After drastic cutting, the biography remains approximately the same length. There are new pages on Augustus John’s family, on Gwen John and their Slade School friends; new information concerning artists, such as Henry Lamb and Wyndham Lewis, who played significant roles in his life, and other supporting characters – for example Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, and the great gypsy scholar John Sampson – all of which has enabled me to improve the continuity of the narrative. That narrative is cast as comedy: romantic comedy, domestic comedy, the comedy of morals and of manners, absurdist comedy, black comedy, tragi-comedy.
Some papers I saw twenty-five years ago have disappeared but more have risen to the surface, and this shifting archaeology of sources has inevitably altered John’s place in the artistic landscape. There are new passages about some of his pictures and those, from W. B. Yeats and Sean O’Casey to the Marchesa Casati, Eve Fleming, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Madame Suggia, who sat for his portraits.
John’s artistic reputation, once so high, has plummeted. In place of ‘the last of the great masters’ who worked directly from life in the manner of Rembrandt, Tiepolo or Watteau, stands a banal and flashy manufacturer of pastiches and the simulacra of genuine masterworks. The famously gifted painter who led the revolutionary artists in Britain into the twentieth century has by the end of the century retrospectively dwindled to an inferior talent which in old age grew more obviously vulgar and sentimental.
Neither judgement is definitive. John’s work, blown here and there by contemporary criticism and conventional art history, appeared to fall off the map when in 1987 it was omitted from the Royal Academy exhibition ‘British Art in the Twentieth Century: the Modern Movement’. This technical knockout, unthinkable during the first half of this century, emphasized the difficulty critics and historians have when treating individual talents that do not fit into ideological or narrative patterns. But John’s exclusion was felt to be unsatisfactory, and the placing of his work remains a problem unsolved. Nor are those proper judges of his work who presume to say, as Samuel Johnson wrote of his biographical subject Richard Savage: ‘Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have lived or written better than Savage.’
John’s artistic reputation is a background theme in my book, charted through the contemporary criticism of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, Sickert, Rothenstein and Wyndham Lewis, Anthony Blunt, Herbert Read and others. It is the story of a visual lyricist whose early accomplishment, interpreting English, French and Welsh landscape through poetic eyes, belonged ‘essentially to youth (as so often in poetry)’,10 Richard Shone has argued. His inability to transform these ‘magnificent beginnings’ into a mature body of work in later years clouded his life and moves as a shadow through this book.
But this is a biography, not an art book, and I have used the pictures to illumine the life. For me the virtue of biography is the humanizing effect it can bring to history. To see people as being ‘worth’ a Life on account of their greatness and goodness is a nineteenth-century concept. The aim, I believe, of modern biographers, who live so long with their subjects, is to find some connecting current of energy, travel with it across time, as it were, and, from loneliness perhaps, make contact with other human beings. In that contact, if they are fortunate, may be found a literary pattern, a story with clues and signposts that forms a parallel world to that of the subject’s work. Biography is no longer simply an instrument of information retrieval, though historical and cultural information that is retrieved from these expeditions is a bonus. The biographer’s prime purpose is to recreate a world into which readers may enter, and where, interpreting messages from the past, they may experience feelings and thoughts that remain with them after the book is closed.
PART I
‘The most innocent, wicked man I have ever met.’
W. B. Yeats to John Quinn (4 October 1907)
THE YEARS OF INNOCENCE
ONE
Little England Beyond Wales
1
‘MAMA’S DEAD!’
‘Who am I in the first place?’
Augustus John, Finishing Touches
A regiment of women, monstrously feathered and furred, waited at Tenby railway station. The train that pulled in one autumn day in the year 1877 carried among its passengers a young solicitor and his wife, Edwin and Augusta John. With his upright figure, commanding nose, his ginger whiskers, he had more the bearing of a soldier than lawyer. She was a pale woman of twenty-nine, with small features, rather fragile-looking, her hair in ringlets. She was expecting their third child.
The landladies of Tenby fell upon the new arrivals. But the Johns stood aloof. By prior arrangement the most regal of these beldames escorted them to her carriage and drove them up the Esplanade along the ‘fine houses of coherent design’ fronting the sea to a building on the edge of South Cliffs: No. 50 Rope Walk Field.1 From their windows they looked over to Caldy Island and to a smaller island, St Margarets, later a bird sanctuary, that at low tide seemed to attach it to the mainland of Wales.
Augusta’s other children were born in Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire. But she and Edwin had decided that, for safety, she should give birth to their third child in Tenby, Haverfordwest having recently been hit by an epidemic of scarlet fever. Soon after the New Year her labour pains began, and at five-thirty on the morning of 4 January 1878 the new baby was born. It was a boy, and they named him after both of them: Augustus Edwin John.
*
Victoria Place, Haverfordwest, had been built in 1839 to commemorate the opening of the new toll bridge. The houses were narrow, and all had small square windows with wooden frames that sloped inwards, and window-sills a child could sit on.
The John family lived at No. 7.2 Almost immediately behind the front door ascended a steep staircase. Small alcoves had been cut into the wall. From the second floor it was possible to see into Castle Square opposite, one side of which was formed by the Castle Inn, with its ramparts and its archway through which coaches drove to the stables behind. Above the inn rose the ruined Norman castle, its stone windows gaping at the sky. All around stretched the uneven slate roofs of the houses, now high, now low, undulating away to the perimeter of the town. And beyond the town lay green hills that on summer evenings grew blue and hazy, and in winter, when there was frost, stood out hard.
In the eleven years of their marriage Edwin and Augusta John had two boys and two girls. Thornton was nearly three years older than Augustus: Gwen eighteen months older; and Winifred was born almost two years later.3
For all of them, Haverfordwest was an exciting town in which to grow up. On market days the streets and square heaved with a pandemonium of people and animals – women from Llangwm in short skirts, bright shawls and billycock hats carrying baskets of oysters on their backs; philosophical-looking tramps wandering through with an air of detachment and no obvious purpose; and gypsies, mysterious and aloof, shooting down sardonic glances as they rode by in ragged finery on their horse-drawn carts. From this continuous perambulation rose a cacophony of barking dogs, playing children, the perpetual lowing of cattle, screaming of pigs and the loud vociferation of the Welsh drovers.
Papa warned all his children against walking abroad on market days in case they should be kidnapped by the gypsies and spirited away in their caravans, no one knew where.4 The lure of danger made it a warning Augustus never forgot.
At weekends, Edwin John would lead out his children on well conducted expeditions in the outskirts of the town. Augustus loved these walks. One of his favourites was along a path known as ‘the frolic’ which ran southeast, parallel to the River Cleddau, where barges were pulled in over the marshy ground to dilapidated wharves. Beyond the tidal flats, in the middle distance, a railway train would sometimes seem to issue from the ruins of an ancient priory and rumble on under its white banner till, with a despairing wail, it hurled itself into the hillside: and vanished.
Another popular walk was along a right-of-way called ‘the scotchwells’. Under a colonnade of t
rees this path followed the millstream past the booming flour mill from which the terrifying figure of its miller, white from head to toe, might emerge. Sometimes, too, Papa would take them high above the Cleddau valley and perilously close to the cottage of a known witch.
On all these walks Edwin John marched in front, preserving a moderate speed – the pace of a gentleman – only halting, in primrose time, to pick a few of his favourite flowers and make a nosegay against the frightful exhalations of the tannery, or, when on the seashore, to gather shells for his collection. Behind him, heard but not seen, the children crocodiled out in an untidy line, darting here and there in a series of guerrilla raids.
On Sundays there was church. Augustus preferred being sent with the servants to their Nonconformist chapels, bethels, zions and bethesdas. He loved the sonorous unintelligible language, the fervour of the singing, the obstinacy of prayer, the surging and resurging crescendos of the orator as he worked himself towards that divine afflatus with which good Welsh sermons terminated.
The religious atmosphere of Victoria Place was for several years fortified by two aunts, Rosina and Leah Smith – Aunts ‘Rose’ and ‘Lily’. They were younger sisters of Augusta, both in their twenties, and both ablaze for God. They had come to Haverfordwest from Brighton when Augusta’s health began to fail. After the birth of Winifred, Augusta seldom seemed well. She suffered from chronic rheumatism which the damp climate of Haverfordwest was thought to aggravate, and she travelled much in search of a cure.
In her absence Rosina and Leah took charge of the children’s upbringing. One of the aunts’ first demands was for the dismissal of the nurse, on the grounds that she had permitted the children to grow abnormally fond of her. They had gone to her cottage on the lonely moors above the Prescelly Mountains north of Haverfordwest, where they would sit wide-eyed over their bowls of cawl, staring at the dark-bearded woodmen with their clogs, thin-pointed and capped with brass, and then argue on the way home whether their feet were the same shape. Few of these men knew a word of English. Old pagan festivals still flourished, and on certain dates the children were given sprigs of box plant and mugs of water, and told to run along the stone flags of the streets asperging any stranger they met. These were habits of which the aunts could not approve.
The new regime under aunts was a bewildering change. Both were Salvationists and held rank in General Booth’s army. Aunt Leah, a lady of ruthless cheerfulness and an alarming eloquence, had once ‘tried the spirits’ but found them wanting. Also found wanting was a young man who had had the temerity to propose marriage to her. But she had been seduced by the Princess Adelaide’s Circle, of which she soon became a prominent member.
Aunt Rosina – ‘a little whirlwind’, Winifred remembered her, ‘battering everyone to death’5 – had a curious ferret-like face which, the children speculated, might cause her to get shot one day by mistake. Her choice of religion seemed to depend on her digestion, which was erratic. ‘At one time it might be “The Countess of Huntingdon’s Connexion”, with raw beef and hot water, at another Joanna Southcote and grapes, or again, The Society of Friends plus charcoal biscuits washed down with Rowntree’s Electric Cocoa.’6
The two aunts toured the neighbourhood of Haverfordwest in a wicker pony-trap known locally as ‘the Hallelujah Chariot’, bringing souls to Jesus. Strong men, it was said, pickled in sin, fell prostrate to the ground before them, weeping miserably. Their presence dominated Victoria Place. Each day began with morning prayers, and continued with the aid of improving tracts, Jessica’s First Prayer and The Lamplighter.
Although the theatre was out of bounds, the children were permitted to attend an entertainment called ‘Poole’s Diorama’. This was a precursor of the cinema – a vast historical picture, or series of pictures which, to music and other sound effects, was gradually unrolled on an apparently endless canvas across the stage. At one corner a man with a wand pointed to features of interest and shouted out his explanations to the audience. But when ‘The Bombardment of Alexandria’ was depicted the aunts judged matters had gone far enough and bustled the children outside.
Even more exciting, though viewed with some family misgivings, was the children’s first visit to the circus. Though later in life Augustus used to object to ‘that cruel and stupid convention of strapping the horses’ noses down to their chests’, this circus, he claimed, corrupted him for life. It wasn’t simply a question of the animals, but the dazzling appearance of a beautiful woman in tights, and of other superb creatures, got up in full hunting kit and singing ‘His Moustache was Down to Heah, Tiddy-foll-ol’ and ‘I’ve a Penny in my Pocket, La-de-dah’.
In summer the family used to go off to Broad Haven, twelve miles away, where Edwin had a one-storey house specially built for him out of the local stone.7 And the aunts came too. But here the regime was less strict and the children happier. Their house on St Bride’s Bay had a large lawn and faced the sea, in which the children spent much of their time. Yet even in the waves they were not beyond religious practices which extended offshore with dangerous ceremonies of Baptism by Total Immersion.
The Johns at this time were an isolated family. The uncompromising reputation of the aunts, the formidable respectability of Edwin, and their rather lowly origins, limited the number of their friends while failing to win them entry into the upper reaches of Haverfordwest society. The children were at ease only in the sea or roaming the wilds at Broad Haven. ‘Our invincible shyness,’ Augustus later recorded, ‘comparable only to that of the dwarf inhabitants of Equatorial Africa, resisted every advance on the part of strangers.’ Their grandfather, William John, used to exhort them: ‘Talk! If you can’t think of anything to say tell a lie!’ And: ‘If you make a mistake, make it with authority!’ But the children were speechless.
The only adults with whom Augustus appears to have formed any friendly contact were the servants. At Victoria Place the one room where he felt at home was the kitchen. He passed many hours sitting on a ‘skew’ by the kitchen fire, listening to the quick chatter and watching the comings and goings. Sometimes an intoxicated groom would stagger in, and the women would dance and sing to him till his eyes filled with remorse. It was natural theatre, full of melodrama and comedy, and the fascination of half-understood stories.
The children needed the influence of their mother, but she was absent more and more. One day, in the second week of August 1884, the servants were lined up in the hall of Victoria Place, and Edwin John informed the household that his wife had died. The servants stood in their line, some of them crying quietly; but the children ran from room to room, chanting with senseless excitement: ‘Mama’s dead! Mama’s dead!’
2
THE RESPONSIBLE PARTIES
‘Have I any claim to the throne? My father kept everything dark, but I had an uncle descended from Owen Glyndwr.’
Augustus John to Caspar John (16 February 1951)
‘We come from a long line of professional people,’ Edwin John would tell Augustus when questioned about their antecedents. Since he was seeking to enter fashionable Pembrokeshire society, he had his reasons for not being more explicit. Augustus, who had little sense of belonging to his parents’ families, did not probe further. They couldn’t all have been middle-class lawyers, he thought; then he would glance at his father again and reflect that perhaps it was better to remain in the dark. At least he would be different.
Both his paternal grandfathers, William John8 and David Davies, had been Welsh labourers living in Haverfordwest; while on his mother’s side he came from a long line of Sussex plumbers, all unhelpfully bearing the name Thomas Smith. William John’s son, who was named after him, was born in 1818. At the age of twenty-two he married a local seamstress, Mary Davies, the same age as himself. On the marriage certificate he described himself as a ‘writer’, which probably meant attorney’s clerk (the occupation he gave on his children’s birth certificates). That he had cultural interests, however, is certain. By the end of his life he had collected a
fair library including leather-bound volumes of Dickens, Scott, Smollett and an edition of Dante’s Inferno with terrifying illustrations by Gustave Doré; and he had done something rather unusual for a man of his class in the mid-nineteenth century: he had travelled through Italy, bringing back with him a fund of Italian stories and a counterfeit Vandyke to hang in his dining-room.
William and Mary John had begun their married life in a workman’s cottage in Chapel Street, then moved to Prendergast Hill and in 1850 were living at 5 Gloster Terrace. Each move, though only a few hundred yards, denoted a rise in the world, and the climax was reached when, in 1855, they transferred to Victoria Place. The basis of their fortune was an investment in a new bank which had turned out well. In 1854 William was admitted a solicitor and shortly afterwards started his own legal firm in Quay Street. He served for several years as town clerk of Haverfordwest, bought a number of properties and, on his death, left a capital sum of nearly eight thousand pounds (equivalent to £300,000 in 1996). In politics he was a Liberal, had acted as Lord Kensington’s agent in all his contests up to the late 1870s and was well known for his speeches in Welsh at the Quarter Sessions. But although, in the various directories of the time, he is listed among the attorneys, he is not among the gentry.9
Between 1840 and 1856 William and Mary had six children who survived, three sons and three daughters. Edwin William John, the fourth child and second son, was born on 18 April 1847. No. 5 Gloster Terrace, where his earliest years were spent, was a tall thin house into which were crammed five children,10 their parents and a maternal aunt, Martha Davies, who helped to look after her nephews and nieces. There was also another Martha Davies of about the same age, who acted as a general servant.
Augustus John Page 4