Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

He dreamed of being flown to France but, after three days of waiting in foggy weather, went by train. ‘I am over here to paint something to commemorate the Conference. No small job!’ he wrote to Sampson. ‘…This is my first day in Paris and a full one its been… There seem to be ructions brewing in the Conference.’147 He found himself in ‘a delightful apartment’, ‘almost too dream-like’ on the third floor of 60 avenue Montaigne. Here, as the guest of Don José-Antonio de Gandarillas, a charming opium-eater with dyed hair who was attached to the Chilean Legation, he stayed during February and March. The conference hall was just across the river and he went over in search of profitable celebrities. Though he ‘managed to collar a Belgian representative’, he was worried over how he was to get hold of the statesmen for sittings. ‘A certain delay at the start is to be expected no doubt,’ he hazarded in a letter to Frances Stevenson,148 with whom he was angling for a weekly allowance. It was Gandarillas who speeded things up. He knew everyone, and invited everyone to his flat. The parties they gave in the avenue Montaigne were soon the talk of Paris. ‘My host Gandarillas leads a lurid and fashionable life,’ John admitted.149 An orchestra played ceaselessly all night and the spacious apartment was thronged with the beau monde. Rather nervously John began to infiltrate these parties, entering for the first time ‘as dream-like a world as any I had been deprived of’.150

  He had not thought of promoting himself – certainly he had no wish to dance: he had come prepared to ‘stand apart in a corner and watch the scene’. What happened astonished him. He talked, he laughed, he danced: he was an extraordinary success. Paris this spring was the vortex of the social and political world; and at its centre this son of a Pembrokeshire solicitor stood out as ‘easily the most picturesque personality’, Frances Stevenson recorded. ‘He held court in Paris.’

  All red carpets led to him. The Prime Ministers of Australia, France, Canada and New Zealand submitted to his brush; kings and maharajas, dukes and generals, lords of finance and of law froze before him; the Emir Faisal posed; Lawrence of Arabia took his place humbly in the queue – and Dorelia wrote to inquire whether he had yet been knighted. More wonderful still were the princesses, infantas, duchesses, marchesas who lionized him. His awkwardness departed, and a sudden confidence surged through him. They were, he discovered, these grandiloquent ladies, all too human: they ‘loved a bit of fun’. Under a smart corsage beat, as like as not, ‘a warm, tender even fragile heart’. It was a revelation.

  He was born quite suddenly into a new world, but it did not take full possession of him. Even now, at the height of this triumph, his ‘criminal instincts’ reasserted themselves, and he hurried away to ‘my old and squalid but ever glorious quarter… and sat for a while in the company of young and sinister looking men with obvious cubistic tendencies’.151 A few old friends still roamed Montparnasse, but something had been extinguished, something was vanishing for ever. Jean Moréas was dead; Modigliani, addicted to drink and drugs, would die within a year; Paul Fort had become respectable and the cercle of the closerie des Lilas was disbanded. Maurice Cremnitz was there, only slightly damaged by the war; but he, who had once likened Augustus to Robinson Crusoe, now gazed at Major John with suspicion. ‘I was conscious of causing my friends embarrassment,’ John admitted. A doubt sailed briefly across his mind. Was he too becoming respectable?

  He was doubtful also about his painting. He had begun the Peace portraits grudgingly, but his accelerated technique worked well. ‘I think I have acquired more common skill,’ he wrote to Cynthia Asquith on 24 July 1919, ‘ – or is it that I have learnt to limit my horizons merely?’ In the immense conference hall he had found a room with a high window niche, and from here he made sketches of the delegates. It was a curious assignment. ‘All goes well,’ he reassured Dorelia, ‘ – except for the poor old Conference.’ Sometimes he felt like throwing a bomb into the chamber. Amid the ghastly talk of reparations and indemnities, the British contingent showed signs of despair, ‘all except L[loyd] G[eorge] who looks bursting with satisfaction’. He and President Woodrow Wilson ‘apparently boss the whole show’. General Smuts from South Africa appeared overcome with misgivings; William Massey, Prime Minister of New Zealand, described the proceedings as farcical; Balfour slumbered; the Prime Minister of Australia, William Hughes, looking like a jugged hare, was learning French. Speech followed speech in a multiplicity of languages: the assembly wilted in boredom. For John, who had arrived with ‘my eyes open and brain busy’, these interminable rows of seated figures offered no pictorial possibilities. But he badly needed the three thousand pounds and decided to attempt a more fanciful interpretation of what he saw. ‘I do not propose to paint a literal representation of the Conference Chamber,’ he promised the Ministry of Information, ‘but a group which will have a more symbolic character, bring in motifs which will suggest the conditions which gave rise to the Conference and the various interests involved in it.’ It did not augur well.

  In April he moved from Gandarillas’s apartment to a private house at 3 quai Malaquais belonging to the Duchess of Gramont, whose portrait he was painting. By May he had resolved to quit Paris. ‘I was pretty busy in Paris,’ he told Gwen, ‘& had a queer time.’ He had been spoilt, pampered, dazzled. But now he had had enough: strangers would make better company, or perhaps solitude itself might be best. ‘Life in Paris was too surprising,’ he afterwards confided to Cynthia Asquith. ‘I long for some far island, sun and salt water.’ He had had too much work of the wrong sort. ‘I am very helpless and desolate,’ he confessed.152

  He was still in khaki. Until the autumn of 1919, and to everyone’s consternation, he continued to receive pay and allowances from the Canadians, and also for almost seven months from the British War Office. ‘I must drop this commission and get into walking clothes again,’ he told Dorelia. Everyone agreed. ‘Would it not be more satisfactory for you to be demobilized?’ the authorities tactfully persisted. But each time he prepared to return to civilian life a curious reluctance, not wholly financial, overcame him.153 Had he not been ‘going for a soldier’ even before deciding on the Slade? The uniform, which had caused such embarrassment in Montparnasse, had given him confidence in the Champs-Élysées, and he enjoyed the pantomime. Besides, he had two medals.

  But his inability to finish either the big Canadian war or Paris Peace Conference pictures made him ‘very unstable’. He tried several methods of restoring this stability. To reimburse the British Government for the expenses it had paid him, he gave the Imperial War Museum eight drawings relating to the war, and allowed the museum to buy at an almost nominal price, one hundred and forty pounds (equivalent to £2,900 in 1996), his painting ‘Fraternity’. He felt better too once he began travelling again. In September 1919, he turned up at the Villa La Chaumière at Deauville as the guest of Lloyd George.

  ‘What a monde he lives in!’ he exclaimed in a letter to Cynthia Asquith. ‘…My fortnight here has been fantastic… It’s a place I should normally avoid. I have been horribly parasitical. I began a portrait of a lady here which promised well – till I gathered from her that if I made her beautiful, it might turn out to be the first step in a really brilliant career.’154

  But he had left many unfinished things in Paris from the conference days and had no idea how to deal with them. ‘Here I have met the Duchesse de Guiche who invites me to store my things in her house,’ he wrote from Deauville to Gwen. ‘You see in what exalted company I move!’

  In March 1920, again at the Alpine Club Gallery, John exhibited his war and peace portraits. They were not flattering likenesses, nor were they satirical: with few exceptions they were neutral. The tedium released by the company of this exalted band is very adequately recorded, and to that extent he remained uncorrupted. But he had succumbed to the temptation to waste time. His two exhibitions at the Alpine Club were exercises in the higher journalism of art – commissions that gave little evidence of his special talent. John knew this himself. No amount of social success could conceal the truth for lo
ng. His melancholia deepened. In April 1920 he entered the Sister Carlin Hospital for an operation on his nose to make breathing easier. He had been ‘in a state of profound depression’, he told Ottoline Morrell. ‘…I feel always as though practically poisoned and must not shirk the operation. I look forward to it indeed as a means of recovering my normal self.’155 It was essential to keep morale high. ‘It took an uncommon amount of ether to get me under,’ he bragged to Eric Sutton.156 Under the ether, with a deep sigh, he uttered one remark: ‘Well, I suppose I must be polite to these people.’ He recovered with his usual facility and ‘am doing rather brilliantly’.157

  For his convalescence he went with Dorelia and some of the family to stay with his father in Tenby. A new era was beginning in Britain, and many were curious to know what part John would occupy in it. He was no longer the leader, as the Observer art critic had reported in 1912, of ‘all that is most modern and advanced in present day British Art’. Nor, in his forty-third year, was he yet a Grand Old Man. To the younger artists he had once been the apostle of a new way of seeing: now he was the embodiment of a way of living. He wanted to start again and be more like Gwen. ‘I want to dig myself up and replant myself in some corner where no one will look for me,’ he declared to Cynthia Asquith. ‘There perhaps – there in fact I know I shall be able to paint better.’

  *1 A two-masted fishing-boat of Dutch origin used off the west coast of Ireland. John had a scheme for buying one for fifty pounds.

  *2 See Appendix Five.

  *3 Stuart Gray, an ex-lawyer, hunger marcher and future ‘King of Utopia’.

  NINE

  Artist of the Portraits

  1

  EVERYBODY’S DOING IT

  ‘Après la guerre

  There’ll be a good time everywhere.’

  And there was. Everyone wanted to be young again, and to forget not only the war but the ideals that had been contaminated by it. Enjoyment was to be the new currency – enjoyment spent as an unprecedented freedom to act, to experiment, to travel. The Continent became transformed from a battlefield into a playground. It was as if youth had suddenly been invented and pleasure become compulsory. There was no one who had been unaffected by those four years of terrible fighting: the whole country was scorched. Now it set about applying a balm.

  To no category of people did this freedom seem to apply more directly than the New Woman. During the war her capabilities had been astonishingly displayed in the police, the munitions factories, and on the land. In the twenties she changed into a boy. No longer did she take up her hair and let down her hems to signify at sixteen that she was an adult: her hems went farther up and her hair was cut, redefining the frontiers of gender and adulthood.

  People began exploring new entertainments – nightclubs, cocktails, cinemas, open-air breakfast parties and the thé dansant. ‘I have a thé dansant to-morrow,’ John announced from Mallord Street, ‘ – about 3,000 people are coming.’ Parties grew more informal and gyrated to more syncopated rhythms, jazz on the gramophone and exotic dances – the shimmy, the Charleston, the black bottom, the foxtrot. The handsome woman in the hansom cab was overtaken by a fast woman in a fast car. Glamour had come to London. There was a whirl of glass beads and pearls, sparkling paste, rouge, plucked eyebrows, brilliantined hair, sticky scarlet lips, surprised faces. Coloured underclothes broke out in shades of ice-cream: peach, pistachio, coffee. Young men sported plus-fours, big bow ties, motoring caps, gauntlets, co-respondent shoes. John himself sprouted a dazzling waistcoat and suits of decisive check tweed.

  There was an epidemic of health. ‘Vapours’ were no longer admired, neurasthenia went out of date. Young wives drilled themselves in natural-childbirth exercises, practised art and craftwork for charity. At weekends everyone seemed to stay with everyone else in draughty country houses, playing bridge and tennis. Nature was again important: a million women cycled out beyond the suburbs.

  The twenties was not a cynical but a sentimental decade. Under the high kicks lay a deep disillusionment, beneath the quickstep slow disintegration. Social divisions were being creakingly readjusted. The social centre of gravity in Britain was on the move.

  To the Old Guard, those dinosaurs from Victorian and Edwardian England, Augustus John was still ‘disgusting John’, a rascal in sinister hirsute league with those other dangerous spirits – D. H. Lawrence, Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey – all of them plotting to do away with what was decent in the country. But to the Bright Young Things, John was a ready-made hero, one of the pioneers of the new freedom. This postwar mood seemed sympathetic to him. He appeared to recover himself and gain a second wind. He travelled greater distances, drank greater quantities, made more money, did more portraits. He painted popular people: film actors, airmen, matinée idols, beauties and beauticians, Greek bankers, infantas, Wimbledon champions, novelists, musicians. The Emperor of Japan called one morning and was polished off in an hour. The new cosmetics made a false barrier between the painter and his subject, but John knew about barriers. His most glittering portraits – of the smouldering Marchesa Casati posed before Vesuvius, and of Kit Dunn seen as the arch flapper, and Poppet as a provocative sex-kitten – are extraordinarily vivid.

  The spirit of the age was a fair-weather friend to John. The sun shone, the breeze blew, he sped along: it did not matter where. He was invited everywhere, though the weather of his moods made the journey tempestuous. Wherever he went, his gift for boredom dramatically asserted itself. ‘What a damnable mistake it is to go and stay with anybody,’ he cried out in one letter to Dorelia. Many of the London hostesses were too sophisticated for his appetite. He was sometimes abominably rude to them, but his apologies were full of charm, and all was forgiven this half-tamed society artist.

  He had become one of the most popular men in the country. In Soho restaurants ‘Entrecôte a la John’ was eaten; in theatres any actor impersonating an artist was indistinguishable from him; in several novels he was instantly recognizable as ‘the painter’.1 He began to use a secretary. ‘Is there room for Kathleen Hale?’2 he asked Dorelia somewhat desperately. There was, and he started to employ this twenty-two-year-old girl (later to become celebrated herself as the creator of the marmalade cat Orlando) primarily, he explained, gesturing his hand across his stomach as though guarding against onslaught, to provide a barrier between him and the hostesses, journalists and probationary models who solicited him.

  ‘He offered me £2 a week, a spare bedroom in his Chelsea house, and meals,’ Kathleen Hale remembered. When she took up her duties, she found piles of unanswered letters (often commissions for portraits), unpaid bills and beautiful drawings lying all over the table, chairs, piano, floor, mostly stained by teacups, marked by wine and whisky glasses, dusted with cigarette ash. ‘We had lots of silly fun, but getting him to start work was always a tussle of wills,’ she wrote. ‘The minute he had finished his morning painting session, his only idea was to join his friends at a local pub… There were moments of leisure when he taught me how to play chess… and how to play shove-ha’penny… jabbing at those highly polished ha’pennies, skidding them across the slippery wood.’

  After a few days Dorelia came up to inspect John’s new secretary. Seeing them teasing each other, ‘she looked piercingly at me as if she doubted our relationship. A moment later the suspicion had changed.’ But it was some time before Dorelia trusted her; though Kathleen Hale was captivated by Dorelia who ‘was to have more influence on me than anyone I had ever met’.

  Though John was then at the height of his fame, he seemed unspoilt. To his new secretary he appeared tired, his moustache tobacco-stained, beard grizzled. ‘But the man had panache, and his character was magnetic,’ she wrote. ‘He was a bit of a dandy, only wearing… the best silk shirts, and wonderful wide-brimmed hats… He was broad-shouldered, and muscular, and moved surprisingly lightly on his small feet… He had a feminine ability to draw people out.’ Nevertheless he always seemed on ‘a knife-edge of sensibility’, she saw, ‘poised t
o take things the wrong way and snap off a few heads. I never heard him shout; rather he would rumble, puff, or growl.’

  But the overriding impression John made on her was of a paralysed giant. ‘I always felt that there was more to Augustus than he could ever express, and, though he appeared uninhibited, he seemed to me to be always trying to break through tremendous frustration – as if there was a volcano inside him that might erupt at any moment,’ she wrote. ‘…To his little daughter Vivien, Augustus was “the King of Men”; but I thought him a king in captivity, hounded by two black dogs: one his shyness, the other his despair.’3

  He seemed best able to escape these two black dogs in the blurred tobacco smoke of his Mallord Street parties. They would begin at five and last till five, and they appeared to have what the painter Christopher Wood called ‘a remarkable feature… there was not one ugly girl, all wonderfully beautiful and young’. Though they regularly ended ‘in the most dreadful orgy I have ever seen’, Christopher Wood concluded: ‘One always enjoys oneself so much at his house, he is such a thorough gentleman.’4

  More coveted still was an invitation to Alderney. ‘He has lots of ponies, dogs and all kinds of animals which roam quite wild all round the house,’ Christopher Wood explained to his mother (n October 1926).

  ‘…We arrived to find old John sitting at his long dining table with all his children and family followers. We took our places quite naturally at the table where there was a perfect banquet with all kinds of different drinks, which everyone – even the children going down to ten years of age and even seven, and all the cats and dogs partook of. Afterwards we took off our coats and waistcoats and had a proper country dance. John has a little daughter of fifteen, like a Venus, whom he thinks a lot of… [He] is the most delightful person.’

  Dancing and motoring were the obsessions of the twenties. ‘We often had afternoon jazz sessions,’ Vivien wrote, ‘dancing the Charleston, Black Bottom, or anything new.’5 Dorelia never danced, though she was often near by, watching and smiling. John could not be prevented from taking the floor. ‘The tango can’t be resisted,’ he admitted. More irresistible still were motor cars. He had first been infected with this virus in 1911 when, throwing Mrs Strindberg off the scent, he was chauffeured through France with Quinn. ‘It can’t be denied there’s something gorgeous in motoring by night 100 kilometres an hour,’ he told Ottoline Morrell.6 Two or three years later he had had a whack at steering Gogarty’s canary-coloured Rolls-Royce through the west of Ireland, and concluded that he ‘must get a Ford’. But it was not until 1920 that he acquired, in exchange for a picture, a powerful two-seater Buick with yellow wheels and a dicky. After enduring half an hour’s lesson in London, he filled it with friends and set off for Alderney. Apart from barging into a barrel organ and, so far as the passengers could judge, derailing a train, the car enjoyed an immaculate journey down – and this despite the fact that John’s lesson had not touched upon the philosophy of gear-changing, so that it had been in first gear from start to finish. ‘The arrival at Alderney was rightly considered a great triumph,’ Romilly John recalled.