen’s visit to the Symonses. Rhoda Symons was the sister of Gwen’s friend Isabel Bowser, who had died of cancer in 1919. Gwen had often slept in Isabel’s rooms when difficulties arose between Rodin’s furious American lover, the so-called Duchesse de Choisseul, and herself. ‘I adore your devotion for Isabel… for you and me to have known Rodin is a certain link between us,’166 Arthur Symons wrote. He bought three of her drawings in 1919, and the following year Gwen met him and Rhoda in Paris. Isabel had often told them of Gwen, and Rhoda insisted that ‘I love you… because of your understanding of – & love of – Isabel… are you coming sometime to stay with us?’167
So Gwen made an exception. But it did not seem as if she would travel again to England. In the autumn of 1924 she reminded Gus of a huge portmanteau, miraculously full of her possessions (a dressing case, writing desk, paintbox and pictures), together with some ancient chairs and a chest of drawers, all of which she had left with Charles McEvoy in 1903 to keep for her ‘till my return from Rome’. She wanted Gus to transport everything to her in France. It would, she mysteriously explained, ‘be very useful now’.168
She still lived in the rue Terre-Neuve in Meudon, but in the autumn of 1926 she also bought a derelict shack (which she used as a studio) and a patch of overgrown ground (where she sometimes slept) near by at 8 rue Babie.
One of the reasons she did not tell Gus of this acquisition was probably that he was beginning on her behalf the purchase of Yew Tree Cottage at Burgate Cross, not far from Fryern Court, advancing her most of the purchase money of five hundred pounds. ‘The cottage is yours,’ Dorelia wrote to her in May 1927. ‘So will you send as much money as you can spare to me. What more is wanted Gussie can lend you. I went over the cottage again yesterday… the whole place can be made delightful without much money.’169 By the beginning of May the sale was completed, Dorelia had the keys and was taking measurements for curtains.
‘I don’t mind seeing Gus now or that family,’170 Gwen wrote to Ursula. But there were few people she did want to see. For many years Gus had been sending her admiring letters and advice about the sale of her work. ‘Instead of £50 you ought to get at least 3 times as much for a picture, and would easily if you sent some to England where I know several people who are most anxious to possess things of yours. There is no reason why you should have to submit to any discomfort or privation any longer. It can’t be any good for your health or your work. I’m sure Quinn wanted to help you & get your work as long as you’ld let him.’171 After Quinn’s death, Jeanne Foster had volunteered to take his place and send her a retainer from the United States. But ‘I would rather follow your advice,’ Gwen told Gus, ‘and send my paintings to England.’172
Such an arrangement might have surprised anyone who had only read Gwen’s references to her brother in her correspondence to others (‘he is offended by everything I do or don’t do’). Gus had really become something of a scapegoat for her. Whatever the emotional disturbances between them, there also existed an emotional affinity. As a Christmas present in 1925 he sent her some earrings. ‘My ears are pierced but I thought the time for earrings was over for me,’ she replied. ‘But these are so lovely I must wear them. If you don’t like them on me when you see me I will exchange them for something else.’173
But when would she see him? He wanted her to hold an exhibition of her work at the New Chenil Gallery. ‘Chenil writes that Gus would like a one man show with me if it’s agreeable in the galleries in April,’174 Gwen explained to Ursula Tyrwhitt on 10 November 1925. Ursula and Gwen were still ‘part of each other’s atmosphere’. ‘If you will exhibit with me I will write & say it’s not agreeable,’175 Gwen promised. But Ursula refused to give her friend such an alibi. ‘This exhibition is a nightmare,’ Gwen complained.
‘Paintings and drawings by Gwen John’ was held at the New Chenil Gallery between May and July 1926. ‘My thoughts went back to our youth with its aims and hopes,’ Michel Salaman wrote to her after seeing these pictures, ‘ – and you seemed to be the only one of that eager band who had been utterly faithful to those aspirations, who not only had not failed them but achieved more than we dreamt of.’ The girls had appeared supreme at the Slade, at least in Augustus’s memory. But their advantages ‘for the most part came to nought’, he later wrote, ‘under the burdens of domesticity which… could be for some almost too heavy to bear… “Marriage and Death and Division make barren our lives.”’176
Though he must have been thinking of Ida, this was also largely true of her Slade contemporaries. Edna Clarke Hall’s talent went into decline under her husband’s discouragement. Gwen Salmond had reignited Matthew Smith’s self-confidence, but the failure of their marriage and the bringing up of their two sons had made painting additionally difficult for her – and this had been compounded by the connection between Smith’s success as a painter and other women. Ursula Tyrwhitt also married, but she had altered neither her name (her husband was a cousin called Walter Tyrwhitt) nor her life. ‘Fortunately and by a great piece of luck I’m not at all unhappy,’177 she told Edna Clarke Hall.
Ursula Tyrwhitt was the only friend from the Slade Gwen John consented to see when she eventually came to England for two months during the summer of 1927. ‘I count on you not to tell any one,’ she wrote, ‘I will not be troubled by people.’178 Her nerve had almost failed, but when she did arrive she was enchanted by Yew Tree Cottage. ‘I looked in through the window & saw a lovely dresser & the ground on one side is bordered by lovely little fir trees!!’ she wrote to Ursula. ‘…My cottage is furnished so far only by a little picture of Gus’s & the dresser… I am going over for a few days to whitewash the rooms.’179
She stayed at Fryern that summer, and so did many other people. ‘As she was extremely shy, this made it necessary for her to have her meals in her bedroom,’ her thirteen-year-old niece Vivien remembered. ‘…I was terribly struck by her appearance – so very like my father, but very very tiny, like a miniature Augustus, with eyes that filled with tears almost continuously as she talked; very pale, bluey eyes and she wore dark dark clothes.’ She insisted on speaking French to the children, though with a Pembrokeshire accent Gus could not remember her having when they were children. There was much to do at the cottage, but Gwen was always ready to go and look at the sea at Bournemouth. Henry Lamb, who came over to Fryern, found ‘a little old lady in a shawl’ who, sitting beside him in the car, clutched his arm feverishly. ‘He interpreted this gesture as an amorous advance,’ writes her biographer Susan Chitty. ‘It seems more probable that Augustus was driving.’180
‘It is nice here,’ Gwen decided. She liked the Dorset country more than Gus did, and ‘the cottage has very much beauty… It is quite a big house too, but it looks small outside.’ Dorelia and she bought furniture together, and Ursula gave her a carpet and a counterpane. But it took longer to get settled there than she expected. ‘I have been sleeping here a few days,’ she told Ursula.181 But the workmen bothered her. She planned to stay until 19 September, but ‘I don’t want Gus to know I shant be there this winter.’ She intended to return after she had finished some paintings at Meudon. ‘I cant say how long they will take.’
They took a year. She returned to her cottage in 1928 and seems to have narrowly avoided her father who, she feared, might want to stay with her. ‘Of course we will put up your father [at Fryern] if he will only consent,’ Dorelia assured her. ‘…Do come & I want to invite your Da.’182 She came to England once more, briefly in May 1931, to see the dying Edith Nettleship – Ida’s cousin.
‘I sometimes want to be there very much,’ Gwen had written to Ursula Tyrwhitt. Augustus and Dorelia kept on urging her to come. ‘Are you ever coming again?’ Dorelia asked at the beginning of 1933. ‘…Would you like to have a show in London? Augustus’s agents are anxious to have one & I think you ought to, you have many admirers over here.’183 But Gwen had by then given up painting which she likened to housework – more tiring than it used to be and not much pleasure. Never again would she waste time promising pictures for exhibitions. For she had rather more money now. In 1930, after the death of the last surviving child of her maternal grandfather Thomas Smith, master plumber of Brighton, it had been decided to wind up the estate and dispose of the properties at auction. Over the next year Gwen received nine hundred and fifty pounds (equivalent to £26,600 in 1996) of which she transferred two hundred pounds to Dorelia for Yew Tree Cottage.
Some more family income became available later in the 1930s.
Old Edwin John still kept in remorseless communication with his children. His letters showed an unyielding devotion to the weather. ‘What is the weather like in Paris?’ he would ask urgently. News of its behaviour in parts of the United States and Canada were passed anxiously on to France. ‘The climate is very hot,’ he instructed Gwen of conditions in Jamaica while Augustus was there, ‘ – but usually tempered by a breeze from the sea.’ At home he often found himself dramatically overtaken by some ‘nice breeze’, afflicted with ‘unbearable heat waves’, or ‘in the grip of a fierce blizzard’. ‘Typical November weather’ did not go unobserved, nor the curious fact that ‘the cycle of time has brought us to the season of Christmas again.’ As he advanced into his young nineties, so the climate hardened, ‘the present weather being the worst I think I have ever experienced in my life’. ‘How’, he demanded, ‘is it going to end?’ After each winter, with its unexampled frosts and snows, he revived. ‘I am making good progress to recovery of health,’ he assured Gwen on 28 March 1938 after an attack of bronchitis. ‘I eat and sleep well and take short walks daily… How near Easter has become has it not? I must really purchase some Easter cards...’ On the afternoon of 7 April, while he was resting in bed, his housekeeper heard him call out: ‘Good-bye, Miss Davis. Good-bye.’ When she went up to see him, he was dead.
They buried him in the cemetery at Gumfreston, a tiny damp grey church two miles from Tenby where he had played the hymns on Sundays. After some delay, an inscription, suggested by Thornton and considered to be definitive, was cut upon his gravestone:
Edwin William John
1847–1938
With Long Life will I satisfy
Him and show Him my Salvation
Augustus, Caspar and the housekeeper attended the funeral; Thornton and Winifred were too far off; and Gwen did not come. She seldom went anywhere now. Besides, Gus only sent her the news a few days after the funeral. ‘I am writing to tell you of Father’s death,’ he announced on 16 April.
‘I, Thornton & a solicitor of Haverfordwest are appointed executors & Trustees of the Estate which is of the value of some £50,000 [equivalent to £1,400,000 in 1996]. I am sending herewith a copy of the Will. As far as I can make out we, his sons & daughters, are entitled to an equal share of the Income from the Estate, which at the death of the last survivor will be divided equally between the two families of grandchildren which now or shall exist, irrespective of their numbers.’184
It had seemed a pity to leave her cottage empty for so long, so Gus had asked Gwen’s permission to lease part of it to Fanny Fletcher. For years she had been helping Gus and Dodo, looking after the children and animals, doing the wallpapers. Now she wanted to use the cottage as a teashop. ‘The suggestion is that you should [have] two rooms to yourself and your own staircase and that Fanny should pay you say £12 a year while looking after the garden & raising vegetables & flowers. She understands that you want to be left alone and thinks you need not be at all interfered with by the customers she would expect about tea-time. There seems a good chance of her making a success of this scheme if you agreed and the place would be well looked after in your absence.’185
Gwen agreed that this was a sensible arrangement, but when she did not come back, Augustus and Dorelia began to wonder if they had done the right thing. ‘I hope you won’t regret giving up half the cottage, but it will be much better to have someone there,’186 Dorelia explained. And Gus assured Gwen that ‘Fanny Fletcher will vacate your cottage whenever you want to come to it.’187
For more than ten years Dorelia continued giving Gwen news of her cottage. Few people came to the teashop and ‘your rooms are just as they were except there is a round table and armchair… The garden is lovely in the front thanks to Fanny… Your blue room is just the same except that Fanny has taken off the cement on the floor. The bricks look much nicer… It’s such a pity you cannot come sooner… A bit of your roof was blown off in a great hurricane but has been mended...’188
By 1933 Dorelia was asking: ‘Are you ever coming again? Don’t you think you had better sell the cottage?’189 But evidently Gwen did not want to sell it. She often thought of Dorelia and Gus and the family, and thinking of them was less fatiguing than travelling across the Channel to see them. Besides, she occasionally saw one or other of them in France on their way to St-Rémy. It would probably have been easier for her if Gus had bought a house he coveted in Equihen that had belonged to the painter Cazin, but old Mrs Cazin still occupied it in the 1920s and would not sell.
And nor would Gwen sell since, though she was ill, she had not ruled out the possibility of going back to England until Dorelia wrote to her with a definite proposal on 30 May 1939. ‘I don’t suppose you will use it again, and wondered if you would sell it for the price it cost, £500… Fanny is in very bad health & I should like to think she had somewhere to live if anything happened to me.’190 So Gwen agreed, pretending to make a gift of the cottage to reduce expenses.
On 10 September, a week after Britain and France declared war on Germany, Gwen made her will in Meudon. She was sixty-three. Then, overcome by a longing for the sea, she caught a train to Dieppe, but on arrival collapsed in the street. Though she had ‘not forgotten to make provision for her cats’,191 she had brought no baggage with her and was taken to the Hospice de Dieppe in the avenue Pasteur where, knowing herself to be dying, she gave a lawyer there her will and burial instructions. She died at 8.30 a.m. on 18 September. No cause of death was given on the certificate, and no one knows where she is buried.
*1 But, Marie Mauron went on, ‘ce désespoir-là éclatait d’un grand rire car, lui, savait qu’il recommencerait une toile le lendemain. Avec la même obstination, le même “désespoir”, le même enthousiasme, le même amour, vif et sans amertume, rancune ou vanité devant, tout de même, de magnifiques réussites!’
*2 John and the writer A. P. Herbert were witnesses and the guests included Agatha Christie and her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan.
*3 John, however, was not taken in by this pantomime. In a letter to Dorelia (20 July 1936) he wrote: ‘I drove down to Wales taking Caitlin who wanted to see Dylan Thomas. We stayed at Laugharne Castle and the next day by a strange coincidence Dylan turned up out of the blue!… I drove them to Fishguard, Caitlin and Dylan osculating assiduously in the back of the car.’ NLW MS 22778D fols. (cf. Notes) 136–7.
*4 ‘Last week we christened the baby,’ Dylan Thomas wrote to Veronica Sibthorp early in 1939. ‘…Augustus could not follow the service, although he had the text, and broke in with the refrain “I desire it” at intervals.’
*5 But Romilly John remembers that ‘as a small boy I frequently encountered Augustus striding arrogantly down the King’s Road on his way to the Six Bells. He never deigned to notice one on these occasions. Nor did it occur to me to claim any relationship. We passed as perfect strangers.’ Romilly John to the author, 25 January 1973.