Augustus John Read online

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  About Augustus John

  About Michael Holroyd

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  Biographies by Michael Holroyd

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  Table of Contents

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  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Welcome Page

  Epigraph

  Preface

  PART I

  The Years of Innocence

  CHAPTER I: LITTLE ENGLAND BEYOND WALES

  1. ‘Mama’s dead!’

  2. The Responsible Parties

  3. Life with Father

  4. A Crisis of Identity

  CHAPTER II: ‘SLADE SCHOOL INGENIOUS’

  1. New Students – Old Masters

  2. Water-legend

  3.·A Singular Group

  4. Flammondism

  5. From among the Living...

  6. …Into ‘Moral Living’

  CHAPTER III: LOVE FOR ART’S SAKE

  1. Evil at Work

  2. Liverpool Sheds and Romany Flotsam

  3. What Comes Naturally

  4. Team Spirit

  5. Candid White and Matching Green

  CHAPTER IV: MEN MUST PLAY AND WOMEN WEEP

  1. Keeping up the Game

  2. At the Crossroads

  3. From a View to a Birth

  4. Channel Crossing

  5. A Seaside Change

  6. ‘Here’s to Love!’

  CHAPTER V: BUFFETED BY FATE

  1. The Battle of the Babies

  2. Images of Yeats

  3. All Boys Brave and Beautiful

  4. Or Something

  5. Ethics and Rainbows

  6. Inlaws and Outlaws

  7. In the Roving Line

  8. Fatal Initiations

  9. Italian Style, French Found

  CHAPTER VI: REVOLUTION 1910

  1. What They Said at the Time

  2. What He Said

  3. What He Said about Them

  4. What Happened

  5. What Next?

  PART II

  The Years of Experience

  CHAPTER VII: BEFORE THE DELUGE

  1. A Summer of Poetry

  2. The Second Mrs Strindberg

  3. Cavaliers and Eggheads

  4. Chronic Potential

  CHAPTER VIII: HOW HE GOT ON

  1. Marking Time

  2. The Virgin’s Prayer

  3. Corrupt Coteries

  4. Augustus Does His Bit

  CHAPTER IX: ARTIST OF THE PORTRAITS

  1. Everybody’s Doing It

  2. Surviving Friends, Women and Children: an A to Z

  3. Faces and Tales

  4. Methods and Places

  5. Undiscovered Countries

  CHAPTER X: THE WAY THEY LIVED THEN

  1. Fryern Court

  2. A Long Love Affair with Drink

  3. In Spite of Everything or Because of It

  4. His Fifties, Their Thirties

  5. Children of the Great

  6. Barren Our Lives

  CHAPTER XI: THINGS PAST

  1. Black Out

  2. Fragments

  3. The Morning After

  4. A Way Out

  Preview

  Appendices

  One. Desecration of Saint Paul’s

  Two. John’s Pictures at the New English Art Club

  Three. The Chelsea Art School Prospectus

  Four. ‘To Iris Tree’: A parody of Arthur Symons

  Five. The John Beauty Chorus

  Six. John’s Pictures at the Royal Academy

  Seven. Augustus John: Chronology and Intinerary

  Eight. Locations of John Manuscripts

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  About Augustus John

  Reviews

  About Michael Holroyd

  Biographies by Michael Holroyd

  Michael Holroyd’s Memoirs

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  Copyright

  ‘I inherited a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life, at least not sober.’

  Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s Tour of the Hebrides (16 September 1773)

  ‘Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,

  Fool’d by these rebel powers that thee array,

  Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,

  Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?’

  Shakespeare, Sonnet CXLVI

  ‘So must pure lovers soules descend

  T’affections, and to faculties,

  Which sense may reach and apprehend,

  Else a great Prince in prison lies.’

  John Donne, ‘The Extasie’

  PREFACE

  ‘If an idea’s worth having once, it’s worth having twice.’

  Tom Stoppard

  While I was working on my biography of Lytton Strachey during the 1960s, Dorelia John let me see some correspondence from Strachey and Carrington. After I finished the book I sent her a copy. It was so weighty a work, she wrote, that she could read it only in bed. That was where I had written much of it, I replied: in bed. We had never met, but almost at once what felt like an intimacy sprang up between us. There were some impressive protests when Lytton Strachey was published. ‘Can’t think what the fuss is about,’ Dorelia commented. She wanted to know who my next subject would be. ‘What about Augustus John?’ I asked. Dorelia told me she would think about it and that I must come and see her when the winter was over.

  By a coincidence, the first person invited to write a book about Augustus John – it was probably no more than an introduction and commentary to a volume of drawings – was Lytton Strachey. That had been in 1913, and Strachey (though he wished John to draw his portrait) refused on the grounds that it was too early for such a publication – a verdict with which John agreed.

  Nearly forty years later Alan Moorehead started a biography, but came to a halt under the abrupt pressure of John’s co-operation. Then, following John’s death in 1961, Dylan Thomas’s biographer Constantine FitzGibbon began flirting with the idea, but the affair turned sour. There was also the fashion expert and museum keeper James Laver, who had written books on Tissot and Whistler and who began looking into John’s life too, but his researches turned up very little.

  Augustus John had been dead for not much more than half a dozen years – the very period when I had been writing Lytton Strachey – and it seemed to me that my Strachey researches might be a good preparation for a book on John. I liked the idea of a significant minor character from one book evolving into the subject of the next. The process gave me a feeling that they were choosing me rather than the other way around. Besides, some of the Bloomsbury background extended into Bohemian Chelsea where John held court, and I had met a number of people who knew them both. On one occasion in the late 1950s I had even collided with John himself. There had been no formal introductions. The impact took place on the edge of a pavement in Chelsea. John, in his young eighties, had ‘lunched well’. He hesitated tremendously on the kerb. Like a great oak tree, blasted, doomed, he seemed precariously rooted there until, unintentionally assisted by his future biographer, and to a cacophony of shouting brakes and indignant hooting, a whiff of burnt rubber, he propelled himself triumphantly across the road, and was gone. I stood there wondering how he had survived so long. Even in those few blurred moments, his extraordinary physical presence had struck me forcibly. I mentioned the incident to my father, and he remarked that I was bumping into the right people.

  How similar, I wondered, were Strachey and John? When Strachey turned up at Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912, he was immediately recognized by the porter on d
uty – as Augustus John. It was an understandable mistake since they were both sporting earrings at the time. ‘In our house at Frognal,’ wrote Stephen Spender in his autobiography World Within World, ‘the names of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Van Gogh, stood for a diabolic, cunning depravity, a plot of bearded demons against all which should be held sacred.’1 But individually Strachey and John were so dissimilar, I thought, that even their silences were different: Strachey’s an intellectual scorched earth of dismay; John’s an animal brooding which he communicated to the whole pack. As for Bernard Shaw, so I later discovered, he was never silent. But all of them campaigned in their work and lives, or some combination of both, for greater tolerance in a repressive age – then tested our powers of tolerance in more relaxed times, so offering a biographer, in the interests of historical perspective, opportunities for narrative irony.

  I filled the interval before meeting Dorelia by studying in the Reading Room of the British Museum, and by learning to drive. The Stracheys had lived not far from London and reaching them, though always problematical, had involved a fleet of trains and buses which the Stracheys enjoyed haphazardly plotting for me. Dorelia lived almost a hundred miles west of London, somewhat inaccessibly placed beyond Fordingbridge on the border of Hampshire and Dorset. I had the loan of a car, but no knowledge of it. So I sent myself to driving school. It was an episode that soon took on allegorical significance. Never having been to a university, I have used my biographical subjects as if they were my professors. But the road adventures to which I treated my instructor, and the ordeal through which I put my examiner, became a parody of the teacher-pupil relationship, indicating my natural ineptitude, vulnerability to boredom, and a pedantic ability to take obedience to subversive lengths. Between each agonizing lesson I continued my reading. By the time I drove off to meet Dorelia in the early summer of 1968 I had become quite scholarly.

  I went first to gaze at the memorial statue of Augustus John by Ivor Roberts-Jones, standing like some chocolate pugilist near the river. This statue had been the seat of some recent embarrassments. Originally the memorial was to have been of Augustus and Dorelia, but Augustus was such a big fellow that, to Dorelia’s relief, there wasn’t enough money or materials for anyone else. The single figure was discreetly placed behind a large tree by the parish council. But one night shortly after the unveiling ceremony there had been a violent thunderstorm, and in the morning the tree lay on the ground while Augustus stood dramatically revealed. It was, everyone said, typical of him. But the question that occurred to me was: could I do something equivalent in a biography?

  Next I went to his grave, a simple white stone in a triangular field. Finally I came to Fryern Court, Dorelia’s home and her creation. The lane coiled between azaleas and magnolias, then opened out into a crunchy gravel sweep with a fringe of grass. I parked flamboyantly, but there was no one to see me. Except for a small herd of kittens, the place seemed deserted. On the walls hung pink roses and an ancient clematis in whose matted stems the cats had made their nests. They lay, sleepy in the sun, watching me as I hammered at the open door. Through the windows, which were also open, I could see dark empty rooms. I called, but no one answered. I retreated a little into the foliage, and when I turned back there was Dorelia watching me from the doorway.

  The purpose of our interview, she explained, was to find out if my ‘intentions were honourable’. She led me into the dining-room and sat down at the end of a long refectory table. I was seating myself on her left when she shook her head and pointed to a chair on her right. ‘Sit there,’ she said, ‘where the light is on your face.’ As we were rearranging ourselves, her son Romilly edged in, apologized for being late, and took off his hat. Since Romilly, then in his early sixties, was the writer in the family – at that time, he told me, he was contemplating a humorous work on engineering – his involvement in our discussion seemed sensible. But not to Dorelia. Gently, firmly, she suggested he should run out into the garden and amuse himself there – perhaps even do something useful – while we debated literary and artistic matters indoors. We would come and see how he was getting on when we had finished. He went out as obediently as a child.

  Our talk was not a very precise affair. Dorelia asked me several questions and I explained that I wanted to present an accurate account of Augustus John’s life, correcting the wayward chronology of his own writings. Since he was largely an autobiographical artist, obsessively drawing and painting his family and friends, I hoped that the story of his life might prepare readers for looking again at his work. Was not the work of a portrait painter analogous to that of a biographer? George Steiner had recently argued that ‘it is the minor master… whose career may be important in that it has crystallized the manners of a period, the tone of a particular milieu’, who makes the most valid subject for biography. My belief was that Augustus John’s career would provide a natural frame for a number of pen-portraits and conversation pieces, and enable me to exhibit a post-Victorian, pre-modern phase of our cultural history, a transition period, the tone and manners of which he had greatly influenced. The challenge was to find an imaginative means of recreating the milieu of someone whose concepts appeared primarily in pictures rather than as words.

  Dorelia listened politely, but she was more interested, I sensed, in finding out what sort of person I was than what sort of book I wanted to write. Perhaps, to an extent, the two are the same. We spoke a little of Lytton Strachey and Carrington, of my contact with Augustus John in Chelsea, and the peculiar habits of motor cars. The whole John family, I gathered, were fearless and imaginative drivers, and it struck me that by immersing myself in their world I might gain some of their wit and inventiveness behind the wheel. Yet it was difficult for me to understand how any of this conversation could help Dorelia – unless it was to discover how I might apply my biographical methods to myself. Dorelia, however, had her own method for determining things. This made use of a ring and a piece of cotton – equipment that never failed her. She would tie the cotton to the ring, suspend it between two fingers, and examine the direction in which the ring floated. Since she said little to me that day, I had no doubt that my fate depended upon the behaviour of this pendulum. I felt we had got on well, and my hope was that, below the ritual of these magic operations, lay a subconscious willpower that would direct the movements of the ring.

  At any rate I could do no more. We went out into the garden to find out how Romilly was getting on. Dorelia was at home in that garden. Though smaller than I had imagined, and white-haired, she looked more like the mythical Dorelia of Augustus John’s pictures than I had thought possible – perhaps she had grown to look like this. We followed a path that ended in nettles and a rubbish dump where we found Romilly. He sprang up as we approached and walked back eagerly with us for tea. Dorelia, like a good general, never wasted words. A few syllables, and I was put to work cutting the bread. But when I showed her the slices, immaculate to my eye, she raised her hands to her face and hooted with laughter. We ate what she called my ‘doorsteps’, while the cats weaved in and out among the plates and cups, and outside the light began to fade.

  Before I left, Romilly took me to one side. Should I in the heat and struggle of my researches, he asked, stumble across the date of his birth, would I let him have it? They both came out to hear me race the engine and waved as I started back to London. It had been a strange day, a journey into a world very different from my own, which is one of the fascinations of writing biography.

  After this there was a Dorelian silence. Then in June a letter arrived. ‘I am very sorry to be so long answering… But I am advised not to give you permission to write a book about A.J.’ the first paragraph began. In despair I read on: ‘…until I have an agreement that it will not be published unless approved of by me or my executors Sir Caspar and Romilly.’ My spirits rose. At the end of this formal note, Dorelia had added a conspiratorial postscript. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I will help you in any way I can.’

&nbs
p; So I began my research. There were periods in Somerset House, the Public Record Office, in the storage rooms of museums and galleries, the cellars of solicitors’ offices, the reference sections of libraries, or simply at home writing questionnaire letters, when this research seemed particularly dusty and unrewarding. But then came moments of discovery, like delayed dividends from an arduous investment of time.

  From my accumulating knowledge I mapped out a number of research trips into Wales, to the United States and through Europe. Augustus John was to be my road book, my sea-and-air book. It began with a wonderful summer in Tenby and Haverfordwest, and became, despite the inevitable anxieties, the most purely enjoyable of my books to write.

  In the United States, lecturing as I went to help pay for my travels, I took my first tentative steps into some of the famous manuscript libraries: the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Widener and Houghton Libraries at Harvard, Cornell University Library, Yale University and the Paul Mellon Center for British Art at Yale, and the ‘Morgue’ at Life magazine in New York. I had been used to working in the casual surroundings of people’s houses, and I found it somewhat intimidating to be searched for concealed guns or photographed for police records before I entered these halls of scholarship. Such precautions, I reflected, support the illusion that the written word is greatly in demand. Once inside, I might have any sharp object confiscated together with part of my clothing, and be required to sign forms that were linguistically more interesting than the documents I wanted to consult. I found it sometimes difficult to account for myself in a convincing style on these forms or as I sat in windowless cells scribbling against time with borrowed pencils on pencil-coloured paper. But I was a hardened scholar by the end.

  After reading through the Augustus John–John Quinn correspondence at the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, looked down on by John’s intimidating portrait of Quinn, I took a train to Schenectady and spent a few hours with the poet Jeanne Foster, who had been Quinn’s mistress. In the 1920s she had met Gwen John in Paris and also Augustus John in New York, and though she was now in her early eighties and I in my early thirties, we seemed to hit it off very well. Afterwards we wrote one or two letters to each other, but I did not see her again. A few years later I received a letter from an American lawyer, and an explanatory note from Quinn’s biographer B. L. Reid, to say that Jeanne Foster was dead and that she had added a codicil to her will leaving me her Gwen John papers and pictures. The pictures arrived in their original 1920s frames as I was finishing my biography. I was infinitely touched by this gift from beyond the grave in memory of our day together, which now appeared like an augury for the book itself.