But such sophisticated laughter did not come naturally to very young girls like Chiquita and Caitlin. And perhaps, in any case, there was less laughter in the 1930s. As late as 1929 Augustus still appeared an attractive man. Describing a party given in June that year by the writer Arthur Machin and his wife, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote:
‘Then Augustus John came, and I could have no other eyes. He is very long and lean, his hair is grey, his eyes are bright, he was rather drunk, he is the Ancient Mariner… He is perfectly young still, and with a sad drunken youthfulness and guileless-ness he embraced my waist in the taxi, and begged me to go to Wales with him… I loved him terribly, he is so simple, intent in the true world, astray in the real. It is awful to think that this youth must go down quick into the pit of senility.’103
This descent accelerated after he left Preston Deanery Hall, and his pouncing on women seemed to grow cruder. ‘Not the best introduction to the carnal delights of the marriage bed,’ wrote Caitlin – for she was perhaps sixteen and he was over thirty-five years older. In his poem ‘Into her lying down head’, written almost three years after he married Caitlin, Dylan Thomas conjures up the priapic figure of John:
A furnace-nostrilled column-membered
Super-or-near man
Resembling to her dulled sense
The thief of adolescence.
The affair continued spasmodically over several years, each using the other, neither very happy about it. John seems to have felt some affection for ‘my little seraph’, especially when, in his confusion, he ‘thought she was his daughter as well’.104 Caitlin later denied any feeling for John, claiming only one ‘luridly vivid memory… pure revulsion… and inevitable pouncing… an indelible impression… of the basic vileness of men’.
She was, John noted, ‘apparently in a perpetual state of disgust with the world in general’.105 But he had no sense of contributing to that disgust. She came to see herself as ‘the Avenger of wrongs’. The ‘merciless vengeance’ she had sworn on Francis Macnamara embraced John and almost all men.
It was John who introduced Caitlin to Dylan Thomas. In Constantine FitzGibbon’s version John had met Dylan at the Fitzroy Tavern and it was at another pub, the Wheatsheaf, that he brought the two of them together: ‘Come and meet someone rather amusing.’ Caitlin, ‘quite mute’,106 nervously approached Dylan and ‘within ten minutes’ they were in bed together, spending several days and nights at the Eiffel Tower and charging everything to John’s account. But however ‘deaf and obtuse’ John might be, Caitlin explained, there was a danger he might find out. So they parted, Dylan for Cornwall, she back to Fryern Court.
They met again in the summer of that year, 1936, in the novelist Richard Hughes’s castle at Laugharne, Dylan in the interval having contracted gonorrhoea.
Caitlin, Hughes remembered, was very pretty and gauche and, though now twenty-two years old (she concealed her age from Dylan), impressed him as being about ‘the equivalent of eleven years of age’.107 She arrived with John in July and during their stay there was much giggling and kissing in the passages, and no visible evidence, at least to his eyes, of Caitlin disliking this. One morning John (possibly at Caitlin’s prompting) suggested that the Hugheses invite Dylan (who had written to say he was ‘passing awfully near Laugharne’) over for lunch. He came, and stayed the night. Dylan and Caitlin gave no sign of knowing each other.*3
John was judging a painting competition at the National Eisteddfod in Fishguard, and motored there next day in his six-cylinder Wolseley, ‘the Bumble-Bee’. Dylan and Caitlin went too; but when John arrived back at Laugharne that night he was alone with Caitlin who looked, Hughes noticed, ‘like a cat that’s been fed on cream’. ‘Where’s Dylan?’ Hughes asked. ‘In the gutter,’ drawled John, slurring his words horribly as he lurched in. ‘What happened?’ ‘I put him there. He was drunk. I couldn’t bring a drunk man to a house like this.’
It transpired that at Carmarthen there had been a fight. All day John had felt irritated by Dylan and Caitlin’s lovemaking. It may also have been that, knowing of Dylan’s gonorrhoea, he felt justified in protecting Caitlin. At Carmarthen, Dylan had insisted that John drive him back to Laugharne. But John refused and, tempers rising, they raised their fists in the car park.
Caitlin remembered John being ‘on top of me’ that night. The following morning as John was stepping outside into the sunlight, Dylan turned up and the stage was set for a spectacular castle farce. Laugharne, though somewhat roofless, had a good cellar, a watchtower, plenty of surrounding shrubbery which was said to be haunted, and three entrance doors. No sooner had Dylan gone out by one of these doors than John would appear through another. Though the plot was confused, a tremendous atmosphere of melodrama built up. Caitlin was on stage for most of the performance, but when the exigencies of the theatre demanded it, she would make a quick exit, while the two men made their entrances. The timing throughout was remarkable, and there were many rhetorical monologues in the high-flown style. To the spectators, wiping their eyes, the outcome appeared uncertain. But, a year later, Caitlin married Dylan at Penzance Register Office; and when their first child was born, Richard Hughes and John were godfathers.*4
They had then moved, the Thomases, to Laugharne and, as neighbours of Richard Hughes, were understandably ‘nervous’ of John’s visits there. John too seemed nervous. He put up at their house, Sea View, for a night or two ‘in circumstances of indescribable squalor’.108 It had been to relieve this austerity that he gave them some furniture, including ‘a wonderful bed’. At night, when he went up to his room, Mervyn Levy remembered, John ‘used to stuff ten-shilling notes and pound notes in his pockets, rich sort of reddy-brown notes, and hang this vast coat of his over a chair. Then we would creep upstairs and nick a few, because it was the only way of gaining any money from Augustus.’109 Though ‘bloated and dumb from his deafness’110 John was well aware of these raids. In Finishing Touches he remarks that Dylan had once been a Communist, and ‘could always be relied upon as a borrower...’111
There is a grudging tone to everything John wrote of Dylan who, he owns, was ‘a genius’ – though his shove-ha’penny was superior to Under Milk Wood, in which ‘there is no trace of wit’. Such sallies were themselves attempts at wit which misfired. ‘There is no rancour,’ he explained to D. S. MacColl, ‘only a little playful malice.’ The affection between them, much enlivened by this malice, lurked behind a prickly barricade of gibes. ‘Dylan has a split personality of course,’ he wrote to Matthew Smith’s mistress Mary Keene. ‘He can be unbearable and then something else comes out which one loves.’
Of the two oil portraits John did of Thomas in the late 1930s one, now in the National Museum of Wales, is possibly his best painting of this period – a ‘diminutive masterpiece’, as Wyndham Lewis described it, that matches his pen-portrait in Finishing Touches: ‘Dylan’s face was round and his nose snub. His rather prominent eyes were a little veiled and his curly hair was red, or auburn rather. A pleasant and slightly sardonic smile registered amusement and, I think, satisfaction. If you could have substituted an ice for the glass of beer he held you might have mistaken him for a happy schoolboy out on a spree.’
Both John and Dylan were ‘bad Welshmen’ whose ruin was hastened by their visits to the United States, where they broke records in drinking. There are passages in John’s essay on Dylan in Finishing Touches that could equally well refer to himself since, perhaps unconsciously, he identified himself with the younger man. Having passed on some of his own traits in this way, he is able to deplore them more wholeheartedly. It was a technique he often used to pep up his writing, and accounts for his sharpest sallies being directed towards those with whom he had most in common.
5
CHILDREN OF THE GREAT
‘Tottering under the burden of parental responsibilities.’
Description of Augustus John by Trelawney Dayrell Reed (1952)
When walking the streets of Chelsea, so the story goes, John had
a habit of patting local children on the head ‘in case it is one of mine’.*5 Calculations over the number of these children floated high into fantasy, reaching, in James Laver’s autobiography, three figures at which, in the opinion of Max Beerbohm, John stopped counting.112
He was never quick to deny fathering a child. Improbable rumours, incapable of proof, seethed around him, agitated by the readers of newspapers in which he featured as an archetypal father figure. Adolescents with a liking for art or a connection with Wales, as they grew up and away from their parents, sometimes speculated over their hidden kinship with Augustus John. One middle-aged woman in North Wales has written in a Welsh magazine the elaborate story of John’s friendship with her mother, ingeniously tracing her own family connections with the Johns to show that, in addition to being her father, John was a cousin. Every detail that can be checked pushes this narrative further into invention.
Another example is sadder and more revealing. In about 1930, Sheila Nansi Ivor-Jones, a schoolgirl, was sent by her parents to see a Dr Clifford Scott. Although she was not unintelligent, Sheila had done badly at school. She could not stick to any routine. Her father, Robert Ivor Jones, headmaster of West Monmouth School at Pontypool, and his wife Edwina Claudia Jones (née Lewis) were worried. But Sheila did display some artistic ability and, after going up to an art school in Tunbridge Wells, her troubles seemed over. In October 1937 she transferred to the Slade and by the 1940s had become an art instructor at the Chelsea School of Art. Then, on 15 February 1948, she again consulted Dr Scott, complaining of terrible nightmares about horses, fighting and hysterical love scenes; and adding that she had discovered herself to be the illegitimate daughter of Augustus John – to which she attributed this trouble. The nightmares and delusions persisted throughout this year, growing worse. She seems to have neglected herself, lost her job, and in February 1949 was admitted to West Park Mental Hospital, Epsom, where on 28 February she died. The cause of her death was recorded as bronchial pneumonia and acute mania.
Sheila Ivor-Jones (she hyphenated her name in London) had been born at Llanllwchaiarn in Montgomeryshire on 28 September 1912 and, from the evidence that exists, it seems most unlikely that John could have been her father. If, then, this was fantasy, it seems to have taken possession of her after the death of her real father. She may have seen John fairly frequently in Chelsea, since she lived round the corner from Mrs Fleming’s house (and no distance from John’s various studios) at 77 Cheyne Walk above the Cheyne Buttery – tea and supper rooms and a guest house run by a man called Stancourt, whose christian names were John Augustus.
Whatever the source of her delusion, it represents, in an extreme form, a tendency that was surprisingly widespread. The irony was that, as an actual father, John was extraordinarily difficult. ‘I have no gifts as a paterfamilias,’ he admitted.113 For all his children self-help was the only salvation – the key for entry into, as to liberation from, the powerful John orbit. Fryern Court ‘wasn’t my home’, wrote his daughter Amaryllis Fleming, ‘but it was the only place I ever felt utterly at home in’.114 Another daughter who was not at Fryern felt her exclusion to be a paralysing deprivation of love, leaving her ‘doubting my own validity as a human being, a boring thing to feel’. But the magnetic field rejecting her threatened to devour others, Ida’s sons and the son and daughters of Dorelia, who needed supreme willpower to escape.
John was like a Victorian father. Children were to be seen and not heard, painted and glared into silence. An incorrectly pronounced syllable would provoke pedantic wrath. ‘I apologise for my poor handwriting, syntax, spelling (probably) and faults of style and punctuation,’ David ended a letter written when in his early fifties. One morning when Poppet arrived at breakfast wearing her dress the wrong way round, she was picked up, deposited behind some curtains, and left. Another time when Vivien was at fault, John refused to speak to her and all communication had to pass via a third party. ‘As a child I can only say I feared him greatly,’ Vivien wrote, ‘and if spoken to by him would instantly burst into tears.’ But he was proud, if a little disturbed, when his two daughters, aged seventeen and fourteen, saved a young man from drowning. ‘They dived into the river at Fordingbridge and fished him out and applied artificial respiration and kissed him so frantically’, Ralph Partridge told his friend Gerald Brenan, ‘that he returned from unconsciousness to find he had an erection.’115
John was even more severe with the boys. The tension between them was sometimes agonizing. Edwin had a habit of smelling his food before starting to eat, and this infuriated Augustus so much that he pushed the boy’s face hard into the plate. His son retaliated by flinging the plate out of the window, but Augustus made him go out, collect every morsel from the gravel and eat it. It was a battle of wills and Augustus, with all the advantages, won. As for Dorelia, she ‘had a mysterious way of disappearing when anything troublesome cropped up’.116
Augustus’s silences could last thirty hours or more and were echoed back at him by his pack of brooding sons. ‘Why don’t you say something?’ he growled at David, whose silence darkened. But it was the quality of Robin’s silence, grimmer than any of the others’, seeming to accuse him of something literally unspeakable, that maddened Augustus most. ‘He hardly utters a word and radiates hostility,’ he wrote to Mavis. ‘I fear I shall reach a crisis and go for him tooth and nail. That happened once here and I soon floored him on the gravel outside.’ He affected to believe that all his sons were slightly mad. Should he hire straitjackets? ‘Do you think it would be a good idea’, he asked Inez Holden, ‘to have the lot of them psycho-analysed?’
‘As children,’ Romilly acknowledged, ‘we made no allowances for, since we had no conception of, the despairs of an artist about his work.’ Augustus’s glooms, charged with an intense hostility to those near by, cut him off from easy companionship. Yet he resented not being confided in, and wanted in a discreet way to be loved by all of them. ‘On rare occasions when Augustus and I talked, it was almost invariably about Sanskrit,’ remembered Romilly, ‘a subject neither of us knew much about.’ When another of his sons wrote to him in personal distress, Augustus confined his reply to matters of prose style which ‘I find overweighted with latinisms’, and to the envelope itself upon which ‘you have, either by design or carelessness, omitted to place the customary dot after the diminutive Hants. In an old Dane Courtier this seems to me unpardonable but I put it down to your recent bereavement.’ Nothing intimate could be spoken. At the end of a letter to a Dartmouth schoolmaster (a retiring bachelor of thirty-eight) Augustus had added a timorous postscript suggesting something might be mentioned to his son Caspar about sex: ‘Boys of Caspar’s age stand particularly in need of help and enlightenment on certain subjects, don’t you agree?’ The best he could do was to use conversation as a neutral territory where he and his sons might guardedly meet without giving anything away. It was a tragedy, Caspar thought, that, by the time they could talk on easier terms, his father was so deaf that everything had to be shouted.
To his severity Augustus added a bewildering generosity and freedom. He gave all his sons good allowances into their twenties and thirties when he could not well afford it. He also allowed them at the ages of ten or twelve to choose their own schools. If ‘all that is learned at public schools is football, cricket and buggery’, he wrote to Dorelia after reading Alec Waugh’s The Loom of Youth, ‘I cannot see that these accomplishments need be so expensive myself even if they are indispensable.’117 Nevertheless he always stumped up the fees. David had gone to Westminster, Caspar to Osborne, Robin (‘the slackest youngster I’ve ever come across’) briefly to Malvern and then to Le Rosey in Switzerland, Edwin and Romilly to a strange school, the College de Normandie, near Rouen. As for the girls, when asked at the ages of nine and seven whether they would like to go to school, Vivien again burst into tears and Poppet said ‘No’. A procession of tutors and governesses (one of whom Romilly married) were erratically employed, but the two sisters passed more of th
eir time with ponies than people. Augustus showed interest only in their art work, though when Vivien went up to the Slade she was under specific orders that there was to be no instruction. ‘Little’, she remembered, ‘came of this.’
The sisters had served almost as stern an art apprenticeship as the boys. ‘I had to look at him,’ wrote Poppet, ‘and if I caught his eye he would ask me very politely to come and pose for him, and this would mean the whole morning gone… all our plans for swimming at Bicton or riding in the forest with Vivien...’ These ‘gruellings’, as Vivien called them, continued until the girls married, ‘then ceased abruptly’. A considerable number of nude drawings of them both were hurried off to Australia, Canada, Japan.
As they grew up their relationship with their father became more complicated. Vivien, like Caitlin Macnamara, wanted to be a dancer. In 1930 the two of them caught the Salisbury bus to London, hoping to start their careers with C. B. Cochran’s ‘Young Ladies’ on the revue stage. Arriving at the door of Ethel Nettleship’s house, they sent a reassuring telegram to Augustus and Dorelia back at Fryern: ‘DON’T WORRY, WITH RELIABLE FEMALE’. But Augustus objected to Vivien going on the stage, and it was a relief to him when she took up painting. She received some help from Matthew Smith and the Euston Road artists William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore before going on to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. ‘You can do it,’ Augustus wrote encouragingly.
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