Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  They could not avoid paining each other. Though they tried to make peace, spending ‘some precious beer-time’ together in pubs that had escaped the Blitz and swapping useful wartime tips (‘Bird’s Custard Powder is the best lubricant’), provocation and insult were as natural as breathing to them. Both suffered from ‘neurotic inversion’, Augustus diagnosed after reading a book by the Russian emigré philosopher Nicholai Berdyaev. ‘It’s a pretty prevalent complaint among people with over delicate sensibilities,’ he explained.72 Edwin could no more escape this complaint than he could escape being Augustus’s son – indeed they were virtually the same thing. Throughout their long correspondence, he tried calling his father ‘Augustus’, but almost always it came back to ‘Dear Daddy’.

  After the war their battle centred itself on Gwen’s affairs. The struggle as to who could serve her reputation the better reached deep into them, and was aggravated by legal complexities. Edwin, as the executor and chief legatee, was in authority; which is to say he occupied the father’s role – he even had the same name as Augustus’s father. Augustus himself felt an instinctive protectiveness towards Gwen arising from their childhood days together. In 1946 Edwin gave Matthiesen permission to hold a large memorial exhibition of Gwen’s paintings and drawings in London, and Augustus (who had written an article on his sister for the Burlington Magazine in 1942) agreed to contribute a foreword to the catalogue. ‘I don’t fancy strangers writing about her somehow,’ he told Edwin. ‘As I blame myself continually for having even appeared to be unkind to her at times, the task seems doubly fitting.’73

  His unkindness now turned towards Edwin, and he took offence at the Matthiesen catalogue for which he had eventually ‘coughed up’ an introduction. ‘While this fiasco has been arranged,’ he chided Edwin, ‘I presume you have been conspicuously absent in your mousehole.’74 He needed to make an imaginative act of reconciliation with Gwen, and proposed publishing a memoir of her. ‘I am prepared to do this myself,’ he announced to Edwin at the end of November 1946, ‘being the sole person living competent to do so. If there were anyone else equally or better equipped I would gladly retire as writing is a great labour.’75

  Edwin appeared anxious to relieve Augustus of this great labour. But the suggestion that Romilly’s wife publish a memoir of Gwen infuriated him; while a more interesting proposition for a volume by Wyndham Lewis about both Gwen and Augustus came to nothing. It seemed to Augustus that his son was continually frustrating the act of atonement he wished to make with Gwen. ‘I am perplexed to know what it is that is expected of me,’ Edwin protested. In fact they were both profoundly perplexed. Whatever they did ended up with ‘brickbats’, and though the ‘door to conciliation is never closed’,76 neither of them could walk through it. It was acutely distressing. Sarcasm had become their form of intimacy, and like a poison it paralysed them.

  So, through a fog of pomposity, father and son went on exchanging brickbats, both of them perpetually outraged by the misery of it all. ‘Obviously you have completely misunderstood my letter… If I have failed to get the correct meaning of your letter you have equally misunderstood mine… I had no idea that my last communication, re the book, was going to arouse so foul an exhibition of bad taste (and worse). It is an unpleasant surprise… Your reasoning faculties are still in eclipse… Is your presence really necessary?… my advice is, Keep away… Let us call it a day then… One has, so far as possible, to protect one’s peace of mind.’77

  Augustus finally gave up his idea of writing a memoir of Gwen after Winifred appealed to him to give it up. ‘There is no one in the world who would be more averse to having their private life made public,’ she wrote in 1956. ‘Gwen would wish to be forgotten. I think I knew her better than anyone else ever did, and now I know this to be true. Thornton feels the same way.’78

  Later scholarship has shown up factual errors in the pages about Gwen that appear in Chiaroscuro and Finishing Touches.79 But these glimpses from their shared attic in Tenby and rooms in London, his oblique references to her passions at the Slade and in France, the clues about her nature scattered through notes and letters which he quotes, and his celebration of the talent she so methodically disciplined, are illuminated by genuine understanding and happiness. ‘Few on meeting this retiring person in black, with her tiny hands and feet, a soft, almost inaudible voice, and delicate Pembrokeshire accent, would have guessed that here was the greatest woman artist of her age, or, as I think, of any other.’80

  3

  THE MORNING AFTER

  ‘Our late Victory has left us with a headache, and the Peace we are enjoying is too much like the morning after a debauch.’

  Augustus John, ‘Frontiers’, Delphic Review (Winter 1946)

  For John, the war had been a winter, long, dark, ‘immobilizing me for a devil of a time’. Six years: then all at once ‘a whiff of spring in the air, a gleam of blue sky… renewal of hope and a promise of resurrection’.81 It was impossible not to feel some tremor of optimism: ‘the age-old fight for liberty can recommence.’ Though the world had been spoilt ‘there must be some nice spots left.’82 He was still able-bodied – it was time to be on the move again. ‘We sometimes refer to St-Rémy,’ John wrote to his son Edwin, ‘and, in monosyllables, wonder if we might venture there with car.’ It was not until the late summer of 1946 that he came again to the little mas ‘au ras des Alpilles’.

  He had raced away in 1939, after much anguish and delay. ‘I think of it as a shipwreck, this journey,’ Van Gogh had written to his brother Theo on leaving St-Rémy fifty years earlier. ‘Well, we cannot do what we like, nor what we ought to do, either.’ That was very much how John felt at the beginning of the war. ‘Il regarda au mur les toiles qu’il laissait inachevées,’ his neighbour Marie Mauron remembered, ‘les meubles qui avaient charmé sa vie provençale de leur simplicité de bon aloi, les beaux fruits de sa table et de ses “natures mortes”, ses joies et ses regrets… Sur quoi, Dorelia et lui, émus et tristes mais le cachant sous un pâle sourire, nous laissèrent les clés de leur mas pour d’éventuels réfugiés, amis ou non, qui ne manquèrent pas, et de l’argent pour payer le loger, chaque année, jusqu’à leur retour.’83

  Seven years later they collected their keys. St-Rémy had been a place of no military importance and the damage was not spectacular. Yet ‘everything and everybody looked shabbier than usual,’ John noted.84 The mas had been broken into and a number of his canvases carried off: one of a local girl – ‘a woman at St-Rémy I simply can’t forget’ – he missed keenly. French feeding wasn’t what it had been and the wine seemed to have gone off. But in the evening, at the Café des Variétés, he could still obtain that peculiar equilibrium of spirit and body he described as ‘detachment-in-intimacy’. The conversation whirled around him, the accordion played, and sometimes he was rewarded ‘by the apparition of a face or part of a face, a gesture or conjunction of forms which I recognize as belonging to a more real and harmonious world than that to which we are accustomed’.85

  To fit together these gestures and faces so that they came to reveal a harmony below the discord of our lives – that was still John’s aim. ‘I began a landscape to-day which seemed impossible,’ he wrote to Wyndham Lewis in October. ‘At any rate I will avoid the violence of the usual meridional painter. In reality the pays est très doux.’ For two months he went on painting out of doors, and the next year he painted in Cornwall. Then in the summer of 1950, in his seventy-third year, he returned to St-Rémy, tried again, ‘and I despair of landscape painting’.86 That summer, they gave up the lease of the Mas de Galeron. After this there was little point in travelling far. Each summer they would prepare for a journey west or south; the suitcases stood ready but the way was barred by unfinished pictures; autumn came, the air grew chill, and they began unpacking.

  There seemed so little time. John could seldom bear to leave the illusory lands he was striving to discover in his studio; for the actual world had little to give him now. ‘After the Hitler war he se
emed a ghost of himself,’ Hugh Gordon Proteus remembered. He moved about it uncertainly. The writer William Empson recalled a last meeting with him in the 1950s.

  ‘I came alone into a pub just south of Charlotte St, very near the Fitzroy Tavern but never so famous, and found it empty except for John looking magnificent but like a ghost, white faced and white haired… it was very long after he had made the district famous, and I had not expected to see anyone I knew. “Why do you come here?” I said, after ordering myself a drink. “Why do you?” he said with equal surliness, and there the matter dropped. I had realized at once that he was haunting the place, but not that I was behaving like a ghost too. It felt like promotion...’87

  For John, as for Norman Mailer, the fifties was ‘one of the worst decades in the history of man’. Industrial corrosion seemed to have attacked everything in which he once took pleasure. ‘Our civilization grows more and more to resemble a mixture of a concentration and a Butlin camp,’ he wrote to Cyril Connolly.88 Even the public houses were being made hideous by ‘manifestations of modern domestic technology’. Young girls walked about dressed like the Queen Mother. The food, the rationing and economic restrictions all contributed to ‘the sense of futility and boredom which, together with general restlessness and unease, marks the end of an epoch’.89

  ‘My outlook on life or rather death… [assumes] a Jeremy Bentham-like gloom,’ John told Tommy Earp.90 ‘We shall have little to do with the New World that approaches and, by the look of it, it is just as well.’ He saw a special danger in the effect of architecture upon the conduct of our lives. Already ‘Paris at night has the aspect of a vast garage’; and as for London ‘either it or I or both have… deteriorated greatly since our earlier associations which I so much loved.’ He was ‘reconciled’, he told Thelma Cazalet, ‘to a change of planet in the near future. If we are due to be blown to Kingdom Come, it may be our only chance of getting there after all.’

  The anxiety people were feeling about their future under the shadow of the hydrogen bomb was something to which John was acutely sensitive. ‘The bombs improve,’ he wrote to his son Robin, ‘the politics grow worse.’ He had never been interested in party politics. ‘I’ve got a clean slate,’ he swore to Felix Hope-Nicholson. ‘I’ve never voted in my life.’ The endlessly depressing news from the radio increased his despair. He felt a mounting dislike of professional politicians. If he had sympathy for any party, it was for the Liberals, perhaps because they never got into power these days. But he was more deeply attracted to the concepts of anarchy (‘Anarchism is the thing, anarchism and Bertrand Russell’) and communism, deploring the failure of Britain’s two Prime Ministers in the late forties and early fifties to differentiate between communism (‘which surely lies at the basis of all human society’) and Soviet Kremlinism under Stalin and his successors.

  In his years of haphazard reading John had come across the philosophical writings of the nineteenth-century French social reformer Charles Fourier, and saw in his Utopian theory of gregarious self-governing social groups something similar to what he was trying to depict in his large decorations. Despite some socialist pedantry, there was, he believed, ‘a strain of wisdom’ in Fourier.

  ‘This is shown by his elimination of the state, of national frontiers, armies & trade barriers and in his principle of co-ownership of his Phalansteries without either levelling down or subjection to High Finance. He was indeed “an original” with a touch of genius. As for his oddities, I find them charming and égayant… eg his proposal to harness the Aurora Borealis so as to convert the Arctic regions into a suitable terrain for market-gardening… His “Harmony”, at any rate, has its funny side which is more than can be said for our civilization.’91

  Fourier became the hero of John’s later years, uniting the principles of anarchy and communism, comedy with idealism; while in the world of contemporary politics his special villain was General Franco. In 1942 he had joined the Social Credit Party, ‘our only certainty’,92 and in 1945, after the National Council for Civil Liberties had temporarily become a Communist Front organization unhelpful to anarchists, he joined Benjamin Britten, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Herbert Read and Osbert Sitwell in sponsoring the Freedom Defence Committee ‘to defend those who are persecuted for exercising their rights to freedom of speech, writing and action’.93

  But John was not a man for committees. The best elucidation of his beliefs appeared in the Delphic Review,94 a magazine edited in Fording-bridge. ‘We are not very happy’ – this was his starting point. Looking round for a cause of this unhappiness, he sees the threat of ‘extinction not only of ourselves, but of our children; the annihilation of society itself’. Left to themselves, he believed, ‘people of different provenance’ would not ‘instinctively leap at each other’s throats’. The atmosphere of political propaganda which we constantly breathed in from our newspapers, radios and television sets had set off a reversal of our instincts. ‘Propaganda in the service of ideology is the now perfected science of lying as a means to power.’ For someone passionately neutral like himself and ‘no great Democrat either’, the best course had been silence. But silence was no longer a sufficient safeguard to neutrality. So in the age of microphone and media ‘I have decided that a practice of ceaseless… loquacity should be cultivated.’

  By the end of the 1940s he was publishing and broadcasting his message. National sovereign states, he argued, were by definition bound to fall foul of one another. All nationalities are composed of a haphazard conglomeration of tribes. But the state, originating in violence, must rely on force to impose its artificial uniform on this conglomeration, transmitting its laws and class privileges like a hereditary disease. ‘The State’, he warned, ‘must not be judged by human standards nor ever be personified as representing the quintessence of the soul of the people it manipulates. The State is immoral and accountable to nobody.’ The real quintessence of all people lay in their ‘needs and in their dreams’ – their need ‘to gain their living; freedom to use their native tongue; to preserve their customs; to practise any form of religion they choose; to honour their ancestors (if any); to conserve and transmit their cultural traditions, and, in general, to mind their own business without interference.’ Their need also to feel planted in the land: though many would not know what to do if they found themselves there.

  John’s alternative to ‘the collective suicide pact’ of the 1950s was for a breaking down of communities into smaller groups – the opposite of what has taken place in the last forty years. He began with hedges. The modern hedge, with which the country had been parcelled out by financial land-grabbers, must be dug up:

  ‘Hedges are miniature frontiers when serving as bulkheads, not windscreens. Hedges as bulkheads dividing up the Common Land should come down, for they represent and enclose stolen property. Frontiers are extended hedges, and divide the whole world into compartments as a result of aggression and legalized robbery. They too should disappear… They give rise to the morbid form of Patriotism known as Chauvinism or Jingoism. Frontiers besides are a great hindrance to trade and travel with their customs barriers, tariffs and douanes...’

  Without frontiers, John reasoned, the state would wither and the whole pattern of society change from a heavy pyramid to the fluid form of the amoeba, ‘which alone among living organisms possesses the secret of immortality’. Our monstrous industrial towns, our congested capital cities with their moats of oxygen-excluding suburbs would melt away, and a multiplicity of local communities appear, dotted over the green country, autonomous, self-supporting, federated, reciprocally free. ‘Gigantism is a disease,’ he warned. ‘…Classical Athens was hardly bigger than Fordingbridge.’

  Such beliefs, later commonplace among those advocating an alternative society to capitalism, sounded eccentric in the late 1940s. During the last dozen years of his life John found himself part of a gathering minority. What joined him to others was the atomic bomb. Progress by massacre, historically so respectable, seemed no longer morally
acceptable.

  ‘In the practice of some primitive “savages”, warfare is a kind of ritual: should a casualty occur through the blunder of an inexperienced warrior, a fine of a pig or two will settle the business and everybody goes home (except one). Modern warfare is different. We’ll all be in it, the helpless as well as the armed… There will be no quarter given, for the new Crusaders have no use for “Chivalry”. War will be waged impersonally from the power-house and the laboratory… and mankind will survive, if at all, as brute beasts ravening on a desert island.’

  Nuclear bombs had been hatched in a climate of self-destruction. ‘With only a limited capacity for emotion, a surfeit of excitement and horror induces numbness, or a desire for sleep: even Death is seen to offer advantages.’ The malignant gloom against which John had partly anaesthetized himself, the anxious uncertainties, ill thoughts of death – these that he had lived with so long he now saw reflected in the faces of young people.

  By the late 1950s John’s beliefs had brought him in contact with Bertrand Russell, whose anti-nuclear movement of mass civil disobedience, called the Committee of 100, he joined. This brought him some middle-class hostility. He was called a traitor and told that the sooner he ‘stand in the dock at the Old Bailey on a charge of treason the better it will be for this country’. But ‘you may count on me to follow your lead,’ John assured Russell on 26 September 1960, ‘…it is up to all those of us above the idiot line to protest as vigorously as possible.’ He had planned to participate in the demonstrations against governmental nuclear policy held on 18 February 1961 and on 6 August 1961, ‘Hiroshima Day’, but early in February suffered a thrombosis that ‘forbids this form of exercise’.95 ‘As you see,’ he scribbled almost illegibly, ‘I cannot write; still less can I speak in public, but if my name is of any use, you have it to dispose of.’ Later he made a partial recovery, and against doctor’s orders came quietly up to London for the great sit-down in Trafalgar Square on Sunday 17 September. ‘I have quite lost my hearing and am becoming a nuisance to myself and everybody,’ he told Russell. He had not seen Trafalgar Square so full of people since Mafeking Night over sixty years earlier when, feeling rather scared, he had extricated himself from the pandemonium and crept home. He still loathed crowds, feared policemen, and ‘didn’t want to parade my physical disabilities’. But he would ‘go to prison if necessary’. The public assembly began at five o’clock, and until that time John hid. Unprecedented numbers took part in this demonstration. ‘Some of them were making what was individually an heroic gesture,’ Russell wrote. ‘For instance, Augustus John, an old man, who had been, and was, very ill… emerged from the National Gallery, walked into the Square and sat down. No one knew of his plan to do so and few recognized him. I learned of his action only much later, but I record it with admiration.’96