The doctors were confident they could not cure him. They had diagnosed ‘general paralysis of the insane’, which could proceed, they confirmed, through hopeless idiocy to death. They spoke matter-of-factly, were kind, but firm: all hopes, they promised, were ignorant and vain. Symons (who lived thirty-seven more years in perfect sanity) had, they declared, a life expectancy of between two months and two years – it could not be more. His manner of life at Brooke House, though described by the specialists as ‘quiet’, was in some ways unusually active. He took off his clothes and assumed the title of Duke of Cornwall. He frequently dined with the King and kept forty pianofortes upstairs on which he composed a prodigious quantity of music. He rose each morning at 4 a.m., and worked hard on a map of the world divided into small sections; he also wrote plays, devoted endless time to the uplifting of the gypsy, and, when not occupied as Pope of Rome, involved himself in speculations worth many thousands of pounds. But his main duty as a lunatic was to arrange for Swinburne’s reception in Paradise, and when Swinburne died in 1909 the pressure of these delusions began to ease. ‘Had it not been for [Augustus] John,’ he wrote later, ‘whose formidable genius is combined with a warmth of heart, an ardent passion and will, at times deep, almost profound affection, which is one of those rare gifts of a genius such as his, I doubt if I could have survived these tortures that had been inflicted upon me.’
Already by the summer of 1909, Symons was being allowed out from Brooke House in convoy, followed by Miss Agnes Tobin, a West Coast American lady bitten with a passion for meeting real artists, and, at some further distance, a hated ‘keeper’ from the asylum. This procession would make its serpentine way to the home of Augustus who, after losing the keeper ‘without compunction or difficulty’, would set them high-stepping to the Café Royal, where he prescribed for Symons medicines more potent than any administered at Brooke House. ‘At the Café Royal, between five and eight, we each drank seven absinthes, with cigarettes and conversation,’ Symons wrote excitedly.113 There were many of these splendid occasions: visits to the Alhambra Theatre and to the Russian ballets; glorious luncheons at the Carlton and sumptuous suppers with young models in Soho; all for the sake of what Symons called ‘la débauche et l’intoxication’.
Augustus was good to Symons. ‘Although I like him,’ he later explained to his sister Gwen, ‘I find it difficult to support his company for more than 5 minutes.’114 Nevertheless, under the impression that the poor man was shortly to die, he set out to make his last few weeks enjoyable. ‘I have seen Symons a good deal,’ he informed Quinn (25 October 1909) ‘ – he keeps apparently well but one can see all the same that he is far from being so. The doctors give him 2 or 3 more months… he reads out his latest poems – which are all hell, damnation and lust.’
Augustus had not calculated that, a dozen years later, he would still be entertaining Symons ‘a good deal’, and that Symons would still be counting on him to be (14 April 1921) ‘as wonderful as ever’.
What he did for Symons was to blow into his life and keep blowing, ventilating it with humour, filling it with people, elbowing out Symons’s morbid introspection. The delusions melted into nothing before the heat of actual events. But part of Symons’s recovery was due, Augustus maintained, ‘to the kindness and devotion of Miss Tobin’.115 She was forty-five with the light behind her, hailed from San Francisco, had translated Petrarch, and now lived at the Curzon Hotel in Mayfair. She was observed to be ‘a little bit flighty’.116 Conrad (who dedicated Under Western Eyes to her) called her Inez; Francis Meynell, however, called her Lily ‘because of the golden and austere delicacy of her head and neck’; and she called Augustus ‘my poor butterfly’. He stood up to it well. ‘I’ve been seeing Symons and Miss Tobin,’ he told John Quinn (18 December 1909). Symons, he added, ‘keeps pouring out verses’.
The three of them had been brought together (while Augustus was briefly in London following his escape from Liverpool’s Lord Mayor) by John Quinn, the New York lawyer reckoned to be ‘the twentieth century’s most important patron of living literature and art’.117 Quinn arrived in England that summer to buy some pictures by Charles Shannon, Nathaniel Hone and ‘Augustus John, the artist who is much discussed in London now’.118 He had heard tell of both Symons and Augustus from W. B. Yeats and, not content to meet them separately, had arranged for them to see one another too. There appeared to be advantages in this for everyone. Miss Tobin, who was coming into contact with more artists and authors than she could have dreamed possible, made the suggestion that Quinn acquire manuscripts by Symons and her friend Conrad. ‘Your bringing A.S. and Mr John together was a miraculous success and will, I think, be an immense solace to A.S.,’ she assured Quinn (16 September 1909). ‘Mr John told me he would keep up the friendship – and wants A.S. to sit for him.’ Augustus’s portrait of Symons, one of his subtlest interpretations of writers, was delayed until the autumn of 1917 when, though described by Frank Harris119 as showing ‘a terrible face – ravaged like a battlefield’, it was warmly praised by the Symons family. ‘John has done a fine portrait of A[rthur],’ Rhoda confided to Quinn (29 October 1917). ‘…What an odd fish he is; but he has great personal qualities. He has been true to A[rthur] all thro’ these years, and it’s few who have… he’s a great artist, isn’t he?… A[rthur]’s portrait is very El Grecoish!’
Of Quinn Augustus did a number of drawings (one of them described by a friend as ‘the portrait of a hanging judge’) and a large formal portrait in oils – all during a single week in August 1909. On the fifth and final sitting, as Augustus was about to take up his brushes, Miss Tobin stepped forward and exclaimed that the canvas was perfect – ‘at the razor’s edge’. Augustus at once laid down his brushes and began drinking – so the picture was perforce finished.120
Although Quinn affected to think well of his portrait – ‘I liked the portrait John made of me,’ he wrote calmly to Lady Gregory (21 December 1909). ‘And I liked John himself immensely’ – it was not an encouraging likeness. When it was exhibited that autumn at the NEAC under the title ‘The Man from New York’, the critic of the English Review (January 1910) wrote: ‘The peculiar note of hardness which Mr. A. E. John has could not have found a better subject than “The Man from New York”. It shows exactly that hardness which we look for and find in this type of American.’
Quinn insisted that, on reading this, ‘I howled out loud with glee’.121 There are few more doleful sounds than the laughter of a man without humour. Quinn’s lack of humour was a very positive quality and he enjoyed drawing attention to it by cracking jokes.122 His response to Augustus’s portrait was indeed partly the result of its being a very funny picture. It presents him at three-quarters length, seated with his left hand on his hip and his right hand extended, resting on a cane. The shape of his figure is that of a tent and upon a face of tiny proportions at the apex of this design there sits an expression of the sternest vacancy, the mouth of the ‘garrulous Irish American’ for once firmly sealed. Quinn, his biographer B. L. Reid tells us, ‘felt baffled and unhappy about it’,123 though Symons, Pissarro and others considered it ‘extremely good’.124 Bravely, he hung it over his mantelpiece for as long as he lived, but would indignantly protest that Augustus ‘painted me as though I were a referee or umpire at a baseball game or the president of a street railway company with a head as round and unexpressive and under-developed as a billiard ball. Thirty or forty years of life in school, college, university and the world has I hope put a little intelligence into my face. Intelligence is not predominant in the John painting of me, but force, self-assertion and a seeming lack of sensitiveness which is not mine!’125
Quinn’s interpretation of the portrait was right. ‘Do not expect any subtle intelligence from him [Quinn] or any other Yankee,’ Augustus warned Will Rothenstein (20 September 1911). ‘…Money has literally taken the place of brains and character, and the American mind is a metallic jungle of platitude and bluff.’
In an earlier letter to Rothenstein A
ugustus had lamented the dearth of ‘millionaires of spirit’. In Quinn he had found a millionaire of the purse. He would have liked to like him. ‘We became very friendly,’ he wrote after their first meeting.126 But they valued each other for qualities other than friendship. ‘He’s a treasure,’ Augustus told Dorelia (August 1909). ‘He’s offered me £250 [equivalent to £11,800 in 1996] a year for life and I can send him what I like. He’s a daisy and will do much more than that.’ It seemed to Augustus that so liberal a patron, and one tactful enough not to inconvenience him by living in the same country, presented an ideal solution to his problems. This extra money would release him from a lot of commissioned work and allow him to paint imaginative pictures. ‘I can tell you honestly you did me a lot of good that week in London,’ he wrote in his first letter to Quinn (September 1909), ‘and that quite apart from pecuniary considerations. You will help me to keep up to the scratch.’127
The figure of Quinn, hopelessly beckoning, stood at the end of a long road lavishly paved with good intentions. When, for example, he asks for a complete set of etchings, Augustus willingly consents, adding (4 January 1910): ‘I mean to methodize my work more and put aside say one or two months every year to etching – it can’t be done every day or any day.’ In another letter (25 October 1909) he tells Quinn: ‘I am extremely anxious to study Italian frescos as I am fired with the desire to revive that art… I am quite ready to say goodbye to oil painting after seeing the infinitely finer qualities of fresco and tempera.’ But when Quinn replies with dismay, Augustus hurriedly gives way (18 December 1909):
‘What you say about my remarks on fresco and oil-painting are words of wisdom – I wrote under the enthusiasm of the moment. But I have had time to realise that oil-painting has its own virtues and have given up despising my own past – a thing one is too apt to do, when struck with a fresh idea. I suffer from being unduly impressionable – and often forget the essential continuity of my own life: the result being I am as often put back on my beam’s ends rather foolishly. What you say is true that one is apt to despise one’s own facility – whereas one should recognise it as the road to mastery itself. I shall keep your letter and read it over whenever I feel off the track – my own track. It will be medicine for me who am occasionally afflicted with intellectual vapours.’
One of the contradictions of Quinn’s character was that, while being financially generous, he was a triumphantly mean man. His letters to Augustus and other artists and writers are always business letters, and almost always interchangeable – what has been the main body of one is quoted in another. Essentially this correspondence is a form of memoranda for his files; it is pitted with headings and sub-headings, listings and recapitulations of earlier correspondence. He is not afraid of recounting events out of which he comes extremely favourably and everyone else greatly to their disadvantage. He confesses being partial to ‘juicy girls’, but at the same time he is a sexual puritan much given to amatory philosophizing, for which Augustus seemed an obvious target.
Quinn perfected the art of boredom. Dullness by itself was not enough. He ensnared his victims in the web of his money and inflicted on them his terrible jokes, appalling lectures, his deathly political harangues. Many of his ‘friendships’ disintegrated under this treatment, invariably, on Quinn’s part, with a sense of moral relish. He fed greedily on gossip, extracting confidences and, ‘in confidence’, passing them on. It continually amazed him how extraordinarily stupid people were, and sometimes he wrote to tell them so – though he preferred telling their friends.
But in Miss Tobin, Quinn had met his match. Before long she was seeking to employ him for legal advice about her nightmares. ‘I had a frightful dream which told me efforts were being made to make me out mentally unbalanced at some time or other,’ she informed him (24 July 1911). ‘This is a dreadful stigma. But… the only side of it that is of importance is the legal side. Can you find out for me if I have been found “incapable” at any time for any cause – that is the legal term (“incapable”) isn’t it? Irresponsible, I mean.’ This was a subject upon which Quinn found some difficulty in taking instructions. Miss Tobin was sympathetic. She would cross the Atlantic and call at his office. She would travel with an English nanny who would be seasick. So would he please ‘have a man sent out on a pilot- boat’. There is real pathos when Quinn suddenly cries out: ‘I am a dreadfully driven man!’ But in his legal opinion to Miss Tobin can be detected the seeds of his own lunacy: ‘My conviction [is] that the origin of most dreams is in the stomach or intestines.’
Quinn had rapidly diagnosed Symons’s complaint as venereal disease. Symons might ‘fool them all yet’, he guessed, but Quinn himself would not be fooled. His duty was clear: CABLED FIFTY POUNDS PLEASE WARN FRIEND AGAINST DANGER VENEREAL INFECTION ITALY.
Such cables, which were intended for Augustus and no ‘friend’, reached him wherever he travelled. However far he went, however fast or uncertainly, by van or train or erratically on foot, the venomous torrent of Quinn’s goodwill, choked with the massive boulders of punning and unintentional double entendres, overtook him. At Arles, for instance, Augustus read (February 1910):
‘For God’s sake look out and protect yourself against venereal disease in Italy. Remember the Italians aren’t white people. They are a rotten race. They are especially rotten with syphilis. They don’t take care of themselves. They are unclean. They are filthy. Whatever their art may have been in the past, to-day they are a degenerate, filthy, diseased race. They are professional counterfeiters, professional forgers, habitual perjurers, blackmailers, black-handers, high-binders, hired assassins, and depraved and degenerate in every way. I know two men who got syphilis in Naples… I know another man who got syphilis in Rome. Therefore for God’s sake take no chances. Better import a white concubine than take chances with an Italian. The white woman would be cheaper in the end… Your future is in your own hands, my dear friend. I am convinced you have the intellect to keep the rudder true.’128
In time, Quinn’s medical lunacy took a deeper hold on him, spreading from venereal disease to diseases of the feet and teeth. He became a specialist in sciatica (‘sciatica is a term of ignorance and a disease arising from ignorance’); in lumbago (‘lumbago is a term of ignorance and a disease arising from ignorance’); and in the relationship between fornication and eye strain. The cure for such distempers was soup, eight glasses of water a day and plenty of X-rays. In dentistry, a new American science ‘like chiropody’, lay the secret of ‘healthful’ life. To all writers and artists he was generous with his expertise. Whether they had bad eyesight or bad feet, he would urge them to visit their dentist. ‘I think I wrote to you two years ago I told [James] Joyce that the trouble with his eyes was due to his teeth,’ he reminded Symons (15 November 1923). ‘I could see it.’
What was common to both Symons’s and Quinn’s relationship with Augustus was a form of vicarious living. In Symons this vicariousness is plain: ‘What I am certain of is that John – of all living men – has lived his life almost entirely as he wanted to live it,’ he wrote to Quinn (21 October 1915). ‘So – he is the most enviable creature on earth.’
The vicarious quality in Quinn is more complicated. He led two lives. In the present he worked hard as a lawyer and amassed a considerable fortune; and with this fortune he bought his paintings for the future. He had a good eye for pictures, but he neither enjoyed them much aesthetically nor treated them primarily as financial investments. He collected them so as to shore up his immortality. ‘All my life, or rather for twenty years, it seems to me I have been doing things for others,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein (25 March 1912). The thought gave him no pleasure.
Augustus was one of those for whom, Quinn later came to believe, he had done too much. He initially cast Augustus as an angel on whose back he would ride heavenwards – only to discover that this was not necessarily Augustus’s destination. By 1910 Quinn had arranged to pay him three hundred pounds a year (equivalent to £14,100 in 1996) for the pick
of his own work, and a further two hundred pounds to select, on his behalf, work by other British artists. In short, Augustus was to act as his patron’s agent. Quinn’s delusion, almost as fundamental as Symons’s, was that a man who, by his own admission, was inconsistent, temperamental and had different tastes from his own, would be a good choice as his British representative. Nevertheless the plan worked reasonably well for a few years, and it was the eccentricities of Augustus that killed it.
Augustus’s eccentricity was compounded of several ingredients. Between his promise and the fulfilment of that promise fell an almost endless pause. His incompetence over small matters tuned Quinn up to a marvellous pitch of exasperation. What should have been simple was made complicated with radiant ingenuity: paintings were sold twice, or painted over, set fire to, sunk, never begun, or lost for ever. But there was another ingredient – a motive, for all this purposeless perversity. Augustus hated these patron-and-artist dealings: they reminded him of father-and-son arrangements, and he felt an increasing itch to behave badly. He attracted hero-worship – then punished it.
‘We were rather afraid he’d go mad again,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia about ‘poor Arthur’. He was certainly ‘very gaga’ sometimes. But, from among the four of them – Augustus, Quinn, Symons and Miss Tobin – it seems that Symons, protected by an official certificate, was suffering less grievously from ‘intellectual vapours’ than his friends.
9
ITALIAN STYLE, FRENCH FOUND
‘What’s the good of being an island, if you are not a volcanic island?’
Wyndham Lewis to Augustus John (1910)
‘I am overwhelmed with work just now,’ Augustus wrote to Alick Schepeler, ‘and have to scorn delights (or pretend to) and live laborious days.’ He had it in mind during the autumn of 1910 to prepare a catalogue of his etchings, and to make a book about the gypsies of Europe; he would exhibit some paintings at the NEAC and drawings at the Chenil; and then he would paint all his children, separately and together. He had already started a large new portrait of Dorelia – ‘it ought to be one of the best portraits of a woman in the world,’ he told Quinn (4 January 1910), ‘ – the woman at any rate is one of the best.’ Newest and best of all were two other big enterprises. ‘There’s a millionairess from Johannesburg [Mrs Lionel Phillips] who proposes sending me abroad to study and do some decorations for a gallery at Johannesburg which she is founding,’ he wrote to Quinn (25 October 1909). ‘If she is sufficiently impressed by what I will show her all will be well.’ This opportunity had almost certainly come through Sir Hugh Lane, who was then forming the collection at the Johannesburg Municipal Gallery. Augustus had started work this autumn decorating Lindsay House, Lane’s home in Cheyne Walk – ‘exciting work’, he told Ottoline Morrell (1 October 1909). Wyndham Lewis wrote to encourage him: ‘Let it be an authentic earthquake.’129
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