The Royal Academy, that ‘asylum for the aged’,140 put on a memorial show after Matthew Smith’s death. ‘Bloody marvel,’ John grunted. Some days it seemed he really wanted to die himself but did not know how to go about it. During a television interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1957 he demanded ‘another hundred years’ to become a good painter.141 Otherwise it was a dog’s life, an agony from start to finish. If he had it all over again he would probably do the same.
Early in the 1950s, in an effort to break new ground, he had taken to sculpture ‘like a duck to water’. He had first felt ‘longings to sculpt’ in the summer of 1905, but it was not until 1952, when he met the Italian sculptress Fiore de Henriques, that this ‘new phase in my history opened up’.142 She was a wild young woman ‘of robust physique’, he noted, savagely featured, with coal-black hair, stalwart legs and a grip of iron. She came to Fryern late in 1952 shortly after her monument to the humanist philosopher Don Giovanni Cuome in Salerno had been blown up, and ‘has done a very successful bust of me’.143 He could not keep his hands, while she worked, off the clay, and eventually she gave him some with which to experiment. The result was ‘a prognathous vision of the young Yeats’,144 followed by busts of some of his family, friends and a model. ‘Getting the hang of this medium’, as he called it, was exciting for John. ‘I visited the Foundry where my busts are being cast,’ he told Lord Alington’s daughter, Mary Anna Marten, ‘…I feel all the excitement of a Renaissance artist who happened on a head of Venus of the Periclean age while digging in his back garden.’145
It may have been that John hoped to overcome in sculpture some of those muscular vagaries that were so affecting his draughtsmanship and painting. In the opinion of Epstein it was ‘the sculpture of a painter; it’s sensitive, but you could stick your finger through it. It’s interesting, but it’s not real sculpture.’146 John had many mighty plans, from a ‘colossal statue’ of St Catherine at the summit of St Catherine’s Rock at Tenby, to a towering statue of the mature Yeats to confront all Dublin – ‘Would you advise trousers,’ he questioned Yeats’s biographer, Joe Hone, ‘or a more classic nudity?’147 But within eighteen months this ‘new phase’ was over, and he was free to pursue with fewer interruptions the big composition upon which the reputation of these post-war years would depend.
The only other interruption was portraiture – often drawings of famous men such as Thomas Beecham, Frank Brangwyn, Walter de la Mare, Charles Morgan, Gilbert Murray, Albert Schweitzer (‘sat like a brick he did’). These drawings provided John with ‘outings’, moments of adventure and respite. His studies of these ‘old buffers’ are probably his best work in these last years. Of the original talent little remains: yet a certain ingenuity has developed, the skill of using a restricted vocabulary. The trembling contours, the blurred and fading lines convey poignantly the frailty of old age. Some, who guarded their public image scrupulously and would have given much for a John portrait before the war, now refused his requests: among them J. B. Priestley and A. L. Rowse. Others refused because of their own great age. ‘I am too old for sittings,’ Shaw wrote (10 May 1949). ‘…I have no longer any outline and am just like any other old man with a white beard. At 90 one must be counted as dead...’148
But one who welcomed him enthusiastically was John Cowper Powys. ‘Here is Augustus John Himself with his daughter [Vivien] as his driver,’ he wrote to Phyllis Playter (26 November 1955). ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! – He himself is a splendid picture.’ In an hour and a quarter John polished off two drawings, retired for the night to the Pengwern Hotel, then ‘like Merlin’ returned next morning for another session. When he rose to depart, Powys told Louis Wilkinson, ‘I leapt at him exactly as a devoted Dog of considerable size leaps up at a person he likes, and kissed his Jovian forehead which is certainly the most noble forehead I have ever seen. I kissed it again & again as if it had been marble, holding the godlike old gent so violently in my arms that he couldn’t move till the monumental and marmoreal granite of that forehead cooled my feverish devotion. His final drawing was simply of my very soul – I can only say it just awed me.’149
Almost his last outing, in October 1959, was to Tenby, which had conferred on him the Freedom of the Borough. It means ‘simply civil amour propre, something good to drink, a few little speeches and jokes, a write-up in the papers,’ Thornton wrote from Canada. But, he warned, Augustus would ‘have to get a new suit’.150 Dodo, ‘under the impression that it rains perpetually in Wales’, did not go, and he was accompanied by his daughter-in-law, Simon John, who ‘was very much admired’.151 He had been quite afraid to go back, but the morbid associations with Tenby had now vanished. The Prescelly Mountains where he had been taken by his nurse, and the Cleddau valley where he had walked with his father were ‘more beautiful than ever… all, all was perfect.’152 He also liked the people, ‘particularly one’, he told Caspar, ‘a blonde of truly classic proportions. With the backing of the mayor, a past owner of the hotel where this paragon works as a waitress I hope to succeed in overcoming this young lady’s scruples, and putting her to the acid test of my brush.’153
He lingered over dinner with the Mayor while a large audience, waiting impatiently for them in the town hall, was assailed by Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition. At last, to the sound of cheers, the diners clambered on to the flower-camouflaged platform with, the Tenby Observer and County News reported, ‘an air of deep sincerity and of historic significance’. John, though ‘the piercing eyes still flashed’, seemed enveloped by benevolence. Sandwiched between the Mayor and Town Clerk, flanked by aldermen, councillors and burgesses, buffeted by sonorous compliments, he looked ‘deeply moved and at times somewhat overcome by… an emotion that he did not try to conceal’.154 As he rose to sign the Freeman’s Roll, the audience rose too, singing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow!’ In a speech of stumbling thanks, he spoke of his walks as a boy over the beaches and burrows: ‘I could take those walks again now and I don’t think I would get lost,’ he declared defiantly. ‘I can find my way about still.’
But to many, in these last years, he looked pitifully lost, the beard stained with nicotine, the listening eyes glaring, the slurred actions menacing the traffic. He was shepherded back by Simon ‘my eldest son’s wife’, he explained to his sister Winifred, ‘or rather ex-wife for I think they are now divorced’. Simon had come to live at Fryern in 1956 ‘and to my astonishment is quite a success’.155 He relied on her as a model (his voluptuous portrait of her, very dashing en déshabillé, was shown at the Royal Academy in 1959); and she was devoted to him, though there was a number of what he lightly called ‘fracas’ – matters of words and tablets, after which they would all return to ‘friendly terms’ again.
John’s face – ‘one of the most remarkable old faces I have ever seen’, the writer Maurice Collis called it156 – appeared on television, was splendidly photographed for the newspapers, and occasionally seen at galleries being ‘assaulted’ by some old lady ‘whose summer costume quite concealed her identity till a warm embrace on parting brought me to my senses’.157 He had little to say. Every birthday the journalists telephoned and every time they reported his words: ‘Work as usual’. No one seemed interested in this work – it was the past for which he was famous. From time to time phantoms from that past would overtake him, dragging his name into the headlines. He was reported as racing to Devizes Hospital after Mavis Wheeler suddenly shot her current lover, Lord Vivian, in the stomach. She was charged at the Assize Court in Salisbury with attempted murder and found guilty of unlawful and malicious wounding. ‘Heard from Mavis, very cheerful and cock-of-the walk at her new prison,’ John told their son Tristan.158 Then Eve Fleming, aged over seventy, began a series of ‘foolish’ court battles, drenched by gusts of public laughter, against one of John’s models, a voluble overweight daughter of a Parsee high priest, and author of Heroines of Ancient Iran, for the affection of a penniless nonagenarian aristocrat, the sixteenth Marquis of Winchester, known harmlessly as
‘Monty’. John advised Eve to ‘drop that discredited old ass’, but she persisted, eventually winning her case on appeal, carrying her elderly prize to the Hôtel Metropole in Monte Carlo, and steering him into the Guinness Book of Records as the oldest peer in history. ‘How pleased you must be to hear that Mama is about to join the aristocracy,’ John wrote to their daughter Amaryllis.159
But it was to a remoter past that he felt himself tied. The subject of his gigantic triptych, ‘Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer with Sainte Sara, l’Egyptienne’, had first fired his imagination when, with the encouragement of Scott Macfie in 1910, he became involved with the pilgrim mystery of the gypsies. In the years between the wars, the dreams symbolized for John by this legend paled. Then, with the Second World War, he turned back to them. ‘I have begun a picture of Les Saintes Maries de la Mer with Sainte Sara l’Egyptienne,’ he wrote to Dora Yates on 13 March 1946. His first attempt to re-illumine this miraculous land had been ‘The Little Concert’ which, he told William de Belleroche on 1 April 1948, ‘will never be really finished as I want to alter it every time I see it’. He could resign himself to its inconclusive state only by becoming more interested in variation. It was then, in the late 1940s, that his long-slumbering interest in Sainte Sara awoke. It was as if, on opening his eyes, she mesmerized him. ‘I am astonished at my own industry,’ he declared. She became his reason for not travelling, not taking on profitable portrait work. For over a dozen years, with few pauses, she held him, like some siren, calling him back to his studio day after day, and making his nights sleepless. She enchanted and tortured him; she was to be his resurrection or his death.
The saga of this vast mural and John’s ‘dreadful expenditure of time and effort’ over it can be assembled from his letters. ‘There will soon not be an inch of wall-space left for me to disfigure,’ he had joked to Doris Phillips on 24 July 1951. By 1952 the three compositions appeared to be combining harmoniously. ‘So much depends on them,’ he confessed to Daniel George. ‘They wax and wane like the moon.’160
The spirit in which he met this challenge is conveyed in a letter to the artist Alfred Hayward: ‘It seems to me one wasted most of one’s time when young. At last I feel myself interested only in work and feel always on the brink of discovery. That surely is excitement enough. We are left very much in the dark and have to find a way out for ourselves. One thing becomes clear – nothing worth doing is easy – though it may and should look so, after ages of effort and god knows what failures!’161
The months moved on and ‘I work from morning to night on the big panels which are developing well but seem to need years of work.’162 In May 1954 he reported that they were showing ‘signs of “coming out” like a game of Patience’.163 Four years later, however, he was still labouring at them and admitting: ‘Unfinished things are often the best.’ But there was no chance this time of supplanting his obsession with another. For this was love and must give birth to beauty. ‘My wall decorations keep changing and evolving like life itself,’ he had told Cecil Beaton. But ‘the sureness of hand and mind’, Sir Charles Wheeler records, ‘…was waning and more than ever he scraped, altered and hesitated… I was charmed by the design which had all the Celtic poetry so characteristic of his figure work. Each time I saw it, it became less and less resolved...’164
At Fryern he could sometimes be heard alone in his studio, roaring in distress. ‘What the hell do I know about art?’ His right hand was partly crippled with arthritis and, as he smoked, it trembled. Canvases lay everywhere, hanging on the walls, stacked in cupboards and on ledges, propped up or lying on the floor. People scurried in and out taking what they wanted. John stood, a skullcap on his head, dressed in a woollen sweater and jeans, scraping and hesitating before the triptych, caring for nothing else. Sometimes he drew in chalk on top of the paint; sometimes he splashed on gold and silver paint, or pasted it over and over again with dozens of pieces of paper to try out modifications; sometimes it seemed to him that even now, after all these years, he was about to pull it back from the precipice and have a ‘triumph of a sort’.165
He was impatient with sympathy, but longed for the expert encouragement of another artist. After seeing the work, the gallery owner Dudley Tooth wrote to him calling it ‘magnificent… among the finest things done in this generation’. But John was not fooled, knowing Tooth was simply a ‘man of affairs’ interested in the money. In 1960 a private collector offered him up to eight thousand pounds (equivalent to £99,500 in 1996), but John would not let it go. Over the last two or three years he relied increasingly on the President of the Royal Academy, Charles Wheeler. ‘I think he needed someone to lean on,’ Wheeler wrote, ‘so that I received many letters begging me to visit him at Fryern Court.’166 They would lunch together with Dodo, then pass most of the afternoon in John’s studio discussing the composition. ‘When it was time to leave Augustus would hug us and, standing side by side with Dorelia at the tall Georgian windows, wave us goodbye.’ He had undertaken to show his triptych at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1960. The sending-in day was 22 March. On 10 February ‘a strange thing happened’, he told Philip Dunn. ‘I rapidly made some bold changes and the results have delighted me beyond measure!’167 But a month later he was writing to Wheeler: ‘I think it impossible to finish the triptych in time… I shall have to keep the big panels for another time.’168
Early in 1961, on the evidence of some photographs169 of the cartoon, the Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Trust offered to purchase the central panel for five thousand pounds and present it for the decoration of Burlington House. It was hoped that this ‘magnificent proposal’170 would give John the stimulus he needed. But after five agonizing days, he could not keep back the truth any longer: the triptych was not good enough and never would be. Before, locked up with his fantasies, he could pretend and try to conjure something from this pretence. But studying the panel with the objectivity that the Abbey Trust’s offer now compelled, he could see only the truth. The letter he wrote ‘in great distress’ to Wheeler on 9 March 1961 bows to this truth:
‘I have some bad news for you. After working harder than ever I have come to the conclusion that I cannot continue without ruining whatever merit these large pictures may have had, nor can I expect to recover such qualities as have already been lost. I want to ask you to release me from my promise to have these things ready for the coming show while there is still time to replace them. I cannot work against time. That is now quite obvious: it will be a disappointment for you, and perhaps a disaster for me… I will not again make unnecessary promises but will return to the work I love with renewed zest and confidence...’
Wheeler at once replied with a wire, following this up with a letter accepting John’s reasons and absolving him from his promise: ‘They saved me and I am almost myself again,’ John answered.
But nothing could be the same. In a real sense it had been against time he sought to work: to reach out and reassemble the past – a legendary past that had never existed otherwise than in his imagination. ‘This working from the imagination is killing me,’ he had written on 5 May 1960. ‘I find myself so variable that sometimes I lose all sense of identity and even forget my name.’ So, at the end, he had been brought back to the central predicament of his life: ‘Who am I in the first place?’ In the early visual lyrics, he had revealed a paradise composed in the image of his desire which, though mysterious in its origin, was immediate and actual in its observation. But his desire, arising perhaps from the loss of his mother, had been overlaid by other desires. What had been damped down could not now be rekindled. In his triptych the dream paled into nebulous shadows miming the sensuous beauty and stately gestures of earlier days.
John never abandoned the triptych, but was freer in this final year to turn to ‘lesser and handier things’. Almost his last portrait was of Cecil Beaton. It had been begun in June 1960, but much to John’s fury Beaton left shortly afterwards for the United States. John felt mollified, however, on being introduced to Gret
a Garbo. ‘I fell for her of course,’ he assured Beaton. ‘…Quel oiseau!… I really must try to capture that divine smile but to follow it to the U.S.A. would kill me. I wouldn’t mind so much dying afterwards...’171 The sittings started up again after Beaton’s return, and became increasingly painful for them both. John seemed at his last gasp. The portrait would change and change again. John daubed it with green paint like a cricket pavilion, then with pillar-box red. He stumped about, lunging at the canvas to add a pupil to one eye or, it might turn out, a button. His hands shook fearfully, his beret fell off, he glared; and Beaton, exquisitely posed, watched him suffer. ‘I think’, John puffed, ‘…this is going to be… the best portrait… I have ever… painted.’
Sex had been one medicine that, in the past, could lift him clear of melancholia. In the summer of 1961, Simon John having left to marry a neighbour, John’s daughter Zoë came to stay at Fryern. John, then in his eighty-fourth year, was sleeping on the ground floor. One night, carrying a torch and still wearing his beret, he fumbled his way upstairs to Zoë’s room, and came heaving in. ‘Thought you might be cold,’ he gasped, and ripped off her bedclothes. He was panting dreadfully, waving the torch about. He lay down on the bed; she put her arms round him; and he grew calmer. ‘Can’t seem to do it now,’ he apologized. ‘I don’t know.’ After a little time she took him down, tucked him up, and returned to her room. It was probably his last midnight expedition.
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