He thought her ‘as supreme as ever’. A letter from her would make him ‘more éperdument [madly] amoureux than ever’; and after a telegram telling him to meet her at the station ‘imagine the volcano in my soul’. It was amazing how, after a few days in his company, she would recover from ‘that old wreck of a millstone round her neck’. When conducting her home to ‘a very copious bed’ and spending four nights with her while John was away, he felt ‘some tremendous affirmation of that Spring that glimpsed on me with curious rays...’
Then there would be the prolonged anguish of separation. What aggravated everything was his sense that, by making Dorelia one of the most famous icons in twentieth-century British art, John had forever tied her to him. ‘I have had some glimpses of her,’ Lamb wrote. ‘But in spite of some occasional gleams I cannot escape from the terrible feeling of a great cloud descending – dark & immoveable.’12
Still he persisted in the hope that she would come to him, ‘and then perhaps part of the day dream could be realised… when that strange woman is less perplexed and all our nerves less raging.’13 Seeing her with John’s friends, it was inexplicable to Lamb why Dorelia ‘willingly inflicts herself with such trials’. But by the summer of 1926 it seemed as if she were finally ready to leave. He came for her and they set off together. But ‘it was no use,’ Lamb wrote afterwards, ‘the rain & the hopelessness of the houses seemed to penetrate her and she wanted to turn back at Salisbury. Although I carried out the plot to programme, waiting till the last minute at Upavon before springing it on her she flatly refused.’ It was not until the next day that she gave Lamb the reason why she would not run off with him: ‘we should never have been able to get away,’14 she said. It would have been like her escapade with Leonard all those years ago in Bruges.
Lamb’s hopes were finally extinguished by the move to Fryern. ‘I think she [Dorelia] is already pretty well bored there,’ he wrote sourly to Carrington not long afterwards. He had managed at last to get a divorce from Euphemia, and the next year, 1928, he married Pansy Pakenham, the eldest daughter of the sixth Earl of Longford, springing the news on Dorelia a few days beforehand.
Dorelia’s life with John had been growing more difficult. She made at least two attempts to leave. Once she got so far as the railway station. A pony and trap was sent off in scalding pursuit, arriving just before the train, and she was persuaded to return. The letters John wrote whenever he was abroad reveal his dependence on her, and it was this need that held her back. Finally it was too late, too unthinkable that ‘Dodo’, as everyone now called her, should not always be there. She grew more fatalistic, relying on the swing of her pendulum – a ring harnessed to a piece of string – to decide everything from the wisdom of a marriage to the authenticity of a picture. From anything that might cause pain she averted her attention, though she might seem to stare at it without emotion. The range of her interests narrowed. She had stopped drawing, now she read less, and eventually would give up the piano. Nothing got on top of her, nothing came too near. She grew more interested in the vegetable world. The sounds at Fryern matched her equanimity: no longer the jaunty duets with Lamb, but a softer noise, the purring, amid the pots and plants, of the sewing-machine as she sat at it, for life as it were.
2
A LONG LOVE AFFAIR WITH DRINK
‘They don’t give it a name, but it seems to me rather like Winston [Churchill]’s complaint.’
Augustus John to Caspar John
In the first four years at Fryern a physical change came over John. ‘He had aged very much in those years,’ Diana Mosley remembered. ‘…John was fifty-three in 1931, but he seemed old, his hair was grey, his eyes bloodshot, and he already looked almost as he did in the cruelly truthful self-portrait he painted after the war.’15
The immediate cause of this change was alcohol. ‘I drink in order to become more myself,’ he stated once to Cecil Gray.16 At Fryern he was king of the castle; but outside this castle he felt ill-at-ease. He remained loyal to one or two places – Stulik’s, or the Queen’s Restaurant in Sloane Square – he had made homes-from-home.
Drink changed him into a different person. It was the passport that enabled him to go anywhere, giving him the gift of tongues. After a glass or two the terrible paralysis lifted, and the warmth that had been locked up within him flowed out. But then there was a third stage, when the geniality and amorousness gave way to senseless aggression – such as punching out a cigarette on someone’s face – about which he would afterwards feel baffled and ashamed.
Though he nowhere laments his mother’s death when he was six, his obsessive theme as a painter – a mother with her children in an ideal landscape – illustrates the lasting effect this loss produced. If his father represented the actual world, the deprivation of his mother became the source of that fantasy world he created in its place. It was an attempt to transmute deprivation into an asset. He was still haunted by those ‘delectable regions’ into which Ida had disappeared. To recreate this miraculous promised land in his large-scale imaginative work – a simple, self-sufficient, tribe-like way of living, vital and primitive – within the pressure of the contemporary world, with its bureaucracy and bombs, soap kings and tax inspectors, was a lonely struggle. But alcohol, which blurred the distinction between dream and reality, lessened this sense of loss. Ida ‘will always live on in your drawings’,17 Will Rothenstein had assured him. About her death, as about his mother’s, he was reticent, but she had been a casualty in the warring of these worlds, committing him, if he were to find any justification for it, more deeply to the fantasy of his art.
But alcohol fulfilled another function: it screened the truth. It did so in many ways, numbing his disappointment, leading him into moods of self-deception. In the fictitious jollity of the bar, he acted happy and almost felt so. Acting, which had begun as a means to self-discovery, became a method of self-forgetfulness. It was this remoteness that people sensed about him. ‘I’m sure he has no human heart,’ noted Hugh Walpole in his diary (3 July 1926), ‘but is “fey”, a real genius from another planet than ours.’18 But if he was not of this planet, he did not now belong to any other. ‘Sometimes one feels positively the old horror vacui overwhelming one,’ he admitted to Christabel Aberconway.19 Although alcohol promoted a temporary sense of well-being, John had long recognized it as an enemy. ‘I have never really been captured by alcohol,’ he had told John Quinn in 1910, ‘and I’m not going to run after it. I think any sport can be overdone; and I’m taking a real pleasure in dispensing with that form of entertainment. In a short while I shall be able to get as drunk as I like on green tea.’ He made many of these ‘experiments in temperance’, but his drinking had got worse in the war, and worse still during his trips to the United States which seemed to prohibit temperance. Driving home in the pink light of dawn, he had been shocked to see a small herd of elephants, not realizing that they belonged to a travelling circus. He tried to pull himself together, but towards the end of the 1920s he began to have attacks of delirium tremens and appeared to be suffering from some sort of breakdown. Lamb believed these were ‘some of his melodramatic methods’ for stopping Dorelia from leaving him. ‘I think Augustus’s threatened breakdown is all fiddle dedee,’ he wrote to Carrington, ‘…though I suppose he is quite plainly, though slowly, breaking up if not down.’ Treatment was made difficult because John never admitted his addiction to alcohol. He prevaricated, referring to ‘Neurasthenia’ or even (to account for his unsteady walk) ‘water on the knee’. ‘There’s nothing the matter with me except occasional “nerves”,’ he diagnosed in a letter to Ottoline Morrell (8 June 1929). On this matter of nerves he consulted Dr Maurice Wright who was ‘very eminent in his own line – psychology, and he is already an old friend of mine’.20 According to Leonard Woolf, Wright was ‘an exceptionally nice and intelligent man’. He had failed to cure Leonard of his trembling hands and Virginia of her suicidal troughs of depression, though he was a man of high principle who ‘knew as much about the hum
an mind and its illnesses’21 as any of his contemporaries – which, Leonard Woolf adds, ‘amounted to nothing’. Discussing his difficulties with Wright, John used a rich supply of euphemisms, inviting the psychologist to treat symptoms which, masking the real complaint, he saw as diseases in themselves. Some of them were so bad, he joked, they could drive a man to drink. ‘You are quite right,’ he wrote to Dr Gogarty, ‘catarrh makes one take far more drink than one would want without it.’ Pretending to treat a variety of sicknesses, from lumbago to sinusitis, while achieving a cure for alcoholism, was too stern a test for even so eminent a psychologist, and these consultations came to nothing. But by the end of March 1930, on the advice of Ottoline Morrell, John was attending her doctor. ‘Dr Cameron has done me worlds of good,’ she assured him. ‘He is the only really honest doctor I have found, and I have tried so many!… So do, dear John, give Cameron a trial.’22
Dr Cameron, ‘nerve specialist’, was fairly knowledgeable about alcohol. When drunk one day he ran over a child, and was sent to gaol. But he was a persuasive man, with a nice bedside manner, and many of his patients returned to him. Later, after a number of them had died from his drugs, he committed suicide.
John took to Cameron at once. ‘I shall bless you to the end of your days for sending me to Dr Cameron,’ he thanked Ottoline. ‘Would that I had seen him years ago. He put his finger on the spot at once. Already I feel happy again and ten years younger.’ The treatment involved no surrender of pride, and John’s relief came from having escaped a long process of humiliation. Both he and Cameron knew that alcohol was the real cause of his ‘nerves’, but they entered a conspiracy to gloss over this truth. ‘The defect in my works has been poisoning me for ages,’ John reported. ‘It explains so much...’23 Cameron’s diagnosis was delivered with a vagueness very dear to alcoholics. John had been ‘overdrawing his bank account’ and should go to a convalescent home where (though expensive in terms of money) he would make a sober investment. Under the guise of tackling a rigorous rest cure, John allowed himself to be sent to Preston Deanery Hall in Northampton, a briefly fashionable private nursing home full of fumed oak, leatherette, beaten copper and suburban mauve walls, that had opened in 1929 and was to close in 1931. Here, as if by accident, he was removed from all alcohol though permitted to equivocate as much as he liked. He was ‘travelling in the midlands’ or suffering from a ‘liver attack’ or undergoing ‘a thorough spring-cleaning’ because ‘my guts weren’t behaving harmoniously’. His friends were generally optimistic. ‘Any place apart from the world is a good idea for a bit, and it will do no harm to try it,’ Eve Fleming wrote to him. ‘You must get well, & I do hope this will do the trick.’24 Expressing her gratitude for Ottoline’s ‘great brain wave’, Dorelia wrote on 5 May 1930: ‘Of course J. would be perfectly well without wine or spirits. Many a time I’ve managed to keep him without any for weeks and then some idiot has undone all my good work in one evening. He may be impressed this time. All the other doctors have said the same, Dr Wright included. One can only hope to do one’s best… ’
What Dorelia did not perhaps appreciate was that the first phase of a successful cure must be the patient’s admission that he needs special treatment for alcoholism. This admission John was never required to make. He stayed at the nursing home a month, and his treatment appears to have been largely custodial, with a few vitamin supplements, nuts, caraway seeds and some tranquillizing drugs served on silver platters by footmen. ‘They are making a good job of me, I feel,’ he announced.25 ‘…I am a different being and they tell me in a week or two I’ll be as strong again as a horse.’ He was allowed out with another inmate for a ‘debauch of tea and toast’ and by himself to Cambridge for a drink ‘of coffee with Quiller-Couch and a bevy of exquisite undergrads’, as well as for walks to the church and, more recklessly, drives in his car. In the absence of gypsies, he made friends with ‘some nice animals’, cows and sheep mostly; while indoors there were erotic glimpses of a remarkable chambermaid. He read voraciously, but was sometimes ‘rather forlorn’. ‘If I were not beginning to feel as I haven’t felt for years I might be bored,’ he threatened in a note to Ottoline, who had entered the nursing home herself for a few days, ‘ – as it is – I am smiling to myself, as at some huge joke.’
The presence of Ottoline helped to reconcile John to Preston Deanery Hall. He insisted that she came and sat by his bed and, after his morning exercises on the ‘electric belly-waggler’, photographed his new etherealized figure. Ottoline was likewise convinced that she looked ‘much younger since I went to Dr Cameron. Everyone exclaims so.’ It was, she added, ‘so depressing to look like a wreck’. John gallantly affirmed that she was ‘more paintable than ever’, at which she suddenly took fright. So they discussed other people such as Henry Lamb, who was said to be curing himself of his Augustus John ‘infection’ in the company of Stanley and Gilbert Spencer, but whose case (so Dorelia had told Ottoline) ‘was more serious than John’s’.26 As for John himself, Ottoline couldn’t help reflecting ‘how like he has become to Asquith, who had his two failings, drink and women.’ Every day he entreated her to keep him company, and when Philip Morrell arrived to fetch her away, he came down to the front door to wave them off. He looked, she thought, ‘like the boy who had been left behind at the school gate’.27
After Ottoline had gone, John could not stay there long. Instead he ‘had it out with the doctor’ and left a week earlier than planned. ‘No doubt I’ll have to follow a regime for a while,’ he warned Dorelia. ‘They say I’ll be marvellously well in about 10 days after leaving.’28 His aftercare came in the form of a diet. ‘Unfortunately I have lost that almost ethereal quality which I had so welcomed,’ he told Ottoline (23 May 1930). ‘…I blame the cook for giving me unauthorized potatoes and beef steak.’
‘You’d be all right if you lived sensibly,’ Eve Fleming instructed him. ‘You’re as strong as twelve lions by nature.’29 But sense of this sort was unavailable to him: ‘I who always live from hand to mouth and have so little practical sense.’30 He was awash with optimism. His strong constitution, with its extraordinary powers of recovery, quickly misled him. Austerity, he claimed, had made him ‘much more like myself’ – though he had also bought a new hat which was making him ‘a different person and a better’. One way or another he felt like ‘a giant refreshed’.31
It was not long before he relapsed into drinking, and the deterioration went on. ‘John is in ruins,’ T. E. Lawrence noted in 1932, ‘but a giant of a man. Exciting, honest, uncanny.’32 He never quite became a chronic drinker – ‘I was never a true alcoholic,’ he admitted to Mavis Wheeler. From time to time he went back to doctors who tried to remove him from alcohol altogether. But Dorelia’s tactics worked better. She rationed him with lock and key at home, and in restaurants would furtively empty his glass. Without drink he tended to avoid people: ‘I find my fellow-creatures very troublesome to contend with without stupéfiant,’ he told Christabel Aberconway. He still retreated into the comforting womb of pubs ‘to get alone for a bit’.33 A solitary figure in a muffler, booted and corduroyed, he sat quietly in a corner, drinking his beer. Latterly he consumed far less, because his tolerance to alcohol had diminished. Conger Goodyear, who had been so struck by his capacity at the Saturn Club in the 1920s, was regretting by the 1940s that ‘his ancient alcoholic prowess had departed’, and after a few drinks ‘Augustus did not improve’.34
The loss of confidence, the upsurges of temper, the tremulousness of his hands, his inability to make decisions – all grew more pronounced. He knew the truth, but would not hear it from anyone. But it amused him sometimes to make people connive at his inventions – then, with disconcerting relish, come out with the facts. ‘I have heard of a new treatment for my complaint – it consists of total abstention from liquor.’35 At other times he would innocently complain of Dodo that she smoked too much; or of J. B. Manson (who was dismissed as Director of the Tate Gallery) that ‘the fellow drinks’, deliberately slurring his word
s as he spoke.
Intermittently between bursts of renewed effort, he drank to destroy himself. If he could not paint well, and could not disguise his inability to do so, then he was better dead. But Dorelia, who had tolerated so much, would not tolerate this. Her watchfulness, care, relentless programme of regular meals and early nights, propped him up and pulled him through – the ghost of an artist he had once been.
3
IN SPITE OF EVERYTHING OR BECAUSE OF IT
‘I still draw a little.’
Augustus John to T. E. Lawrence
The first test came that summer of 1930. He had been invited by Gogarty to assist at the opening of his hotel, Renvyle House, in Connemara. Yeats was also coming, and Gogarty arranged for John to do a ‘serious portrait’ of him. ‘I would think it a great honour,’ Yeats had murmured. But standing before the mirror, he began to examine himself with some apprehension, ‘noticing certain lines about my mouth and chin marked strongly by shadows’, and to wonder ‘if John would not select those very lines and lay great emphasis upon them, and, if some friends complain that he has obliterated what good looks I have, insist that those lines show character, and perhaps that there are no good looks but character.’36
Early that summer Yeats learnt that the city of Cork had rejected John’s earlier portrait of him ‘because of my attack on the censorship & my speech about divorce’, choosing instead ‘as an expression of Cork piety and patriotism’37 a picture of the Prince of Wales by the Irish painter James Barry. At about the same time he received a letter from Gogarty saying that John wished to paint a portrait of him in his maturity. ‘John is to paint me at Renvyle,’ he wrote from Italy to Lady Gregory (27 June 1930), ‘and I will try to go there at once...’ The sittings began in the third week of July, and Yeats himself was soon writing that it ‘promises to be a masterpiece – amusing – a self I do not know but am delighted to know, a self that I could never have found out for myself, a gay, whimsical person which I could never find in the solemnity of the looking-glass. Is it myself? – it is certainly what I would like to be.’38
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