On one occasion, after a successful party, the two war artists commandeered a car and careered off together almost into enemy lines. It was probably the closest John got to the fighting, and Lewis, the ex-bombardier, was soon poking fun at his friend’s mock-war experiences. But John, noticing that Lewis had retreated home following their exploit, pursued him vicariously. ‘Have you seen anything of that tragic hero and consumer of tarts and mutton-chops, Wyndham Lewis?’ he asked their mutual friend Alick Schepeler. ‘He is I think in London, painting his gun pit and striving to reduce his “Vorticism” to the level of Canadian intelligibility – a hopeless task I fear.’
Occasionally John would ‘run over’ to Amiens, Paris or, more surreptitiously, back to London. At Amiens he ‘found Orpen’,118 whose welcome seemed a little agitated. ‘They are trying to saddle me with him [John],’ Orpen protested to Will Rothenstein, ‘ – but I’m not having any! Too much responsibility.’ He also came across the painter Alfred Munnings who was there to ‘do some horse pictures’.
In Paris he put up at the Palais d’Orsay as the guest of Lord Beaverbrook, who had arranged a special entertainment for his ‘Canadians’ in a suite at the Hôtel Bristol.119 At supper, John recalled, ‘the guests were so spaced as to allow further seating accommodation between them. The reason for this arrangement was soon seen on the arrival of a bevy of young women in evening clothes, who without introduction established themselves in the empty chairs.’ These girls, the pick of the local emporium, came strongly recommended: ‘one or two of them were even said to be able to bring the dead to life.’ Beaverbrook, at this critical moment, tactfully withdrew, and was followed by the impetuously cautious Orpen (‘I’m afraid he’s a low lick-spittle after all,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia). Bottles of champagne then appeared and the atmosphere became charged with conviviality. ‘Yet as I looked round the table, a curious melancholy took possession of me,’ John recorded. ‘…I had no parlour tricks, nor did my companions-in-arms seem much better equipped than I was in this line; except for one gallant major, who, somehow recapturing his youthful high spirits, proceeded to emit a series of comical Canadian noises, which instantly provoked loud shrieks of appreciative laughter.’ To keep his melancholy at bay, John also attempted an outburst of gaiety, raising ‘in desperation’ one of the girls to the level of the table and there effecting ‘a successful retroussage, in spite of her struggles’.
Despite all this ‘rich fun’, he felt curiously islanded. Before starting out, he had promised Cynthia Asquith to keep a diary while at the Front, but ‘the truth is I funk it!… I am in a curious state,’ he had explained from Aubigny,
‘ – wondering who I am. I watch myself closely without yet being able to classify myself. I evade definition – and that must mean I have no character… To be a Major is not enough – clearly – now if one were a Brigadier-General say – would that help to self-knowledge if not self-respect...? I am alone in what they call the “Château” in this dismal little town. I am very lucky, not having to face a Mess twice a day with a cheerful optimistic air. When out at the front I admire things unreasonably – and conduct myself with that instinctive tact which is the mark of the moral traitor. A good sun makes beauty out of wreckage. I wander among bricks and wonder if those shells will come a little bit nearer...’
The wearing of a uniform seemed to have imposed another self on him, and he had no centre from which to combat this imposition. The devastation of the fields and trees reflected a devastation within him. At Beaverbrook’s party or in the mess, he could not lose himself; alone, in the château where there was ‘no romance’, he felt characterless. Yet to paint he had to establish a sense of character, and if he could not do this then he felt it might be better to be killed, suddenly, pointlessly, by some shell. A sudden bellicose joy surged through him at the great news that thirty German divisions had been repulsed with ‘colossal slaughter’. There was ‘a wonderful show last night’, he wrote to Dorelia, ‘when we discharged five thousand gas drums at the Boches followed by an intense bombardment. Things are getting interesting out here.’ But this joy quickly passed and he fell into ‘a horrible state of depression’.120
The crisis erupted in a sudden act of self-assertion when he knocked out one of his fellow officers, Captain Wright. ‘The gesture had only an indirect relation to my codpiece,’ he assured Gogarty.121 Captain Wright had said something that, interpreted by John as an insult, acted as the trigger for this explosion. The situation was serious and John was rushed out of France by Lord Beaverbrook. ‘Do you know I saved him [John] at a Court-martial for hitting a man named Peter Wright?’ Beaverbrook complained in a letter to Sir Walter Monckton, the lawyer and politician who had been serving in France (30 April 1941). ‘I cannot tell you what benefits I did not bestow on him. And do you know what work I got out of John? – Not a damned thing.’
John arrived back in London at the end of March ‘in a state of utter mental confusion’.122 There was no chance of getting back to France, and for four months the threat of military punishment hung over him. ‘I think this trouble must be over,’ he eventually wrote to Gogarty on 24 July 1918. ‘The Canadian people seem to think so, and it’s now so long since.’
It remained to be seen whether he could salvage something from his few months at the front. ‘I am tackling a vast canvas,’ he had told Innes Meo (22 February 1918), ‘- that is, I shall do.’ Cynthia Asquith, who saw this canvas on 29 July, recorded her impression in a diary: ‘It is all sketched in, but without any painting yet… it rather took my breath away – splendid composition, and what an undertaking to fill a forty-foot canvas!’ On 18 November he is writing to Gwen: ‘I am hard at work on the Canadian war picture. The cartoon will be finished by Xmas after which there will be an exhibition.’123 This cartoon went on view in January 1919 when the Observer art critic P. G. Konody organized a Canadian War Memorials exhibition at Burlington House showing war pictures by Bernard Meninsky, C. R. W. Nevinson, William Roberts, the Nash brothers and others. ‘Even Mr Paul Nash may grow old-fashioned with the years,’ commented The Times, ‘but it is hard to imagine a time when Major John’s cartoon (not yet finished) “The Pageant of War” will not interest by its masterly suggestion of what war means.’124 In an article for Colour Magazine, Konody described John’s summary of all he had witnessed during his five months in France, and his portrayal of it as a vast gypsy convoy.
‘His picture may be described as an epitome of modern war. In it are introduced crowds of refugees, men, women and children with their carts and cherished belongings, detachments of soldiers in their trench outfits, officers on horseback, trucks carrying soldiers to the front line, wounded sufferers and stretcher-bearers, a camouflaged gun position, bursting shells, an observation balloon, a ruined château, Vimy Ridge, all the movement and bustle, all the destruction and desolation of war. But this astounding accumulation of motives is organized with classic lucidness, with a sense of style unrivalled by any other living painter. Full of animation, movement and seething life, the design is controlled by a rare sense of order.’
Konody, who wrote books on Velazquez, Filippo Lippi and Raphael, as well as a study of C. R. W. Nevinson’s war paintings, believed that John’s prodigious decoration would stand comparison with the work of ‘Michelangelo, Signorelli, Raphael or Leonardo, to whose best tradition John is faithful in spite of his essential modernity… [if he] has the staying power to carry out consistently with the brush what he has so triumphantly accomplished in charcoal’.125 Intermittently during that year John grappled ‘with my Canadian incubus… I must try to get quit of the whole business. No more official jobs for me.’126 He did not have the staying power. The erection of the art gallery in Ottawa, planned to house the entire Canadian War Memorials collection, was postponed, and forty years on Beaverbrook and John were still in correspondence, Beaverbrook asking after the picture, John parrying with inquiries about the gallery.127
But there is one large oil painting, ‘Fraternity’,128
at the Imperial War Museum in London, that seems to justify the time he spent in France. Executed in muted greens and browns, it depicts three soldiers against a background of ruined brickwork and shattered trees, one giving another a light for his cigarette. It is a touching picture, emotionally and literally in the swirl of arms and the two cigarettes held tip to tip. But though the background is an authentic record of what John actually saw in France, the figures are a straight copy of a mass-circulation postcard from the Daily Mail’s Official War Picture Series 2, No. II – ‘A “Fag” after a Fight’. It is a studio artist’s picture.
The fact was that John had little aptitude as a war artist. A caricature by Max Beerbohm that appeared in Reveille in 1918 shows him in his neat uniform and tin hat behind the front lines staring into a field of French peasants in Johnesque attitudes with spades, buckets and hoes, exclaiming: ‘Ah, now there really is a subject.’
*
‘Peace has arrived,’ Gus wrote to Gwen on 18 November. ‘London went mad for a week & Paris too I suppose.’129 He had called on Gwen in December 1917 on his way to the Canadian headquarters at Aubigny and ‘at the fourth call caught her & we dined together’ at the Café de Versailles in Montparnasse. The change in her since he had last seen her four years ago was rather terrible. Before the war Henry Lamb had thought her ‘really quite a gay person who could be full of fun’;130 and Duncan Grant, seeing her ‘living with her cats on the old fortification’,131 did not find a recluse but someone eager to go out picnicking and talk of Rodin. But Rodin had died on 17 November 1917 and Gwen, so Gus reported to Dorelia the following month, ‘has been getting more and more hypochondriac’.132 During these war years she had not seen much of Rodin, though they corresponded and she still thought of herself as his ‘true wife’. But then she did not see much of anyone over these years. The fortifications rose. ‘I don’t like meeting people,’ she explained to Quinn. In 1913 she was admitted into the Catholic Church. As Rodin was a Catholic, she explained, this made no difference to their relationship. ‘I was born to love,’ she had written. The advantage of loving God was that He did not fall ill, get old, die. ‘He loves me,’ she wrote in her child’s hand. But He could not protect her from grief over Rodin’s death. ‘I don’t know what I am going to do,’133 she admitted to Ursula Tyrwhitt five days after he died. ‘I have not seen Gus yet.’
Gus trusted to Gwen’s ‘esprit’ not to get morbid over Rodin. Yet he was bothered by her. ‘I trust you to believe that my infrequent letters don’t mean that I don’t think of you very often,’ he assured her.134 The morning after their dinner, he drove round to her ‘garret at Meudon’ and borrowed five pounds off her. ‘She says my visit did her a lot of good,’135 he assured Dorelia. That sounded like typical bravado, almost comic in its insensitivity. Yet it was true. Gwen confided to Ursula that she had surprisingly enjoyed his visit. Somehow he broke the spell of death and connected her again, however randomly, with living energy. By February 1918 she was feeling ‘nearly normal’ and beginning to paint again. She had particularly liked learning about Gus’s family (and was ‘surprised to hear of Vivien’s existence’).
‘She utterly neglects herself,’ Gus had complained to Dorelia, whom he asked to send Gwen photographs of the children ‘and perhaps a Jaeger blanket as she admits the cold keeps her awake at night. The Lord only knows how she passes her days.’136 He had promised to come back and see her again soon, but after his stand-up fight with Captain Wright and the threat of a court martial, he was not allowed into France for the duration of the war. He seems to have been too embarrassed to tell Gwen the facts. ‘My authorities wouldn’t send me back to France as I expected & wanted,’ he wrote. ‘They preferred to keep me at work here [Mallord Street] which was very silly… I will try to get to Paris early next year [1919]… One will be able to fly over in 2 or 3 hours! I cannot come before.’137
In the last months of the war, as Paris came under bombardment from German and American troops, Gwen had abandoned her room in the rue de l’Ouest and, under ‘balls of fire’ from the planes and the awful ‘Gottas [i.e. Gotha heavy bombers] with torpillos’, she travelled back and forwards on the train moving her possessions to Meudon. Gus had renewed his invitation to Alderney. Dorelia, he said, ‘would love to see you again’. But if he could not lure her into England, he did at least persuade her to go off a few times to Brittany.
During 1918 she found rooms in the Château de Vauxclair, an empty, silent, sixteenth-century house behind tall iron gates, with a neglected garden, near a ‘wild lonely bay’ at Pléneuf. ‘I think I shall be alone there,’ she wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt. ‘I could work.’138 But in the spring of 1919 the house was bought by speculators. Gwen stayed on as a squatter, hoping that Gus might buy it. He tried, but at fifty thousand francs it became too expensive for him. ‘Just at present debts & responsibilities are rather overwhelming,’ he apologized to her that summer.’ ‘…As you say it takes a lot of money to keep my family going.’139 She also appealed to Quinn, but he complicated everything with his businesslike questionnaires and plans to move in Arthur Symons as caretaker. Men always became entangled in money like this.
Before the end of 1919 Gwen returned to Meudon. At last it was business as usual. Winifred had given birth to a second child in the United States. Thornton, after a short stay in Tenby, was mining oil shale at Deer Park in Newfoundland. ‘I suppose later he will live in his boat and catch fish,’140 Gus accurately predicted in a letter to Gwen. He himself was also planning to spend a week or two round Tenby. ‘I wish you were coming too.’141
This concern for her, tinged obscurely with guilt, agitated Gwen. Gus had written to Quinn saying that she ‘wasn’t looking at all fit’. But he wanted things for her that she didn’t want herself, or at least not often, not much. So she made an effort to reassure him, explaining the nature of her independence. ‘When illness or death do not intervene, I am [happy],’ she wrote. ‘Not many people can say as much.
‘I do not lead a subterranean life… Even in respect to numbers I know and see more people than I have ever. (Some of my friendships are nothing to be proud of by-the-bye.) It was in London I saw nobody. If in a café I gave you the impression that I am too much alone, it was an accident. I was thinking of you and your friends and that I should like to go to spectacles and cafés with you often. If to “return to life” is to live as I did in London, merci Monsieur! There are people like plants who cannot flourish in the cold, and I want to flourish.’142
Admiration, exasperation, attraction, temptation confused their feelings. If they could have shuffled the cards, dealt new ones from the pack they both held, then they might truly have helped each other. As it was they could do very little, though that little was sometimes useful. In their separate ways, now that the war was over, Gus wrote to Gwen, ‘one will work better I hope.’143
*
On Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, John made his appearance at a party in the Adelphi ‘amid cheers, in his British [sic] officer’s uniform, accompanied by some land-girls in leggings and breeches who brought a fresh feeling of the country into the overheated room’.144 He seemed to be enjoying himself, and communicating enjoyment, more than anyone. The following month he wrote to Quinn: ‘London went fairly mad for a week but thank the Lord that’s over and we have to face the perils of Peace now.’
He had, he reminded Dorelia, ‘an odd nervous system’. His ‘bad period’, that had begun in France, persisted. ‘Rather dreadful that feeling of wanting to go somewhere and not knowing where,’ he noted. ‘I spend hours of anguish trying to make a move – in some direction.’145 In this sinking uncertainty he grew more dependent on other people. One was Lady Cynthia Asquith. ‘Of you alone I can think with longing and admiration,’ he declared. ‘You have all the effect of a Divine Being whose smile and touch can heal, redeem and renew.’ For Cynthia Asquith, herself close to a nervous breakdown, admiration was a medicine to be swallowed as ‘dewdrops’ – though when it took the form of ‘an adva
nce – clutching me very roughly and disagreeably by the shoulders – I shook myself free and there was no recurrence’.146 What John responded to was the unhappiness below her giddy exterior. He understood her need for such an exterior and found he could talk with her. ‘I bucked up somewhat,’ he told her. ‘Such is the benefit we get from confessing to one another.’
The war was over, but the trappings of war remained. In the spring of 1919 he was invited to attend the Peace Conference in Paris. Lloyd George proclaimed that the conference should not be allowed to pass ‘without some suitable and permanent memento being made of these gatherings’. The British Government had therefore decided to ‘approach two of the most famous British artists and ask them to undertake the representation of the Conference’. The two selected were John and Orpen, and both accepted. They were to get a subsistence allowance of three pounds (equivalent to £62 in 1996) a day, expenses, an option whereby the Government could purchase each of their pictures for three thousand pounds, and a five-hundred-pound option price for the portraits of visiting celebrities. Many of these celebrities, the Government was assured by Sir George Riddell, Chairman of the News of the World, who was acting as liaison officer between the British delegation and the press, ‘are most anxious to be painted’. In John’s case there was an immediate obstacle. Unaccountably he was still in the Canadian Army, and special arrangements were rushed through enabling him officially to be ‘loaned to the War Office’.
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