Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  So Gwen made an exception. But it did not seem as if she would travel again to England. In the autumn of 1924 she reminded Gus of a huge portmanteau, miraculously full of her possessions (a dressing case, writing desk, paintbox and pictures), together with some ancient chairs and a chest of drawers, all of which she had left with Charles McEvoy in 1903 to keep for her ‘till my return from Rome’. She wanted Gus to transport everything to her in France. It would, she mysteriously explained, ‘be very useful now’.168

  She still lived in the rue Terre-Neuve in Meudon, but in the autumn of 1926 she also bought a derelict shack (which she used as a studio) and a patch of overgrown ground (where she sometimes slept) near by at 8 rue Babie.

  One of the reasons she did not tell Gus of this acquisition was probably that he was beginning on her behalf the purchase of Yew Tree Cottage at Burgate Cross, not far from Fryern Court, advancing her most of the purchase money of five hundred pounds. ‘The cottage is yours,’ Dorelia wrote to her in May 1927. ‘So will you send as much money as you can spare to me. What more is wanted Gussie can lend you. I went over the cottage again yesterday… the whole place can be made delightful without much money.’169 By the beginning of May the sale was completed, Dorelia had the keys and was taking measurements for curtains.

  ‘I don’t mind seeing Gus now or that family,’170 Gwen wrote to Ursula. But there were few people she did want to see. For many years Gus had been sending her admiring letters and advice about the sale of her work. ‘Instead of £50 you ought to get at least 3 times as much for a picture, and would easily if you sent some to England where I know several people who are most anxious to possess things of yours. There is no reason why you should have to submit to any discomfort or privation any longer. It can’t be any good for your health or your work. I’m sure Quinn wanted to help you & get your work as long as you’ld let him.’171 After Quinn’s death, Jeanne Foster had volunteered to take his place and send her a retainer from the United States. But ‘I would rather follow your advice,’ Gwen told Gus, ‘and send my paintings to England.’172

  Such an arrangement might have surprised anyone who had only read Gwen’s references to her brother in her correspondence to others (‘he is offended by everything I do or don’t do’). Gus had really become something of a scapegoat for her. Whatever the emotional disturbances between them, there also existed an emotional affinity. As a Christmas present in 1925 he sent her some earrings. ‘My ears are pierced but I thought the time for earrings was over for me,’ she replied. ‘But these are so lovely I must wear them. If you don’t like them on me when you see me I will exchange them for something else.’173

  But when would she see him? He wanted her to hold an exhibition of her work at the New Chenil Gallery. ‘Chenil writes that Gus would like a one man show with me if it’s agreeable in the galleries in April,’174 Gwen explained to Ursula Tyrwhitt on 10 November 1925. Ursula and Gwen were still ‘part of each other’s atmosphere’. ‘If you will exhibit with me I will write & say it’s not agreeable,’175 Gwen promised. But Ursula refused to give her friend such an alibi. ‘This exhibition is a nightmare,’ Gwen complained.

  ‘Paintings and drawings by Gwen John’ was held at the New Chenil Gallery between May and July 1926. ‘My thoughts went back to our youth with its aims and hopes,’ Michel Salaman wrote to her after seeing these pictures, ‘ – and you seemed to be the only one of that eager band who had been utterly faithful to those aspirations, who not only had not failed them but achieved more than we dreamt of.’ The girls had appeared supreme at the Slade, at least in Augustus’s memory. But their advantages ‘for the most part came to nought’, he later wrote, ‘under the burdens of domesticity which… could be for some almost too heavy to bear… “Marriage and Death and Division make barren our lives.”’176

  Though he must have been thinking of Ida, this was also largely true of her Slade contemporaries. Edna Clarke Hall’s talent went into decline under her husband’s discouragement. Gwen Salmond had reignited Matthew Smith’s self-confidence, but the failure of their marriage and the bringing up of their two sons had made painting additionally difficult for her – and this had been compounded by the connection between Smith’s success as a painter and other women. Ursula Tyrwhitt also married, but she had altered neither her name (her husband was a cousin called Walter Tyrwhitt) nor her life. ‘Fortunately and by a great piece of luck I’m not at all unhappy,’177 she told Edna Clarke Hall.

  Ursula Tyrwhitt was the only friend from the Slade Gwen John consented to see when she eventually came to England for two months during the summer of 1927. ‘I count on you not to tell any one,’ she wrote, ‘I will not be troubled by people.’178 Her nerve had almost failed, but when she did arrive she was enchanted by Yew Tree Cottage. ‘I looked in through the window & saw a lovely dresser & the ground on one side is bordered by lovely little fir trees!!’ she wrote to Ursula. ‘…My cottage is furnished so far only by a little picture of Gus’s & the dresser… I am going over for a few days to whitewash the rooms.’179

  She stayed at Fryern that summer, and so did many other people. ‘As she was extremely shy, this made it necessary for her to have her meals in her bedroom,’ her thirteen-year-old niece Vivien remembered. ‘…I was terribly struck by her appearance – so very like my father, but very very tiny, like a miniature Augustus, with eyes that filled with tears almost continuously as she talked; very pale, bluey eyes and she wore dark dark clothes.’ She insisted on speaking French to the children, though with a Pembrokeshire accent Gus could not remember her having when they were children. There was much to do at the cottage, but Gwen was always ready to go and look at the sea at Bournemouth. Henry Lamb, who came over to Fryern, found ‘a little old lady in a shawl’ who, sitting beside him in the car, clutched his arm feverishly. ‘He interpreted this gesture as an amorous advance,’ writes her biographer Susan Chitty. ‘It seems more probable that Augustus was driving.’180

  ‘It is nice here,’ Gwen decided. She liked the Dorset country more than Gus did, and ‘the cottage has very much beauty… It is quite a big house too, but it looks small outside.’ Dorelia and she bought furniture together, and Ursula gave her a carpet and a counterpane. But it took longer to get settled there than she expected. ‘I have been sleeping here a few days,’ she told Ursula.181 But the workmen bothered her. She planned to stay until 19 September, but ‘I don’t want Gus to know I shant be there this winter.’ She intended to return after she had finished some paintings at Meudon. ‘I cant say how long they will take.’

  They took a year. She returned to her cottage in 1928 and seems to have narrowly avoided her father who, she feared, might want to stay with her. ‘Of course we will put up your father [at Fryern] if he will only consent,’ Dorelia assured her. ‘…Do come & I want to invite your Da.’182 She came to England once more, briefly in May 1931, to see the dying Edith Nettleship – Ida’s cousin.

  ‘I sometimes want to be there very much,’ Gwen had written to Ursula Tyrwhitt. Augustus and Dorelia kept on urging her to come. ‘Are you ever coming again?’ Dorelia asked at the beginning of 1933. ‘…Would you like to have a show in London? Augustus’s agents are anxious to have one & I think you ought to, you have many admirers over here.’183 But Gwen had by then given up painting which she likened to housework – more tiring than it used to be and not much pleasure. Never again would she waste time promising pictures for exhibitions. For she had rather more money now. In 1930, after the death of the last surviving child of her maternal grandfather Thomas Smith, master plumber of Brighton, it had been decided to wind up the estate and dispose of the properties at auction. Over the next year Gwen received nine hundred and fifty pounds (equivalent to £26,600 in 1996) of which she transferred two hundred pounds to Dorelia for Yew Tree Cottage.

  Some more family income became available later in the 1930s.

  Old Edwin John still kept in remorseless communication with his children. His letters showed an unyielding devotion to the weather. ‘W
hat is the weather like in Paris?’ he would ask urgently. News of its behaviour in parts of the United States and Canada were passed anxiously on to France. ‘The climate is very hot,’ he instructed Gwen of conditions in Jamaica while Augustus was there, ‘ – but usually tempered by a breeze from the sea.’ At home he often found himself dramatically overtaken by some ‘nice breeze’, afflicted with ‘unbearable heat waves’, or ‘in the grip of a fierce blizzard’. ‘Typical November weather’ did not go unobserved, nor the curious fact that ‘the cycle of time has brought us to the season of Christmas again.’ As he advanced into his young nineties, so the climate hardened, ‘the present weather being the worst I think I have ever experienced in my life’. ‘How’, he demanded, ‘is it going to end?’ After each winter, with its unexampled frosts and snows, he revived. ‘I am making good progress to recovery of health,’ he assured Gwen on 28 March 1938 after an attack of bronchitis. ‘I eat and sleep well and take short walks daily… How near Easter has become has it not? I must really purchase some Easter cards...’ On the afternoon of 7 April, while he was resting in bed, his housekeeper heard him call out: ‘Good-bye, Miss Davis. Good-bye.’ When she went up to see him, he was dead.

  They buried him in the cemetery at Gumfreston, a tiny damp grey church two miles from Tenby where he had played the hymns on Sundays. After some delay, an inscription, suggested by Thornton and considered to be definitive, was cut upon his gravestone:

  Edwin William John

  1847–1938

  With Long Life will I satisfy

  Him and show Him my Salvation

  Augustus, Caspar and the housekeeper attended the funeral; Thornton and Winifred were too far off; and Gwen did not come. She seldom went anywhere now. Besides, Gus only sent her the news a few days after the funeral. ‘I am writing to tell you of Father’s death,’ he announced on 16 April.

  ‘I, Thornton & a solicitor of Haverfordwest are appointed executors & Trustees of the Estate which is of the value of some £50,000 [equivalent to £1,400,000 in 1996]. I am sending herewith a copy of the Will. As far as I can make out we, his sons & daughters, are entitled to an equal share of the Income from the Estate, which at the death of the last survivor will be divided equally between the two families of grandchildren which now or shall exist, irrespective of their numbers.’184

  It had seemed a pity to leave her cottage empty for so long, so Gus had asked Gwen’s permission to lease part of it to Fanny Fletcher. For years she had been helping Gus and Dodo, looking after the children and animals, doing the wallpapers. Now she wanted to use the cottage as a teashop. ‘The suggestion is that you should [have] two rooms to yourself and your own staircase and that Fanny should pay you say £12 a year while looking after the garden & raising vegetables & flowers. She understands that you want to be left alone and thinks you need not be at all interfered with by the customers she would expect about tea-time. There seems a good chance of her making a success of this scheme if you agreed and the place would be well looked after in your absence.’185

  Gwen agreed that this was a sensible arrangement, but when she did not come back, Augustus and Dorelia began to wonder if they had done the right thing. ‘I hope you won’t regret giving up half the cottage, but it will be much better to have someone there,’186 Dorelia explained. And Gus assured Gwen that ‘Fanny Fletcher will vacate your cottage whenever you want to come to it.’187

  For more than ten years Dorelia continued giving Gwen news of her cottage. Few people came to the teashop and ‘your rooms are just as they were except there is a round table and armchair… The garden is lovely in the front thanks to Fanny… Your blue room is just the same except that Fanny has taken off the cement on the floor. The bricks look much nicer… It’s such a pity you cannot come sooner… A bit of your roof was blown off in a great hurricane but has been mended...’188

  By 1933 Dorelia was asking: ‘Are you ever coming again? Don’t you think you had better sell the cottage?’189 But evidently Gwen did not want to sell it. She often thought of Dorelia and Gus and the family, and thinking of them was less fatiguing than travelling across the Channel to see them. Besides, she occasionally saw one or other of them in France on their way to St-Rémy. It would probably have been easier for her if Gus had bought a house he coveted in Equihen that had belonged to the painter Cazin, but old Mrs Cazin still occupied it in the 1920s and would not sell.

  And nor would Gwen sell since, though she was ill, she had not ruled out the possibility of going back to England until Dorelia wrote to her with a definite proposal on 30 May 1939. ‘I don’t suppose you will use it again, and wondered if you would sell it for the price it cost, £500… Fanny is in very bad health & I should like to think she had somewhere to live if anything happened to me.’190 So Gwen agreed, pretending to make a gift of the cottage to reduce expenses.

  On 10 September, a week after Britain and France declared war on Germany, Gwen made her will in Meudon. She was sixty-three. Then, overcome by a longing for the sea, she caught a train to Dieppe, but on arrival collapsed in the street. Though she had ‘not forgotten to make provision for her cats’,191 she had brought no baggage with her and was taken to the Hospice de Dieppe in the avenue Pasteur where, knowing herself to be dying, she gave a lawyer there her will and burial instructions. She died at 8.30 a.m. on 18 September. No cause of death was given on the certificate, and no one knows where she is buried.

  *1 But, Marie Mauron went on, ‘ce désespoir-là éclatait d’un grand rire car, lui, savait qu’il recommencerait une toile le lendemain. Avec la même obstination, le même “désespoir”, le même enthousiasme, le même amour, vif et sans amertume, rancune ou vanité devant, tout de même, de magnifiques réussites!’

  *2 John and the writer A. P. Herbert were witnesses and the guests included Agatha Christie and her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan.

  *3 John, however, was not taken in by this pantomime. In a letter to Dorelia (20 July 1936) he wrote: ‘I drove down to Wales taking Caitlin who wanted to see Dylan Thomas. We stayed at Laugharne Castle and the next day by a strange coincidence Dylan turned up out of the blue!… I drove them to Fishguard, Caitlin and Dylan osculating assiduously in the back of the car.’ NLW MS 22778D fols. (cf. Notes) 136–7.

  *4 ‘Last week we christened the baby,’ Dylan Thomas wrote to Veronica Sibthorp early in 1939. ‘…Augustus could not follow the service, although he had the text, and broke in with the refrain “I desire it” at intervals.’

  *5 But Romilly John remembers that ‘as a small boy I frequently encountered Augustus striding arrogantly down the King’s Road on his way to the Six Bells. He never deigned to notice one on these occasions. Nor did it occur to me to claim any relationship. We passed as perfect strangers.’ Romilly John to the author, 25 January 1973.

  ELEVEN

  Things Past

  1

  BLACK OUT

  ‘I am trying to live down my adolescent past, but find I cannot bury it altogether. I have great hopes of my maturity though.’

  Augustus John to John Davenport

  The hectic drive from St-Rémy to Fordingbridge in the late summer of 1939 had been for John a journey into old age. The Second World War cut off his retreat and confined him to a narrow routine. On the surface there seemed little change: it was business as usual again. ‘I don’t see what I can do but go on painting.’1 But there was a difference. In the past he had often worked ‘like blazes’ in fits and starts (‘mostly fits’). Now he began to feel ‘ashamed of wasting my time… thinking that life went on almost for ever’. He had been studying the papers that were coming to light from Gwen’s studio. ‘Astonishing how she cultivated the scientific method,’ he exclaimed in a letter to his daughter Vivien. ‘I feel ready to shut up shop.’ His own premier coup days were long past, and he sought to acquire some of Gwen’s patience, investing time in one or two large imaginative pictures, writing a simple message on the landscape. ‘I want a good 20 years more to do something respectable,’ he had to
ld Herbert Barker.2

  During the 1940s he laboured hesitantly over a cartoon in grisaille twelve feet long called ‘The Little Concert’. ‘I’m doing a huge picture of imaginary people – about 25 or 30, life size,’ he told his son Edwin in the summer of 1944. ‘I’ve just provided the females with Welsh top-hats which stiffens things up greatly.’3 The picture represents three itinerant musicians entertaining a group of peasants on the fringe of a landlocked bay. ‘Though the conception is romantic, it is carried out with a classic authority of form,’ wrote T. W. Earp when it was first shown at the Leicester Galleries in 1948, ‘and is easily the most important achievement in English painting since the war.’4 Wyndham Lewis, reviewing the same exhibition, described it as being ‘as fine an example of Augustus John’s large-scale decorative work as I have ever seen’.5 But John himself felt unsatisfied, snatched the picture back and after some revision re-exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1950, after which it went to a private collection. Even then he could not think of it as ‘finished’, and as late as 1957 was proposing to ‘warm up’ the monochrome. Fortunately he was prevented, and coming across this ‘almost forgotten and very big composition’ unexpectedly in 1961, ‘I was very bucked I can tell you,’6 he reported to his son Caspar.

  Over the last twenty years of his life there was always one of these decorative compositions ‘cooking’ in his studio. ‘Imaginative things occupy me mostly now,’ he wrote to Conger Goodyear.7 He worked on them laboriously, with much anguish and persistence, continually revising and from time to time challenging the public to see in them his finest achievement. ‘They interest me very much and take up a lot of my time,’ he wrote. ‘What will become of them God knows.’8 Commissioned portraits, he told Dudley Tooth, had rarely paid off and he was tired of making promises he was unable to keep. ‘The artist doesn’t consider the “Public” – which is the concern of the theatrical producer, the journalist, the politician and the whore.’9 The Great War had obliterated the visionary world he had created in his painting; the Second threatened to devastate the world itself. He resolved therefore to use the opportunity war provided to retire into greater privacy; there, by the magical operation of his art, to re-illumine a peaceful paradise of sea and mountain, women, children, age and youth, music, dancing. From the age of sixty till he died at eighty-three this task overwhelmed all others.