Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  Sonny eventually renounced the artist’s life because ‘I could not draw’. He had decided instead, he told McNulty, to found a new religion.

  At an early age Sonny had tried to build a fanciful world in which to forget the miseries of the real one – ‘a sort of pale blue satin place,’ as Broadbent describes it at the end of John Bull’s Other Island. This dream of heaven presented itself as a small square apartment in which he was sitting with his ankles dangling, poorly dressed and filled with fears because

  ‘I knew that I should presently be brought up for judgment by the recording angel before some awful person in the next room; and I had good private reasons for anticipating that my career would not be found up to the mark... on the only occasion on which I ever dreamt myself in heaven, I was glad when I woke. I also dreamt once that I was in hell; but I remember nothing about that except that two of my uncles were there and that it did not hurt. In my waking hours I thought of heaven as a part of the sky where people were dressed in white, had golden harps, did not eat or drink or learn lessons, and were wholly preoccupied in being intensely good.’

  When very young he had used the Lord’s Prayer as a spell against thunderstorms. But one evening on Torca Hill ‘I suddenly asked myself why I went on repeating my prayer every night when, as I put it, I did not believe in it. Being thus brought to book by my intellectual conscience I felt obliged in common honesty to refrain from superstitious practices.’ By the third night, he tells us, his discomfiture vanished ‘as completely as if I had been born a heathen... this sacrifice of the grace of God, as I had been taught it, to intellectual integrity synchronized with the dawning of moral passion in me which I have described in the first act of Man and Superman.’

  What Sonny had done was to transfer his religious energy from day-dreaming to his actual life. He had come to recognize that, as an unlovable boy, he could expect nothing from other people. His ‘moral passion’ was a means of producing, independently of other people, the self-respect he lacked. Though he might not make himself into the sort of person his mother loved, he could become the sort of person she was: insensible to public opinion and a Bohemian without Bohemian vices. Before this ‘I was such a ridiculously sensitive child,’ he wrote, ‘that almost any sort of rebuff that did not enrage me hurt my feelings and made me cry’. This new-found Stoicism reached its heretical peak in 1875 with a letter he wrote to Public Opinion attacking the Moody and Sankey revivalist meetings then being celebrated in Dublin. He ridiculed the vanity of their ‘awakenings’ which created ‘highly objectionable members of society’, and announced that he had given up religion.

  He was by this time a committed Shelleyan. Shelley, who was to make Shaw into a momentary anarchist and lifetime vegetarian, cleared away the refuse of supernatural religions and prepared him for the planting of Creative Evolution. Sonny was a voluminous reader. Before he was ten he was saturated in Shakespeare and the Bible. But he had no access to a library and no money with which to buy books. Nobody at Hatch Street read. Lee, who made a habit of falling asleep at night over Tyndall on Sound, had been perplexed at hearing that Carlyle was an author and not Dublin’s Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Carlisle, and was puzzled by his failure to find, even in the large-print edition of Shakespeare, The School for Scandal. But his pupils often presented him with books – anything from Byron’s works to Lord Derby’s translation of Homer’s Iliad – and to these were added pirated editions of novels brought back from America by Walter Gurly.

  Sonny read all of these. He relished The Arabian Nights, The Pilgrim’s Progress, The Ancient Mariner, John Gilpin, and fled from his own life into the adventures of Scott and Dumas. ‘The falsifications of romance are absolutely necessary to enable people to bear or even to apprehend the terrors of life. Only the very strongest characters can look the facts of life in the face.’ But he was determined to become one of this band of ‘strongest characters’ and started choosing his books accordingly. ‘At twelve or thereabouts,’ he remembered, ‘I began to disapprove of highwaymen on moral grounds and to read Macaulay, George Eliot, Shakespeare, Dickens and so on in the ordinary sophisticated attitude.’ He went through John Stuart Mill’s autobiography, studied Lewes’s Life of Goethe and every translation of Faust he could lay his hands on. ‘No child should be shielded from mischief and danger, either physical or moral, in the library or out of it. Such protection leaves them incapable of resistance when they are exposed, as they finally must be, to all the mischief and danger of the world.’

  Shaw’s ingenious form of self-protection is best seen in his use of Dickens and Shakespeare. Beginning as a Dickensian disciple, he went on to convert Dickens, as the unconscious prophet of revolution, into an early attempt by the Life Force to produce an authentic Shavian. This sympathetic feeling sprang from the comparison he made between their early unhappiness, and the theatrical methods by which they later superimposed success upon unhappiness. Shaw wrote of his time at the Central Model School as being equivalent to ‘what the blacking warehouse was to Dickens’; and his description of Dickens’s outward life as ‘a feat of acting from beginning to end’ is a variation of his self-portrait: ‘the real Shaw is the actor, the imaginary Shaw the real one.’ By converting his schooldays into a Dickensian episode he gave them a sense of drama and a context in which they could be treated with humorous detachment. This was the power of comedy.

  For a time he replaced his own life with the fictions of Dickens and Shakespeare. He knew some of Shakespeare’s plays by heart. ‘Hamlet and Falstaff were more alive to me than any living politician or even any relative.’ In the reading of Shakespeare there was all life except the actual presence of the body from which, as a vehicle of emotion, Sonny had become alienated. In separating the word-music from the meaning he was to become, like Ulysses, tied to the mast and listening to the sirens. For Shaw’s prejudice was optimism. To expose yourself to feel what wretches feel could lead to the ‘barren pessimism’ that Shakespeare himself might survive, but Shaw could not. Shakespeare’s celebration of the splendours and miseries of sexual love paralysed Shaw who described it as ‘folly gone mad erotically’, and used all his wit and critical intelligence to reduce it to ‘platitudinous fudge’. He could allow himself to respond to the passionate language only by insisting that it swept literature ‘to a plane on which sense is drowned in sound’. So Sonny listened and was comforted by these sounds that filled the place of his captivity.

  7

  Music in Dublin

  Without music we shall surely perish of drink, morphia, and all sorts of artificial exaggerations of the cruder delights of the senses.

  ‘The Religion of the Pianoforte’, Fortnightly Review (February 1894)

  ‘My university has three colleges,’ Shaw used to say. They were Dalkey Hill, the National Gallery, and Lee’s Amateur Musical Society. Hatch Street was full of music. ‘I was within earshot of a string of musical masterpieces,’ Shaw wrote, ‘which were rehearsed in our house right up to the point of the full choral & orchestral rehearsals.’ Before he was fifteen he knew Beethoven’s Mass in C, Mendelssohn’s Athalie, Handel’s Messiah, Verdi’s Trovatore, Donizetti’s Lucrezia and above all Mozart’s Don Giovanni from cover to cover. After seeing Gounod’s Faust, he decorated the walls of his room at Dalkey with watercolour heads of Mephistopheles. ‘We made of Mephistopheles a familiar, almost living character,’ McNulty recalled.

  In music Sonny’s senses came alive. He felt he was experiencing all manner of impossible emotions: the ‘candour and gallant impulse of the hero, the grace and trouble of the heroine, and the extracted quintessence of their love’. But he could neither play nor read a note of music, for ‘nobody dreamt of teaching me anything’. When an amateur player named Phipps offered to teach him the oboe, George Carr Shaw objected that the price of an oboe and tuition fees put it out of the question. Sonny did what he could. Presented by one of his uncles with an ancient cornet-à-piston (‘absolutely the very worst and oldest cornet then in existence�
��), he took lessons twice a week from an English guardsman, walking to his house in Mount Pleasant Street with the obsolete instrument wrapped up in brown paper under his arm.

  ‘My elder sister had a beautiful voice,’ Shaw wrote. ‘...it cost her no effort to sing or play anything she had once heard, or to read any music at sight.’ This contrast to himself irked Shaw. Lucy sang, he wrote, ‘without the slightest effort and without the slightest point, and was all the more desperately vapid because she suggested artistic gifts wasting in complacent abeyance’.

  Although it was Agnes of the hazel eyes and gorgeous curtain of red hair who received most attention within Hatch Street, Lucy was the star. Her expression charmed and interested people, and she had a faint resemblance to Ellen Terry to which she drew attention by wearing Lyceum-style clothes and feather hats. One of her admirers was Sonny’s friend McNulty who later ‘asked her to marry me: but she refused on the grounds that she was five years older: and that when I was forty-five she would be “a white haired old woman of fifty”. So, that little romance faded.’ Away from home, she was ‘everybody’s darling,’ Shaw wrote: ‘she broke many hearts, but never her own.’ She longed not for a lover, but for a mother and father: a family. Not finding one, she affected a defensively low opinion of men. ‘Brothers don’t matter to their sisters,’ Shaw commented; ‘at least I didn’t matter to mine: it is the stranger who is loved. The natural dislike for near relatives is ordained to save frightful complications. So presto vivace... and away with melancholy!’

  Italian opera seemed what Lucy was heading for even before she sang Amina in Lee’s production, at the Theatre Royal, Dublin, of Bellini’s La Sonnambula. Lee had begun to organize musical evenings in the Antient Concert Room at 42½ Great Brunswick Street. These were often in aid of hospitals and would include a popular overture, some ballads and choruses, and the strengthening contribution from a regimental band. For the Shakespeare Tercentenary of 1864, having worked up a programme of Purcell and Schubert, Lee emerged at the head of his Amateur Musical Society as an orchestral conductor. He had no scholarship but, conducting from a first violin or vocal score, gave the right time to the band. ‘There was practically no music in Dublin except the music he manufactured,’ Shaw wrote.

  ‘He kept giving concerts... and he had to provide all the singers for them. If he heard a flute mourning or a fiddle scraping in a house as he walked along the street, he knocked at the door & said “You come along & play in my orchestra.” If a respectable citizen came for twelve lessons to entertain small tea parties, he presently had that amazed gentleman, scandalous in tights & tunic, singing as “il rio di Luna” to my mother’s Azucena, or Alfonso to her Lucrezia, as the case might be. He coached them into doing things utterly beyond their natural powers.’

  ‘This favourite Society,’ reported the Irish Times on 30 May 1865, ‘...includes many of the most distinguished amateur vocalists in the city... On few occasions has the Ancient Concert’s Music Hall contained a larger and more fashionable attendance... and the concert was in every respect most judiciously carried out.’ This was typical of the notices that the Amateur Musical Society received in the late 1860s. But Lee wanted to conduct oratorio festivals and operas; and his ambitions were set upon London.

  *

  It was probably in 1869 that Lee first began to dream of a conquest of London. He appears to have taken Bessie Shaw into his confidence. On 30 October that year Bessie and her brother made an agreement with their father whereby the son received £2,500 (equivalent to £97,500 in 1997) and Bessie £1,500 paid to her at the rate of £100 a year ‘for her own sole and separate use and free from the debts control or engagements of her husband’. This was in addition to £400 settled on Agnes either through the estate of Ellen Whitcroft or Mrs Shaw’s own trust of 1852. Bessie now had the maximum financial independence it was in her power to command.

  Six weeks later, Lee published a book entitled The Voice: Its Artistic Production, Development, and Preservation. Encased between heavy dark green boards elaborately stamped in gold, with a woodcut on its cover from Maclise’s Origins of the Harp, this volume of 130 pages of ‘agreeably tinted’ paper represented Lee’s passport to a larger musical world. It had been ghosted, Shaw tells us, ‘by a scamp of a derelict doctor whom he entertained for that purpose’ – probably Malachi J. Kilgarriff, Demonstrator at the Ledwich School of Anatomy, a Catholic and one-time neighbour of Lee’s in Harrington Street.

  Not long after this, while still thirteen, Sonny was sent off to be interviewed by a firm of cloth merchants, Scott, Spain & Rooney, on one of Dublin’s quays. His employment in the warehouse loading bales was on the point of being settled when the senior partner walked in and declared that ‘I was too young, and that the work was not suitable to me. He evidently considered that my introducer, my parents, and his young partner, had been inconsiderate... I have not forgotten his sympathy.’

  Unable to convert him from an expenditure at school to a source of income in the warehouse, they had failed to get him off their hands. He returned for another year to the Dublin English and Scientific Commercial Day School. Then, through the influence of his Uncle Frederick he was found employment as office boy in a ‘leading and terribly respectable’ firm of land agents, Uniacke Townshend & Co. He started work there on 26 October 1871 with an annual salary of £18 (equivalent to £875 in 1997). He was no longer Sonny to his family, but the name he most loathed: George.

  Six weeks later an odd, apparently insignificant thing happened: Lee changed his name. In all press notices and legal documents he had been George J. Lee, the J. sometimes appearing as John. After 2 December 1871 the J. is replaced by a V. often lengthened to Vandeleur. This flowering of his name coincided with a fresh thrust to his musical ambitions. Since the publication of The Voice, Lee had been extending his Society beyond the giving of charitable concerts for the poor – increasing his advertisements in the press together with the number and glory of his patrons which, by 1871, included His Excellency the Lord Lieutenant. He had by now begun producing Italian Opera (mixed into the menu with burlesque and miscellaneous band music) at the Theatre Royal and the newly opened Gaiety Theatre – taking these productions on tour to Limerick and Cork, and making a reconnaissance himself to London.

  The opposition to Lee was led by Sir Robert Prescott Stewart, an ambitious academic who had won many prizes for his glees and rose to become the most highly regarded Irish musician of his day. Stewart made his first move in the summer of 1871 – persuading the more eminent members of Lee’s committee to resign. At a meeting on 11 November, following the congratulations on increased membership and money, the Irish Times reported that ‘some misunderstanding has arisen as to members of the Society performing in English or other operas at the theatre [the Theatre Royal], and in consequence of which a considerable number of the committee refused to offer themselves for re-election’.

  Lee acted immediately. He reconstituted his Society into the Amateur Musical, Operatic and Dramatic Society, replaced the various Lords and Generals with a sixteen-man Committee that included a Colonel, two Majors and ten Captains, and announced: A GRAND MILITARY, DRAMATIC AND OPERATIC PERFORMANCE WILL BE GIVEN AT THE NEW GAIETY THEATRE.

  In January 1872, Lee transformed his amateurs into the New Philharmonic Society – a title that signalled his ambition to replace the almost fifty-year-old Philharmonic – and, under one title or another, led them indefatigably through concerts, oratorio festivals and truncated operas. Bessie, as his musical adjutant, was indispensable to him, arranging orchestral accompaniments, copying out band parts, composing songs (‘The Parting Hour’, ‘The Night is Closing Round, Mother’) under the nom de plume ‘Hilda’ and singing with what the Irish Times described as ‘artistic grace and expression’. Her voice, which ‘never expressed eroticism’, was particularly thrilling in the interpretation of songs about bereaved lovers seeking reunion in the next world.

  So successful had Lee become that on 19 September he bought the lea
se of Torca Cottage (which up to then he had merely rented). Though many of his concerts were advertised as being in aid of charity, only what was termed ‘the Surplus’ found its way to various hospitals. This usually amounted to about £25 – whereas Lee himself, so John O’Donovan has calculated, ‘would have pocketed a sum not far off £200 for each concert’.

  Early in 1873 Lee fulfilled one of his major ambitions by conducting the Dublin Musical Festival. ‘The crowds of persons who besieged each portion of the hall soon filled to its utmost capacity, every particle of available space obtainable... the large doors leading into the building at the end of the Hall had to be thrown open and numbers were content to obtain standing room in the outer galleries,’ reported the Irish Times. After congratulating Lee on his splendid results, the reviewer predicted that with patience he would surely ‘reap the rewards his energies and abilities deserve’.

  Eager for these rewards, Lee prominently advertised two benefit concerts of ‘Amateur Italian Opera’ for himself and the leader of his orchestra, the violinist R. M. Levey, in late March or early April. But Robert Prescott Stewart was already at work; with his encouragement the debenture holders availed themselves of their right to one free ticket and crowded the theatre. On 5 April, Lee and Levey published a sarcastic announcement in the Irish Times in which they begged ‘to return their grateful thanks (?) to the many debenture holders who honoured their BENEFIT... by making use of their FREE admissions’.