‘I am trying to live down my adolescent past, but find I cannot bury it altogether. I have great hopes of my maturity though.’
Augustus John to John Davenport
The hectic drive from St-Rémy to Fordingbridge in the late summer of 1939 had been for John a journey into old age. The Second World War cut off his retreat and confined him to a narrow routine. On the surface there seemed little change: it was business as usual again. ‘I don’t see what I can do but go on painting.’1 But there was a difference. In the past he had often worked ‘like blazes’ in fits and starts (‘mostly fits’). Now he began to feel ‘ashamed of wasting my time… thinking that life went on almost for ever’. He had been studying the papers that were coming to light from Gwen’s studio. ‘Astonishing how she cultivated the scientific method,’ he exclaimed in a letter to his daughter Vivien. ‘I feel ready to shut up shop.’ His own premier coup days were long past, and he sought to acquire some of Gwen’s patience, investing time in one or two large imaginative pictures, writing a simple message on the landscape. ‘I want a good 20 years more to do something respectable,’ he had told Herbert Barker.2
During the 1940s he laboured hesitantly over a cartoon in grisaille twelve feet long called ‘The Little Concert’. ‘I’m doing a huge picture of imaginary people – about 25 or 30, life size,’ he told his son Edwin in the summer of 1944. ‘I’ve just provided the females with Welsh top-hats which stiffens things up greatly.’3 The picture represents three itinerant musicians entertaining a group of peasants on the fringe of a landlocked bay. ‘Though the conception is romantic, it is carried out with a classic authority of form,’ wrote T. W. Earp when it was first shown at the Leicester Galleries in 1948, ‘and is easily the most important achievement in English painting since the war.’4 Wyndham Lewis, reviewing the same exhibition, described it as being ‘as fine an example of Augustus John’s large-scale decorative work as I have ever seen’.5 But John himself felt unsatisfied, snatched the picture back and after some revision re-exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1950, after which it went to a private collection. Even then he could not think of it as ‘finished’, and as late as 1957 was proposing to ‘warm up’ the monochrome. Fortunately he was prevented, and coming across this ‘almost forgotten and very big composition’ unexpectedly in 1961, ‘I was very bucked I can tell you,’6 he reported to his son Caspar.
Over the last twenty years of his life there was always one of these decorative compositions ‘cooking’ in his studio. ‘Imaginative things occupy me mostly now,’ he wrote to Conger Goodyear.7 He worked on them laboriously, with much anguish and persistence, continually revising and from time to time challenging the public to see in them his finest achievement. ‘They interest me very much and take up a lot of my time,’ he wrote. ‘What will become of them God knows.’8 Commissioned portraits, he told Dudley Tooth, had rarely paid off and he was tired of making promises he was unable to keep. ‘The artist doesn’t consider the “Public” – which is the concern of the theatrical producer, the journalist, the politician and the whore.’9 The Great War had obliterated the visionary world he had created in his painting; the Second threatened to devastate the world itself. He resolved therefore to use the opportunity war provided to retire into greater privacy; there, by the magical operation of his art, to re-illumine a peaceful paradise of sea and mountain, women, children, age and youth, music, dancing. From the age of sixty till he died at eighty-three this task overwhelmed all others.
It overwhelmed but it never eliminated his portrait painting, for he was still caught by the visible world. In these war years his portraits were of pretty girls and public men. Drawing girls he could not resist. They were to be seen – ‘living fragments of my heart’10 – in shows at the Wildenstein, Redfern and Leicester Galleries: magnified faces, almost identical, large-eyed and honey-lipped, a parody of his past. ‘My drawing rather large heads appears to synchronize with wearing spectacles which do distinctly magnify,’ he told the critic D S. MacColl (17 January 1945). ‘…It often takes me l/2 dozen tries before I get anything satisfactory: at any rate one can choose the best’ (16 February 1940).
After weeks of refuge ‘from contact with a depressing epoch’, weeks in his studio spent painting ‘decorations as remote as possible from the world we precariously live in’,11 a longing to paint people again, to be swept back into the world as an artist-biographer, would gain on him. It was an honourable pursuit in wartime, he believed, for an artist to paint those men who were leading the fight for one’s country. He accepted a number of such commissions, but a lack of interest in his sitters helped to make this wartime portraiture unsatisfactory. ‘He [John] was usually asleep when I arrived at Tite Street,’ Lord Portal, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, remembered, ‘and loud knocks were required to rouse him. When roused he came noisily to the door, greeted me gruffly and started clearing the space for my chair by kicking away any pieces of furniture that were in the way… I did not get the impression that he enjoyed painting me, but he certainly got a wonderful picture after 5 or 6 sittings. He then asked that my wife should come and look at it, which she did and admired it. She told me that while she was actually watching him at work he turned the portrait, in the course of a few minutes, into the “caricature” which she and others think it now is… I don’t think he ever asked me what I thought… A powerful character, but I don’t think we attracted each other.’
He did not set out to caricature; he wanted to produce noble painting. But the difficult short sittings and the lack of intimacy with his beribboned subjects would tempt him into ambiguously exaggerated concoctions of paint that pleased no one. The most celebrated of these portraits, mopped up shortly before the Normandy landing, was of General Montgomery. At first glance he looked ‘a decent chap’, John told his son Edwin. ‘Without being a great scholar, he is polite, speaks up clearly and to the point and sits still… He is also apparently good at his job.’ Montgomery would motor in his Rolls-Royce each day to Tite Street and sit ‘as tense as a hunting dog on a shoot’12 upon the dais John had positioned for him. ‘Monty has been sitting like a brick,’ John reported to Mavis, ‘and the picture progresses.’ But it did not progress well. Montgomery felt downright suspicious of the whole business. John lurched around dropping cigarette ash into his paints, and Montgomery complained that ‘my right ear was not in the right place.’13 Matters deteriorated after John turned up for one sitting with a broken rib. It smelt very fishy to Monty. ‘Who is this chap?’ he demanded. ‘He drinks, he’s dirty, and I know there are women in the background!’14 John painted away in a spirit of deepening gloom. ‘It’s rather unfortunate the Colonel has to be in the room while I’m working,’ he lamented, ‘as I feel his presence through the back of my head which interferes with concentration. I seem to be a very sensitive plant.’15 To improve the atmosphere between the two men, another figure was imported: Bernard Shaw. ‘Fancy a soldier being intelligent enough to want to be painted by you and to talk to me.’ For an hour Shaw ‘talked all over the shop to amuse your sitter and keep his mind off the worries of the present actual fighting’.16 ‘Little was done by me on that occasion,’ John remembered. Monty hadn’t been able to get a word in, but old Shaw liked ‘this soldier who knows his job so well (and doesn’t smoke or drink)’.17 Then, his hour up, Shaw was driven home by Montgomery’s chauffeur (whom he goaded into reaching ninety miles an hour) and sat down to write John two brilliantly nonsensical letters about the portrait. ‘The worst of being 87–88 is that I never can be quite sure whether I am talking sense or old man’s drivel,’ he admitted.18
According to John, Shaw ‘has a wild admiration for Monty’;19 whereas, in Shaw’s view, John really was not ‘interested’ in him. Nevertheless, ‘I don’t think the result is too bad,’ John hazarded after the sittings were over, ‘though I haven’t got his decorations exact.’ Not knowing what time Montgomery could give to the painting, ‘I couldn’t launch out on a full length in the desert. Besides he only bargained for a head and shoulders,’ John explained to Shaw. ‘…I have been concerned with his remarkable bony structure: a queer combination of massiveness & delicacy.’20 Montgomery was appalled when he finally saw the portrait. An alcoholic blue cloud was suspended over his head, he declared, and it wasn’t ‘the sort of likeness he would want to leave to his son’. ‘I daresay’, commented John, ‘I stressed the gaunt and boney aspect of his face – the more interesting one I thought.’21 But he was familiar with dismay from his sitters, accepting it with particular geniality when, as in this instance, it enabled him to sell the picture for more elsewhere.22
Such work still loomed large in the public mind where even his worst failures were regarded as ‘controversial’. The peculiar conditions of war held him in the limelight. He was asked to open exhibitions, to donate pictures for war victims. But it was on behalf of artists he exercised himself most energetically. He had been one of those, along with Eric Gill, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, who in 1933, the year of Hitler’s ascendancy, had helped to form the Artists’ International Association. The aim of this body had been to establish an army of artists opposing the advance of ‘philistine barbarism’ with periodic exhibitions ‘Against Fascism and War’ to which John prominently contributed. He also presented several pictures to sales for war funds and used his influence to free a number of German and Austrian refugee artists who had been interned by the British government.23
He joined (rather late in the day) the Voluntary Contraception League, the committee of the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment and, though not interested in party politics, he persistently petitioned Members of Parliament on behalf of the gypsies.*1 He also kept in faithful correspondence with Sampson’s Liverpool friend Dora Yates who, since the death of Scott Macfie, was ‘the best Romani scholar going’.24 The gypsies still looked on John in good times as a brother and in bad times as their champion; and he had felt genuinely honoured in 1936 to be elected President of the Gypsy Lore Society. ‘It is a distinction I had never dreamt of attaining,’ he told Dora Yates.25
Dora Yates came to depend on his commitment, reinforced by a ‘noble cheque’ now and then, to this society which ‘keeps alive the great work of the Baro Rai [Sampson]’.26 Without gypsies, and this centre for gypsy scholarship, ‘life indeed would be bleak for me,’27 she admitted. And he responded: ‘Be sure that I (and others) know you to be a very precious person.’28 Though they almost never met these days, they had become curiously indispensable to each other. As academic and economic officialdom in Liverpool trampled over ‘the great Sampsonian tradition’, she sometimes needed John to pull her ‘out of the gulf of dark despair’.29 On reading through her letters, her ‘Recollections of a Romani Rawnie [Lady]’ called My Gypsy Days, and the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society which she regularly sent to Fryern, the clamorous affairs of Egypt would rise up in his mind, reminding him of his ups and downs with Sampson, filling him ‘with mixed regret and elation’,30 until he felt ‘a good deal younger than I am’.31 Then the clock would jerk forward again and ‘I hardly ever see a Gypsy now-a-days.’32
The war affected everyone. ‘People carry on marvellously through it all I must say,’ he wrote to Conger Goodyear on 19 April 1941. ‘…Life in London goes on much as usual except that people don’t go out so much at nights – though I do.’ It was an uneventful time, ‘punctuated with pinpricks’. There was less to eat and drink, but they had plenty of vegetables at Fryern and from friends and family in the United States came parcels of food, whisky, pipes. No longer could he rove and ramble round France, but there was Mousehole in Cornwall where one of his daughters-in-law now lived – ‘very pleasant. I go to Penzance for my rum.’ Petrol rationing had made travel even in England difficult (‘we hardly move a yard’), but the trains still ran between London and Fordingbridge, and since his journeys were ‘really necessary’ he could admit to being ‘moderately gregarious’.
The country, in wartime, was ‘like a paddock which one grazes in, like a cow, but less productive’. To enliven the scene at Fryern ‘we must get a lot of children’, he announced.33 He was particularly keen to attract black children – ‘darkies’ as he called them – and by the spring of 1940 he and Dodo had five evacuees, all white. Dodo herself appeared to take no notice of the war, spending it in the garden; but John’s letters are full of gibes against ‘old Schicklgruber’ (Hitler). In London no one could ignore the bombardment. ‘London is being badly bombed,’ he wrote to his sister Winifred on 18 October 1940. ‘I was up there with Vivien the other day and saw a good deal of devastation… The row at night is hellish.’
He was determined not to allow these disturbances to interrupt his work even if it sometimes endangered his sitters. One of them, Constance Graham, remembers posing for him when an air raid started. John ‘was utterly unperturbed, and we were seated by the enormous studio window while the bombs buzzed overhead. They might have been blue bottles for all he cared so of course I felt obliged to remain equally unmoved.’
London had become a village. People stopped each other in the streets, swapped stories about last night’s raid, drank together, made one another laugh. John, ‘the oaktrunked maestro’ as Dylan Thomas called him, swaying between one pub and the next, was a cheerfully reassuring sight. ‘He is like some great force of nature,’ noted Chips Channon, ‘so powerful, immense and energetic.’34 It was out of the question that anything Hitler could do might disturb him. While the ‘doodle-bug’ or ‘buzz-bombs’ were falling, twice ‘buggering up’ his Tite Street studio, he would sit with Norman Douglas and Nancy Cunard in the Pier Hotel at Battersea Bridge, where the ‘drink supply had generously expanded – to steady the clients’ nerves’.35 There was a marvellously enhancing quality about his presence. After an evening here, or at the Gargoyle Club in Dean Street, or the Antelope in Chelsea, he liked to invite his companions back to Tite Street for a last drink or two. At such times there seemed something undeniably lovable about him; by turns generous then angry, an old gentleman wobbling through the black-out. Back at Tite Street, on one fuddled occasion, he laid himself down vaguely on top of the artist Michael Ayrton, as if, Ayrton recalled, quite shocked, ‘I were his daughter’. The third member of the party, Cecil Gray, snatched up his Quaker hat, shouted: ‘I’m not going to remain here to watch this’, and opening a door, walked into the broom cupboard. ‘He’s gone into the broom cupboard,’ John declared, sitting up. ‘By God he has!’ Ayrton agreed, also sitting up. They stared at the closed door from which faint scufflings could be heard. Then Cecil Gray knocked, came out and took off his hat: ‘I think I’ll stay after all.’ After which they all went to sleep.
Such stories, revealing an innocence not altogether lost, endeared him to his friends. ‘Look at Augustus John!’ proclaimed Norman Douglas. ‘Take away his beard, close-crop his hair and Augustus would be as impressive as before. Him I admire not only as a fine man but for his way of thinking about life. Alas! I fear he’s the last of the Titans.’ In wartime John’s stature appeared to grow. He was unafraid, almost grateful, for there was an external enemy to account for his look of suffering. People needed parties, drink and the boosting of their morale in much the same way as he needed these things in peacetime. Homes and buildings were everywhere being destroyed; friends, families, lovers killed. The marks of torture on John’s face reflected what everyone was feeling. But his real enemy was invisible. Late one night, when Michael Ayrton was being driven home, his taxi, swerving suddenly to a halt, nearly ran over a pedestrian. It was John. Tears were streaming down his face. At Ayrton’s insistence he got into the taxi to be taken back to Tite Street. ‘It’s not good enough,’ he kept murmuring to himself. Disliking histrionics, and believing the old actor to be up to his tricks again, Ayrton tried to tease him out of this mood. ‘What girl is that, Augustus? What girl’s not good enough?’ John gave a dismissive wave. ‘My work’s not good enough,’ he said. Nor would he be comforted: ‘My work’s not good enough.’
It was seldom he could speak of anything about which he felt deeply. ‘The only English thing about me is my horror of showing emotion,’ he confessed to Mary Keene.36 ‘This makes my life a hideous sham.’37 This ‘sham’ was a necessary covering over ‘the ghastliness of existence’. He hated this war. His five adult sons were in different services; Vivien had become a nurse, Poppet worked in a canteen. Everyone, even the girls, seemed to be in uniform. In such circumstances it was ‘not amusing’ to remain a civilian. ‘I think of joining the Salvation Army,’ he joked, ‘though I believe the training is severe.’38 What depressed him was ‘this foul and bogus philosophy of violence’.39 It was a world war to end all worlds he could recognize as his own. ‘I can hardly bear to think of France being overrun by those monsters,’ he told Will and Alice Rothenstein.40
He kept working. ‘What else is there to do?’ he wrote to Conger Goodyear in the first week of October 1943. But he feared that his painting might become impossible. ‘There seems nothing (in my line) in London just now,’ he told Emlyn Williams. Yet the war, which was to transform the art world, eroding the influence of figurative painters and setting up an international style of abstract art, at first produced the reverse effect. Owing partly to Britain’s isolation and the difficult conditions for young painters, the public’s attention was forced back to previous generations of artists, to Whistler, Sickert and John himself.
A black-out stretched over London. ‘It extended to every form of pleasure, recreation or enlightenment,’ wrote Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery.41 ‘Theatres and concert halls were in darkness, museums and galleries were closed, most art dealers shut up shop.’ The permanent collection at the National Gallery was evacuated to an ‘unknown destination’ (Wales), and the building was used as a canteen for war workers. But every lunchtime concerts were put on and, ‘to uphold the traditions of art in the winter of the Blitzkrieg’,42 special exhibitions were also held. The most popular of these exhibitions was ‘British Painting since Whistler’, to which one hundred and twelve Augustus John drawings were added between 21 November 1940 and 22 March 1941. Twice the opening was delayed by bombs which destroyed part of the roof and courtyard and some of the galleries themselves, and the drawings were moved for safety into the ground-floor room of the east wing previously reserved for Dutch pictures. Over eleven thousand people made their way round the craters and down into the long room divided into bays where John’s drawings, ‘representative of various aspects of my draughtsmanship from student days to the present’, were hung. ‘It is an astonishing record,’ wrote Herbert Read, ‘and it is doubtful if any other contemporary artist in Europe could display such virtuosity and skill.’43 A year later Lillian Browse produced her volume of Augustus John Drawings, and in 1944 Phaidon Press published John Rothenstein’s Augustus John which, despite wartime paper restrictions, went into three editions in two years.
Rumours of a knighthood had been blowing around, and when it was offered to John early in the war he felt unaccountably pleased. Unfortunately there was a fly in the ointment. Buckingham Palace soon discovered that he was not officially married to Dorelia, and he was discreetly requested to put matters on a regular footing. He had no objections. Dorelia and he might well have married if there hadn’t been so many paintings to finish and so much work to do in the garden. But the thing had to be done properly. So, after almost forty years and the birth of four children, he went down on one knee and formally asked for her hand in marriage – and she turned him down! It was ridiculous to marry so late and for such a reason. Besides, she had no wish to be known as ‘Lady John’. So the knighthood receded and, brooding in the pub, John felt strangely out of sorts. Then in 1942, three months after the death of Wilson Steer, he was offered the Order of Merit – a much more distinguished award, it was explained, which did not have repercussions on one’s marital status. He brightened at once. ‘It is of course a matter both of pride and humility to succeed Steer in this order,’ he instructed D. S. MacColl on 25 June 1942.44 ‘Daddy got what Tristan calls his “medal” on Thursday,’ Dorelia wrote to Edwin on 4 July 1942, ‘& the ceremony went off quite well.’ He was engulfed with congratulations. ‘I knew it was a great distinction,’ he told John Freeman, ‘and I thanked them for it, whoever they were. But I wasn’t oppressed by the grandeur.’ There were some, however, who deplored the old republican having accepted recognition from the monarch. His response to all criticism was that people should be allowed to do whatever they liked, and benefit by whatever gave them pleasure. He disapproved of hereditary titles but found in other awards a romantic appeal. He supported Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s fight against disqualification as a Member of Parliament because of his inherited peerage,45 but also defended Herbert Read’s ‘courageous decision’ to take on a knighthood in 1953 when his fellow anarchists were sharply critical. ‘Although we may diverge in some matters, I think you were quite right to accept a knighthood (though I feel it should have been a baronetcy),’ John wrote to him. ‘If there is one thing certain, it is that there is no such thing as “equality” in human society, and your Order, symbolizing this truth, justifies itself in admitting you.’46 As for his own award, though not to be overvalued, it gave him a momentary glaze of harmless pleasure. ‘Would you believe it?’ he asked in a letter to his sister Winifred. ‘It is the rarest of all orders.’ He treated it in the manner of a private transaction between himself and George VI – and particularly good of the monarch considering how much of his wife’s time he had squandered. But he discouraged outsiders from concerning themselves with it. ‘I only remember the O.M.,’ he reprimanded D. S. MacColl, ‘when others forget it.’
‘I feel writing a great labour and takes up too much time when I should be painting. However it is often too dark to paint.’
Augustus John to Sean O’Casey (1952)
‘I am two people instead of one: the one you see before you is the old painter. But another has just cropped up – the young writer.’ With these words at a Foyle’s Literary Lunch in March 1952, John announced the publication of Chiaroscuro, his ‘fragments of autobiography’. It had been a lengthy cropping-up – a month or two short of thirty years. ‘I think we must all write autobiographies. There would be such side-splitting passages,’ he had urged Henry Lamb on 13 June 1907. But it was not for another fifteen years that he was seriously importuned by publishers. ‘I’ve been approached by another firm on the subject of my memoirs,’ he wrote to the publisher Hubert Alexander on 21 February 1923. The approaches multiplied, grew bolder; the delay lengthened, became confused. A synopsis – three-and-a-half sides of Eiffel Tower paper in fluent handwriting reaching forward to 1911 – was probably done before the end of 1923, but sent to no one; and another fifteen years slipped by before a contract was signed. The interval was full of speculations: the whispering of vast advances47 and extraordinary disclosures.
‘Other people’s writing has always interested me,’ runs the first sentence of Chiaroscuro. He was surprisingly well-read – surprisingly because he was never seen with a book. At Alderney and Fryern visitors were made to feel it was somehow reprehensible to be caught in the act of book-reading. John himself read in bed. He devoured books voraciously, reading himself into oblivion, to escape the horrors of being alone. His library reflected the wide extent of his tastes – occultism, numerology, French novels, Russian classics, anthropology, anarchy, cabbala – and the ill-discipline with which he pursued them all.
He had long dreamed of writing. Privately he composed verse – ballads, sonnets, limericks – and was immoderately gratified when Dylan Thomas exhorted him to pack in painting for poetry. But he had also written for publication: first, with the encouragement of Scott Macfie, for the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society; then, with the approval of T. E. Lawrence, a preface for a J. D. Innes catalogue; some pieces for A. R. Orage’s New Age; a few pages, under the guidance of Cecil Gray, about the composer ‘Peter Warlock’ (Philip Heseltine); and, with the help of T. W. Earp, eight articles on painting for Vogue. More recently, with Anthony Powell’s support, he had completed an essay on Ronald Firbank. He needed encouragement. ‘I have not a practised hand at writing & am quite aware of the howlers a novice is capable of,’48 he told Cecil Gray. In the spring of 1930 Jonathan Cape wrote to say that he ‘would be very proud to be the publisher’ of his reminiscences. Eight-and-a-half years later, in the autumn of 1938, John was able to assure him: ‘I have thought of a good opening – which was holding me up.’
Their contract was an engaging work of fantasy. John would deliver his completed manuscript by All Fools’ Day 1939 ‘or before’. The length was to be ‘at least 100,000 words’ and it should be ‘copiously illustrated’. The prospect excited everyone. ‘I believe this to be a big book on both sides of the water,’ enthused his publisher in the United States.49 Much correspondence crossed this water over the next twelve months from one publisher to the other and back: but from John, nothing. He had equipped himself with a literary agent50 to whom, on 2 May 1939, he expressed his appreciation of their dismay. Nevertheless ‘the idea of the book has developed and interests me more and more,’ he maintained. ‘…When I am quite myself again it will unroll itself without much difficulty and turn out a success.’ The war, seen by his publishers as a cause for acceleration, he saw as a fresh reason for delay. He continued distressingly to play the optimist. Already by January 1940 he had made ‘an important step forward in destroying what I have already written’, he promised Cape. In vain his agent would expound John’s method of allowing ‘his work to accumulate until everybody loses patience and subsequently complete it in an incredibly short time’. It was a case of ‘this year, next year, sometime – ’ growled Cape.51 ‘Each time I have seen him [John], he has told me how busy he is, painting portraits.’52 The publishers formally conceded defeat in the autumn of 1940, the fabulous contract expired and this first stage of negotiations was at an end.
But Jonathan Cape himself had not surrendered. ‘I have the strong conviction that John is a natural writer,’ he had told the United States publisher Little, Brown and Company. The book had been conceived; what it now needed was a team of midwives to nurse it into the world. First of these aides-mémoire was Cyril Connolly, who had recently launched his monthly review of literature and art, Horizon. In conversation with Connolly one day, John volunteered to write something for the review, and this led to an arrangement whereby Cape allowed Connolly to have, without fee, what amounted to serial rights in John’s autobiography. Between February 1941 and April 1949, John contributed eighteen instalments to Horizon.53 He liked writing in short sections and, knowing how ‘a little food and drink [can] make things move along’, every time he had a few pages ready he would arrange an evening in London with Connolly, without whose support it is unlikely that the book would have been written. John’s letters are full of author-complaints. He seized upon air raids, black-outs, apple-tree accidents, electricity cuts, bouts of ‘Mongolian’ or ‘Korean’ flu, broken ribs, dislocated fingers, operations, thunderstorms – any narrow squeak or Act of God that made painting impracticable – to turn to ‘my literary responsibilities’. Over a decade of such setbacks he gradually edged forwards.
At the beginning of 1949 Jonathan Cape tiptoed back into the arena, and John was persuaded to reorganize his Horizon pieces into a book. He made heavy weather of this ‘colossal task’.54 ‘I lack paper,’ he cried out. Secretaries were provided; he changed his agent and joined the Society of Authors. He was full of ideas, eager for advice (with which he sometimes lit his pipe). In place of Cyril Connolly, Jonathan Cape dispatched John Davenport, a friend of Dylan Thomas, to be his literary philosopher and the two of them ‘spent many pleasant days together at odd intervals’.55 As a way out of his difficulties Davenport proposed that John simply abandon the autobiography, and instead commission him to write a biography. But John reluctantly demurred. ‘I feel if anybody is to do it, it will have to be myself.’
Back in London, Cape was foaming with impatience. He began to petition some of John’s friends and, a bad blunder, girlfriends. Learning this, John fell into a passion. His publisher was excavating for ‘scurrility and scandal which I’m not able or willing to provide’. He would stand no nonsense. ‘I’ve done nothing drastic about Cape yet,’ he threatened. ‘…I would have to seek advice.’ To John Davenport he pointed out the terrible lesson this had taught him against overfamiliarity with tradespeople. ‘I regret having been inveigled into getting on friendly terms with this business man… He had incidentally an eye on Mavis.’
In 1950 Cape sent his last ambassador to Fryern, the tenacious Daniel George. ‘My function was merely that of the tactful prodder, the reminder of promises, the suggester of subjects, the gentle persuader,’ Daniel George wrote.56 John’s writing technique, similar to his method of painting, depended upon short bursts and timeless revision. ‘I would receive from him two or three quarto sheets of small beautifully formed and regular script,’ Daniel George remembered. ‘…On one such sheet now before me are twenty-five lines, only seven of which are without some emendation. One line reads: “I am a devil for revision. I cannot write the simplest sentence without very soon thinking of a better one.” Here the words “very soon” have been changed to “at once”.’
John called it ‘putting my stuff in order’. Once a few pages had been typed, they were sent back to him, and after further copious corrections (‘I keep thinking of fresh things’) he would submit them for retyping. They were then returned to him and he would set about ‘improving certain recent additions and making a few new ones’.57 This process would jog on until the typescript was mislaid. ‘I am most unmethodical,’ John admitted, ‘and have been troubled too by a poltergeist which seizes sheets of writing from under my nose and hides them, often never to reappear.’58 It was Daniel George who released him from this predicament by inventing a conspiracy of forgetfulness. He ‘forgot’ to send the revised revisions back to John who forgot never having received them. It worked perfectly. After this John’s area for revision was restricted to the title, which he altered a dozen times before uniting everyone in opposition to his final decorative choice, Chiaroscuro, ‘a forbidding mouthful for the timid book-buyer’.
The book was reviewed widely when it appeared in 1952. Lawrence Hay ward in the Guardian called John ‘a writer of genius’. Desmond MacCarthy, Sacheverell Sitwell and Henry Williamson also praised what Will Rothenstein had called the ‘splendidly baroque’ quality of his prose style.59 ‘Augustus John is an exceptionally good writer; and upon this most reviewers have dilated, with a tendency to compare him with other painters who have written books,’ criticized Wyndham Lewis in the Listener. ‘This is the obvious reaction, it would seem, when a painter takes to the pen: to see a man of that calling engaged in literary composition, affects people as if they had surprised a kangaroo, fountain-pen in hand, dashing off a note. The truth is that Augustus John is doubly endowed: he is a born writer, as he is a born painter...’60
These reviews were a measure of the affection in which John was now held in the country – an affection that ignored the unhappy complications of his character. ‘What a pleasure it is to read this robust autobiography of a man who has achieved all he has desired from life,’ exclaimed Harold Nicolson in the Observer. To such devastating irony many readers were blind. Chiaroscuro presents John as an enigma. It gives a sense of his powerful personality and a feeling of great waste. It is ‘a tragic record’, in Quentin Bell’s words. John ‘had gained the whole world and lost his talent’. The atmosphere is of expanding fame and deepening loneliness, a general disgust, and a sardonic humour through which he gave that disgust expression. ‘A great character emerges, a giant covered with the dust of a falling world,’ wrote a reviewer in the Twentieth Century. ‘…A Celtic melancholy underlies all: Chiaroscuro is an apt title.’
Tom Hopkinson in Britain and Geoffrey Grigson in the United States attacked the book in print; otherwise criticisms were voiced in private. One of the more severe critics was the man who, perhaps more than any others, had helped to get it written: Cyril Connolly. In Connolly’s view, despite the long years of preparation, John had not gone through enough agony. ‘For someone who was such a brilliant conversationalist he was terribly inhibited when he wrote… He would fill his writing with the most elaborate clichés. He couldn’t say “She was a pretty girl and I pinched her behind”. He would say: “The young lady’s looks were extremely personable and I had a strong temptation to register my satisfaction at her appearance by a slight pressure on the derrière.”’61
Only in the opening pages, recalling his boyhood in Pembrokeshire, did John achieve sustained and imaginative narrative. The rest of the autobiography arranges itself into a scrapbook, brief brilliant moments and haphazardly plotted incidents with little reference to their sequence. Increasingly he relied on indistinct anecdotes relating the misfortunes of his friends and the loss of their women implicitly to him – traits that were to be amusingly parodied by Julian Maclaren-Ross.62 Sometimes he felt like writing ‘with less bloody diffidence and reserve’, but usually found he had hidden more than he revealed. In a passage which the editor, J. R. Ackerley, removed from Wyndham Lewis’s review in the Listener (20 March 1952), Lewis asked: ‘Why should there not be something in the way of a “Confession”? He informs us at the end of “Chiaroscuro” that he does not lay bare his heart, which, he adds, concerns no one but himself. I think he is wrong there, everyone would be delighted to look into his heart; and so great a heart as his is surely the concern of everybody.’ But John did not wish, he claimed, to ‘spoil other people’s fun’ later on. ‘Much of the portraiture in the book is sketchy and incomplete,’ he admitted to Dora Yates (10 March 1952). ‘Perhaps a kind of shyness has often led me to conceal my true feelings or camouflage them under a show of bravura & high-spirits I was far from feeling.’
John’s preference for a combination of reverberating syllables to a single short word encumbers his prose, but does not conceal his genuine enjoyment of language. There are many passages of sudden beauty, of wit and penetrating irony: but being unattached to anything they do not contribute to a cumulative effect. Also: ‘There is too much facetiousness’, he told John Davenport, ‘…this is a form of evasion’. He had laboured long at these fragments, but never to connect them, and the result, he concluded, was ‘a bit crude and unatmospheric’. Contrasting Caitlin Thomas’s Leftover Life to Kill with Chiaroscuro, he wrote to Daniel George: ‘As a self-portrait it’s an absolute knock-out. Unlike me she cannot avoid the truth even at its ghastliest.’
As soon as Chiaroscuro was published he started ‘writing on the sly’63 a second series of fragments. ‘I’ll get on with the next with renewed energy,’ he promised Caspar. John Lehmann, editor of the London Magazine, and Leonard Russell at the Sunday Times assisted one section or another into print, and ‘Book-lined Dan’, as he now called Daniel George, continued with him to the end. As with Chiaroscuro, there are good pages.64 But generally this second volume is scrappier than its predecessor. John had become so ‘literary’ that he had lost the innocent style. Compared to his paintings, simple and primitive at their best, the deviousness of this writing is extraordinary. In the book he focused his mind retrospectively on the actual world which, in these last years, held for him a lessening interest. ‘My second book languishes,’ he reported to John Davenport. It was uphill work. In almost ten years he completed a hundred and ten pages. Early in 1960 Jonathan Cape died, but his partner wrote to assure John that the company’s policy and plans remained unaltered. So did John’s until his own death eighteen months later. Not until 1964 was this doubly posthumous work published.
There could be no amendments this time to the title, which pointed to what for so many years had troubled him most: Finishing Touches.
*
Gwen’s will surprised everyone. ‘It could hardly have been more succinct,’ Augustus remarked. She left a small legacy to Thornton, and made her nephew Edwin her heir and executor. ‘Our meetings were few and far between & more often than not my communications by letter remained unanswered,’ Edwin had told his brother Henry early in the 1930s. The reason she ‘shunned my society’, he explained, was that ‘I indulged in the horrible and degrading pursuit of boxing.’65
But by the mid-1930s Edwin was no longer ‘Teddy John of Chelsea’, the hefty humorous fellow whom Augustus had so much liked. He had taken up painting instead of boxing, and gone to live in Paris for three years with his wife and small son. Gwen was still rather suspicious of him. When she had told him that she believed Georges Rouault to be ‘the greatest painter of our day’,66 it seemed to her that he had given a contemptuous snigger – though later, having perhaps heard Rouault praised by others, he volunteered that at the exhibitions Rouault put everyone else in the shade. Coming up with her opinions as if they were his own discoveries was merely the awkward process of his education. By the time he left Paris in 1938, he had picked up a good deal of artistic knowledge. The following year, when she died, he was still only thirty-three.
Edwin went over to France in September 1939 to wind up Gwen’s estate. ‘I retrieved a mass of beautiful drawings in various mediums, pencil, gouache, water colour, charcoal, etc.,’67 he wrote to Maynard Walker, a gallery owner in New York. Augustus was ‘deeply impressed’68 by these pictures when Edwin brought them to England. A number of galleries wanted to show Gwen’s work, and the Matthiesen Gallery in London was chosen to represent her estate. In 1940 Matthiesen held an exhibition of her paintings and drawings at the Wildenstein Gallery in Bond Street. ‘I am flummoxed by their beauty,’69 wrote Augustus, who offered to pay for the mounting and framing of the pictures. Because of the war it was impossible to show more of her work for another half-dozen years. The easy beginnings were now over and difficulties began to accumulate.
During the war Augustus and Edwin got terribly on each other’s nerves. ‘What’s eating you?’ Augustus demanded. Edwin was vexed by the feeling that his father treated him ‘like muck’ because he was a ‘miserable private’ in the Military Police. ‘Come off it!’ Augustus exclaimed. But it was true that he had always felt the police to be his natural enemies, and hated thinking of his son among them. ‘It is an impossible situation,’ he protested. ‘…The Police is hardly the correct service for an old Collégien de Normandie and Pooleyite.’70 But it was no joking matter for Edwin. He attributed his difficulties to the carelessness Augustus had lavished over his education. ‘Forget it!’ Augustus commanded. When Edwin somewhat unrealistically asked his father to ‘pull some strings’ on his behalf with General Montgomery during one of their portrait sittings, Augustus bluntly answered: ‘I did mention your case [to Monty] but failed to interest him.’71
They could not avoid paining each other. Though they tried to make peace, spending ‘some precious beer-time’ together in pubs that had escaped the Blitz and swapping useful wartime tips (‘Bird’s Custard Powder is the best lubricant’), provocation and insult were as natural as breathing to them. Both suffered from ‘neurotic inversion’, Augustus diagnosed after reading a book by the Russian emigré philosopher Nicholai Berdyaev. ‘It’s a pretty prevalent complaint among people with over delicate sensibilities,’ he explained.72 Edwin could no more escape this complaint than he could escape being Augustus’s son – indeed they were virtually the same thing. Throughout their long correspondence, he tried calling his father ‘Augustus’, but almost always it came back to ‘Dear Daddy’.
After the war their battle centred itself on Gwen’s affairs. The struggle as to who could serve her reputation the better reached deep into them, and was aggravated by legal complexities. Edwin, as the executor and chief legatee, was in authority; which is to say he occupied the father’s role – he even had the same name as Augustus’s father. Augustus himself felt an instinctive protectiveness towards Gwen arising from their childhood days together. In 1946 Edwin gave Matthiesen permission to hold a large memorial exhibition of Gwen’s paintings and drawings in London, and Augustus (who had written an article on his sister for the Burlington Magazine in 1942) agreed to contribute a foreword to the catalogue. ‘I don’t fancy strangers writing about her somehow,’ he told Edwin. ‘As I blame myself continually for having even appeared to be unkind to her at times, the task seems doubly fitting.’73
His unkindness now turned towards Edwin, and he took offence at the Matthiesen catalogue for which he had eventually ‘coughed up’ an introduction. ‘While this fiasco has been arranged,’ he chided Edwin, ‘I presume you have been conspicuously absent in your mousehole.’74 He needed to make an imaginative act of reconciliation with Gwen, and proposed publishing a memoir of her. ‘I am prepared to do this myself,’ he announced to Edwin at the end of November 1946, ‘being the sole person living competent to do so. If there were anyone else equally or better equipped I would gladly retire as writing is a great labour.’75
Edwin appeared anxious to relieve Augustus of this great labour. But the suggestion that Romilly’s wife publish a memoir of Gwen infuriated him; while a more interesting proposition for a volume by Wyndham Lewis about both Gwen and Augustus came to nothing. It seemed to Augustus that his son was continually frustrating the act of atonement he wished to make with Gwen. ‘I am perplexed to know what it is that is expected of me,’ Edwin protested. In fact they were both profoundly perplexed. Whatever they did ended up with ‘brickbats’, and though the ‘door to conciliation is never closed’,76 neither of them could walk through it. It was acutely distressing. Sarcasm had become their form of intimacy, and like a poison it paralysed them.
So, through a fog of pomposity, father and son went on exchanging brickbats, both of them perpetually outraged by the misery of it all. ‘Obviously you have completely misunderstood my letter… If I have failed to get the correct meaning of your letter you have equally misunderstood mine… I had no idea that my last communication, re the book, was going to arouse so foul an exhibition of bad taste (and worse). It is an unpleasant surprise… Your reasoning faculties are still in eclipse… Is your presence really necessary?… my advice is, Keep away… Let us call it a day then… One has, so far as possible, to protect one’s peace of mind.’77
Augustus finally gave up his idea of writing a memoir of Gwen after Winifred appealed to him to give it up. ‘There is no one in the world who would be more averse to having their private life made public,’ she wrote in 1956. ‘Gwen would wish to be forgotten. I think I knew her better than anyone else ever did, and now I know this to be true. Thornton feels the same way.’78
Later scholarship has shown up factual errors in the pages about Gwen that appear in Chiaroscuro and Finishing Touches.79 But these glimpses from their shared attic in Tenby and rooms in London, his oblique references to her passions at the Slade and in France, the clues about her nature scattered through notes and letters which he quotes, and his celebration of the talent she so methodically disciplined, are illuminated by genuine understanding and happiness. ‘Few on meeting this retiring person in black, with her tiny hands and feet, a soft, almost inaudible voice, and delicate Pembrokeshire accent, would have guessed that here was the greatest woman artist of her age, or, as I think, of any other.’80
‘Our late Victory has left us with a headache, and the Peace we are enjoying is too much like the morning after a debauch.’
Augustus John, ‘Frontiers’, Delphic Review (Winter 1946)
For John, the war had been a winter, long, dark, ‘immobilizing me for a devil of a time’. Six years: then all at once ‘a whiff of spring in the air, a gleam of blue sky… renewal of hope and a promise of resurrection’.81 It was impossible not to feel some tremor of optimism: ‘the age-old fight for liberty can recommence.’ Though the world had been spoilt ‘there must be some nice spots left.’82 He was still able-bodied – it was time to be on the move again. ‘We sometimes refer to St-Rémy,’ John wrote to his son Edwin, ‘and, in monosyllables, wonder if we might venture there with car.’ It was not until the late summer of 1946 that he came again to the little mas ‘au ras des Alpilles’.
He had raced away in 1939, after much anguish and delay. ‘I think of it as a shipwreck, this journey,’ Van Gogh had written to his brother Theo on leaving St-Rémy fifty years earlier. ‘Well, we cannot do what we like, nor what we ought to do, either.’ That was very much how John felt at the beginning of the war. ‘Il regarda au mur les toiles qu’il laissait inachevées,’ his neighbour Marie Mauron remembered, ‘les meubles qui avaient charmé sa vie provençale de leur simplicité de bon aloi, les beaux fruits de sa table et de ses “natures mortes”, ses joies et ses regrets… Sur quoi, Dorelia et lui, émus et tristes mais le cachant sous un pâle sourire, nous laissèrent les clés de leur mas pour d’éventuels réfugiés, amis ou non, qui ne manquèrent pas, et de l’argent pour payer le loger, chaque année, jusqu’à leur retour.’83
Seven years later they collected their keys. St-Rémy had been a place of no military importance and the damage was not spectacular. Yet ‘everything and everybody looked shabbier than usual,’ John noted.84 The mas had been broken into and a number of his canvases carried off: one of a local girl – ‘a woman at St-Rémy I simply can’t forget’ – he missed keenly. French feeding wasn’t what it had been and the wine seemed to have gone off. But in the evening, at the Café des Variétés, he could still obtain that peculiar equilibrium of spirit and body he described as ‘detachment-in-intimacy’. The conversation whirled around him, the accordion played, and sometimes he was rewarded ‘by the apparition of a face or part of a face, a gesture or conjunction of forms which I recognize as belonging to a more real and harmonious world than that to which we are accustomed’.85
To fit together these gestures and faces so that they came to reveal a harmony below the discord of our lives – that was still John’s aim. ‘I began a landscape to-day which seemed impossible,’ he wrote to Wyndham Lewis in October. ‘At any rate I will avoid the violence of the usual meridional painter. In reality the pays est très doux.’ For two months he went on painting out of doors, and the next year he painted in Cornwall. Then in the summer of 1950, in his seventy-third year, he returned to St-Rémy, tried again, ‘and I despair of landscape painting’.86 That summer, they gave up the lease of the Mas de Galeron. After this there was little point in travelling far. Each summer they would prepare for a journey west or south; the suitcases stood ready but the way was barred by unfinished pictures; autumn came, the air grew chill, and they began unpacking.
There seemed so little time. John could seldom bear to leave the illusory lands he was striving to discover in his studio; for the actual world had little to give him now. ‘After the Hitler war he seemed a ghost of himself,’ Hugh Gordon Proteus remembered. He moved about it uncertainly. The writer William Empson recalled a last meeting with him in the 1950s.
‘I came alone into a pub just south of Charlotte St, very near the Fitzroy Tavern but never so famous, and found it empty except for John looking magnificent but like a ghost, white faced and white haired… it was very long after he had made the district famous, and I had not expected to see anyone I knew. “Why do you come here?” I said, after ordering myself a drink. “Why do you?” he said with equal surliness, and there the matter dropped. I had realized at once that he was haunting the place, but not that I was behaving like a ghost too. It felt like promotion...’87
For John, as for Norman Mailer, the fifties was ‘one of the worst decades in the history of man’. Industrial corrosion seemed to have attacked everything in which he once took pleasure. ‘Our civilization grows more and more to resemble a mixture of a concentration and a Butlin camp,’ he wrote to Cyril Connolly.88 Even the public houses were being made hideous by ‘manifestations of modern domestic technology’. Young girls walked about dressed like the Queen Mother. The food, the rationing and economic restrictions all contributed to ‘the sense of futility and boredom which, together with general restlessness and unease, marks the end of an epoch’.89
‘My outlook on life or rather death… [assumes] a Jeremy Bentham-like gloom,’ John told Tommy Earp.90 ‘We shall have little to do with the New World that approaches and, by the look of it, it is just as well.’ He saw a special danger in the effect of architecture upon the conduct of our lives. Already ‘Paris at night has the aspect of a vast garage’; and as for London ‘either it or I or both have… deteriorated greatly since our earlier associations which I so much loved.’ He was ‘reconciled’, he told Thelma Cazalet, ‘to a change of planet in the near future. If we are due to be blown to Kingdom Come, it may be our only chance of getting there after all.’
The anxiety people were feeling about their future under the shadow of the hydrogen bomb was something to which John was acutely sensitive. ‘The bombs improve,’ he wrote to his son Robin, ‘the politics grow worse.’ He had never been interested in party politics. ‘I’ve got a clean slate,’ he swore to Felix Hope-Nicholson. ‘I’ve never voted in my life.’ The endlessly depressing news from the radio increased his despair. He felt a mounting dislike of professional politicians. If he had sympathy for any party, it was for the Liberals, perhaps because they never got into power these days. But he was more deeply attracted to the concepts of anarchy (‘Anarchism is the thing, anarchism and Bertrand Russell’) and communism, deploring the failure of Britain’s two Prime Ministers in the late forties and early fifties to differentiate between communism (‘which surely lies at the basis of all human society’) and Soviet Kremlinism under Stalin and his successors.
In his years of haphazard reading John had come across the philosophical writings of the nineteenth-century French social reformer Charles Fourier, and saw in his Utopian theory of gregarious self-governing social groups something similar to what he was trying to depict in his large decorations. Despite some socialist pedantry, there was, he believed, ‘a strain of wisdom’ in Fourier.
‘This is shown by his elimination of the state, of national frontiers, armies & trade barriers and in his principle of co-ownership of his Phalansteries without either levelling down or subjection to High Finance. He was indeed “an original” with a touch of genius. As for his oddities, I find them charming and égayant… eg his proposal to harness the Aurora Borealis so as to convert the Arctic regions into a suitable terrain for market-gardening… His “Harmony”, at any rate, has its funny side which is more than can be said for our civilization.’91
Fourier became the hero of John’s later years, uniting the principles of anarchy and communism, comedy with idealism; while in the world of contemporary politics his special villain was General Franco. In 1942 he had joined the Social Credit Party, ‘our only certainty’,92 and in 1945, after the National Council for Civil Liberties had temporarily become a Communist Front organization unhelpful to anarchists, he joined Benjamin Britten, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Herbert Read and Osbert Sitwell in sponsoring the Freedom Defence Committee ‘to defend those who are persecuted for exercising their rights to freedom of speech, writing and action’.93
But John was not a man for committees. The best elucidation of his beliefs appeared in the Delphic Review,94 a magazine edited in Fording-bridge. ‘We are not very happy’ – this was his starting point. Looking round for a cause of this unhappiness, he sees the threat of ‘extinction not only of ourselves, but of our children; the annihilation of society itself’. Left to themselves, he believed, ‘people of different provenance’ would not ‘instinctively leap at each other’s throats’. The atmosphere of political propaganda which we constantly breathed in from our newspapers, radios and television sets had set off a reversal of our instincts. ‘Propaganda in the service of ideology is the now perfected science of lying as a means to power.’ For someone passionately neutral like himself and ‘no great Democrat either’, the best course had been silence. But silence was no longer a sufficient safeguard to neutrality. So in the age of microphone and media ‘I have decided that a practice of ceaseless… loquacity should be cultivated.’
By the end of the 1940s he was publishing and broadcasting his message. National sovereign states, he argued, were by definition bound to fall foul of one another. All nationalities are composed of a haphazard conglomeration of tribes. But the state, originating in violence, must rely on force to impose its artificial uniform on this conglomeration, transmitting its laws and class privileges like a hereditary disease. ‘The State’, he warned, ‘must not be judged by human standards nor ever be personified as representing the quintessence of the soul of the people it manipulates. The State is immoral and accountable to nobody.’ The real quintessence of all people lay in their ‘needs and in their dreams’ – their need ‘to gain their living; freedom to use their native tongue; to preserve their customs; to practise any form of religion they choose; to honour their ancestors (if any); to conserve and transmit their cultural traditions, and, in general, to mind their own business without interference.’ Their need also to feel planted in the land: though many would not know what to do if they found themselves there.
John’s alternative to ‘the collective suicide pact’ of the 1950s was for a breaking down of communities into smaller groups – the opposite of what has taken place in the last forty years. He began with hedges. The modern hedge, with which the country had been parcelled out by financial land-grabbers, must be dug up:
‘Hedges are miniature frontiers when serving as bulkheads, not windscreens. Hedges as bulkheads dividing up the Common Land should come down, for they represent and enclose stolen property. Frontiers are extended hedges, and divide the whole world into compartments as a result of aggression and legalized robbery. They too should disappear… They give rise to the morbid form of Patriotism known as Chauvinism or Jingoism. Frontiers besides are a great hindrance to trade and travel with their customs barriers, tariffs and douanes...’
Without frontiers, John reasoned, the state would wither and the whole pattern of society change from a heavy pyramid to the fluid form of the amoeba, ‘which alone among living organisms possesses the secret of immortality’. Our monstrous industrial towns, our congested capital cities with their moats of oxygen-excluding suburbs would melt away, and a multiplicity of local communities appear, dotted over the green country, autonomous, self-supporting, federated, reciprocally free. ‘Gigantism is a disease,’ he warned. ‘…Classical Athens was hardly bigger than Fordingbridge.’
Such beliefs, later commonplace among those advocating an alternative society to capitalism, sounded eccentric in the late 1940s. During the last dozen years of his life John found himself part of a gathering minority. What joined him to others was the atomic bomb. Progress by massacre, historically so respectable, seemed no longer morally acceptable.
‘In the practice of some primitive “savages”, warfare is a kind of ritual: should a casualty occur through the blunder of an inexperienced warrior, a fine of a pig or two will settle the business and everybody goes home (except one). Modern warfare is different. We’ll all be in it, the helpless as well as the armed… There will be no quarter given, for the new Crusaders have no use for “Chivalry”. War will be waged impersonally from the power-house and the laboratory… and mankind will survive, if at all, as brute beasts ravening on a desert island.’
Nuclear bombs had been hatched in a climate of self-destruction. ‘With only a limited capacity for emotion, a surfeit of excitement and horror induces numbness, or a desire for sleep: even Death is seen to offer advantages.’ The malignant gloom against which John had partly anaesthetized himself, the anxious uncertainties, ill thoughts of death – these that he had lived with so long he now saw reflected in the faces of young people.
By the late 1950s John’s beliefs had brought him in contact with Bertrand Russell, whose anti-nuclear movement of mass civil disobedience, called the Committee of 100, he joined. This brought him some middle-class hostility. He was called a traitor and told that the sooner he ‘stand in the dock at the Old Bailey on a charge of treason the better it will be for this country’. But ‘you may count on me to follow your lead,’ John assured Russell on 26 September 1960, ‘…it is up to all those of us above the idiot line to protest as vigorously as possible.’ He had planned to participate in the demonstrations against governmental nuclear policy held on 18 February 1961 and on 6 August 1961, ‘Hiroshima Day’, but early in February suffered a thrombosis that ‘forbids this form of exercise’.95 ‘As you see,’ he scribbled almost illegibly, ‘I cannot write; still less can I speak in public, but if my name is of any use, you have it to dispose of.’ Later he made a partial recovery, and against doctor’s orders came quietly up to London for the great sit-down in Trafalgar Square on Sunday 17 September. ‘I have quite lost my hearing and am becoming a nuisance to myself and everybody,’ he told Russell. He had not seen Trafalgar Square so full of people since Mafeking Night over sixty years earlier when, feeling rather scared, he had extricated himself from the pandemonium and crept home. He still loathed crowds, feared policemen, and ‘didn’t want to parade my physical disabilities’. But he would ‘go to prison if necessary’. The public assembly began at five o’clock, and until that time John hid. Unprecedented numbers took part in this demonstration. ‘Some of them were making what was individually an heroic gesture,’ Russell wrote. ‘For instance, Augustus John, an old man, who had been, and was, very ill… emerged from the National Gallery, walked into the Square and sat down. No one knew of his plan to do so and few recognized him. I learned of his action only much later, but I record it with admiration.’96
A month later John was dead.
‘P.S. Is the world going mad?’
Augustus John to Caspar John (29 December 1960)
He had shrunk into old age. Over his lifetime the changes had been remarkable. Emerging from the little renaissance of the nineties, a romantic Welshman in a Guy Fawkes hat, he had imposed a new physical type, almost a new way of life, on British Bohemia. ‘Under his influence’, wrote the novelist Anthony Powell, ‘painters became, almost overnight, a bearded, silent, unapproachable caste… Huge families, deep potations were the order of the day. A new race of models came immediately into being, strapping, angular nymphs with square-cut hair and billowing smocks. The gipsies, too, were taken over wholesale, so that even today it is hard to see a caravan by the roadside without recalling an early John.’97
Then, in his middle years, he had moved from the roadside into town, a commanding personality in shaggy well-cut suits, embracing whole parties at the Eiffel Tower or in Mallord Street. He had swelled into a national figure, one of the legendary demigods round which the post-war carnival was danced.
But after the Second World War there had been no carnival. The caravans halted; the fierce nights in Chelsea and Fitzrovia drifted into dreams; the national figure itself was whitewashed and transformed into a monument to be photographed on birthdays. One art student, visiting Fryern in 1948, found him ‘old and very deaf… It was rather like visiting Rubens… I noticed various goats and people dotted about in the sun. I noticed too, as we stepped into his surprisingly small and cluttered studio at the end of the garden, that he came alive, his rambling memory returned and he moved about the canvases with the agility of youth.’98
Most of his days were passed in this little studio. ‘I am immobilised with work,’ he wrote to Dora Yates. He painted there each morning, and in winter Dodo would send in a little milk-and-whisky. After lunch he slept for an hour, then returned to the studio until late afternoon when he would come stumping across to the house for two cups of tepid tea. His mood depended upon his work. He would sit, growling complaints, with his hands round the cup. In summer he often went back to the studio again and continued painting until half-past six or so. Then out would come the wine bottles from the telephone cupboard, perhaps a visitor or two would call, and he relaxed.
Dodo, who he claimed was becoming more ‘tyrannical’, sent him to bed at about eight and he would have his dinner brought to him on a tray. He listened to the radio at night, growing frantic with the knobs on the contraption and the wilful obscurities of the Radio Times. In bed he would wear his beret at a revolutionary angle or, when it was mislaid, a straw hat, and often fell asleep in it, his pyjamas smouldering gently from his pipe, the radio blaring around him with competing programmes.
In these last years John and Dodo were represented as Darby and Joan. The ‘resentments had faded away with the years,’ Nicolette Devas wrote.99 They were ‘enviable in the peace between them’. There were days like this, and there are photographs that catch these moments of tranquillity. But difficulties persisted almost to the end. Outrage was never far below the surface of John’s melancholia. ‘He said he hated London… he hated where he lived in Hampshire… he hated settling down, and that he was thinking of leaving his family,’100 Stephen Spender recorded after an evening in 1955. He looked ‘quite magnificent’ with his mane of white hair, but his fanatical stare put some people in mind of Evelyn Waugh. ‘Shocked by a bad bottle of wine, an impertinent stranger, or a fault in syntax, his mind like a cinema camera trucked furiously forward to confront the offending object close-up with glaring lens’; Waugh’s description of himself closely fits John.
He found it difficult to accept the limitations of old age. The world closed in on him. ‘Age in my case brings no alleviation of life’s discomforts,’ he told Sylvia Hay, ‘and the way to the grave is beset with potholes.’101 He was often breaking fingers, ribs, legs. ‘I am too old for these shocks,’ he admitted.102 But it was less the accidents that tormented him than the galling disabilities. He hated having to rely on spectacles to see, a hearing aid to understand. He would borrow other people’s spectacles – ‘I say, these are rather good. Where did you get them from?’ But his hearing aid infuriated him and he would hurl it across the room into a corner where it would lie feverishly ticking. The trouble, he explained to friends, was that Dodo grudged spending the money on batteries: it had come to that. He had reached the age ‘when one is far too much at the mercy of other people. I shall never get used to it – nor will they.’103
Old age had become his schoolmaster but he was always playing truant, darting up to London. Some of these trips were memorable for others, if not himself. After one terrific beano at a Chelsea pub, the crowds ‘gathered together to do me honour… some of them claiming intimate acquaintance’, he woke up ‘safely in bed at my dosshouse’ next morning completely mystified. He sometimes claimed ‘my tempo has slowed down,’ but ‘when he comes to town, [he] seems to set a terrific pace,’ Mavis wrote admiringly in the 1950s. ‘I wonder how the old boy doesn’t drop dead in his tracks.’ Almost always he would demand her presence for ‘an hour or two’s sitting and a sweet embrace’. ‘Must get hold of the old cow,’ he would gruffly tell other people. She could still – ‘how was it possible?’ – make him forget his years, and their battles at the bar of the Royal Court Hotel, or at the Queen’s Restaurant, were precious to both of them.
He had given up Tite Street in the autumn of 1950 ‘and am on the pavement till I find another studio’.104 The new studio he found was in Charlotte Street, the very one he had shared with Orpen and Albert Rutherston after leaving the Slade in 1898. It belonged now to his daughter Gwyneth Johnstone, who lent him a room there. For an easel he turned a chair upside-down, but the light was not good and he did little work in town.
He came to London to escape the ‘decrepit’ household at Fryern and, by implication, his own decrepitude, and would put up at 14 Percy Street, where Poppet kept a flat. He never gave warning of these trips, but expected everyone to fit in with him the moment he arrived. Otherwise he would grow depressed and begin dialling old cronies – anyone who might be free to lead him astray for a few hours. Robert and Cynthia Kee, who had a room next to his at Percy Street, could sometimes hear the stentorian blast of his snores, mixed with powerful swearing, through the dark. At night, it seemed, he fought again the old campaigns, vanquished long-dead rivals. But during the day his manner was guardedly courteous, sinking periodically to disconcerting troughs of modesty.
He was still, even to the age of eighty, apparently in the thick of life. ‘He could outdrink most of his companions and engage in amorous – if that is the word – relations that would have debilitated constitutions generally held robust,’ remembered Will Rothenstein’s son John.105 The two of them would go off into Chelsea and be joined by others. ‘After a longish visit to a bar he would apprehend that his guests might be inclined to eat. “I want to stay here for a bit longer. There’s a girl who’s going to join us. Sturdy little thing… ” We would wait. Sometimes she would turn up and sometimes not. Augustus did not seem to mind, assured that before the evening was finished there would be others.’
He still distributed love poems – only now it was the same poem he shamelessly handed out to everyone; he was still given to sudden lunges at women, but took no offence at their rebuffs. ‘A little of Augustus went a long way,’106 wrote Diana Mosley. With his sparse hair and bloodshot eyes he was no longer attractive, especially to women who did not relish pubs and shove ha’penny. ‘May I fig-and-date [fecundate] you?’ he politely inquired of Sonia Brownell. These days he felt relief at being spared such duties, but he was seldom so discourteous as to forget them. Nor were they always refused. Late one night at Percy Street a girl with long fair hair came beating on the door, shouting that she loved him and must be let in. The Kees cowered beneath their bedclothes, and the old man’s snoring halted and he eventually heaved himself downstairs. There followed a series of substantial sounds, then silence. Next day several of the banister supports were missing, there seemed to be blood on the floor and, more mysteriously, sugar. John looked sheepish. ‘’Fraid there was rather a rumpus last night,’ he muttered. Later that day he visited the girl in hospital and came back elated. ‘Said she still loved me,’ he declared wonderingly.
There is no greater misfortune, Disraeli said, than to have a heart that will not grow old. This was John’s misfortune. ‘No Romanichale can fail to diagnose my trouble on sight,’ he wrote to Dora Yates in November 1959, ‘a trouble which he would do nothing to allay, but on the contrary, will at once set about adding coals to what should rightly be a dying flame.’ To everyone’s consternation he had fallen for an art student in 1950. To separate them, Poppet dragged him and Dodo through France to her house at Opio. John arrived very crestfallen. For days he was abominably rude to Dodo, who sat silently absorbing his insults. Eventually Poppet flared up into a red-hot temper. ‘Didn’t know you had it in you,’ John exclaimed, beaming. He quickly regained his spirits. ‘Not going to lose your temper again, are you?’ he asked hopefully from time to time during the rest of their holiday.
From the prison of old age, he treated his family as gaolers. Dodo, he complained, kept everything dark, barred all visitors, never spoke, was ‘illiterate, dumb and ill-natured’, and had made Fryern into a tomb. ‘No gatherings of the clan – no community singing after breakfast – no wrestling on the green after dinner.’ On good days he took most delight in his grandchildren and liked to league with them against their ‘respectable’ fathers. On bad days it was often Dodo he attacked, because she was there. ‘She comes from a stinking cockney breed,’ he wrote to Robin on 3 September 1961. Gwen, he seemed to remember, had felt the same. When the two girls had ‘walked to Rome’, Dorelia had preferred to take a passport than a pistol. It proved what ‘a fishy lot’ the McNeills were. ‘I’m glad you at least are a true-bred Nettleship,’ he congratulated his eldest son David (27 October 1956). This querulousness showed his agony: his vanished talent and the irreversible change of life. Who was there to blame except Dodo, who had kept him alive and so helped to make him old? By identifying her as an enemy and deliberately making his complaints absurd, he tried to numb the truth and lessen the pain. But the side-effects were unpleasant. Then the effects would wear off and he was confronted by the full horror of his condition. ‘Hell seems nearer every day. I have never felt so near it as at Fryern Court. There must be a bricked-up passage leading straight to it from here. I see no way of escape. Meanwhile I have to pretend to work away gaily and enjoy my worldwide renown...’
The pretence, though still accepted by the world, had become very brittle. It took little to crack it. Cyril Connolly remembered him having lost his temper with a taxi-driver, bursting out of the taxi and measuring up to fight him in the road.107 ‘I’m sorry, but it’s the right fare,’ insisted the driver. ‘Why, so it is,’ hesitated John, lowering his fists. ‘I apologize.’ In a moment he had changed from an angry giant to a Lear-like old man, confessing his error and touchingly polite to the driver, who was himself overwhelmed with remorse.
In 1951, though warned by mutual friends against it, Alan Moorehead suggested to John that he write his biography. ‘I was captivated by John at that time,’ Moorehead records, ‘…and I believed that my genuine admiration for him would smooth over any difficulties that arose between us.’ At John’s suggestion they met in the saloon bar of the Royal Court Hotel, a quiet spot, he described it, where they could chat undisturbed. ‘Directly he walked in… all conversation among the other customers ceased while they gazed at the great man and listened with interest to the remarks I shouted into his hearing-aid.’
John was inclined to think a biography not possible. He had no head for dates and many of his friends were dead, ‘usually through having committed suicide’. Yet the past for him was not a different country. ‘He appeared to look back on his life as he might have looked at a broad large painting spread out before him, all of it visible to the eye at once, and having no connection with time or progression,’ Moorehead noticed. ‘It was the sum of his experiences that counted, the pattern they presented… Once one grew accustomed to this approach it had a certain coherence and I believed that with persistence I could enter, in terms of writing, into that close relationship that presumably exists between a painter and his sitter.’ It was agreed he should start work at once, calling on those friends who had so far failed to commit suicide and seeing John from time to time to check his notes. After several months Moorehead ventured fifteen thousand words on paper ‘as a sort of sample or blueprint’ of the projected book, and sent them to John. ‘This typescript’, he records, ‘came back heavily scored with a pen, whole pages crossed out and annotated with such comments as “Wrong” and “Liar”.’ It was accompanied by a letter: ‘All your statements of fact are wrong. I prefer the truth. Your own observations I find quite incredibly out of place. I must refuse to authorize this effort at biography.’108
‘I can remember’, wrote Moorehead, ‘feeling appalled and humiliated – indeed after all these years the rebuff is still fresh and it remains in some ways the worst set-back I have ever experienced in my attempts to write.’
The two of them were due to meet that March at a Foyle’s lunch. Moorehead was ‘determined to go to this lunch and to have it out with him’. As soon as the speeches were over John made for the door, with Tommy Earp growling out at Moorehead as he passed: ‘Come on.’ The three of them went by taxi to a Soho wine shop, and there Moorehead tackled him. ‘I thought for a moment he was going to strike me. Where, he demanded, had I obtained the information about his father’s Will? I had gone to Somerset House, I replied, and had got a copy. What business had I going to Somerset House? That was spying… ’
The argument went on long, reaching nowhere, until Moorehead revealed that he had abandoned the biography and was sailing to Australia next week. John then grew calmer, the eyes glared less, and when they said goodbye he was gruffly amiable. A week later Moorehead’s ship reached Colombo. There was a cable waiting for him from John: ‘For heavens sake lets be friends.’ ‘I remember now the feelings of intense relief, contrition and happiness with which I read those few words,’ Moorehead wrote. ‘In an instant all was well again… After all these years I am left admiring him as much as I ever did. If there was pettiness in his life and much ruthlessness, he was also a mighty life-enhancer and a giant in his day… Reflecting, long after our contretemps, about his really passionate anger at my mentioning such matters as his father’s Will, I saw that in a way he hated his own wealth and notoriety. These things diminished his true purpose which was to paint to the final extent of his powers.’
Difficulties lay like watchdogs about his work and it was almost impossible not to stir them up. Over a book of fifty-two of his drawings that George Rainbird published in 1957, no one escaped censure, because as usual no one was ‘able to tell the difference between a drawing and a cow-pat’.109 Lord David Cecil, who contributed an introduction, came from a good family but clearly knew nothing about art; Rainbird was a philistine businessman; and from the expert advice of Brinsley Ford, John sought relief through referring to him by his initials. ‘I prefer’, he told Joe Hone, ‘to make my own mistakes.’110 To other people’s eyes these mistakes arose from his preference for his current work. ‘References to my early efforts sometimes make me sick,’ he grumbled to D. S. MacColl, ‘ – as if I had done nothing since.’111
The contrast between the old and new was often painfully marked, particularly when, in 1954, four hundred and sixty exhibits from all periods of his career were shown together in the four rooms of the Diploma Gallery in Burlington House. It was almost unprecedented for the Royal Academy to hold an exhibition of work by a living artist. John, however, initially failed to answer the formal invitation. ‘I don’t repudiate the great compliment but only doubted my capacity for deserving it,’ he later explained. ‘…I’ld love to make the show you suggest more than anything in the world, now that I am (apparently) on the way to a kind of rebirth.’ Nevertheless, he queried, might it not be ‘more safely deferred till after my death when [my] responsibilities will be lessened?’ But for the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Gerald Kelly, the arranging of this show was a lifetime’s ambition and he would not be deterred. ‘I have good reason to beware of hurry,’ he was warned by John, who succeeded in delaying ‘this threatening show’ of the ‘collection of my misdeeds’ by two years. What he feared were the ‘appalling distractions, fatal to the activities which still lie ahead and which may lead me a little nearer to the light’. The Royal Academy was also eager that he should not be distracted. ‘We should never have got anywhere if it had been left to John,’ Kelly explained to Tommy Earp. For months, to everyone’s dismay, John worked feverishly to have as many of his recent pictures as possible ready for the exhibition. ‘If I survive the strain,’ he told Kelly, ‘I shall need a powerful restorative followed by a trip to the South Seas where, I am told, work is at a discount.’ Everyone was exhausted by the time of the opening. ‘I hope John won’t come up when we are hanging the show,’ Kelly nervously wrote to Earp. But he did come, twice, and took advantage of these visits for ‘weeding’ out a dozen early canvases (‘by no means enough’), modestly claiming some of them to be forgeries – a charge that, as soon as it was too late to reintroduce them, he withdrew. ‘I sometimes wonder if all artists are not the worst judges of their own work,’ John’s friend Hugo Pitman commiserated with Kelly. ‘…I can well imagine how in need of a holiday you must feel.’112
John had not received much serious critical attention since the 1930s. This Royal Academy exhibition gave critics an opportunity to estimate his work after a long interval. ‘The freedom, sureness, versatility and sheer voluptuous accomplishment’ of the early drawing, wrote John Russell in the Sunday Times, ‘befit them to hang in great company.
‘They have, moreover, a note of wonder and bemusement which is carried over into the group of panel-paintings… these radiant Tennysonian panels are Mr John’s great accomplishment, not only to English painting, but to the English poetic imagination. It is in them, and in the drawings… that his private mythology comes wonderfully to fruition and he persuades us that the whole of life may be illumined by what happened to him, and his family, and his closest friends, in the Welsh mountains and around Martigues.’113
Gerald Kelly had assured John that ‘the show is going to be really fine’. In fact it turned out to be ‘a far greater success than any of us had dared hope’, as he wrote to Liza Maugham. ‘No one-man show has had a tithe of the success or attraction which yours has,’ he told John. Almost ninety thousand people came, and the catalogue had to be reprinted twice. ‘It is surprising how the young came along,’ Kelly wrote. The Queen also came and, John falling ill that day, she told Kelly that ‘she wished you had painted the King’.114
And John too came away in high spirits. ‘It was such a relief to see Augustus was really pleased,’115 Dorelia confided to Kelly. ‘I have had a wonderful press,’ John acknowledged. ‘…I see some chance now of living down my somewhat lurid reputation.’116 Perhaps the fairest summary of his career appeared in The Times.117 The display at Burlington House, this critic wrote, made his ‘neglect seem outrageous, but at the same time explains it.
‘The effect of the drawings, when seen in such abundance, is overwhelming. They do more than explain why Mr John’s contemporaries were convinced that here at last was a great modern artist in England; they suggest even now that a genius of that order had really appeared… His power of draughtsmanship would have fitted him to work in Raphael’s studio, but in 1900 there was no way in which it could be used directly and with conviction.’
With the panels came John’s poetry. Their colour was
‘radiant and clear, and the paint, which has aged very beautifully on almost all the small panels of this time, is laid with a sweet and sensitive touch. At the same time Mr John now found expression for the vein of true poetry that runs through the best of his work. In part the sentiment of these pictures is Celtic, other-worldly, and ideal, but never for a moment did he paint in a Celtic twilight. To these blue distances and golden suns Mr John transferred, not some wraith of the literary imagination, but quite simply and in literal fact his family and friends.’
Finally there was his gift for catching a likeness – at its best not simply a superficial resemblance but that physical identity imprinted upon the features from childhood to old age. As a portrait painter he had chosen an art that was guided by fewer standards than formerly. In consequence he was thrown back on his own judgement ‘and quite clearly Mr John is not a good critic; the unevenness of his later work is really startling, and this even in the simplest technical matters’. Even so, The Times critic concluded, ‘he remains a force and a power and every now and then there is a picture, a landscape or a portrait of one of his sons, in which all has gone brilliantly well. But though it is impossible not to see that here is a great man, this is too great a man, one sometimes feels, to practise the painter’s slow and nine-tenths mechanical art.’
Yet since the war John had been applying himself to these mechanical matters as never before. He lacked only the one-tenth of inspiration. However long he waited in his studio, it did not visit him. The only remedy he understood was time; to stay by his easel endless hours, hoping for a miracle. But the hit-or-miss stage was over – it was all miss now. His unfinished canvases lay around him. ‘I fear I shan’t accomplish as much as I intended,’ he confessed to Tommy Earp. ‘Life is definitely too short.’ He had begun to learn something of physical exhaustion through the multiplying illnesses that consumed days and weeks. In November 1954 he entered Guy’s Hospital for a double operation. ‘My bloody old prostate might need attending to and also a stone in my bladder,’ he told Hugo Pitman. ‘Together they are responsible for my condition which has become very troublesome.’118 He lay in a modest room where ‘there is no room for modesty’,119 surrounded by flowers and sending out in vain for bottles of wine. ‘I have instructed… [the surgeon] not to make a new man of me but to do what he could to restore the old one to working order,’ he informed John Davenport. He hated being confined ‘in this horrible place’, watched over by ‘a dozen vague females in uniform. I have considered getting away but it’s difficult… ’ After the operation, his relief flowed out unchecked. He inflated himself with optimism: the vague females blossomed, the invisible future glowed. ‘I had a most successful op. and am still considered the prize boy of the hospital,’ he boasted.120 ‘The only snag is it seems to have increased my concupiscence about 100%! What makes my situation almost untenable is the arrival of a pure-blooded African nurse from Sierra Leone… you may imagine the difficulties with which I am constantly confronted...’
Though he had made a ‘wonderful’ recovery, he was still very weak. His doctor, he later told Caspar, ‘has banned all my favourite sports, such as football, golf etc’. Both he and Dodo, too, needed a convalescence. While grappling with some garden creature, a goat or lawn mower, she had broken her arm. They decided to go away and, on the advice of Gerald Brenan, submitted to Spain. It was a victory of climate over politics, and therefore partly a defeat. ‘I would love to visit Spain again,’ John had written many years earlier to Herbert Barker, ‘but not during the horrible regime of General Franco.’ Like many artists he had backed the Republican cause, but his hatred of Franco was personal and recurs obsessionally through his correspondence over twenty years. He believed that Britain’s failure to come out against the insurgents had led to the Second World War. ‘With our backing the Spanish people would rise and throw Franco and the Fascists into the sea and chase the Germans out of the country,’ he had written to Maud Cazalet on 4 December 1940. ‘…Spain is the key country and our potential friend. Meanwhile Franco continues to murder good men… Remember the Spanish War was the preliminary to this one and our benighted Government backed the wrong horse. We are now expiating that crime.’ With rare passion, too, he spoke of Vichy’s handing over to Germany of Republican refugees in France. ‘What is he [President Roosevelt] or what are we doing for Franco’s million prisoners, imprisoned and enslaved by that foul renegade and his Axis allies?’121 After the liberation of France (‘a real re-birth’) and the defeat of Germany, he looked for the freeing of Spain. ‘When we have dealt with Franco in his turn Europe will be a hopeful continent again and fit to travel in.’122 He attended anti-Franco meetings and contributed pictures for the relief of prisoners (though ‘I cannot approach anything like the munificence of Picasso or any other millionaire’123) up to the end of his life. But in the winter of 1954–5 he spent four convalescent months in Spain, during which the outpouring of criticism continued – ‘Franco is beneath contempt, he “knows nothing of nothing” I think is the general view.’124
Their son Romilly had bought the tickets and driven them to Heathrow. ‘Almost the last time I saw this remarkable couple together,’ he remembered, ‘they were standing arm in arm, at the entrance to the airport, quite clearly petrified by the monstrosities that, unknown to them, had sprung up since the days of their youth. Augustus was glaring angrily at me for having got them into this fearful situation, while Dodo, thinking I was about to desert them, cried out in anguish, “Don’t leave us, don’t leave us!”’
They flew to Madrid, travelled by train to Torremolinos where they took rooms at a hotel, the Castello Santa Clara, belonging to Fred Saunders, a castrated cockney who had served with T. E. Lawrence. ‘They have a bed-sitting-room and a private balcony looking over the sea,’ wrote Gerald Brenan who had taken them from the station to their hotel. ‘…They seemed cheerful and to like the place.’125 But both of them were fragile. They were looked after by a staff of sturdy Spanish women, ‘fine girls all’, and visited by a local doctor who was ‘quite a celebrity in the medical world’ on account of having been thrown into gaol as a ‘political firebrand’. ‘This is a Paradise of convalescents, full of elderly English rentiers,’ John recommended on his arrival. ‘…The Bar is hideous’, but ‘the Rioja wine very palatable.’126 Gerald Brenan, whose house they visited at Yegen (the ‘garden made us green with envy’), noted that ‘Augustus had become very genial in his old age’.127 But much of this mildness was attributable to post-operative fatigue – ‘weaker than any cat and hardly able to eat a thing’.128 After a single debauch amid rear-admirals in Gibraltar, he collapsed. The sun shone every day, the roses flowered, there was not a breath of air, and he cast lustful eyes at the ‘superb landscape back of here’,129 but contented himself with Edie, Fred Saunders’s wife – though ‘my bedroom proved unsatisfactory as a studio’.130 Vowing to return to his unfinished canvases in Spain, he left with some relief for Fryern.
‘I get anchored down here’, he had told Matthew Smith, ‘with some endless work.’131 It was to Matthew Smith in France that he cast off for his last journey abroad in 1956. Tickets were bought for him, money of various denominations placed in his pockets, his clothes in a suitcase, and reminders hummed about his ears. A network of old girlfriends along the route was alerted. Most of this planning was conducted in whispers, for John would vastly have objected to the fuss. In Paris, where he was obliged to change trains, it had been arranged that the artist William de Belleroche would meet him as if by accident and chaperone him from one station to the other. John blandly accepted the coincidence. ‘Extraordinary! When I stepped out of the train, there was Belleroche who happened to be passing.’ Even so, he lost his tickets. After a few nights with Matthew Smith and his friends John and Vera Russell at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, he pressed on to Aix to see Poppet, but failed to turn up at the agreed meeting point. They found him, not far off, grazing over lunch, and took him for a few days to their house near Ramatuelle. But he felt physically ill away from his paints and insisted on being driven to St-Raphael so as to catch a train direct to Calais. ‘I would have liked to have stayed in Provence,’ he told William de Belleroche, ‘but felt still more drawn to my work here. I find I cannot stop working… ’132 Yet it had been a good expedition because of a Cézanne exhibition at Aix. ‘The Cézanne show was overwhelming,’ he wrote to Matthew Smith on his return to Fryern, ‘and painting seems more mysterious than ever if not utterly impossible. Only the appearance of a young woman outside, with very little on, restored me more or less to normality and hope. But she belonged to an earlier and more fabulous age than ours.’133
Most fellow creatures from that age were dead. Among the artists and writers, Will Rothenstein had ‘pegged out’ in 1945, ‘a severe loss’; Dylan Thomas died in 1953, which ‘greatly saddened me’;134 Frank Brangwyn in 1956, though ‘he was a courageous man who made the best use of his talents and could have nothing to regret.’135 Gogarty had long before gone to the United States, a fate worse than death (he died in 1957). Among the women, the Rani had ‘popped off’; Alick Schepeler had disappeared with all her illusory charm, something she had always been threatening to do, suddenly dying after leaving the Illustrated London News and bequeathing her tiny savings to a cats’ home; and Dorelia’s sister Edie faded sadly away as Francis Macnamara’s neglected wife.
One of those whose company John missed most was Tommy Earp who pursued his solitary recreation, silence, to its ultimate lair in 1958. He was buried at Selborne. ‘John came with Dorelia – a quiet elderly lady by then,’ the critic William Gaunt remembered.136 He wore a black-varnished straw hat, headgear venerable enough for a dean, yet at a rakish angle. ‘Painted it myself,’ he boasted. ‘Best thing you’ve done for years,’ a friend retorted. William Gaunt murmured something about it being a sad occasion. ‘Oh, awful!’ John thundered enthusiastically. ‘I noticed at the same time,’ Gaunt records,
‘how the artist’s eye professionally functioning in a separate dimension was observing the architectural and natural details of the scene: and when all the mourners were assembled in Selborne Church and all was hushed, suddenly a roar reverberated along the nave. It was Augustus with a superb disregard of devout silence. “A fine church”, he roared. There was… a shocked rustling through the interior. With perfect sang-froid he went on with his meditations aloud. “Norman!” the word pealed to the rafters. There were some who seemed to scurry out into the open with relief at no longer being subjected to this flouting of convention.’
Of the survivors, those who had strayed prehistorically into the bland 1950s, he still saw something of Wyndham Lewis. The jousting between these two artists-in-arms continued to the end. Passages of complimentary abuse were interrupted by sudden acts of kindness. When Lewis went blind in 1951, John bragged that he had sent him a telegram expressing the hope that it would not interfere with his real work: art criticism. When pressed to account for this message, he declared that he wasn’t, through sentimentality, going to lay himself open to some crushing rejoinder. In fact his letter had not been unsympathetic. ‘I hope you find a cure as did Aldous Huxley,’ he wrote. ‘Anyhow indiscriminate vision is a curse. Although without the aid of a couple of daughters like Milton, I don’t really see why you should discontinue your art criticism – you can’t go far wrong even if you do it in bed. You can always turn on your private lamp of aggressive voltage along with your dictaphone to discover fresh talent and demolish stale.’ At other times he treats this blindness as a gift of which Lewis has taken full advantage. Lewis received these ‘impertinent’ congratulations with an appreciative silence. Never once did he allude to his blindness, preferring to make any accusation obliquely: ‘Dear John, I’m told you’ve mellowed.’ John hotly denied the charge, but Tristan de Vere Cole remembers him taking Lewis out to dinner shortly before his death, seeing that his food was properly cut up, deferring to him in their talk.
Wyndham Lewis died in 1957; Matthew Smith two years later. The war had devastated him. Evacuated from France, he had abandoned many canvases and later lost his two sons on active service. In 1944 he came to Fryern for some months, and in October that year the two artists painted each other. Smith’s three portraits of John are wild-eyed and florid – John called them ‘landscapes’;137 John’s picture of Smith is full of quietness and sympathy – perhaps his last interesting portrait.
They were often seen about Chelsea in those years after the war: a curious couple – Smith, ‘whose canvases suggest that a stout model has first been flogged alive, then left to bleed to death, slowly and luxuriously, on a pile of satin cushions’,138 looking timid and myopic, a pale, spindly specimen like some bankrupt financial expert; John, with his late-flowering addiction to anaemic prettiness, like an ageing lion full of sound. ‘It is always an amusing experience to see them together,’ Peter Quennell observed, Matthew Smith ‘shrinking into his chair and glancing nervously about the room, John looking too large for the table and ordering the wine in a voice of rusty thunder’.
They went regularly to the Queen’s Restaurant, where the atmosphere – a little French, a little Edwardian – suited them well. John hated dining in a restaurant where he did not know the waiters. Here everything was the same, the waiters, the menu, the tired flowers on the tables, the potted palm at the foot of the staircase. Having a large but dispersed clientele, it was haunted by the past – old friends you could have sworn were long dead appearing there from time to time like spectres: ‘They were easily distinguishable,’ Lucy Norton remembered:
‘John with his lion-coloured hair, the wisps drawn thinly over the top of his head, and the numerous mufflers that he never seemed to take off… the cavalier-puritan hat on the antlers of the old hat stand, and the black coat below, could have prepared anyone for the sight of him. Matthew Smith was always in the best place, against the wall, facing the room, looking very old now, but serene and gentle, seeming to say very little but a very bright smile unexpectedly lighting up his face… What struck me was John’s attitude, his care for the other old man, the way he turned his attention upon him, leaning forwards towards him over the table, encouraging him to talk and listening to everything he said… I used to join them a moment before I left… and I remember talk about Sickert and his odd clothes (no odder than Augustus’s), of Paul Nash’s illness and death… It was a totally different side to all that I had ever known of John. He had always been the focus of attention whenever I had seen him. In the very distant past, with a circle of people round him, women particularly, trying to flatter him; in later years, when he was growing old, sitting against a wall muzzy and fuddled with drink, waiting to be rescued, to be taken safely home. To see him thus sober, in command, so wrapped up in someone who took all his interest, was extraordinarily moving.’139
The Royal Academy, that ‘asylum for the aged’,140 put on a memorial show after Matthew Smith’s death. ‘Bloody marvel,’ John grunted. Some days it seemed he really wanted to die himself but did not know how to go about it. During a television interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1957 he demanded ‘another hundred years’ to become a good painter.141 Otherwise it was a dog’s life, an agony from start to finish. If he had it all over again he would probably do the same.
Early in the 1950s, in an effort to break new ground, he had taken to sculpture ‘like a duck to water’. He had first felt ‘longings to sculpt’ in the summer of 1905, but it was not until 1952, when he met the Italian sculptress Fiore de Henriques, that this ‘new phase in my history opened up’.142 She was a wild young woman ‘of robust physique’, he noted, savagely featured, with coal-black hair, stalwart legs and a grip of iron. She came to Fryern late in 1952 shortly after her monument to the humanist philosopher Don Giovanni Cuome in Salerno had been blown up, and ‘has done a very successful bust of me’.143 He could not keep his hands, while she worked, off the clay, and eventually she gave him some with which to experiment. The result was ‘a prognathous vision of the young Yeats’,144 followed by busts of some of his family, friends and a model. ‘Getting the hang of this medium’, as he called it, was exciting for John. ‘I visited the Foundry where my busts are being cast,’ he told Lord Alington’s daughter, Mary Anna Marten, ‘…I feel all the excitement of a Renaissance artist who happened on a head of Venus of the Periclean age while digging in his back garden.’145
It may have been that John hoped to overcome in sculpture some of those muscular vagaries that were so affecting his draughtsmanship and painting. In the opinion of Epstein it was ‘the sculpture of a painter; it’s sensitive, but you could stick your finger through it. It’s interesting, but it’s not real sculpture.’146 John had many mighty plans, from a ‘colossal statue’ of St Catherine at the summit of St Catherine’s Rock at Tenby, to a towering statue of the mature Yeats to confront all Dublin – ‘Would you advise trousers,’ he questioned Yeats’s biographer, Joe Hone, ‘or a more classic nudity?’147 But within eighteen months this ‘new phase’ was over, and he was free to pursue with fewer interruptions the big composition upon which the reputation of these post-war years would depend.
The only other interruption was portraiture – often drawings of famous men such as Thomas Beecham, Frank Brangwyn, Walter de la Mare, Charles Morgan, Gilbert Murray, Albert Schweitzer (‘sat like a brick he did’). These drawings provided John with ‘outings’, moments of adventure and respite. His studies of these ‘old buffers’ are probably his best work in these last years. Of the original talent little remains: yet a certain ingenuity has developed, the skill of using a restricted vocabulary. The trembling contours, the blurred and fading lines convey poignantly the frailty of old age. Some, who guarded their public image scrupulously and would have given much for a John portrait before the war, now refused his requests: among them J. B. Priestley and A. L. Rowse. Others refused because of their own great age. ‘I am too old for sittings,’ Shaw wrote (10 May 1949). ‘…I have no longer any outline and am just like any other old man with a white beard. At 90 one must be counted as dead...’148
But one who welcomed him enthusiastically was John Cowper Powys. ‘Here is Augustus John Himself with his daughter [Vivien] as his driver,’ he wrote to Phyllis Playter (26 November 1955). ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! – He himself is a splendid picture.’ In an hour and a quarter John polished off two drawings, retired for the night to the Pengwern Hotel, then ‘like Merlin’ returned next morning for another session. When he rose to depart, Powys told Louis Wilkinson, ‘I leapt at him exactly as a devoted Dog of considerable size leaps up at a person he likes, and kissed his Jovian forehead which is certainly the most noble forehead I have ever seen. I kissed it again & again as if it had been marble, holding the godlike old gent so violently in my arms that he couldn’t move till the monumental and marmoreal granite of that forehead cooled my feverish devotion. His final drawing was simply of my very soul – I can only say it just awed me.’149
Almost his last outing, in October 1959, was to Tenby, which had conferred on him the Freedom of the Borough. It means ‘simply civil amour propre, something good to drink, a few little speeches and jokes, a write-up in the papers,’ Thornton wrote from Canada. But, he warned, Augustus would ‘have to get a new suit’.150 Dodo, ‘under the impression that it rains perpetually in Wales’, did not go, and he was accompanied by his daughter-in-law, Simon John, who ‘was very much admired’.151 He had been quite afraid to go back, but the morbid associations with Tenby had now vanished. The Prescelly Mountains where he had been taken by his nurse, and the Cleddau valley where he had walked with his father were ‘more beautiful than ever… all, all was perfect.’152 He also liked the people, ‘particularly one’, he told Caspar, ‘a blonde of truly classic proportions. With the backing of the mayor, a past owner of the hotel where this paragon works as a waitress I hope to succeed in overcoming this young lady’s scruples, and putting her to the acid test of my brush.’153
He lingered over dinner with the Mayor while a large audience, waiting impatiently for them in the town hall, was assailed by Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. At last, to the sound of cheers, the diners clambered on to the flower-camouflaged platform with, the Tenby Observer and County News reported, ‘an air of deep sincerity and of historic significance’. John, though ‘the piercing eyes still flashed’, seemed enveloped by benevolence. Sandwiched between the Mayor and Town Clerk, flanked by aldermen, councillors and burgesses, buffeted by sonorous compliments, he looked ‘deeply moved and at times somewhat overcome by… an emotion that he did not try to conceal’.154 As he rose to sign the Freeman’s Roll, the audience rose too, singing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow!’ In a speech of stumbling thanks, he spoke of his walks as a boy over the beaches and burrows: ‘I could take those walks again now and I don’t think I would get lost,’ he declared defiantly. ‘I can find my way about still.’
But to many, in these last years, he looked pitifully lost, the beard stained with nicotine, the listening eyes glaring, the slurred actions menacing the traffic. He was shepherded back by Simon ‘my eldest son’s wife’, he explained to his sister Winifred, ‘or rather ex-wife for I think they are now divorced’. Simon had come to live at Fryern in 1956 ‘and to my astonishment is quite a success’.155 He relied on her as a model (his voluptuous portrait of her, very dashing en déshabillé, was shown at the Royal Academy in 1959); and she was devoted to him, though there was a number of what he lightly called ‘fracas’ – matters of words and tablets, after which they would all return to ‘friendly terms’ again.
John’s face – ‘one of the most remarkable old faces I have ever seen’, the writer Maurice Collis called it156 – appeared on television, was splendidly photographed for the newspapers, and occasionally seen at galleries being ‘assaulted’ by some old lady ‘whose summer costume quite concealed her identity till a warm embrace on parting brought me to my senses’.157 He had little to say. Every birthday the journalists telephoned and every time they reported his words: ‘Work as usual’. No one seemed interested in this work – it was the past for which he was famous. From time to time phantoms from that past would overtake him, dragging his name into the headlines. He was reported as racing to Devizes Hospital after Mavis Wheeler suddenly shot her current lover, Lord Vivian, in the stomach. She was charged at the Assize Court in Salisbury with attempted murder and found guilty of unlawful and malicious wounding. ‘Heard from Mavis, very cheerful and cock-of-the walk at her new prison,’ John told their son Tristan.158 Then Eve Fleming, aged over seventy, began a series of ‘foolish’ court battles, drenched by gusts of public laughter, against one of John’s models, a voluble overweight daughter of a Parsee high priest, and author of Heroines of Ancient Iran, for the affection of a penniless nonagenarian aristocrat, the sixteenth Marquis of Winchester, known harmlessly as ‘Monty’. John advised Eve to ‘drop that discredited old ass’, but she persisted, eventually winning her case on appeal, carrying her elderly prize to the Hôtel Metropole in Monte Carlo, and steering him into the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest peer in history. ‘How pleased you must be to hear that Mama is about to join the aristocracy,’ John wrote to their daughter Amaryllis.159
But it was to a remoter past that he felt himself tied. The subject of his gigantic triptych, ‘Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer with Sainte Sara, l’Egyptienne’, had first fired his imagination when, with the encouragement of Scott Macfie in 1910, he became involved with the pilgrim mystery of the gypsies. In the years between the wars, the dreams symbolized for John by this legend paled. Then, with the Second World War, he turned back to them. ‘I have begun a picture of Les Saintes Maries de la Mer with Sainte Sara l’Egyptienne,’ he wrote to Dora Yates on 13 March 1946. His first attempt to re-illumine this miraculous land had been ‘The Little Concert’ which, he told William de Belleroche on 1 April 1948, ‘will never be really finished as I want to alter it every time I see it’. He could resign himself to its inconclusive state only by becoming more interested in variation. It was then, in the late 1940s, that his long-slumbering interest in Sainte Sara awoke. It was as if, on opening his eyes, she mesmerized him. ‘I am astonished at my own industry,’ he declared. She became his reason for not travelling, not taking on profitable portrait work. For over a dozen years, with few pauses, she held him, like some siren, calling him back to his studio day after day, and making his nights sleepless. She enchanted and tortured him; she was to be his resurrection or his death.
The saga of this vast mural and John’s ‘dreadful expenditure of time and effort’ over it can be assembled from his letters. ‘There will soon not be an inch of wall-space left for me to disfigure,’ he had joked to Doris Phillips on 24 July 1951. By 1952 the three compositions appeared to be combining harmoniously. ‘So much depends on them,’ he confessed to Daniel George. ‘They wax and wane like the moon.’160
The spirit in which he met this challenge is conveyed in a letter to the artist Alfred Hayward: ‘It seems to me one wasted most of one’s time when young. At last I feel myself interested only in work and feel always on the brink of discovery. That surely is excitement enough. We are left very much in the dark and have to find a way out for ourselves. One thing becomes clear – nothing worth doing is easy – though it may and should look so, after ages of effort and god knows what failures!’161
The months moved on and ‘I work from morning to night on the big panels which are developing well but seem to need years of work.’162 In May 1954 he reported that they were showing ‘signs of “coming out” like a game of Patience’.163 Four years later, however, he was still labouring at them and admitting: ‘Unfinished things are often the best.’ But there was no chance this time of supplanting his obsession with another. For this was love and must give birth to beauty. ‘My wall decorations keep changing and evolving like life itself,’ he had told Cecil Beaton. But ‘the sureness of hand and mind’, Sir Charles Wheeler records, ‘…was waning and more than ever he scraped, altered and hesitated… I was charmed by the design which had all the Celtic poetry so characteristic of his figure work. Each time I saw it, it became less and less resolved...’164
At Fryern he could sometimes be heard alone in his studio, roaring in distress. ‘What the hell do I know about art?’ His right hand was partly crippled with arthritis and, as he smoked, it trembled. Canvases lay everywhere, hanging on the walls, stacked in cupboards and on ledges, propped up or lying on the floor. People scurried in and out taking what they wanted. John stood, a skullcap on his head, dressed in a woollen sweater and jeans, scraping and hesitating before the triptych, caring for nothing else. Sometimes he drew in chalk on top of the paint; sometimes he splashed on gold and silver paint, or pasted it over and over again with dozens of pieces of paper to try out modifications; sometimes it seemed to him that even now, after all these years, he was about to pull it back from the precipice and have a ‘triumph of a sort’.165
He was impatient with sympathy, but longed for the expert encouragement of another artist. After seeing the work, the gallery owner Dudley Tooth wrote to him calling it ‘magnificent… among the finest things done in this generation’. But John was not fooled, knowing Tooth was simply a ‘man of affairs’ interested in the money. In 1960 a private collector offered him up to eight thousand pounds (equivalent to £99,500 in 1996), but John would not let it go. Over the last two or three years he relied increasingly on the President of the Royal Academy, Charles Wheeler. ‘I think he needed someone to lean on,’ Wheeler wrote, ‘so that I received many letters begging me to visit him at Fryern Court.’166 They would lunch together with Dodo, then pass most of the afternoon in John’s studio discussing the composition. ‘When it was time to leave Augustus would hug us and, standing side by side with Dorelia at the tall Georgian windows, wave us goodbye.’ He had undertaken to show his triptych at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1960. The sending-in day was 22 March. On 10 February ‘a strange thing happened’, he told Philip Dunn. ‘I rapidly made some bold changes and the results have delighted me beyond measure!’167 But a month later he was writing to Wheeler: ‘I think it impossible to finish the triptych in time… I shall have to keep the big panels for another time.’168
Early in 1961, on the evidence of some photographs169 of the cartoon, the Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Trust offered to purchase the central panel for five thousand pounds and present it for the decoration of Burlington House. It was hoped that this ‘magnificent proposal’170 would give John the stimulus he needed. But after five agonizing days, he could not keep back the truth any longer: the triptych was not good enough and never would be. Before, locked up with his fantasies, he could pretend and try to conjure something from this pretence. But studying the panel with the objectivity that the Abbey Trust’s offer now compelled, he could see only the truth. The letter he wrote ‘in great distress’ to Wheeler on 9 March 1961 bows to this truth:
‘I have some bad news for you. After working harder than ever I have come to the conclusion that I cannot continue without ruining whatever merit these large pictures may have had, nor can I expect to recover such qualities as have already been lost. I want to ask you to release me from my promise to have these things ready for the coming show while there is still time to replace them. I cannot work against time. That is now quite obvious: it will be a disappointment for you, and perhaps a disaster for me… I will not again make unnecessary promises but will return to the work I love with renewed zest and confidence...’
Wheeler at once replied with a wire, following this up with a letter accepting John’s reasons and absolving him from his promise: ‘They saved me and I am almost myself again,’ John answered.
But nothing could be the same. In a real sense it had been against time he sought to work: to reach out and reassemble the past – a legendary past that had never existed otherwise than in his imagination. ‘This working from the imagination is killing me,’ he had written on 5 May 1960. ‘I find myself so variable that sometimes I lose all sense of identity and even forget my name.’ So, at the end, he had been brought back to the central predicament of his life: ‘Who am I in the first place?’ In the early visual lyrics, he had revealed a paradise composed in the image of his desire which, though mysterious in its origin, was immediate and actual in its observation. But his desire, arising perhaps from the loss of his mother, had been overlaid by other desires. What had been damped down could not now be rekindled. In his triptych the dream paled into nebulous shadows miming the sensuous beauty and stately gestures of earlier days.
John never abandoned the triptych, but was freer in this final year to turn to ‘lesser and handier things’. Almost his last portrait was of Cecil Beaton. It had been begun in June 1960, but much to John’s fury Beaton left shortly afterwards for the United States. John felt mollified, however, on being introduced to Greta Garbo. ‘I fell for her of course,’ he assured Beaton. ‘…Quel oiseau!… I really must try to capture that divine smile but to follow it to the U.S.A. would kill me. I wouldn’t mind so much dying afterwards...’171 The sittings started up again after Beaton’s return, and became increasingly painful for them both. John seemed at his last gasp. The portrait would change and change again. John daubed it with green paint like a cricket pavilion, then with pillar-box red. He stumped about, lunging at the canvas to add a pupil to one eye or, it might turn out, a button. His hands shook fearfully, his beret fell off, he glared; and Beaton, exquisitely posed, watched him suffer. ‘I think’, John puffed, ‘…this is going to be… the best portrait… I have ever… painted.’
Sex had been one medicine that, in the past, could lift him clear of melancholia. In the summer of 1961, Simon John having left to marry a neighbour, John’s daughter Zoë came to stay at Fryern. John, then in his eighty-fourth year, was sleeping on the ground floor. One night, carrying a torch and still wearing his beret, he fumbled his way upstairs to Zoë’s room, and came heaving in. ‘Thought you might be cold,’ he gasped, and ripped off her bedclothes. He was panting dreadfully, waving the torch about. He lay down on the bed; she put her arms round him; and he grew calmer. ‘Can’t seem to do it now,’ he apologized. ‘I don’t know.’ After a little time she took him down, tucked him up, and returned to her room. It was probably his last midnight expedition.
There was no escape now from the tyranny of the present, no land of hope in his studio, no forgetfulness elsewhere. ‘I have been struck deaf and dumb,’ he told Poppet, ‘so that the silence here is almost more than I can bear.’ Old age had become a nighmare. ‘I feel like a lost soul at Fryern!’ he cried out to Vivien. Honours, now that he cared little for them, came to him from the United States, Belgium, France.*2 ‘I’d like to quit and get away from it all,’ he told a friend. ‘But where is there to go?’
The end, when it came, was simple. He caught a chill; it affected his lungs; and after a short illness he died of heart failure, his heart having been greatly weakened by previous illnesses.
During the last weeks, his abrupt exterior largely fell away and he revealed his feelings more directly. He was agitated at being a ‘blundering nuisance’ to Dodo and Vivien, worried lest they were not getting enough rest. The night he died, they left him alone for a minute and he at once got up and sat in an armchair, complaining that he could not sleep. ‘You try it,’ he suggested, indicating the bed. They got him back and when his eldest son David arrived later that evening, he was ‘breathing very quickly and with difficulty but just about conscious’. Vivien told him that David had come, and he spoke his name. In his sleep he rambled about a picture of an ideal town which he claimed to have finished. The doctor came and John lay very quiet, rousing himself suddenly to remind the women ‘to give the doctor a drink’.
Dodo, Vivien and David took turns sitting up with him that night. At 5.30 a.m. on Tuesday 31 October, with Dodo beside him, he died. ‘His face looked very fine,’ David wrote, ‘calm and smoothed out, in death.’172
*
The funeral service was at Fordingbridge Parish Church. Apart from the many members of John’s family, there were few people – Charles Wheeler and Humphrey Brooke from the Royal Academy; one or two students who had ‘footed it’ from Southampton. ‘I didn’t have any great feeling of disturbance or deprivation,’ remembered Tristan. ‘…But suddenly half way through the service I burst into tears… I couldn’t stop myself and it went on and on.’ Afterwards, at Fryern, they had a party. Dodo, tiny but regal, seemed to have taken it wonderfully well, as if she could not believe yet that John was really dead.
He had been buried in an annexe of Fordingbridge cemetery, an allotment for the dead up one of the lanes away from the town. To this rough field, in the months that followed, odd groups of hard-cheekboned people, with faces like potatoes, silent, furtive-looking, made their pilgrimage. Sven Berlin, man of the road, took Cliff Lee of Maghull. Under the great expanse of sky they stood before the gravestone. ‘He rested with councillors and tradesmen of the area,’ Sven Berlin wrote. ‘…His name was carved in simple Roman letters.’ Cliff Lee stood holding a rose he had torn from the hedge on the way.
‘“The first time I’ve seen you take a back seat, old Rai,” he said… “Here is a wild rose from a wild man.” He threw the rose on the grave and turned away; perhaps to hide from me the grief in his dark face though he was not ashamed.’173
The newspapers were covered with obituaries, photographs, reproductions of pictures that would soon be hurried back to their dark repositories. ‘A man in the 50 megaton range,’ wrote Richard Hughes.174 ‘We lose in him a great man,’ declared Anthony Powell.175 He had personified ‘a form of life-enhancing exhibitionism’, said Osbert Lancaster, ‘which grew up and flourished before the Age of Anxiety’.176 His death was treated as a landmark. ‘In a very real sense it marks the close of an era,’ recorded the leader writer of the Daily Telegraph.177 More remarkable, perhaps, was the admiration felt by artists, such as Bernard Leach and David Jones, whose work and manner of life were different from his own.
On 12 January 1962 a memorial service was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields. To the large crowd, many with curiously similar features, Caspar John read the lesson and Amaryllis Fleming played Bach’s Prelude and Fugue from Suite No. 5 in C Minor for unaccompanied cello. In his address, Lord David Cecil spoke of the heroic scale of John’s personality, the strength and sensibility of his imagination, and the pictures in which these qualities found expression. ‘A visionary gleam pervades these rocky shores, these wind-blown skies… the earthy and the spiritual in his art expresses the essence of the man who created it… it was rooted in the sense that the spiritual is incarnate in the physical, that the body is the image of the soul.’
In questioning how future generations would assess his work, many agreed that it was essential to discount most of what he had done during the last twenty-five years. Public estimation even of his earlier pictures had changed, and would change again. But one day these pictures would be brought out again – ‘Caravan at Dusk’, ‘Dorelia Standing Before a Fence’, ‘Ida in a Tent’, ‘The Smiling Woman’, ‘The Red Feather’, ‘The Red Skirt’, ‘The Blue Shawl’, ‘The Blue Pool’, ‘The Mumper’s Child’ – passing moods and moments of beauty that he had made permanent.
John’s reputation was sent into a deep decline by the many sales and exhibitions that were held shortly before and following his death.178 The market was flooded with very inferior work that he had never intended to be seen.
Romilly and his wife Kathie came to Fryern, and Dodo lived on. She still wore the same style of clothes, sitting as if posing for, walking as though out of, another John painting. At work in the garden, or seated at the refectory table over tea – Gwen John’s ‘Dorelia by Lamplight at Toulouse’ behind her – she appeared extraordinarily like the mythical Dorelia of John’s imagination. ‘Her white hair’, noted the Gwen John scholar Mary Taubman, ‘ – strange and unexpected but accentuating the unchanged features… very kind and smiled quickly… her whole face quick and intelligent. Self-contained, rather frightening, though charming. Conversation conducted very much on her terms.’ Brigid McEwen, who visited Fryern in December 1963, observed her ‘long dress of saffron cotton patterned in black, a neckerchief, long cardigan, long earrings, pierced ears, rings on wedding finger, white stockings & no shoes. She kept playing with her spectacles rather like an old man. Her asymmetrically done hair – a long plait & a white comb. Very young voice… and young expressions “Jolly difficult” (to write life of John so soon)...’
For years she had seemed pliant, sensible, undemanding. But following John’s death she flexed her muscles and rather enjoyed being ‘difficult’. Though she travelled more to France, staying with her daughter Poppet, for most of this time she remained at Fryern.
Fryern too was ageing. Dry rot burrowed through the house; the large studio stood deserted, like an empty warehouse; brambles made the path to the old studio impenetrable. Vandals had broken in and covered the vast triptych of Sainte Sara with graffiti and explosions of paint. Under Dodo’s orders, Romilly laboured long hours in the garden among the giant weeds. Yet even in disarray, a magic atmosphere clung to the place. Kittens still nested in the stems of the clematis; the hammock still swung between the apple and the Judas tree; the pale brick, the long windows leading to dark rooms, the crazy paving inaccurately sprayed with weedkiller, the roses, magnolias, yellow azaleas and, outgrowing everything, the mountainous rubbish dump: all were part of this magic.
On 19 December 1968 Dodo was eighty-seven. She had been getting visibly weaker and, to her consternation, able to do less in the garden. On the evening of 23 July 1969, Romilly found her lying on the dining-room floor. He got her to bed, and she slept. Next morning when he went in she lay in the same position. She had died in her sleep.
*1 ‘After my election to the House of Commons in 1950,’ Montgomery Hyde wrote to the author, ‘…I took up the cause of gypsies. At that time they were being pushed around by the police, particularly in Kent, and Augustus took a lot of trouble in briefing me on the subject of their troubles. He was convinced that their periodic clashes with the police which were reported in a not too favourable press at the time were largely due to a misunderstanding.’ Hyde’s campaign ranged from an article in Encounter (1956) to an appeal for help to Barbara Cartland and physical intervention in the case of Sven Berlin, whose house the authorities were attempting to convert into a public lavatory.
*2 He had been elected an honorary member of the American National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1943; in 1946 he became an associate of the Académie Royale de Belgique; and in 1960 he was invited to join the Institut de France.
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We hope you enjoyed this book.
For an exclusive preview of Michael Holroyd’s definitive biography of Bernard Shaw, read on or click the image.
Or for more information, click one of the links below:
Declaration of Saint Paul’s
John’s Pictures at the New English Art Club
The Chelsea Art School
To Iris [Tree]
‘Augustus John’
John’s Pictures at the Royal Academy
Augustus John: Chronology and Itinerary
Locations of John Manuscripts
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