Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘The company was very charming and sympathetic, I thought,’ wrote one of the guests, Lytton Strachey,’ – so easy-going and taking everything for granted… John was a superb figure. There was dancing – two-steps and such things – so much nicer than waltzes – and at last I danced with him [John] – it seemed an opportunity not to be missed. (I forget to say I was dressed as a pirate). Nini [Euphemia] Lamb was there, and made effréné love to me. We came out in broad daylight.’100

  It was like a dolls’ house. Steep steps led up to the front door, behind which the rooms were poky and, in spite of the sun streaming in from the south over the market gardens, rather dark. The windows were long and thin and well proportioned; yet when children appeared behind them, they looked like iron-barred cages. The best feature was the staircase, which was copied from Rembrandt’s house. In the drawing-room Boris Anrep designed a superb mosaic, a pyramid of wives and children with John at its apex, glowing a dull green as if from the depths of the sea. At the back lay the great studio. With its sloping ceiling, deep alcove, and two fires burning at opposite corners, ‘The studio looks fine,’ John told Quinn on 24 June 1914. But even in these early days he recognized the prison-like atmosphere of the place. ‘It is quite a success I think. It has nearly ruined me,’ he wrote to John Hope-Johnstone. ‘…It certainly is rather Dutch but has a solidity and tautness unmatched in London – a little stronghold. I hope I shall find the studio practical.’ The studio was perhaps the most practical area – an excellent place for parties.

  One of John’s motives for commissioning this house had been to please Dorelia. Their correspondence in these years before the war shows her reluctance to go on accompanying him on his jaunts to windswept areas of Wales or Ireland, or join him roaming after gitanos and mumpers anywhere between Battersea and Merseyside. He had to be on the move; but she needed to settle herself and the children at Alderney: and this was putting their relationship under new strain. ‘I think you are anything but morbid. I get that way far too often I fear,’ he assures her in the summer of 1912. He was painting her less frequently. But ‘…I’m sure I could paint a good picture of you if you wouldn’t mind letting me try.’101 He sends her loving letters – ‘I wish to God you were here,’ he writes from Galway. ‘…wish I was going to sleep with you’102 – and his tone is sensitive, even at times humble. But she is less available now, having so much work of her own to do at Alderney. Since she will not travel with him he must take other models – Nora or Lillian, Nelly or ‘Katie with Songs’ from the bar at the New Docks in Galway City, though whenever Dorelia objects, John quickly comes to heel again.

  But sometimes Dorelia did not object soon enough. Surely then she would be better placed to do so if they shared a house in London as well as in the country? There would be advantages too for him, comforts such as Dorelia’s cooking. The housekeeper she had engaged at Mallord Street intimidated him. ‘Her puddings with froth on the top make me rather self-conscious,’103 he complained. He was sure that one or two bouts of illness he suffered had never been due to alcohol, as malicious people alleged, but to the fact that this housekeeper ‘doesn’t think things are ready to eat till they begin to decompose’.104 But Dorelia remained unmoved by his pleas.

  As a means of bringing them closer together and the symbol of a conventional union, the house in Mallord Street*7 was a failure. Within two years the ‘little stronghold’ had become ‘this damned Dutch shanty’.105 John attributed his dissatisfaction to the Dutch architect’s ‘passion for rectangles’.106 Dorelia blamed the roof garden, which faced north.

  Mercifully John had begun shedding his Welsh cottages before occupying Mallord Street. Nant-ddu went first. Between February 1913 and August 1914 he did not see Innes who, attempting to regain his health, had gone to Tenerife with Trelawney Dayrell Reed. Llwynythyl was given up with its debris of painting materials in 1914.107 The place had gone sour on him. He tracked down the source of the trouble to the noise that Joseph Holbrooke made at meals. ‘I don’t think I can stand him and will probably leave at the end of the week… I could get on with Sime but Holbrooke is too horrible.’ Holbrooke dedicated his piano ballad ‘Tan-y-grisiau’ to John. ‘Most of your Welsh titles of your things are misspelt,’ John told him. Besides, he had the disadvantage of ‘a tune constantly playing in his left ear’. But the ‘man Sime’ was one of Nature’s gentlemen – strongly built, with a cliff-like forehead, eyes of superlative greyish-blue and a look (which grew fixed at Llwynythyl) of heroic patience.108

  In place of Wales, John had hit upon ‘the only warm place north of the Pyramids’109 during winter: Lamorna Cove, near Penzance in Cornwall, where he met ‘a number of excellent people down in the little village… all painters of sorts’110 – John Birch, Harold and Laura Knight, and Alfred Munnings111 – ‘and we had numerous beanos’. John was later said to have indecisively remembered a party that began in Haverfordwest one Thursday and ended the following Tuesday somewhere in Hungary. A number of his Cornish ‘beanos’ were also pretty terrifying affairs. ‘We feared’, Dame Laura Knight recalled, ‘to shorten our lives.’112 John would perform amazing tricks – tenderly opening bottles of wine without a corkscrew; flicking, from great distances, pats of butter into other people’s mouths; dancing, on point in his handmade shoes, upon the rickety table, and other astonishing feats. Then, while the others collapsed into exhausted sleep, out he would go in search of Dorelia, and do little studies of her in various poses on the rocks: ‘He never did anything better.’113 John was delighted with the place. ‘I found Cornwall a most sympathetic country,’ he wrote to Quinn on his arrival back at Alderney (19 February 1914). ‘…There are some extraordinarily nice people there among the artists and some very attractive young girls among the people.’

  ‘It seems your appearance at the Café Royal caused a great sensation,’ John had told Dorelia after one of her rare appearances in London. He himself was in the Café Royal on 4 August 1914, the night war was declared. ‘I remember our excitement over it.’114 One of their friends carried the news among the waiters, and John, suddenly perturbed, turned to Bomberg: ‘This is going to be bad for art.’

  Much of that month he spent with Innes who was to die of his tuberculosis on 22 August. ‘He cannot be said to have fulfilled himself completely,’ John was to write in his first draft for an Innes Memorial Exhibition at the Chenil Gallery in 1923; ‘he died too young for his powers to have reached their full maturity – and for that matter does not everyone?

  ‘But by the intensity of his vision and his passionately romantic outlook, his work will live when that of many happier and healthier men will have grown, with the passing years, cold and dull and lifeless… the cruel fate so soon to overtake him spurred him into frenzied activity which used up all those hours so often with others devoted to dreams or talk or recreation.’

  *

  One of the first things Augustus did after the declaration of war was to send a letter to his sister Gwen. ‘I wonder if you are going to remain in Paris during the war,’ he wrote on 4 August. ‘I hope not. You will have to suffer great hardships I fear if you do and it is not too late to come back here… food will be awfully dear and most likely communication will be stopped and in any case sending money over will be difficult if not impossible… Let me know what you decide and if I can help in any way. With love, Gus.’115

  But he already knew what she would decide. At the Guildhall that autumn, Winston Churchill, newly appointed First Lord of the Admiralty, declared the maxim of the British people to be ‘business as usual’. In their own curiously detached yet conventional ways, it was to be business as usual for both Gwen and Gus. She insisted that she would be safer in France; and besides, she could not leave Rodin. Yet if it became impossible for her to receive her mother’s quarterly allowance from Britain, or to send her pictures to Quinn in the United States, how would she subsist? There was little Gus could do. He sent her train times and offered to fetch her over to stay at Alderney, ‘but of course
she won’t’, he told Dorelia.116

  *1 The painter Jean Varda remembered a characteristic affair with the extravagant dancer Lady Constance Stewart-Richardson – reputedly ‘the worst dancer in the world but one of the most remarkable athletes’, as described by Aldous Huxley, ‘whose strength is as the strength of ten’. Their liaison began in 1914 and ‘for being unrequited lasted longer than his [John’s] periodic infatuations. At Lady Constance’s studio (in her performance of the sword dance) he took a violent dislike to me and in fits of prodigious eloquence cursed me with a wealth of abuse and vituperation, the like of which I never encountered in my life… It was a great treat to hear these gorgeous syllables delivered with the grandiose emphasis of a Mounet Sully of the Comédie Française.’ Varda at that time was Lady Constance’s perspiring partner in the dance. A few years later a calm seems to have descended and at Evan Morgan’s birthday party in July 1917 Aldous Huxley records: ‘in one corner of the room Lady Constance supported John on her bosom.’ She was, he adds, ‘profoundly exhausting company’.

  *2 In Chiaroscuro, John was careful to write of ‘passive yet firm resistance’ at the railway station. But in a letter to Dorelia he is more direct: ‘I shoved her out.’

  *3 He was the author of The Battle of Britain in the Fifth Century; an Essay in Dark Age History.

  *4 He was drawn by Wyndham Lewis playing the flute. Later, with Compton Mackenzie, he became joint editor of the Gramophone, in which he reviewed the latest records under the pseudonym ‘James Caskett’. In Octave 5 of My Life and Times, Compton Mackenzie recounts that he first met Hope-Johnstone in Greece in 1916. ‘John Hope-Johnstone had arrived by now from Corfu with a kitbag containing a few clothes, one top-boot, several works on higher mathematics and two volumes of Doughty’s Arabia Deserla, a pair of bright yellow Moorish slippers, a camera and a flute… He enlisted at the beginning of the war, somehow cheating the military authorities over his eyesight; then his myopia was discovered by his having saluted a drum he had mistaken for the regimental sergeant-major.’

  *5 ‘Hope-Johnstone used to try and explain relativity to me when I was about 10,’ Romilly John recalled. ‘I still remember the horror of his subsequent discovery that I had not wholly mastered vulgar fractions.’

  *6 ‘We considered her rather a witch-like figure, though I daresay she was quite handsome in a Danish way,’ Romilly John wrote. ‘…On parents’ day Mrs P. invariably gave the same speech, in which she told, with considerable emotion, how she was enlightened as to the meaning of the word “gentleman”, presumably there being no equivalent in Denmark either of the word or the thing. One day she had seen from an upstairs window one of the 12 older boys {not a. John) stealing gooseberries. This boy had subsequently owned up to the theft, an instance of gentlemanliness the like of which Denmark could afford no equal. It was this boy who at a later date was employed as tutor to Edwin and me.’ Romilly to the author, 15 November 1972.

  *7 It was originally No. 5, but the numbering was changed in 1914 and it became No. 28.

  EIGHT

  How He Got On

  1

  MARKING TIME

  ‘Kennington and John: both hag-ridden by a sense that perhaps their strength was greater than they knew. What an uncertain, disappointed, barbarous generation we war-timers have been. They said the best ones were killed. There’s far too much talent still alive.’

  T E. Lawrence to William Rothenstein (14 April 1928)

  ‘[Edward] Wadsworth, along with Augustus John and nearly everybody, is drilling in the courtyard of the Royal Academy, in a regiment for home defence,’ wrote Ezra Pound that autumn to Harriet Monroe. It was the last occasion John would find himself so precisely in step with other artists. His letters soon grew more portentous, nearer in tone to those of his father: full of the stuff to give the troops. Already in the first month, the sight of fifteen hundred Territorials plodding up Regent Street swells him with pride: ‘they looked damn fine.’1 And by the end of the war he was anxious lest the Germans be let off too lightly. ‘The German hatred for England is the finest compliment we have been paid for ages,’ he assures Quinn. To some extent he seems to have fallen victim to war propaganda, though never to war literature. ‘The atrocities of the Germans are only equalled in horror by the war poems of the English papers,’ he writes to Ottoline Morrell in 1916. ‘What tales of blood and mud!’ In addition to what he reads in the papers, he absorbs confidential whispers from his various khaki sitters, repeating stories of lunatic generals on whom he fixes the blame for early defeats. ‘As for the men, they are beyond praise.’2 By the spring of 1916 he is looking forward to being able to ‘swamp the German lines with metal’.

  John’s attitude to the war remained consistent: but his emotions, as he lived through it, veered hectically. At first he is excited; by the end it has aged him, and he is no longer quite the same person. Starting out smartly in step, he was left behind struggling to find a world where he could be at ease. From the beginning he wanted to ‘join in’ – ‘it’s rather sickening to be out of it all.’3 His predicament is set out in a letter (10 October 1914) to Quinn:

  ‘I have had more than one impulse to enlist but have each time been dissuaded by various arguments. In the first place I can’t decide to leave my painting at this stage nor can I leave my family without resources to go on with. I feel sure I shall be doing better to keep working at my own job. Still all depends on how the war goes on. I long to see something of the fighting and possibly may manage to get in [in] some capacity. I feel a view of the havoc in Belgium with the fleeing refugees would be inspiring and memorable. Lots of my friends have joined the army. The general feeling of the country is I believe quite decent and cheerfully serious – not at all reflected by the nauseating cant and hypocrisy and vulgarity of the average Press. There is no lack of volunteers. The difficulty is to cope with the immense number of recruits, feed and clothe and drill them. There are 20,000 near here, still mostly without their uniforms but they have sing-songs every night in the pubs till they are turned out at 9 o’clock.’

  The war intensified John’s sense of exclusion. There was his deafness ‘which is very bad now’, he wrote in 1917. ‘I can’t hear anything less than an air-raid.’4 By curtailing freedom of movement, the war also aggravated his tendency to claustrophobia.

  He was being badgered by their old friend Ursula Tyrwhitt to make sure Gwen was all right. Gwen had written to Ursula describing the bombing raids on Paris and the cattle trucks at the Gare Montparnasse ‘crammed with frightened people’. But though she became a little frightened herself by what she was to read in the newspapers, especially by the massacre at Ypres, she felt ‘more and more disinclined to go’.5 The Germans of course were ‘brutes and vandals’ and it would be ‘dreadful’ if they won; yet England had become ‘quite a foreign country to me’. In a sense she had no country outside the dark first-floor room she now inhabited at 6 rue de l’Ouest and the flat she had rented on the top storey of an old house near the bois de Meudon, in the south-west suburbs of Paris.

  In December 1914 Gus came striding up the rue Terre-Neuve in Meudon, ‘tall and broad-shouldered’, Gwen’s biographer Susan Chitty writes, ‘wearing a loose tweed suit with a brightly coloured bandanna round his neck’.6 After having registered as an alien, Gwen told him, she was doing work as an interpreter for English officers; and Gus approved. ‘The soldiers must be glad of your help as an interpreter. I suppose even the officers don’t know a word of French.’ He suggested she might try Red Cross work – certainly any sustained painting seemed ‘impossible’ for both of them during the war. He also explained why he could not join a fighting regiment (his ‘establishment would go bust if I did’); and Gwen understood. ‘Will the world be very different afterwards?’ Gus was brimful of confidence. ‘It might do people a world of good,’7 he asserted. In any event he was certain Britain would benefit. For Gwen, who had feared Britain would be invaded, there was comfort in the feeling that the English would ‘come up to th
e mark’.

  Gus’s invitation to England remained open; and Gwen remained in France. ‘Ici tout va bien, surtout la petite fille,’ he wrote to her from Alderney.8 ‘…The children obstinately keep up the Xmas traditions. They are all flourishing & Dorelia too… Don’t let yourself get frozen dearest. Take exercises. Love from Gus.’9 Dorelia sent over some money and clothes; Gus sent Sanatogen tonic wine and copies of A. R. Orage’s New Age. He could tell Ursula Tyrwhitt, and also his father, that he had done what was possible; and old Edwin John could pass the news on to Winifred and Thornton.

  Winifred had made her final visit to Europe shortly before Ida’s death. In January 1915 she married – and Thornton, perhaps the loneliest of all these Johns, returned to England. In a letter to Gwen, Winifred had described Thornton as a ‘thought reader’.10 But though he could trespass into her secret thoughts he never seemed to know what other people were thinking and he was, she told Gus, ‘very unlucky in his partners’.11 His twelve years in North America had been disappointing. He worked hard at mining gold in Montana, but found only hostility among the farmers, who disliked the holes he dug in their land and threatened him with writs. Then he got a job ploughing with three horses in British Columbia, but had fallen ill. After that he built a boat which he sailed on Lake Kinbasket, planning to make good wages washing the gravel for gold. He loved his boat and the work suited him, but there was only gravel. By now he had run out of partners and eventually spent his solitary days on his boat, fishing. He was fishing near Lasquet Island when war broke out. He had been so long alone, and the world had changed so much, he was astonished by the news when he went to buy provisions in Vancouver. He applied to join the Canadian Army – nearly all the Canadian troops, he believed, were English-born – but was rejected on account of his broken foot.