To what extent is this picture of his father accurate? Winifred, who was probably Edwin’s favourite but who saw less of him than the others, told her daughters she felt Augustus had been rather unfair. But Thornton approved, and Gwen’s attitude to their father exceeded Gus’s. ‘I think the Family has had its day,’ she wrote.
Edwin had two ambitions. The first was the revival of an old daydream: to enter the church. All his life he entertained an admiration for churchmen, and had once considered preparing himself for the priesthood. In his fifties, he became organist at Gumfreston, a tiny inaccessible church two miles from Tenby. Every Sunday morning, wet or fine, he would make his way there, play the hymns and the psalms loud and slow; then walk back along the fields. He persisted with these duties until he was almost ninety.
His other ambition was to remarry. For a short time he seems to have become engaged to Alice Jones-Lloyd, and on another occasion was said to have proposed marriage to Teresa George. Both women were considerably younger than himself, handsome and of good family. These matrimonial skirmishes were always discreet, but news of them eventually leaked out bringing down on him the combined rage of Gwen and Winifred. ‘I was furious at this heartless and extravagant outburst, and took his part,’ Augustus records, ‘but my overheated intervention only earned me the disapproval of all three.’33
The ordinary people of Tenby quite liked Edwin. They liked the look of him. ‘I am not clever,’ he boasted, ‘but I am independent, and I believe in a good appearance all the time. With a good appearance I can accomplish much.’ His chief accomplishment was to convert this good appearance into the appearance of goodness. His stamina for church-going, his cast-iron empty routine, above all his unrelenting loneliness and longevity excited a respect uncomplicated by envy. He was no trouble and he seemed a kindly man. He offered to pay for the education of his housekeeper’s son; he taught a number of local children to play the organ; and when he wished to try out some new air he would call on a young chorister and present him afterwards with a shilling. Another of his pupils in the neighbourhood, John Leach, remembers that:
‘my own father in spring and summer often took my sister and me to evensong… and usually we walked home with Edwin John through the woods and lanes. It came about through these walks that he asked my sister and me to go with him to the cinema, of which he appeared to be very fond. These were the days of the early Chaplins, the Keystone cops and the serial with its weekly threat to the life or virtue of the heroine. Perhaps Edwin John was fortified by the presence of children on these occasions… Besides being generous, one recalls [him] as a quiet, gentle, soft-voiced courteous man, who talked to children without condescension.’
But his own children he could not love. He was faced with the obstacle of their existence: an obstacle to remarriage, to the church and to almost any ambition he may have had. ‘He became an object only,’ commented Thornton. ‘Is it any wonder we felt the effects of this?’34
‘What damned ancestral strain is at work?’35 Augustus later demanded. All of them were afflicted by melancholia. Winifred was probably the most successful at shedding what Augustus called this ‘gloom by day and horror by night’.36 She was to bring up a conventional American family and nourish a belief in the rigorous simplicities of psychic religion. Though she developed ‘strong nerves’37 to combat her timidity, she shared with Gwen, so she felt, a lifetime’s devotion to privacy and the wish ‘to be forgotten’38 after death. But Gwen, who thought ‘aloneness’ rather than family life ‘is nearer God’,39 believed in the value of her work after death. Gwen’s self-neglect worried Gus and he worried her about it. ‘Leave everybody and let them leave you,’ she exhorted herself. ‘Then only will you be without fear.’40 Thornton, too, came to agree ‘about solitude being a good thing. I didn’t always think so.’41 He would pass much of his own life ‘alone but I am not at all lonely’42 or fishing from his sailing boat.
Winifred, after escaping to the United States in her twenties, was obliged, like all the children, to keep up a regular correspondence with her father so as to receive the quarterly allowance from her mother’s estate. ‘Papa worries me to go home,’ she wrote to Gwen in 1910. ‘I don’t want to’43 – and she didn’t. But Thornton, who left for Canada at the same time as Winifred, did return to Tenby at the end of the First World War. For Edwin still wanted his sons and daughters round him, even if he could not show them affection. He took the opportunity to remind Thornton that he was an executor of his will and, despite there being no work for his son in Tenby, advanced this as a proper reason for his staying there. ‘I said I could return in the event of his death,’ remembered Thornton who, on getting back to Canada, realized that he would never return. ‘Do you think I should write to tell him so?’44 he questioned Gwen.
Gwen, who went to live in France, could not avoid seeing her father occasionally. ‘My father is here,’ she wrote from Paris to her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘ – not because he has wished to see me or I to see him, but because other relations and people he knows think better of him if he has been to see me. And for that I have to be tired out and unable to paint for days. And he never helps me to live materially – or cares how I live.’45 Gwen hardly ever referred to her childhood and her few references to Wales – ‘the mild climate of Tenby means that one has little energy there’46 – are polite metaphors. For ten years, in the optimistic belief that their father was dying, Gus would try to arrange a farewell meeting between the three of them. But he failed, and when eventually the old man died in 1938 Gwen did not go over for his funeral. He had been no more than an ‘unwanted interruption to her work’.47
‘I hold no grudge against him,’ Thornton wrote of Edwin after his death. Nor did Winifred. But Gwen, who spent more precious energy in escaping from him, and Gus, who never really escaped and sometimes felt ‘I ought to have stopped’ in ‘my native town’,48 did hold a grudge.
Augustus had needed a hero, and the hope that his father might somehow reveal himself as this hero had died a slow death. He described his father to the painter Darsie Japp as ‘a revolting personage’49 and was anxious to erase signs of involuntary attachment. ‘I wanted to be my own unadulterated self, and no one else. And so, taking my father as a model, I watched him carefully, imitating his tricks as closely as I could, but in reverse. By this method I sought to protect myself from the intrusions of the uninvited dead.’50
His actions represented not simply a wish to be different from his father, but to be someone other than his father’s son. His claim to be a descendant of Owen Glendower; his vivid fantasy life, nourished by books, which developed into the cult of the ‘Red Indian’: these were symptoms of his identification with non-John people. The kinship he felt for gypsies, too, and which later became so close that many people believed him to have gypsy blood, arose not just from the fact that Edwin John disapproved of them but from his having warned his son they might capture him and bring him up as one of their own. He longed to be kidnapped. At home he felt an outcast, and at school it was with the outcast he grew most sympathetic – the ‘half-wit’ at Clifton, even the boy he beat in a fight at Greenhill.
This drive to be someone else grew more complicated in adult life. To know Augustus John was to know not a single man, but a crowd of people, none of them quite convincing. His reaction against the paternal environment of his early years was in perpetual conflict with the melancholy characteristics he inherited from his father. Between the two opposing forces in this civil war stretched a no man’s land where Augustus pitched his tent. But this battling against himself produced a state of crisis. In later years everyone else would recognize readily enough the manly and melodramatic form of Augustus John – but he himself did not know who he was. His lack of stylistic conviction as a painter, the frequent changes of handwriting and signature in his letters, his surprising passivity and lack of initiative in everyday matters, the abrupt changes of mood, the sense of strain and vacancy, the theatricality: all these suggested a lack
of self-knowledge. ‘When I am in Ireland I’m an Irishman,’ he told Reginald Pound, and it was partly true. He was a chameleon. He had half turned his back on Wales and, while continuing to make sentimental visits, chose to live fifty years of his life amid the lushness of Hampshire and Dorset – a green-tree country he seldom painted and to whose beauty he was not particularly responsive. Like his brother and sisters, he too dreamed of exiling himself far off from the land of their father. But having ‘got stuck’51 in England, he later resented the parental contamination of his homeland. ‘I wish to the Devil I were in Wales again instead of this blighted country,’52 he wrote from Hampshire to his friend John Sampson in 1913. In such moods of disgruntled nostalgia his thoughts veered wistfully to the Prescelly Mountains and the west coast – and he would suddenly ‘make a dash’ there (‘a pony trap and a spell of irresponsibility’53). But when in 1929 Sylvia Townsend Warner advised him to ‘go back to Wales’ permanently, he replied that this was ‘impossible’ because his father was there and he ‘was still afraid of him’.54 Yet, had it been possible, it would have been ‘better to try and make the best of one’s own country’,55 he acknowledged. Indeed, he sometimes felt it would have been really best of all if he had never left Wales.
Over the years Augustus became more imaginative at changing his past. He claimed not to know the date of his birthday, and declared that he never celebrated it. In 1946 he told a Time magazine interviewer, Alfred Wright, that his mother’s name was Augusta Petulengro; and six years later (14 May 1952) he wrote to John Rothenstein: ‘As for Gypsies, I have not encountered a sounder “Gypsy” than myself. My mother’s name was Petulengro, remember, and we descend from Tubal-Cain via Paracelsus.’ What he did not tell Alfred Wright or John Rothenstein (saving the inverted commas) was that Petulengro was the Romany version of Smith.56 It was deliberate teasing, a fantasy that was irresistible to him but in which he did not actually believe. His real state of mind concerning who he was seems to have been a genuine bewilderment. ‘I am in a curious state,’ he confessed to Lady Cynthia Asquith in 1918, ‘ – wondering who I am. I watch myself closely without yet being able to classify myself. I evade definition – and that must mean I have no character. Do you understand yours?’
This void seems to have been created through the rejection of all Augustus knew of his background. He could not remember his mother; he knew nothing of his origins; he disliked his father. Victoria House appeared to enclose him in darkness. His shyness and anxiety cut him off from other people, cut them all off from everyone except themselves. Gwen was to make solitude part of her way of life. Edwin had done much the same but, probably in reaction to him, Augustus could not come to terms with this legacy of melancholia, endeavouring by force of energy to hurl it from him, or to outpace it, like a boy running against his shadow which at evening lengthens and overtakes him. To many who, like William Rothenstein, believed that Augustus had been born ‘with a whole series of silver spoons between his gums’,57 this stampeding through life seemed a thoughtless squandering of his natural gifts. But Augustus took a more sombre view of himself: ‘I am not so perverse as unfortunate,’ he wrote (15 September 1899). All the children had been unfortunate in losing their mother and in having to contend with the family’s isolation. But Augustus seemed particularly unfortunate in having been afflicted while at school by partial deafness that raised another invisible barrier between him and the world.
‘If our mother had lived it would have been different,’ Thornton wrote to Augustus over seventy years after her death (3 February 1959). She had encouraged them to draw and paint and, surrounded by her pictures, Gwen and Gus continued drawing and painting, using the attic at Victoria House as their studio. ‘Wherever they went their sketch-books went with them,’ their father liked to recall.
‘In their walks along the beach… on excursions into the country, wherever they went the sketch-books went too, and were used. They sketched everything they saw – little scenes, people, animals… I can remember when they were a little older, and I sometimes used to take them to the theatre in London, how, even here, the inevitable sketch-books turned up as well. Then in the few minutes interval between the acts they worked feverishly to draw some person who had interested them.’58
Although he conceded ‘it was possible that I was a less keen observer of the boy’s work than his mother would have been’, Edwin took pride in having failed to put a stop to all this sketching. He had left his children’s talent ‘to develop freely and naturally’. But one day on Tenby beach, Gwen, who ‘was always picking up beautiful children to draw and adore’,59 came across Jimmy, a twelve-year-old boy with a pale haunting face and corkscrew curls down to his shoulders, dressed in a costume of old green velvet. Having made friends with him, she invited him back to her attic, and, in the hope of some payment for these sessions, his mother came too – rather to Gwen’s disgust. But Edwin disapproved of strollers, and the sight of this woman wandering into his house was open to misinterpretation. He therefore decided to put his foot down and forbid Gwen inviting ‘models’ home. But already it was too late. He objected; Gwen insisted; and he gave way. It was the pattern of things to come.
In their adolescence the children began to pair off differently, Thornton and Winifred, both small and quiet, spending more time together, and Gwen growing more involved with Gus. They needed someone to replace their mother and displace their father, someone to love and from whom to learn. Gwen appears to have hoped that Augustus might be this person, but his needs were similar to hers and he responded fretfully to Gwen’s attentions, undermining her confidence by making her feel ignorant. She was older, but he was bigger. ‘I suffered a long time because of him,’ she wrote in her early thirties, ‘it’s like certain illnesses which recur in time… I revolted against him at the beginning of each holiday, but he won by telling me horrible things and when I threw myself on him to fight him and pull his hair… he always won, for of course he was the stronger.’60 Gwen was often in tears over this period, and Gus in angry despair.
Like Gwen, Gus saw life in terms of pictures. ‘Once when we were walking together over the sand dunes and saw a piece of hard perpendicular sand,’ Arthur Morley recalled, ‘Gussie pulled out his penknife and very rapidly carved out an attractive hand and face. On another occasion when he was sitting on my right in class he seized my Latin Grammar book and on the first empty page drew in ink with amazing speed two comic faces very different from each other, face to face.’61
At Greenhill there had been art classes in which the pupils, armed with coloured chalks, copied lithographs of Swiss scenery. But Augustus also practised drawing from life, discovering from among the masters some challenging models. At Clifton he had been given no encouragement and no instruction. ‘Philosophy was eschewed,’ he afterwards wrote, ‘Art apologized for, and Science summarized in a series of smelly parlour tricks.’62
Back at Tenby, while studying at St Catherine’s, he endured a course of ‘stumping’ under the tuition of a Miss O’Sullivan. ‘Stumping’ was a substitute for drawing prescribed by the State Art Education Authorities. The stumps were spiral cones of paper, and the stumping powder a box of pulverized chalk. With these materials, some charcoal, an indiarubber and a sheet of cartridge paper, students would reproduce the objects placed before them by means of a prolonged smudging, rubbing and stippling that gave him a method of representing form without risking the use of line. At first he copied simple cones, pyramids and cylinders, then gradually advanced, via casts of fruit and flowers, to Greco-Roman statuary until he finally arrived at the Life Room, where he spent several months studying a fully clothed model almost as bored as himself. At this stage his work was submitted to the Central Authority, since each successful student received a certificate qualifying him to indoctrinate others in the Theory and Practice of Stumping, while the school received a grant from the Exchequer. Augustus was awarded his certificate and, at the age of sixteen, became a Master Stumper, Third Class.
H
e was more than ever anxious to leave Tenby. But what was he to do? He no longer thought of becoming a trapper on the Red River, or of leading a revolt of the Araucanian Indians, but dreamed of exploring the exotic possibilities of China. He would join the Civil Service perhaps, if that would carry him to such enchanted lands: he would do anything to get far enough away from this stagnant little backwater. He still loved parts of Tenby, the wooded valleys inland and the wild sea coast and rocky country along it, but the meanness of his life at home constricted him unbearably, and his hunger for a larger world grew every day more acute. His father, who would have preferred to launch him on a barrister’s career, had to acknowledge that he was unfitted by nature to such a profession, and for a short time it was agreed between them that he should join the army. Augustus began his army training locally, and in the evenings the respective merits of the officer-training establishments at Sandhurst and Woolwich were weighed.
Then he changed his mind. He had decided, he said, not to join the army, but to study art. Edwin had never, he later admitted, ‘taken their drawing seriously’. But for some months Augustus had been going to an art school in Tenby run by Edward J. Head, a Royal Academician, who reported very favourably on his progress. Edwin was impressed by these reports. He was an annual visitor to the Royal Academy and had read in The Times accounts of various sales and successes in the art world. Pastoral painting and conversation pieces in particular recommended themselves to him as gentlemanly pursuits. These days, it seemed, the artist’s profession might be tolerably respectable, provided it was practised with financial success. Mr Head himself, if not exactly a gentleman, managed to live comfortably. When a number of his pictures had first been hung at the Academy, Edwin’s civic pride vibrated. Here was an example his son might strive to emulate. Naturally he would have preferred Augustus to go for a soldier, but he was such a temperamental fellow, so moody and mutinous and with no head for serious business: art might be just the job for him. One thing still bothered Edwin: had he been sufficiently unenthusiastic? Certainly he had failed to encourage his son, but was that by itself enough? He had no wish to appear irresponsible in the way of putting up difficulties. In his own account of this time, Edwin explained his position by means of paradox:
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