Augustus John

by Michael Holroyd

  There was no escape now from the tyranny of the present, no land of hope in his studio, no forgetfulness elsewhere. ‘I have been struck deaf and dumb,’ he told Poppet, ‘so that the silence here is almost more than I can bear.’ Old age had become a nighmare. ‘I feel like a lost soul at Fryern!’ he cried out to Vivien. Honours, now that he cared little for them, came to him from the United States, Belgium, France.*2 ‘I’d like to quit and get away from it all,’ he told a friend. ‘But where is there to go?’

  The end, when it came, was simple. He caught a chill; it affected his lungs; and after a short illness he died of heart failure, his heart having been greatly weakened by previous illnesses.

  During the last weeks, his abrupt exterior largely fell away and he revealed his feelings more directly. He was agitated at being a ‘blundering nuisance’ to Dodo and Vivien, worried lest they were not getting enough rest. The night he died, they left him alone for a minute and he at once got up and sat in an armchair, complaining that he could not sleep. ‘You try it,’ he suggested, indicating the bed. They got him back and when his eldest son David arrived later that evening, he was ‘breathing very quickly and with difficulty but just about conscious’. Vivien told him that David had come, and he spoke his name. In his sleep he rambled about a picture of an ideal town which he claimed to have finished. The doctor came and John lay very quiet, rousing himself suddenly to remind the women ‘to give the doctor a drink’.

  Dodo, Vivien and David took turns sitting up with him that night. At 5.30 a.m. on Tuesday 31 October, with Dodo beside him, he died. ‘His face looked very fine,’ David wrote, ‘calm and smoothed out, in death.’172

  *

  The funeral service was at Fordingbridge Parish Church. Apart from the many members of John’s family, there were few people – Charles Wheeler and Humphrey Brooke from the Royal Academy; one or two students who had ‘footed it’ from Southampton. ‘I didn’t have any great feeling of disturbance or deprivation,’ remembered Tristan. ‘…But suddenly half way through the service I burst into tears… I couldn’t stop myself and it went on and on.’ Afterwards, at Fryern, they had a party. Dodo, tiny but regal, seemed to have taken it wonderfully well, as if she could not believe yet that John was really dead.

  He had been buried in an annexe of Fordingbridge cemetery, an allotment for the dead up one of the lanes away from the town. To this rough field, in the months that followed, odd groups of hard-cheekboned people, with faces like potatoes, silent, furtive-looking, made their pilgrimage. Sven Berlin, man of the road, took Cliff Lee of Maghull. Under the great expanse of sky they stood before the gravestone. ‘He rested with councillors and tradesmen of the area,’ Sven Berlin wrote. ‘…His name was carved in simple Roman letters.’ Cliff Lee stood holding a rose he had torn from the hedge on the way.

  ‘“The first time I’ve seen you take a back seat, old Rai,” he said… “Here is a wild rose from a wild man.” He threw the rose on the grave and turned away; perhaps to hide from me the grief in his dark face though he was not ashamed.’173

  The newspapers were covered with obituaries, photographs, reproductions of pictures that would soon be hurried back to their dark repositories. ‘A man in the 50 megaton range,’ wrote Richard Hughes.174 ‘We lose in him a great man,’ declared Anthony Powell.175 He had personified ‘a form of life-enhancing exhibitionism’, said Osbert Lancaster, ‘which grew up and flourished before the Age of Anxiety’.176 His death was treated as a landmark. ‘In a very real sense it marks the close of an era,’ recorded the leader writer of the Daily Telegraph.177 More remarkable, perhaps, was the admiration felt by artists, such as Bernard Leach and David Jones, whose work and manner of life were different from his own.

  On 12 January 1962 a memorial service was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields. To the large crowd, many with curiously similar features, Caspar John read the lesson and Amaryllis Fleming played Bach’s Prelude and Fugue from Suite No. 5 in C Minor for unaccompanied cello. In his address, Lord David Cecil spoke of the heroic scale of John’s personality, the strength and sensibility of his imagination, and the pictures in which these qualities found expression. ‘A visionary gleam pervades these rocky shores, these wind-blown skies… the earthy and the spiritual in his art expresses the essence of the man who created it… it was rooted in the sense that the spiritual is incarnate in the physical, that the body is the image of the soul.’

  In questioning how future generations would assess his work, many agreed that it was essential to discount most of what he had done during the last twenty-five years. Public estimation even of his earlier pictures had changed, and would change again. But one day these pictures would be brought out again – ‘Caravan at Dusk’, ‘Dorelia Standing Before a Fence’, ‘Ida in a Tent’, ‘The Smiling Woman’, ‘The Red Feather’, ‘The Red Skirt’, ‘The Blue Shawl’, ‘The Blue Pool’, ‘The Mumper’s Child’ – passing moods and moments of beauty that he had made permanent.

  John’s reputation was sent into a deep decline by the many sales and exhibitions that were held shortly before and following his death.178 The market was flooded with very inferior work that he had never intended to be seen.

  Romilly and his wife Kathie came to Fryern, and Dodo lived on. She still wore the same style of clothes, sitting as if posing for, walking as though out of, another John painting. At work in the garden, or seated at the refectory table over tea – Gwen John’s ‘Dorelia by Lamplight at Toulouse’ behind her – she appeared extraordinarily like the mythical Dorelia of John’s imagination. ‘Her white hair’, noted the Gwen John scholar Mary Taubman, ‘ – strange and unexpected but accentuating the unchanged features… very kind and smiled quickly… her whole face quick and intelligent. Self-contained, rather frightening, though charming. Conversation conducted very much on her terms.’ Brigid McEwen, who visited Fryern in December 1963, observed her ‘long dress of saffron cotton patterned in black, a neckerchief, long cardigan, long earrings, pierced ears, rings on wedding finger, white stockings & no shoes. She kept playing with her spectacles rather like an old man. Her asymmetrically done hair – a long plait & a white comb. Very young voice… and young expressions “Jolly difficult” (to write life of John so soon)...’

  For years she had seemed pliant, sensible, undemanding. But following John’s death she flexed her muscles and rather enjoyed being ‘difficult’. Though she travelled more to France, staying with her daughter Poppet, for most of this time she remained at Fryern.

  Fryern too was ageing. Dry rot burrowed through the house; the large studio stood deserted, like an empty warehouse; brambles made the path to the old studio impenetrable. Vandals had broken in and covered the vast triptych of Sainte Sara with graffiti and explosions of paint. Under Dodo’s orders, Romilly laboured long hours in the garden among the giant weeds. Yet even in disarray, a magic atmosphere clung to the place. Kittens still nested in the stems of the clematis; the hammock still swung between the apple and the Judas tree; the pale brick, the long windows leading to dark rooms, the crazy paving inaccurately sprayed with weedkiller, the roses, magnolias, yellow azaleas and, outgrowing everything, the mountainous rubbish dump: all were part of this magic.

  On 19 December 1968 Dodo was eighty-seven. She had been getting visibly weaker and, to her consternation, able to do less in the garden. On the evening of 23 July 1969, Romilly found her lying on the dining-room floor. He got her to bed, and she slept. Next morning when he went in she lay in the same position. She had died in her sleep.

  *1 ‘After my election to the House of Commons in 1950,’ Montgomery Hyde wrote to the author, ‘…I took up the cause of gypsies. At that time they were being pushed around by the police, particularly in Kent, and Augustus took a lot of trouble in briefing me on the subject of their troubles. He was convinced that their periodic clashes with the police which were reported in a not too favourable press at the time were largely due to a misunderstanding.’ Hyde’s campaign ranged from an article in Encounter (1956) to an appeal for help
to Barbara Cartland and physical intervention in the case of Sven Berlin, whose house the authorities were attempting to convert into a public lavatory.

  *2 He had been elected an honorary member of the American National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1943; in 1946 he became an associate of the Académie Royale de Belgique; and in 1960 he was invited to join the Institut de France.

  ~

  We hope you enjoyed this book.

  For an exclusive preview of Michael Holroyd’s definitive biography of Bernard Shaw, read on or click the image.

  Or for more information, click one of the links below:

  Appendix One

  Declaration of Saint Paul’s

  Appendix Two

  John’s Pictures at the New English Art Club

  Appendix Three

  The Chelsea Art School

  Appendix Four

  To Iris [Tree]

  Appendix Five

  ‘Augustus John’

  Appendix Six

  John’s Pictures at the Royal Academy

  Appendix Seven

  Augustus John: Chronology and Itinerary

  Appendix Eight

  Locations of John Manuscripts

  Acknowledgements

  Notes

  Index

  ~

  Michael Holroyd

  More books by Michael Holroyd

  An invitation from the publisher

  PREVIEW

  Read on for a preview of

  Playwright, wit, socialist, polemicist, vegetarian and charmer, Bernard Shaw was a controversial literary figure, the scourge of Victorian values and middle-class pretensions.

  This is Michael Holroyd’s essential biography of George Bernard Shaw for the general reader, with its pace and verve, its comedy, drama and politics, it shows a provocative and paradoxical figure sympathetically and movingly portrayed.

  Preface

  In the late 1960s the Shaw Estate decided to commission a new biography of G.B.S. Previous biographies had been ‘partial’, usually written by friends of Shaw, and the time had come for ‘an assessment of the man in his period’. Shaw’s executor, the Public Trustee, had recently relinquished his control of the publication and production arrangements for Shaw’s works and set up an independent Committee of Management composed of nominees from the Estate’s three residuary legatees (the British Museum and Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London, and the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin). Its first chairman, Sir John Wolfenden, director and principal librarian of the British Museum, took advice as to who should write Shaw’s life from an eminent biographer and incunabulist at the museum, and my name came up. So the Society of Authors (which acted as agent for the Shaw Estate) was asked to sound me out.

  I was then thirty-four, had published a biography of Lytton Strachey the previous year and already agreed to write a biography of Augustus John. But this invitation surprised me. I was more accustomed to appeals from people wanting me not to write about their friends and members of their family. Perhaps, it occurred to me, I was becoming respectable. The feeling was not altogether comfortable. In fact, I was terrified. To my eyes G.B.S. appeared as a gigantic phenomenon with whom I felt little intimacy. At the same time he presented a challenge I really ought to accept. Nevertheless I hesitated. I had heard that Shaw used to write ten letters every day of his adult life and that correspondents kept his letters. I knew he had composed over fifty plays, that his collected works extended over almost forty volumes (and were well exceeded by his uncollected writings), and that there were libraries of books about his work and huge deposits of unpublished papers around the world. I suspected that with his shorthand and his secretaries G.B.S. could actually write in a day more words than I could read in a day. Since he lived into his mid-nineties, writing vigorously almost to the end, this was an alarming speculation. I therefore prevaricated, replying that while I would in principle be delighted to write Shaw’s Life, I could not in practice begin until I had finished Augustus John.

  To my surprise the Society of Authors was undeterred by this delay. I did not begin my research until early in 1975 when I went to Dublin. I lived in Rathmines, strategically placed between a convent and a barracks, and a mile or so from Shaw’s birthplace in Synge Street. Intermittently I worked at the National Library of Ireland (to which Shaw had donated the manuscripts of his novels) and I visited Dalkey where he had passed his happiest hours while growing up. I also met a number of writers – John O’Donovan, Monk Gibbon, Vivian Merrier, Arland Ussher, Terence de Vere White – who encouraged me. Yet, however hard I try, I cannot account for my time in Ireland very coherently. The atmosphere was thick with goodwill. There was almost no one who, even when they had no information at all, would not be prepared to volunteer something over a jar or two. People I had never heard of came to advise me that they knew nothing, and then stayed on awhile. Many wrote letters to the same effect: some hopefully in verse; others more prosaically enclosing business cards. And everyone pressed in on me so warmly that I was moved to reply with such politeness that my replies elicited answers to which I felt bound to respond. One lady (whom I had never met) eventually enquired whether we had ever had an affair, the crucial part of which had escaped her. I was swimming in the wake of the great Shaw legend, swimming and almost drowning.

  The writing of my book, which took me all over the world, must have tested the patience of the Shaw Estate to its utmost. But the extra time I was obliged to spend with Shaw helped to give me that sense of intimacy I had found lacking at the beginning of my research and which I believe is an essential ingredient for the writing of biography. Between Shaw’s work and his life, I found, moved an unexpected current of passion which I sought to navigate. I felt eventually as if I were breaking a Shavian code, the alpha and omega of his dramatic style (so assertive yet so reticent), and was picking up subtle themes that, to gain an immediate public, he orchestrated for trumpet and big drum.

  Many people had come to think of the legendary G.B.S. as having only ink in his veins. I began to dismantle this literary superman and replace him with a more recognizable if still uncommon human being. I wanted to demythologize him without reducing him. Behind the public phenomenon was hidden a private individual, intermittently glimpsed, who gave G.B.S. his concealed humanity. He covered up his vulnerability with dazzling panache; I have tried to uncover it and show the need he had while alive for such brilliant covering. He became the saint of the lonely and a fugleman for those who were out of step with their times. He gave them a heartening message. For every disadvantage, in Shavian terms, becomes a potential asset in disguise. The art of life therefore is the art of heroic paradox.

  The paradox continues into our own times. G.B.S. is in his element by virtue of still being heroically out of step. I had already noticed, with respect to my previous biographies, how quickly a prevailing mood could change and how unpredictable these changes sometimes were. In the 1960s I had been assailed by a good deal of homophobic mail after my Lytton Strachey was published; but when a rewritten version of that book came out twenty-five years later I received no hate mail at all. On the other hand Augustus John, generally seen in the mid-1970s as an adventurous heterosexual character who might have emerged from the pages of Fielding’s Tom Jones, attracted much greater puritan censoriousness twenty years later, mostly from men who, though responding to the rise of feminism, put me in mind of Dr Johnson’s attack on Tom Jones.

  By the end of the 1980s most people expected there would soon be a Labour Government in Britain. But the country did not embrace change as the United States appeared to be trying to do by turning from the Republicans to the Democrats. Instead it was preparing to dig in against the rest of Europe over what was to be a radically retrogressive period. We returned to past battlefields. Many of the political campaigns in which Shaw took part, and which had been manifestly won, were being fought out again a hundred years later, and with opposite results. The break-up of the Soviet Union, the ‘end of communism’ a
nd of ‘history’, the spread of privatization across the world and the rise of nationalism, the fear in Britain of the very word ‘socialist’ (as frightening as ‘liberal’ in the United States) were to make Shaw’s beliefs deeply unfashionable. While Oscar Wilde’s once-faded aestheticism was being revitalized and revived by modernists, Shaw’s persistent progressiveness had become dated. Yet being thoroughly out of fashion, wilfully marching in an alternative direction, was a Shavian speciality – and perhaps a useful one. Many pages which I wrote as a contribution to social history now appear to me, as I reread them, to have gained a peculiar relevance to our contemporary politics.

  ‘Trust your genius rather than your industry,’ Shaw advised his biographer St John Ervine. In preparing this abridgement, which was planned and contracted for over ten years ago, I have done away with all signs of industry by following the example of Leon Edel’s abridged Life of Henry James and eliminating reference notes. I have also trusted to my instinct while reducing ninety-four years of Shaw’s hectic life, and more than fifteen years of my own work, into a form that a general reader can get through in a matter of weeks or days. I have weeded out errors I detected in earlier versions, and occasionally added a passage founded on recent Shaw scholarship. What I have aimed at is something equivalent in biographical narrative to the ‘revolver shooting’ of Shaw’s own dramatic dialogue where ‘every line has a bullet in it and comes with an explosion’. Undoubtedly this technique reveals a rather different G.B.S. from the one conveyed by my original armada of volumes. It is for readers rather than myself to say what the difference is. All I can say is that it emerges from this synthesis, rather than being premeditated or imposed.

  When infiltrating the work of his biographers with concealed autobiography, Shaw sacrificed something of his own life so that these ‘partial’ biographies might act as endorsements to his political ideas. Treating the Gospels as early examples of biography, he noted in the Preface to Androcles and the Lion how St Matthew (‘like most biographers’) tended to ‘identify the opinions and prejudices of his hero with his own’, while St John used biography as a record of the ‘fulfilment of ancient Jewish prophecies’. Since Shaw’s death, biographical technique has grown more ingenious and the range of subject matter has expanded so that biography embraces most human experience, insofar as it is recoverable, and accepts it as fit for publication. So far as I am aware, I do not specifically identify my opinions with Shaw’s, nor have I used his life to record the fulfilment or non-fulfilment of socialist predictions. My deepest involvement is with biography itself and its never-ending love-affair with human nature, and my aim has been to come a little nearer a biographical ideal described by Hugh Kingsmill as ‘the complete sympathy of complete detachment’.