Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  That evening, after dinner at the Coffee House, Frank Crowninshield whirled him round the city and eventually landed him back at the Biltmore Hotel ‘exhausted and bewildered by an orgy of colour, noise, smartness and multitudinous legs’.150

  Of Pittsburgh, where he arrived next day, John remembered little but the boundless hospitality of its natives and the ‘infernal splendour’ of their steelworks. He did not stay long. He had been invited to Buffalo to paint an impeccable old lady, Mrs Goodyear. On the station platform at Buffalo the sitter’s son, Conger Goodyear, was surprised to see hovering at John’s elbow the Assistant Director of the Carnegie Museum, John O’Connor. O’Connor whispered that he had come to explain away the ‘extraordinary capacity’ of John’s drinking habits. ‘I replied, somewhat haughtily that I thought Buffalo men could take care of themselves in the drinking line,’ Goodyear reported. ‘Pittsburgh might have suffered but I had every confidence in my fellow citizens. I was wrong.’151

  John was lodged at the Saturn Club, reputedly – in those days of Prohibition – ‘the most bibulous of our social institutions’. He appreciated the compliment. ‘This club is a very good place’, he acknowledged, ‘full of determined anti-Prohibitionists… There is a little back room with lockers all round the walls in which the members keep their “hootch”. About 6 o’clock this room gets densely packed with a crowd of vociferating men wildly mixing cocktails. I have the freedom of Conger Goodyear’s locker.’152 For part of the first evening, about which he could recall nothing, his host ‘participated lap by lap’. ‘The following afternoon and evening I decided to stay aloof and keep count,’ Goodyear wrote. ‘Some of my friends formed relay teams to pace the visitor. The official score showed seventeen cocktails for our guest without visible effect other than a slight letting down of British taciturnity. There were a few highballs during dinner and after and we sat in a respectful silence as the champion walked a straight path bedwards.’153

  Work on the portrait sped along intermittently, and sometimes John would escort the old lady politely to the shops. One morning, as she was emerging from her dressmaker, Mrs Goodyear cracked a joke, fell down a flight of stairs and broke her ankle. ‘Just my luck!’ commented John.154 That afternoon he left for New York.

  Over the next weeks a gradual disenchantment with American life may be traced in his letters. Like his brother Thornton, he had hoped to ride over the American West, he told a reporter from the New York Times, to set up camp along the prairies, push up the Mississippi, mix with the black workers on the cotton plantations. His plans were greeted with bewilderment. ‘The prairies had been ploughed; the backwoods levelled; the Indians mostly tamed or exterminated; the frontiersmen replaced by “regular fellows”.’155

  In a letter to the ten-year-old Poppet (28 April 1923) he gives a child’s-eye view of New York.

  ‘This is a strange country. There are railways over your head in the streets and the houses are about a mile high… The policemen chew gum and hold clubs to knock people down. The people don’t say “yes”. They say instead Yep, yeah, yaw, yawp, yah and sometimes yump. Otherwise they simply say “you bet” or “bet your life”. They eat clams, fried chicken, chives, slaw soup and waffles with maple syrup. They drink soda-ices all the time. The rich people drink champagne and whisky for dinner and go about with bottles of gin in their pockets. When a policeman catches them they have to pay him about 1,000 dollars after which he drinks their gin and locks them up.’

  John did not seek publicity in New York: the more publicity, the less freedom. So far as possible he kept his whereabouts secret from journalists.156 He put up initially at the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue, then at the Hotel des Artistes at sixty-seventh and Central Park, and finally moved to a studio owned by Harrington Mann. To this studio numbers of Americans trekked, convinced that they were discovering a new Sargent, the famous American portraitist. ‘It’s been a fearful grind,’ John wrote to Dorelia. Everyone wanted to give parties for him. ‘The telephone rings continuously.’ There was always something to do: a boxing match, a cocktail party, the theatre, a trip to Philadelphia, another party. His best hours were in the company of a decorative artist called ‘Sheriff’ Bob Chanler, ‘a Gargantuan creature, as simple as a babe’, with great flapping arms and hands, ‘indescribably improper but… as good as gold’ at whose house he met ‘easy-going ladies, eccentrics and hangers-on’. It was almost like home. But John was cautious. ‘I walked down Fifth Avenue,’ he told Dorelia,

  ‘there were a number of rather tarty-looking damsels walking about giving glad or at any rate significant eyes – of course one mustn’t respond, for if you as much as say “how do you do” to a woman, you are immediately clapped into gaol for assault or otherwise blackmailed for the rest of your life. The country is chiefly controlled by a villain named [Randolph] Hearst who owns most of the papers… This city at night is dominated by a stupendous scintillating sign advertising Wrigley’s chewing gum. The poor bewildered multitude seethe aimlessly below.’157

  He saw the Americans as ‘inconceivably naif though ‘not unattractive’. But it is possible to see John himself as floundering naïvely within the bowl of this artificial society. Despite all the hectic enjoyment he was never quite at ease, except in Harlem. It was with great difficulty at first that he could persuade anyone to take him there. After that he went alone and sometimes stayed all night. ‘The dancing that took place in these Harlem clubs was brilliant beyond description… I was immensely pleased.’158

  Harlem at that time was not known in polite society and when John spoke of his plans to paint New York’s black population there was some high-pitched embarrassment. ‘Do you like the mulattoes, or the brown or black Negroes?’ one incredulous journalist asked. ‘I like them all,’ he growled. He was questioned on Harlem as if it were some far-off planet. ‘They seem to be natural artists,’ he told the New York press. ‘It seems too bad that when any of them in this country show talent in the graphic and plastic arts, or in any line of artistic endeavour, they are denied an equal chance with other artists.’159

  John’s other area of criticism was Prohibition. ‘There’s a new rich class springing up,’ he told Dorelia, ‘ – the bootleggers. They are the strongest advocates of Prohibition and extremely powerful.’ In public he aimed his protest at what appeared to him the most appropriate point. The Secretary of the Independent Society of Artists in New York had been convicted for hanging a picture by Francois Kaufman that showed Christ being prevented by some Prohibitionist politicians from changing water into wine, a joke that appealed to John. ‘The conviction was an outrage on liberty and art,’ he thundered. ‘Your prohibitionists seem the richest subjects for satire… Prohibition is more than a farce – it is a tragedy. I agree with those who say it breeds disrespect for all laws. It is unjust to the poor, because one doesn’t have to be in this country long before discovering that anyone with money can get all the liquor he wants, while it’s beyond the reach of those with little money.’160

  These were scarcely the tones of a new Sargent. Nevertheless, New Yorkers liked him. He was wild but, like the Indians, he could be tamed. ‘I could get any number of portraits to do if I liked,’ he informed Dorelia. The idea of having done them, swiftly, painlessly, profitably, was attractive; but the work itself was ‘sweat and travail’. Letters from Dorelia arrived, describing the flowers in her garden, the girls’ new pony, the dogs, cats and vegetables. Amid the canyons of New York, all this seemed infinitely green and desirable, and he longed to be back.

  Before leaving, he saw for the last time his old patron John Quinn. Quinn had been dreading this encounter. Having largely lost interest in John’s painting, he was then arranging to sell off most of his pictures on the open market. To his relief John ‘was very pleasant and did not allude to the episode of my selling the paintings at all’, he confided to Percy Moore Turner. ‘I took him out riding with a lady...’ By admiring his new pictures and his special friend, the beautiful Jeanne Foster (to whom he made
amiable advances), John charmed Quinn. But the following year, Quinn was dead. The doctors had given him up months before, but once again he knew better than any of them, and simply would not die. They told him he was suffering from a hardening of the liver; he shook his head. Barely alive, hardly able to move, his body skeletal though swollen with fluid and yellow all over, he admitted to a small glandular disorder. He was ‘run down’, he believed, and must be careful not to catch a cold. He was to die on 28 July 1924. ‘He had cancer of the liver but never knew it and so had hope to the end and made plans for the future,’ Jeanne Foster wrote to Gwen John. For three months she had scarcely left him. ‘He suffered greatly… He was so thin I could lift him.’161 No longer did he want to look at Picasso’s work, or Braque’s, Rousseau’s or anything by Augustus. But he kept a few of Gwen’s pictures near him, as well as some by Matisse, Arthur Davies and Nathaniel Hone, and some sculpture by Brancusi and Gaudier-Brzeska. Towards the end he grew strangely fond of flowers, having never much cared for them during his life. But he had been frightened of his emotions, and perhaps it was this which had made Jeanne Foster afraid of declaring her love for him. ‘He was a strange man,’ Mitchell Kennerley wrote to John; ‘led a strange life; died a strange death. Properly handled his Collections will ensure his fame.’162

  In the last week of June, John sailed back on the Berengaria. ‘The first few days he seemed quite low,’ noted Conger Goodyear, who was with him on the boat. ‘He said he thought he had rather overdone it in New York and he was glad to be getting back from American Prohibition to England and temperance.’

  By April the next year he was back in New York in a big bare studio in the Beaux Arts Building at 80 West Fortieth Street. ‘It is a very beautiful high building on Bryant Park – near our Public Library and not far from Fifth Avenue – quite fashionable in fact,’ Jeanne Foster wrote to Gwen. This second coming, which has been described as ‘an electric event… that enriched the great saga of John’s career’,163 was largely indistinguishable from the first. ‘All the newspapers reproduced photographs of him,’ Jeanne Foster wrote.164 The Mellons and the Wideners queued up for the society portraits; Harlem, all aglow at night, again bewitched him. But he was less cautious. He began painting black girls ‘semi-nude’; and he began quarrelling with American dealers from whose ‘unctuous greetings’ he protected himself with a ‘cold zone’. There was something about New York, he discovered, that for all its speed and activity deprived him of initiative. All around throbbed an air of industry: yet it was impossible to work.

  ‘Life’, he warned Homer Saint Gaudens, ‘is full of pitfalls (and gin).’ At the end of one dinner he broke his silence and, to everyone’s amazement, apologized in booming tones for having ‘monopolized the conversation’. At a lunch he was seated next to a lady who pressed him about young artists: whose pictures could she buy that would multiply in value ten times within five years? ‘But is there no one?’ she finally asked, ‘is there no one whom you are watching?’ His reply ended their conversation: ‘I am watching myself, madam, with considerable anxiety.’

  John’s reputation in the United States was built largely on hearsay. The Carroll Gallery and the Photo-Secession Gallery in New York; the Boston Art Club, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Cleveland Museum of Art and numerous other galleries had been endeavouring over several years to hold John exhibitions. The Carnegie Institute itself had offered to set up a one-man show that would tour the country. All these establishments had the burden of John’s active co-operation. He was, as one gallery director put it, always ‘cordial… but persistently indefinite’.165 When his first one-man show in New York was held early in 1928 at the Anderson Gallery, John inadvertently was in Martigues and never saw it. Stevenson Scott, who had brought him over in 1924 to ‘secure commissions for the paintings that commemorate his American period’, and had undertaken to show the fruit of this period at Scott and Fowles, did not live to see the exhibition take place. It opened, a quarter of a century later, in the spring of 1949.

  Perhaps John’s best portraits of Americans were done in Europe: of Tom Mix, the movie actor, who visited Mallord Street with a camera team to film the event; and of the McLanahans from Philadelphia, at their aptly named house in the Côte d’Or, Château de Missery. His portrait of Frances McLanahan,166 a large-eyed oval-faced beauty, is a Swedish study, blue and yellow, of peach-fed innocence. It was eventually completed in London where, about the same time, he was failing to finish a portrait of Governor Fuller of Massachusetts.

  It was in pursuit of Fuller that he made his last voyage to the United States in 1928 – a journey he never failed to regret. ‘Come over and rescue me!’ he appealed to Carrington. He had been carried off to the Fullers’ country house, some fifty miles from Boston, and presented with the task of painting the Governor and his problematic children. ‘This sort of work is very ageing,’ he grieved. ‘I have practically no hair left.’ One difficulty was that the Fullers ‘do not yet grasp the difference between a hired photographer and an artist. As I am their guest I cannot point out the difference as forcibly as I should like.’167 The children were impossible – in John’s picture the son (‘who blacked his sister’s eye’) has no feet because ‘that boy drives me crazy, swinging his legs about all the time’; and one of the daughters (‘a nice young bitch… if one could catch her on the hop’) he dismissed altogether because ‘neither she nor I could concentrate’. Mrs Fuller, a good soul brimming over with cheerfulness, had ‘designs on my virtue’, making his position in the house tricky. ‘I can’t stick this,’ he wrote darkly to Dorelia. ‘I can’t tell you all.’ The Governor himself, John decided, ‘is the best of the lot… I could make Fuller the most ridiculous figure in two hemi-spheres if I wanted to.’

  As the weeks flowed by, his lamentations reached a comic intensity. ‘It’s hell and damnation here!’ he cried. ‘Everybody I meet seems half-witted.’ The prolonged meals with sweet food and iced-water; the gramophone gabbling all day its muddled melodies; the political guests with their recreational tales of golf and fish; the ‘advice’ on painting; the labour-saving devices including a ‘ridiculous old ass of a butler’ with a pseudo-cockney accent who, John believed, ‘was suffering from a disease of the spine till I realized his attitude was merely one of deference’; all these conspired to make the months of August and September ‘the most hideous ordeal of my life’.

  In the second week of October they moved, en masse, to Boston. The Fullers expected John to stay at their official residence in Beacon Street, but he had been lent a studio in the Fenway by Charles Woodbury, the marine artist, ‘a perfect old dear… I could have embraced him’. Though the walls were covered with alarming pictures of sharks leaping from the Caribbean Sea, ‘I think I shall recover here,’ he assured Dorelia. ‘That stay with the Fullers pulled me down terribly. The darkest passage of my life undoubtedly.’ He had, he added, devised a ‘good method of doing portraits with much use of toilet-paper’.

  Offers for portraits still poured in – ‘there are millions to be made… but I would rather paint vegetables.’168 He took up his brushes and produced four cyclamen, two begonias and a chrysanthemum. It was a long way to have come for such work. Among his few exciting portraits was one of a black elevator girl who offered to return with him to England. Wherever he went he could see nothing but ‘masses of full-grown men dismally guzzling soda-ices’. ‘This city is a desert,’ he concluded. But no longer did he have to rely on charity for a glass of wine. A coffin-like object in his studio had been filled with drink. He began to suffer from terrible hangovers. Worse still, he had picked up ‘a little actress’ with whom he was seen in public. This was Harriet Calloway, the star of Blackbirds and famous for her ‘Diga Diga Do’. By December the Fullers were as eager as John himself for his departure. ‘They seem to think I’m a comic here,’ he grumbled. The last laugh was theirs. When the portrait was finished, an official telegram of congratulation was sent from the Governor’s residence to Augustus’s father i
n Tenby.

  ‘How happy I shall be to get on the Ocean,’ John had written to Dorelia on 28 November, ‘ – even if the ship sinks it will be better than staying here, where one sinks only less quickly.’ He sailed from New York on 14 December. ‘I am a complete wreck,’ he warned his family. ‘…Be ready to meet me at Southampton with a drink.’

  John’s chief endowment to the United States was his unfinished work. Over the next thirty years, numbers of ageing Americans continued to throng the Atlantic in pursuit of their portraits. One was Mrs Vera Fearing, a niece of Whistler’s. John had begun to paint her in October 1928, but not having completed the portrait to his satisfaction by the time he left, he refused to sign it. She promised to come over. The first time she came, he was ill. Later she followed him to Connemara and then back to England. From August to December 1931 she stayed at Fryern, being painted in the tool shed. In the course of these sittings she changed her dress, he changed his studio. She learnt to drink, helped Dorelia with the housework, met Lytton Strachey, Carrington and Lawrence of Arabia, went for death-defying drives to London. Then, in 1935, she tried again – as Mrs Montgomery with a husband and two children. Everyone was extremely kind, John himself offering to give her a child of their own. But one day – ‘one of the worst days I’ve ever been through’ – John decided his studio was haunted and disappeared at midnight to London. So it went on. Telegrams and letters flowed between them, and ruses of all dimensions were engineered to lever the picture from John’s grasp. He worked on, sometimes using photographs and the clothes of other sitters, grappling with the abominable job of fitting someone else’s body on to her head. ‘I want to work some more on your extremities,’ he pleaded. She waited: was divorced, remarried, became a grandmother. Her father-in-law, who had originally commissioned the portrait, died without ever having seen it. War came. War went. ‘Augustus means you to have it,’ his friend Reine Pitman assured her on 13 July 1959, ‘but is already slightly baulking, and saying he wants to show it before sending it off.’ That autumn it had reached ‘an electric fire having its signature dried! So it won’t be long now...’ Then, in 1960, Vera Stubbs (as she had now become) was repossessed of her picture. But her new husband didn’t care for it and it was hung in a disused hut.