Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  All his sons insisted on being taught immediately – in fact they taught one another. It was then Dorelia’s turn. By evening the house was full of brand-new drivers. ‘After that we always seemed to be whizzing… up to London,’ Romilly remembered. ‘In those days the roads were still fairly empty, and motoring was still a sport. We nearly always came up with another fast car, also on its way to town, and then we would race it for a hundred miles. No matter who was driving, we made it a point of honour never to be outdone, and we very seldom were. When our car and its rival had passed and repassed each other several times, emotion would work up to a white-heat, and every minor victory was the signal of a wild hilariousness.’7

  Though the family inherited his talent, the John style of motoring was seen in its purest form whenever Augustus took the wheel. In fine country, on a good day, he was apt to forget he was driving at all, allowing the car to pelt on ahead while he stared back over his shoulder to admire some receding view. Indeed the car often performed better like this than when he bent upon it his fullest attention. Then, roaring like a wounded elephant, it would mount hedges, charge with intrepid bursts towards corners, or simply explode. Once, when hurtling towards a fork in the road, John demanded which direction to take, and, his passenger hesitating a moment, they bisected the angle, accelerating straight into a ploughed field until brought to a halt by the waves of earth. Another time, he ‘awoke to find himself driving through the iron gate of a churchyard’.8 Because of feats like these, the car soon began to present a dilapidated appearance, like an old animal in a circus: the brakes almost ceased to operate, and the mechanism could only be worked by two people simultaneously, the second taking off the handbrake at the precise moment when the first, manipulating the knobs, pedals and levers as if performing on an organ, caused the engine to engage with the wheels. But though he occasionally admitted it to be suffering from a form of indigestion known as ‘pre-ignition’ or to be unaccountably off colour (‘pinking somewhat’), John would loyally insist that his Buick was ‘still running very sweet’. It was true that sometimes, ‘like a woman’, the car refused to respond and had to be warmed up, cajoled, petted, pushed. At last, yielding to these blandishments, she would jerk into life and, with her flushed occupants, drag herself away from the scene of her humiliation to the dispiriting cheers of the assembled voyeurs. In her most petulant moods, she would react only to the full-frontal approach. But once, when John was winding the crank (the car having been left in gear on the downward slope of a hill), she ran him down. His companion, the music critic Cecil Gray, ‘frantically pushing and pulling every lever I could lay my hands and feet on’,9 was carried off out of sight.

  Not that I would cast a slur

  No; but accidents occur,

  And your driving not your drawing

  Was what there might be a flaw in.10

  Even if accidents were plentiful, as Gogarty acknowledged, there were almost no deaths and the Johns themselves seemed marvellously indestructible. They were, however, extremely critical, even contemptuous, of one another’s skill. Dorelia, for example, would not applaud John’s inspired cornering: while he irritably censored her triumphant use of the horn. She was, so Kathleen Hale remembered, like a lion at the wheel, brave and imperturbable. ‘She didn’t seem to understand the danger.’ But none of them ‘felt safe’ while being driven by the others, and did not scruple to hide this. ‘I will not attempt to conceal,’ wrote Romilly John, ‘that some of us were secretly glad when some others incurred some minor accident.’11

  Towards people outside the family, though dismissive of their ability, they were nervously polite. An episode from Lucy Norton’s motoring career shows John’s kindness on wheels at its most characteristic. The incident happened in 1926 or 1927 when she was in her early twenties.

  ‘I had recently purchased a motor-car, and John thought a long country drive would be the thing to give me experience. Night-driving experience, he said, was very important. I picked him up at Mallord Street early on a May morning. He appeared in a beautiful Harris-tweed coat, his usual large gypsy hat, several scarves with fringed ends, a bottle of whisky in case of need, and a bottle of gin for a friend.

  All seems to have gone well until we reached Winchester, when I was turning to the right as John was saying “turn left”, and we mounted, very slowly, a lamp-post. John said nothing but I could see he was shaken. We… had a superlative lunch and about six o’clock started for home.

  I suppose we must have gone about ten miles or so, when I was overcome with the strong suspicion that the back door of the four-doored Morris Cowley (I had bought the cheapest car, so that it would not matter if I hit things) was not shut. I turned to shut it – not realising that, as I pivoted with one hand back, the other on the steering wheel would follow me round. The next thing was a mildly terrific crash, as the car hit the soft bank at right angles on the other side of the road. John rose upright in his seat, lifted me also to a standing position behind the wheel, and clasping me to his shoulder said in tones of sympathetic disgust: “You simply cannot trust the steering of these modern cars! It’s too bad!”’12

  Such imaginative courtesy was often useful in court. The biographer Montgomery Hyde, who happened to be passing one day, observed how John, coming out of his drive ‘fairly rapidly’,13 cannoned into a steamroller which was doing innocent repairs to the road outside his gate. Very correctly John reported this incident but the police, having their own ideas, replied with a summons. In due course he appeared before the local Bench but was acquitted because, the magistrate explained, he ‘behaved in such a gentlemanlike manner’.

  As it whizzed through the twenties this car took on many of John’s characteristics. It became, in effect, a magnified version of himself, and its exploits drew attention to a developing feature of his life. He seemed to have no sensitivity to danger. ‘How we never got killed in this car was a miracle,’ Poppet recalled.14 The detached feeling that had first invaded John at the front during the war – the calm knowledge that he might be struck dead at any second – grew more established. ‘He might easily have been killed,’ the music critic Cecil Gray calculated, ‘…but Augustus has always lived a charmed life where cars are concerned.’15

  To more than one person in his later years John spoke of suicide: how he must resist the temptation to give into it. His carelessness seemed deliberate. But Dorelia helped to keep him ticking on. Sometimes he longed – or so it appeared – to make what haste he could and be gone: but she never let him.

  In spite of all vicissitudes, the Buick continued to function with increasing noise and pathos ‘and was only abandoned at last’, Romilly remembered, upside-down and panting terribly ‘somewhere near London’.16

  2

  SURVIVING FRIENDS, WOMEN AND CHILDREN: AN A TO Z

  ‘If it’s beauty, it’s love in my case.’

  Augustus John to John Freeman

  ‘The women! ah! the women!’

  Arthur Symons to Augustus John

  He had said goodbye to his mistresses and, by the end of the war, taken leave of friends. ‘What casualty lists!’ he exclaimed in a letter to Quinn.17 ‘How can it go on much longer? Among my own friends, and I never had many – [Dummer] Howard, [Ivor] Campbell, Heald, Baines, Jay, [Tudor] Castle, Rourke, Warren, Tennant… We must be bleeding white – and it seems the best go down always.’ The eccentrics survived: Trelawney Dayrell Reed, aloof and stammering, to be the perfect subject for John’s El Greco phase; Horace de Vere Cole, to become a victim of his own sinister practical jokes; the odd and fascinating Francis Macnamara, with his soft Irish voice, blue eyes, string-coloured fringed hair and small trim beard, who, surrounded by bottled ships and thundering treatises and rejuvenated by monkey glands, became Dorelia’s brother-in-law and eventually the father-in-law of Dylan Thomas. The boys’ old tutor, John Hope-Johnstone, also danced back ‘like an abandoned camel’18 and re-engaged himself as Robin’s philosopher and guide. Henry Lamb, too, his health fearfully damag
ed after being gassed in the war, floated back into the orbit of their lives, a dry and caustic figure now, furtive and uneasy, like a ghost of the dazzling youth who had served Augustus and who still trailed after Dorelia as she helped to nurse him into health.

  Another damaged survivor was the great Rai, John Sampson, torn for years between patriotic pride and parental anguish as his elder son, after being wounded four times, emerged from the war gloriously decorated; while his younger son, reported missing early in 1918, was killed somewhere in France. He had separated from his wife Margaret who continued living in Wales with their daughter, while Sampson himself lodged with one unfortunate landlady after another in Liverpool. But Liverpool after the war was tense and discontented. ‘The streets are intolerable now,’ he wrote, ‘with all sorts of motor traffic… [and] heaps of accidents.’19 Illness, age and poverty prevented him from adjusting to these post-war times as John appeared to have done. He envied his friend’s success: ‘John must now be at the top of his profession,’ he wrote to Margaret, ‘but what I envy him most is meeting all these interesting people on the free and easy terms that obtain between artist and sitter. [Admiral] Fisher’s conversation must have been worth listening to.’ But with all John’s gifts – ‘friends, freedom, genius, wealth, fame’ – Sampson sometimes wondered ‘whether he is happy’.20

  The two friends kept up their intermittent correspondence, often falling into Romany, ‘this dear language of ours’. ‘Your letters charm me as they always did,’ John assured Sampson, because ‘our friendship has meant a very great deal to me and our gypsing together [is] one of the major episodes in my blooming life.’21 Whatever changes were spreading across the world, Sampson went on ‘putting luxuries before necessities’ – that is, his work before comfort. He soldiered on with his great The Dialect of the Gypsies of Wales, carrying his assault on reflex verbs during the early stages of the war, conquering word-formation and taking on inflexion. By September 1916, as British troops captured Dar-es-Salaam and introduced tanks on to the Western Front, Sampson ‘completed the imperative’, his grandson Anthony Sampson writes with justifiable pride, ‘and was advancing upon the present tense’.22

  In July 1917 he finally handed in his dictionary to Oxford University Press. It ‘should prove to the judicious reader a complete guide to sorcery, fortune-telling, love and courtship, kichimai [inns], fiddling, harping, poaching and the life of the road generally,’ he told John, ‘ – in fact I hope it may prove the Romani Rai’s Bible.’23

  John was all impatience. ‘I hope your publisher will hurry up… The news that we may soon see the proofs of the book is great,’24 he wrote in 1919. By then the dictionary had already been at the publisher two years and seemed miraculously suspended there ‘like Mahomet’s coffin’, as Sampson described, ‘balanced between earth and heaven’.25 A year later some specimen sheets appeared. ‘It’s always a joy to me to read a word of the old tongue,’ John replied after seeing these sheets on 14 July 1920, ‘and now we shall soon have the big book at last.’ Three-and-a-half years later, on 25 January 1924, he was enquiring: ‘When will the book be out? I WANT IT.’26 So did Sampson. After putting his whole life into this work, it was a torment to have it halted in this way. It had only been by ‘not looking at the task ahead’ that he had been able to complete it. ‘There may be three people in England who will buy a copy,’ he had written to his son Michael, ‘but I doubt it.’ One of those who did buy a copy when it eventually came out in 1926 was John, though the book took a further year to reach him. ‘It will be my livre de chevet [bedside book],’ he promised Sampson.27

  How was it that this exploration of a fast-dying secret language, spoken by a few score of persons in the heart of Wales, which had been pursued with so comprehensive a neglect for remuneration, could bring such pleasure? It was a work of unfathomable love. The book’s strange spell shines through Sampson’s autobiographical preface.

  ‘My collections have been gathered in every part of Wales where members of the clan were to be found, following the Gypsy avocations of harpers, fiddlers, fishermen, horse-dealers, knife-grinders, basket-makers, woodcutters, fortune-tellers, and hawkers. From ancient men and women, their faces a complex of wrinkles, to tiny children out of whose mouths Romani falls with a peculiar charm, all have been laid under contribution...’

  One of those who understood what Sampson had achieved with this ‘piquant blend of sound science and inconsequent levity’ was that other great Rai, Scott Macfie. In his review for the Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society, Macfie introduced readers to some of the people they would meet in this vocabulary:

  ‘Black Ellen the teller of tales, Alabama the sorceress with her hollow voice, William who had the misfortune to be transported, Hannah who when her child died suckled two bloodhounds… We are invited to their lodging, “the barn of laughter”, become their friends, discover the nicknames, and admire the diabolical tones of the Gypsy voice in moments of ironic pleasantry. They tell us… : “We are all wanderers: the dear Lord created us so.”’

  John still felt a kinship with these wanderers who could thaw his loneliness as could few of the interesting sitters he painted, whose company Sampson sometimes envied him. But he was no longer painting gypsies, or Dorelia, or his children, Kathleen Hale observed, ‘nor living in Romany style. All this had been overtaken by the need to support his increasing family, and the growing demands on him both socially and financially.’28 His success was a veneer that did not please him, but which he made little effort to strip off. Sometimes he pretended to find satisfaction in it. ‘Having been regarded as a kind of “old master” for a long time,’ he wrote in 1928, ‘I am now hailed as a “modern” which you must admit is very satisfactory.’29 This was the same year as he admitted to Ada Nettleship: ‘I don’t find it at all amusing to paint stupid millionaires when I might be painting entirely for my own satisfaction.’30 From a superficial point of view his career bloomed in the 1920s while that of Sampson withered. But in his heart he agreed with the implication of the dictionary, where Sampson had questioned whether ‘Madam Civilisation may not have put her money on the wrong horse?’

  *

  John appeared superior to the needs of ordinary friendship. ‘Is it because I seem an indifferent friend myself?’ he asked Will Rothenstein. ‘I know I have moods which afford my friends reason for resentment; but I love my friends I think as much as anybody – when they let me.’31 What he needed in the way of friends was variety, from which, like notes on a piano, he could select any tune of his choice. Though many had gone down, more were stepping forward, like the fresh row of a chorus, to fill their places. There was Joe Hone, rare phenomenon, an Irishman of silence; Roy Campbell, the big-action maverick poet from South Africa, with his black cowboy hat, white face and flashing blue eyes, dressed in clothes that ‘appeared to have been rescued from the dustbin’;32 T. W. Earp, ex-President of the Oxford Union, a soft-spoken, gently humorous man, his hair close-cropped, his head shaped like a vegetable, who had taken his lack of ambition to the extreme of becoming an art critic; Ronald Firbank,33 his nervous laugh like the sound of a clock suddenly running down, his hands fluttering with embarrassment, trying to live down ‘the dreadful fact that his father had been an M.P.’; and A. R. Orage, John’s ‘man of sense’,34 the wayward editor of the New Age and advocate of the Douglas Credit Scheme.

  Such friends provided new worlds for John. He was easily transplanted. Having been a Welshman, gypsy, nomad, teacher, he was soon to turn Academician, illustrator for Ronald Firbank, and stage designer for Sean O’Casey and J. M. Barrie. He had been on amicable terms with Bloomsbury, still maintained good relations with the Sitwells, and was an intermittent comrade-in-arms of Wyndham Lewis. By the 1920s he had moved into the land of the affluent upper classes – of Lord Alington, Lord Tredegar (Evan Morgan) and Lord Berners. It was not true that he never looked back – such was not his nature. But the distance over which he had to look to connect other parts of his life lengthened.

&
nbsp; He had crossed into this aristocratic world at the Paris Peace Conference. It was here that his friendship began with T. E. Lawrence who, singling him out as the perfect image-maker, returned again and again (concealing his ‘hideous’ motorbike behind the bushes) for ‘fancy-dress’35 portraits of himself as Café Royal Arab or pale aircraftman. But it was the Marchesa Casati, of the archaic smile and macabre beauty, who beckoned him into international high society. As Luisa Ammon, daughter of a Milanese industrialist, she had been, it was said, a mousy little girl. But, inspired by the example of Sarah Bernhardt, she decided to turn herself into a theatrical work of art and her world into a stage. As the young wife of Camillo Casati Stampa di Soncino, noblest of Roman huntsmen, she pounced like a panther on to life: and somewhat overshot it. The mousy hair burst into henna’d flames; the grey-green eyes, now ringed with black kohl and treated with toxic belladonna, expanded enormously, fringed with amazing false eyelashes like peacock’s feathers. Her lips were vermilion, her feet empurpled, her sphinx-like face, transformed by some black-and-white alchemy, became a painted mask. By taking thought she added a cubit to her stature, raising her legs on altitudinous heels, and crowning her head with top hats of tiger skin and black satin, huge gold waste-paper baskets turned upside down, or the odd inverted flowerpot from which gesticulated a salmon-pink feather. It was for her that Léon Bakst, soaring to his most extravagant fantasies, designed incroyable Persian trousers of the most savage cut; for her Mariano Fortuny invented long scarves of oriental gauze, soaked in the mysterious pigments of his vats and ‘tinted with strange dreams’.36