I had always been taught with some pride that the English are the most insular race in the world. But in matters of art and literature, I discovered, the French are much superior. The indifference with which the English treat all artists, the French reserve for foreign artists alone. There is a special blank look, a specially emphatic shake of the head they use when you mention an artist who is not French. They love to smile incredulously when they hear of such phenomena, and lingeringly mispronounce the names. It was not even possible for them to confuse Augustus John with Jasper Johns: they knew of neither. They knew nothing too of Gwen John, who had spent most of her painting life in Paris – nothing beyond the fact that she was one of Rodin’s models catalogued under the more easily pronounceable name Mary Jones.
Before I set off for France I had armed myself with bilingual letters of introduction and permission statements from various keepers, curators and copyright holders. These gained me a number of appointments, in particular with one conservatrice who, it was said, saw no one. As I entered her office, she rose from her chair to tell me she was off that very hour for Venezuela. I sat down as if for life; she reluctantly subsided and continued talking French. But I was equal to this. My French, in which I never make a mistake, is completely silent (the result of having been taught it as a dead language for ten years at privileged preparatory and public schools). She, equally well-educated, spoke no English. We had therefore equipped ourselves with seconds: she with a teddy bear of an old gentleman twice the age of anyone and deaf; I with a girl, indispensable I hoped to the pursuit of John scholarship, who was afflicted in several languages with an ingenious grasp of malapropism (‘masturbate’ for ‘masticate’ was one I remember with affection). The contest between the four of us was fantastic, but finally the girl’s misnomers won over the teddy bear’s mishearings, and I triumphantly entered the archive.
Further south I was met by the drastic improvements inflicted by the French on the fishing villages Augustus John had sought out as refuges from twentieth-century commercialism. Aerodromes, huge glue factories, bauxite hills, red, barren and misshapen, had obliterated much that he had loved and painted in Provence. But it had not been possible to erase everything, and I saw a little of what he had tried to celebrate: the curious blue light over the inland sea at Martigues; and the Alpilles, spotted with green aromatic scrub and the spiky plumes of the cypress trees above St-Rémy.
Over several years I was to be paid advances on royalties of £4,000 from Heinemann in Britain and $40,000 from Holt, Rinehart in the United States. A good part of this money was not due until completion and delivery of the book, but I was also given several hundred pounds as the recipient of a Winston Churchill Fellowship. With some of this money I extended my travels into Italy, where I saw the pictures that had inspired some of Augustus John’s most ambitious work, and to Spain where I made a short attempt to live a simple mountain life as the guest of some quite genuine demi-Johns. I was not very good at this. To earn goodwill I took on the duties of gardener, a job that needed the skills of an alpinist. I could spy the sea, glimmering with the prospect of escape. But among outdoor people there appears to be a rule of timelessness any interruption of which is judged to be bad manners. As I scaled the rocks with my watering-can, I plotted an acceptable escape. A telegram to my mother requesting her to send an urgent SOS mentioning illness seemed, at that height, the most sensible arrangement. I sent it from a village near by, but it arrived in England reading as if I were gravely ill and requesting her presence at my deathbed. She set out and, miraculously, she found me. She had expected a vigil beside some hospital bed. I was delighted to see, in the face of such a dismal prospect, she had not omitted to pack bathing suits and evening dresses.
One of the privileges of writing biographies is that you meet, often on friendly terms, some extraordinary people. In Liverpool I came across the legendary ‘Romani Rawnie’ Dora Yates, incredibly old but still very game, who introduced me to that sane centre of nomad studies, the Gypsy Lore Society. Later on there was the fine sight of Anthony Powell dancing over a Somerset lawn wearing a striped apron, a Burmese cat on his shoulders, in his hand a wooden spoon, asking me whether I liked curry. Rather different was an afternoon on the floor of David Jones’s room trying to coax tea out of some primitive machinery. Then there were some rain-swept Welsh days with the novelist Richard Hughes and his wife Frances, a painter of bonfires and waterfalls. We passed much of the time reconstructing a farcical drama, complete with doors, windows and haunted shrubbery, that Augustus John and Dylan Thomas had waged at their home nearly forty years earlier. The bearded Hughes was excellent in the role of Caitlin Thomas.
Finally there was the voluminous John family. Dorelia sent word to them all and they collaborated with varying degrees of enthusiasm. ‘What shall I tell him?’ cried her daughter Poppet. ‘Tell him,’ Dorelia replied, ‘that Augustus was a monster!’ The implication was that they could tell me whatever they wanted, and though Poppet and her sister Vivien awaited me with alarm, they both talked and wrote freely once we had got to know one another. There were also their half-sisters, children ‘not of the whole blood’, for whom I posed more of a problem.
And there were the sons. The eldest, David John, I used to visit near the river in Chelsea. He had begun his career as an architect, dreaming of the grand lunatic asylum he would one day build for his family. But instead he had taken to music, then become a postman, and after narrowly missing an opening as lavatory attendant, so he told me, gone into retirement, though occasionally moving furniture and giving parties. I caught up with Robin John on his silent wanderings at a pub in Piccadilly. From Paris came his brother Edwin John, once a prizefighter, later a watercolourist, who was Gwen John’s executor. After an initial meeting in a pub, Edwin’s daughter, the dashing Sara John, gave a supper party for her father and myself, together with Mary Taubman, the leading authority on Gwen John. We all brought bottles of wine and I have little memory of how the evening went, except that it signalled the beginning of a very happy working relationship.
Mary Taubman was herself a painter and had written a thesis on Gwen John at Edinburgh University. In 1953, her final year as a student, she had gone out to see Edwin John in France. ‘He was installed in the little pavilion which Gwen John had built among the tall trees of her garden-plot at Meudon and where she had spent the last years of a reclusive life,’ she remembered. ‘As the heir to Gwen John’s estate, Edwin, more than any other person, could help or hinder my researches. That our meeting should happen in this place was an unlooked-for bonus and, I felt, an auspicious one.
‘He was waiting on the platform of Meudon’s small station when I arrived. It was characteristic of him to have come in person to escort me to his door and a sort of old-world courtesy was a facet of the kindness he showed throughout our meeting… I was relieved to notice that not only my training in drawing and painting but also my rural upbringing seemed to be counting in my favour and I sensed that, among the jokey references to bagpipes, Calvinism and haggis, my Scottishness was being marked up as a plus, even if only because it reinforced the likelihood of independence from what he called “the London world”.
It strikes me now that each aspect of his personality remembered from that first meeting was, in its own way, to impinge on the course of all my future Gwen John studies. Alongside the generosity and the teasing sense of humour (I hadn’t yet heard of his fame as a practical joker) there was his self-deprecating manner and his scorn for pretentiousness. This in turn was linked to an impassioned integrity in his approach to his role as custodian of Gwen John’s oeuvre and reputation. It was his most impressive, if at times disquieting, characteristic and the one which, in the end, and in spite of difficulties it raised, I valued most.
As we looked out over Gwen John’s garden, drinking tea from her teacups, we discussed the enigma of her last decade. Edwin… was unwilling to make a pronouncement, far less a guess, as to why she had virtually given up painting towards the e
nd of her life. I asked about the surviving pictures and learned that they were now dispersed, some in London, some in Cornwall, some still in Meudon, though these were not at present accessible. However there were more gouaches and drawings we could look at. I was impressed by his discerning appreciation of these pictures as we went through them one by one...
One of my objectives in coming to Meudon was to see a collection of Gwen John’s letters and notes already glimpsed in some tantalising extracts published by Augustus John and, more recently, elaborated upon by Sir John Rothenstein… Edwin supplied the additional fact that the suitcase containing these papers was at present in the care of Sir Caspar John and was no doubt lodged somewhere in the corridors of the Admiralty in London… Before I left, he asked me to choose a little picture from a group of her gouaches and presented it to me in a cardboard portfolio she herself had made and decorated. My request to be allowed to study the papers in Sir Caspar’s charge was something he felt unable to agree to.
Back in Edinburgh I was met by a letter from Edwin enclosing Sir Caspar’s address and giving me permission to make use of the Gwen John documents. That letter and the papers it gave access to were to be the key to all my future research.’2
I was meeting Edwin John and Mary Taubman fifteen years later. There had been several interruptions to Mary’s work on Gwen John. She had intended to go back to her own painting, she told me, and had also taught at the Cardiff College of Art. But while she was living in France she had come across a privately owned cache of Gwen John’s pictures, and felt there was no escape. In one sense, it seemed to me, Edwin was her jailer, and the key he provided all those years ago sometimes liberated her, sometimes locked her away. Not all Gwen John papers were ‘in the corridors of the Admiralty’. From time to time Edwin alluded to other material. Like a character in a fairy story, Edwin would release these papers and pictures to Mary by instalments, as if frightened that she might vanish once she had seen everything and published her book. I remember her telling me that after more than a dozen years, he had casually mentioned a most important batch of letters while they were riding on the top of a bus. Partly because of this complex style of collaboration, and partly because of her own perfectionism, Mary’s progress on her Gwen John book was slow. The six or seven years I spent on Augustus John did not particularly impress her.
Each of us worked as the other’s part-time research assistant. I came back from France and the United States with Gwen John material; she managed to get Edwin John’s general agreement to help me, and would let me have copies of items she thought might be useful. It was a rare sympathetic arrangement, with much unspoken, and no sense of rivalry, that did nothing to prepare me for the rigours of academic competitiveness that surrounded Bernard Shaw. I found it encouraging to have someone like this working in tandem and I remember our time together as being full of discovery, excitement and laughter. Were we being affected in any way, we wondered, by our subjects? People said that Mary had begun to look like a Gwen John model, perhaps look like Gwen John – she said it wryly herself, challenging some response. I could point to my clean-shaven chin as a sign of my immaculate independence, a sign that was to become even more remarkable after a third bearded subject. But I could remember that, when I was deep in Lytton Strachey’s early ‘black period’, with all its detail of late-Victorian neurasthenia, I had begun to feel infected with several long out-of-date diseases. The fact is that no writer knows how he or she is being invaded by the subject of a book – at least not at the time of writing it.
Another invaluable colleague was Malcolm Easton, author of an extraordinary book on Aubrey Beardsley. He was twenty-five years older than I was, had scraped a living as an artist in Soho in the 1930s, gone under the sea to serve in submarines during the war, and then emerged as an art historian at the University of Hull. His exhibition there in 1970 entitled ‘Augustus John: Portraits of the Artist’s Family’ was an eye-opener for me, showing a selection of John’s best pictures that no one of my generation had had an opportunity of seeing. A lonely, difficult, admirable man, with a tendency to misunderstand or mishear things to his own disadvantage, and no element of self-seeking in his nature, Malcolm preferred to write to people rather than see them – he had beautiful handwriting and designed his own writing-paper. When we met, it was at the Charing Cross Hotel, and from those meetings and our letters came a book on John’s work, and a couple of exhibitions: ‘Augustus John: Early Drawings and Etchings’ at Colnaghi’s in 1974; and a large two-part show the following year at the National Portrait Gallery.
From my adventures I would return from time to time to Fryern Court. ‘Still more letters have turned up,’ Dorelia would write, and I would go down and load them into the car. On these occasions, followed by the curious gaze of the family, Dorelia would take me into a small room behind the kitchen where she was popularly supposed to be spilling the beans. In fact she was neither eloquent nor exact. Some of her answers were masterpieces of brevity. Her best comments would come in response to stories I told her of people I had met whom she had not seen for many years. She liked travelling back into the past, having grown frailer and feeling sometimes irritated by the limitations of old age. I remember driving away one evening in July 1969. She was sitting in a chair in front of the house in the sunlight, smiling her self-contained smile. A fortnight later she was dead. She died as she had lived, without fuss. On the evening of 23 July, Romilly had found her on the dining-room floor, and he put her to bed. That night she died in her sleep. When Romilly told me, I felt the shock as if I had known her a long time.
She had not expected to live to read my biography, she once told me, and the arrangement we had made concerning her executors now came into force. From Fryern, Romilly reported that he had ‘a pillowcase full of letters’ for me. Over the next year, a number of these pillowcases would bloom from time to time. The other executor, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Caspar John, lived in London. Our first encounter had been an abrupt affair, but I knew enough of Augustus by then to realize that I must not submit, and at the end of our meeting the Admiral generously conceded: ‘I always say if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em: so I join you.’ At various stages of the book’s progress he would get through to me on ‘the blower’ and I would sail over. There might be red wine or beer, an exchange of questions and answers, occasionally a broadside. After an hour or two of these engagements, I would stagger out and navigate my way back as best I might.
As I worked away I accumulated many scholarly encumbrances. Huge filing cabinets appeared; concertina files and coloured pens lay on every surface. It was impossible to open any drawer or cupboard without an avalanche of old photographs and microfilms spilling out. The whole place was cluttered with good intentions unfulfilled – they spread over the desk and chairs and floor, and began growing up the walls.
There is a paradox about research: the more you do, the more you appear to give yourself to do. I have met scholars who pass their lives in research without ever reaching the writing stage. What carries me from one stage to the next is anxiety. There are many strains to the anxiety virus. I remember how, one blustery day in France, my pleasure at watching some beautifully coloured butterflies moving between the trees turned to horror on realizing that they were specimens of French currency that had blown out of my pocket. Other forms of anxiety strike even deeper than the financial one. All length is torture, and the biographer tunnels on so long that, like Macbeth, returning is as tedious as to go on. There is no sighting the end, no remembering the beginning, and he is alone. Not quite alone, of course: he has the dead for company, and his work is to resurrect the dead.
After my travels, I reverted to old habits and wrote in bed. It was the only place where I could resolve my natural laziness with an obstinate streak of conscientiousness. But it was surprising how this sensible arrangement provoked people. It infuriated my father who was determined, as it were, to catch me napping, though no one was ‘at his desk’ earlier than I was.
&
nbsp; A morning bedful of two or three hundred words was by the end no longer a disgraceful total, followed by afternoons among the files. There is nothing like the preparation of a chronology or the copying down of passages from letters for teaching me about my subject. Life itself slipped past as I bent over these mechanical exercises that alone enabled me to spot unexpected connections and give the work tension and design.
The transference of a book from private to public property can be alarming, but I was fortunate in that, despite many difficulties, the John family had really ‘joined me’ and weathered the ordeal so well.
*
Augustus John was published in Britain and the United States in 1974–5. Shortly afterwards Caspar John commissioned a friend, Ronald Hamand, to make a catalogue of the John family papers. This job took some three years, and when it was completed, Caspar delivered the catalogue,3 together with all the papers themselves, to his co-executor and half-brother Romilly John, leaving him to sort out what should be done with them. What Romilly did was to appeal somewhat desperately (‘I have a problem… they’re often so illegible’) to the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff.
The National Museum of Wales was then in the process of rediscovering and establishing both Augustus John’s and Gwen John’s identities as native-born Welsh artists. Early in 1976, the centenary of Gwen’s birth, the museum had acquired from Edwin John more than a thousand of her drawings, together with sketchbooks and several oil paintings – this being material found in her Paris studio after her death in 1939. Before this acquisition, Cardiff held only a small representation of her pictures. But ‘the huge collection the Museum now houses is by far the greatest number of her works anywhere,’ wrote the Assistant Keeper of Art, A. D. Fraser Jenkins, in a booklet accompanying the Gwen John centenary exhibition.
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