Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  ‘I find him [Shaw] a decent man to deal with,’ John notified Quinn,49 after Shaw had decided to buy one of these emphatic portraits for three hundred pounds (equivalent to £10,800 in 1996) – the one with the blue background.50 He had been reminded by Wyndham Lewis that Shaw’s beard ‘protrudes for several feet in front of his face’, unlike Darwin’s which ‘grew into his mouth’.51 The head, as Shaw himself pointed out, had two aspects, the concave and the convex. John produced two studies from the concave angle, and a third (with eyes shut as if in aching thought) from the convex – ‘the blind portrait’ Shaw called it; adding in a letter to Mrs Patrick Campbell that it had ‘got turned into a subject entitled Shaw Listening to Someone Else Talking, because I went to sleep...’52 With this sleeping version John was never wholly satisfied. ‘It could only have happened of course in the dreamy atmosphere of Coole,’ he suggested to Shaw.53

  Though he had sometimes bridled at having his portrait washed out by John, and rebelled against ‘being immortalised as an elderly caricature of myself, Shaw was generally pleased with these poster-portraits, especially the one he bought and kept all his life – ‘though to keep it in a private house seems to me rather like keeping an oak tree in an umbrella stand’.54 In the regular Irish manner, like Yeats, he boasted that ‘John makes me out the inebriated gamekeeper’; but in later life he would tell other artists wishing to paint him that since he had been ‘done’ by the two greatest artists in the last forty years, Rodin and John, there was no room for more portraits.55

  John exhibited the portrait with the blue background at the summer show of the NEAC in May and June 1915; and in February 1916 he held an exhibition of twenty-one paintings and forty-one drawings at the Chenil Gallery.56 It was, perhaps, his last effort to pursue something of what he had been doing before the war, an anthology of past and present, landscape and portrait. Ursula Tyrwhitt made a point of writing to Gwen to say how much she had liked Gus’s drawings. But they had little connection with the war. ‘Mr Augustus John continues to mark time with great professional skill,’ wrote the art critic of The Times. The eyes of critics and painters were now fixed on him to see in what new direction he would go.

  2

  THE VIRGIN’S PRAYER

  ‘Mr John, one feels somehow, does not spend all his vitality on painting.’

  Manchester Guardian (23 November 1912)

  ‘A house without children isn’t worth living in!’ John had once pronounced. His sons, no longer to be classed simply as children, now passed much of their time at schools and colleges: but the supply of fresh children to Alderney continued unchecked. In March 1915, in a room next to the kitchen, John presiding, Dorelia gave birth to a second daughter, described as ‘small and nice’,57 whom they named Vivien. By the age of two she had grown into ‘a most imposing personage – half the size of Poppet, and twice as dangerous’.58 Through the woods she liked to wander with ‘a beautiful Irish setter called Cuchulain… he patiently bringing me home for meals at the toll of the great bell’.59 Unlike the boys, neither Poppet nor Vivien was sent to school. ‘We roamed the countryside,’ Vivien recalled, ‘and a tutor cycled over from Bournemouth to teach us. Finally we punctured his bicycle… ’

  In 1917 four more children joined the Alderney gang – John, Nicolette, Brigit and Caitlin. These were the son and daughters, ‘robust specimens’ aged between seven and three, of Francis Macnamara who, after seven years of unfaithful marriage, had left home permanently to live with Euphemia Lamb (who had briefly left someone else’s home to live with him). His children had circled slowly in the wake of their mother, who was eventually towed down to Alderney out of range of the German Zeppelins. One of the children, Nicolette, elected John as her second father, conceiving for the John ménage an exaggerated loyalty not wholeheartedly welcomed by them. Yet her feelings, despite some lapses from fact, give an intensity to her memories of Alderney.

  ‘In my memory the bedrooms were small boxes with large double beds. Poppet and Vivien shared one of these. On occasions, we three Macnamara girls squashed in beside them for the night. In the morning we always woke up with hangovers from an excess of giggling...

  …Poppet and Vivien, the younger boys, my sisters, splashed naked in the pond, while my mother and Dodo stood by with their arms full of flowers. Edie held out a towel for a wet child. And like some mythical god observing the mortals, Augustus the Watcher, sat on a bench leaning forward, his long hair covered by a felt hat, his beard a sign of authority

  It was in this garden that I first experienced ecstasy… There has never been another garden like it; it excited me in such a way that it became the symbol of heaven.’60

  For those who, like the Macnamara or Anrep children, continually came and went, Alderney seemed an Eden; but for the John children themselves it was an Eden from which they needed to be expelled in order to be born into the world outside. While for a third group, a race of demi-Johns, it was also an Eden, but seen from a place of exile.

  The first of this race ‘not of the whole blood’ was the daughter of a music student of generous figure and complexion called Nora Brownsword, twenty years younger than John and known, bluntly, by her surname. On a number of occasions she had posed for him mostly for wood panels, and on 12 October 1914 he wrote in a state of some financial panic to Quinn: ‘By-the-bye I’ve been and got a young lady in the family way! What in blazes is to be done?’ Quinn suggested exporting the lady to France. This advice, which arrived safely at Alderney almost five months later, was invalid by the time John read it. Yet the problem remained. What in blazes was to be done?

  John explained the position as clearly as he could in another letter to Quinn: ‘Some while back, I conceived a wild passion for a girl and put her in the family way. She has now a daughter and I’ve promised her what she asks: £2 a week and £50 to set up in a cottage. I never see her now and don’t want to, but I’m damned if I see where that £50 is to be found at the moment. Her father is a wealthy man. He has just tumbled to the situation and I suppose he’ll be howling for my blood.’ Dorelia’s attitude was one of sternness and calm. If matters were made too easy, then the same thing might happen many times. So she hardened herself. In John’s letters to her at this time there is a new note of diffidence mingling with reminders that ‘I cannot exist without you for long, as you know.’ He is apologetic too for not meanwhile having painted better. ‘Sorry to be so damn disappointing in my work. It must make you pretty hopeless at times, but don’t give me up yet. I’m going to improve.’ It was, to a degree, for the sake of his work that Ida had died and Dorelia risked her life: for his work and himself and themselves all together.

  As a civilian in wartime John felt at the dead centre of a hurricane. It was this awful sense of deadness, this curious uselessness, that tempted him to rush into new lovemaking, as the only means of self-renewal available. Extricating himself from the consequences of his affair with Brownsword seems to have taken longer than the affair itself. She had often visited Alderney during her holidays from music college; but after the birth of her daughter she did not go back there. ‘She must on no account come to Alderney,’ John instructed Dorelia. ‘…For God’s sake don’t worry about it – don’t think about it.’

  This advice John made several lusty attempts to pursue himself. It was not easy Brownsword had been anxious to shield the news from her parents – which, since they could far better afford to look after the child than he, dissatisfied John. In due course she went to live in Highgate, where John sometimes turned up – Brownsword hiding herself away at his approach. She had become extraordinarily elusive even when John pursued her with genuine offers of help. He felt deeply impatient. ‘I dined with her and wasn’t too nice,’ he admitted to Dorelia, ‘but tried to keep my temper and it’s no use allowing oneself to be too severe… She showed every sign of innocent surprise when I asked her why she had bunked away without warning.’61 In a less severe mood still, he confided on one occasion to Theodosia Townshend: ‘I’d marry he
r if necessary – Dodo wouldn’t mind.’ To what extent he believed this it is impossible to be sure: probably a little, once it was out of the question. In any event the ceremony of marriage meant less to him than it did to many people. Besides, there were other more fantastic plans to fall back on. ‘The Tutor’s plan I think the best,’ John had affirmed in another letter to Dorelia. After leaving Alderney, the boys’ ex-tutor, John Hope-Johnstone, had gone ‘tramping to Asia’, as John explained to Sampson, ‘got as far as Trieste, & then was arrested as a spy, spent 8 days in chokey along with a dozen other criminals mostly sexual, & then was liberated. He doesn’t think he’ll go no further.’ Stopped in his tracks by the world war, he reappeared in London and secretly offered himself in the role of the baby’s legal father. ‘I must say,’ John acknowledged, ‘the tutor is behaving with uncommon decency.’ From Brownsword’s point of view this ‘best plan’ contained disadvantages. Although Hope-Johnstone entertained some romantic attachments for young men of under twenty, he was physically attracted to girls of ten or twelve, towards whom he would proffer timid advances, placing his hand on their thighs until, their mothers getting to hear of it, he was expelled from the house. The prospect of having a young daughter in his own house was certainly inviting; and it seems probable that he scented money in this mariage blanc – to the extent at least of making a household investment, ‘a most expensive frying pan’. But Brownsword was not a party to this. The surname she gave her daughter, the painter Gwyneth Johnstone, suggests that no hope had entered this relationship.

  In his letters to Dorelia, John makes no reference to Nora Brownsword that can be construed as sympathetic. But then Dorelia was not in the business of easy sympathy. He himself appears to have believed that he offered Brownsword money, but that she accepted nothing. She remembered asking for £4 a week for the baby, not herself: and receiving nothing. That nothing positively changed hands on a number of businesslike occasions appears indisputable. Having a musical degree she was just able to support herself and her daughter, and their independence was complete. It was only casually, years later, that John learnt she had married. As for Dorelia, she provided Brownsword with a ring; and within limits she was kind. But she was not welcoming. She offered to take the baby and bring it up as one of the family, provided Brownsword never saw the girl again. But since that was unacceptable to Brownsword, she took no further interest in the matter.

  The Brownsword affair shot a warning across John’s bows.62 Through the deep gloom of war he needed, like pilot lights, a girl to call and a girl to play. After one party at Mallord Street, Dorelia and Helen Anrep could hear him shuffling about in the entrance hall and, with hushed comic intensity, confiding to a procession of female guests: ‘When shall I see you again?… You know how much it means to me… I never cease thinking of you… Relax a little and inspire your poor artist with a kiss… Or shall I drown myself?’ Each time, for a moment, the tone carried conviction. His need seemed, if almost indiscriminate, almost real. Without these girls he was in the dark. He could not stop himself. At the beginning and in the end, he drank: first to make contact, then to forget.

  The roll-call reverberated on. Lady Tredegar, with her strange gift for climbing into trees and arranging nests in which polite birds would settle; Iris Tree, with her pink hair and poetry, ‘someone quite marvellous’; Sylvia Gough, with her thin loose legs, whose husband later paid John the compliment of placing his name on the list of co-respondents in her divorce case; Sybil Hart-Davis, nice and apologetic and also ‘determined to give up the drink’;63 a famous Russian ballerina, from whose Italianate husband John was said to have ‘taken a loan of her’: these and others were among his girlfriends or mistresses over these few years. Not all the voluminous gossip that rose up round him was true: but the smoke did not wholly obscure the flames. Even before the war his reputation, along with that of Ezra Pound, had been popularly celebrated in the ‘Virgin’s Prayer’:

  Ezra Pound

  And Augustus John

  Bless the bed

  That I lie on.64

  Of such notoriety John was growing increasingly shy. ‘The only difference between the World’s treatment of me and other of her illustrious sons is that it doesn’t wait till I am dead before weaving its legends about my name,’ he complained (February 1918) to Alick Schepeler. By becoming more stealthy he did not diminish this legend, but gave it an infusion of mystery. The addict’s spell is written in the many moods of revulsion and counter-resolution, the promises, promises, that chart his downhill flight. Sometimes it seemed as if Dorelia alone could arrest this descent. ‘If you come here I’ll promise to be good,’ he wrote to her from Mallord Street at the end of the war, ‘…I am discharging all my mistresses at the rate of about 3 a week – Goodbye Girls, I’m through.’

  3

  CORRUPT COTERIES

  ‘Do you manage to get any work done in spite of the war?’

  Augustus John to Gwen John (18 November 1918)

  Alderney was also changing with the war. Visitors no longer floated in and out in such abundant numbers. Henry Lamb had left. ‘We are square enough I suppose,’ he had written to John before the war. But in truth, Lamb never felt square with John. After drawing up his first Will and Testament, and handing it to Dorelia during a farewell party at Alderney,65 he was gone, looking ‘very sweet in his uniform’, to serve as an army doctor in France. Deprived of ‘poor darling Lamb’,66 Dorelia dug herself more deeply still into the plant world. Assured by John that ‘in a week or two there’ll be no money about and no food,’67 she surrounded herself with useful vegetables. They clustered about the house giving her comfort. ‘It’s rather a sickening life,’ she confessed to Lytton Strachey, ‘but the garden looks nice.’68

  God came to Alderney less often these days: God was Dorelia’s new name for John. The war had thrown shadows over both their lives, as well as between them. ‘Do you feel 200?’ he asked her, ‘ – I feel 300.’ While Dorelia was immersing herself in the life of the soil, John sought distraction at clubs and parties in London. He went everywhere and belonged nowhere. Though he still drank elbow-to-elbow with poets and prostitutes under the flyblown rococo of the Café Royal, the place was beginning to revolve almost too crazily. There were raucous-voiced sportsmen; alchemists and sorcerers sitting innocuously over their spells; a grave contingent from the British Museum; well-dressed gangs of blackmailers, bullies, pimps and agents provocateurs muttering over plans; intoxicated social reformers and Anglo-Irish jokers with their whoops and slogans; the exquisite herd of Old Boys from the Nineties ‘recognizable by their bright chestnut wigs and raddled faces’ whispering in the sub-dialect of the period; a schlemozzle of Cubists sitting algebraically at the domino tables; and, not far off, under the glittering façade of the bar, his eye fixed on the fluctuating crisis of power, the leader of the Vorticists kept company with his lieutenants. Decidedly the place was getting a bit ‘thick’69 for John.

  Throughout London a bewildering variety of clubs and pubs had sprung up offering wartime consolations. There was the Cave of the Golden Calf, a cabaret club lodged deep in a Soho basement where the miraculous Madame Strindberg had been resurrected. As queen of this vapid cellardom, wrapped in a fur coat, her face chalk white, her hair wonderfully dark, her eyes blazing with fatigue, she drifted among her guests diverting their attention from entertainments that featured everything most up to date. Under walls ‘relevantly frescoed’ by Spencer Gore and Charles Ginner, beside a huge raw-meat drop curtain designed by Wyndham Lewis, and watched over by the heads of hawks, cats and camels which, executed by Epstein in scarlet and shocking white, served as decorative reliefs for the columns supporting the ceiling, couples went through the latest dances, the bunny hug and turkey trot. There were also experiments in amateur theatre, foreign folk songs led by an Hungarian fiddler, and the spectacle of performing coppersmiths. Everything was expensive, but democratic. Girls, young and poor, were introduced to rich men on the periphery of the art world; various
writers and artists, including John, found themselves elected honorary members ‘out of deference to their personalities’ and given the privilege of charging drinks to non-artistic patrons in their absence. Into its holes and corners slunk the Vorticists, ‘Cubists, Voo-dooists, Futurists and other Boomists’70 for whom it was transfigured into a campaign headquarters. But not for long. As war advanced from the East, so Madame Strindberg went west. ‘I’m leaving the Cabaret,’ she wrote to John. ‘Dreams are sweeter than reality.’ Stripping the cellar of everything she could carry, she sailed for New York. ‘We shall never meet again now,’ she wrote from the ship. ‘…I could neither help loving you, nor hating you – and… friendship and esteem and everything got drowned between those two feelings.’71

  Even before Madame Strindberg left, John had absconded to help set up a rival haunt in Greek Street. ‘We are starting a new club in town called the “Crab-tree” for artists, poets and musicians,’ he wrote to Quinn. ‘It ought to be amusing and useful at times.’ The Crabtree opened in April 1914, and for a time it tasted sweet to him: the only thing wrong with it, he hinted darkly, were the crabs. Like the Cave of the Golden Calf it was a very democratic affair, and provided customers with what John called ‘the real thing’. Euphemia Lamb, Betty May, Lillian Shelley and other famous models went there night after night wearing black hats and throwing bottles: and for the men there were boxing contests. Actresses flocked in from the West End theatres to meet these swaggering painter-pugilists and the atmosphere was wild. ‘A most disgusting place!’ was Paul Nash’s recommendation in a letter to Albert Rutherston, ‘where only the very lowest city jews and the most pinched harlots attend. A place of utter coarseness and dull unrelieved monotony. John alone, a great pathetic muzzy god, a sort of Silenus – but also no nymphs, satyrs and leopards to complete the picture.’