The Restless Years (1955-63)

by Cecil Beaton

  I came away crushed, staggered, and feeling quite a great sense of loss. The sittings had been so harmonious; we had seemed to see eye to eye. I had hoped that many of Francis’ theories about life, art and beauty were going to be incorporated in the portrait.

  No sooner had I written the above than the telephone bell rang from London. It was Francis. In an ecstatic voice he said: ‘This is Francis, and I’ve just destroyed your portrait.’ ‘But why? You said you liked it? You thought it such a good work, and that’s all that matters!’

  ‘No — I don’t like my friends to have something of mine they don’t like. And I often destroy my work in any case; in fact, I’ve destroyed most of the pictures for the Marlborough. Only I just wanted to let you know so that you needn’t pay me.’

  It seemed little to Francis to waste all that work. He seemed jubilant at not getting paid, at not finishing a picture. He said that perhaps one day he’d start again, or do one from memory: ‘They often turn out best,’ he said.

  I don’t really know what is at the back of Francis’ mind. I am sorry that the canvas is destroyed and that there is no visible result from all those delightful, interesting and rare mornings.

  AUGUSTUS JOHN

  I hated having to take myself out of my warm house. The rain poured in buckets and the windscreen wiper had gone wrong. It was a horrible journey in the dark. However, on arriving in front of the pretty façade at Fryern the dining room was lit up like a doll’s house and the scene inside, with the long table covered with food and litter, looked inviting. As always, I was delighted to bask in the rare and sympathetic atmosphere of the John household. Dorelia explained that the curtains were new and appeared too violently red when drawn, so they had to keep them pulled back.

  Dodo seemed less worn, less tied down with household chores and responsibilities than usual. She was thrilled that they now had a gardener (three days a week) who was ‘making all the difference’. Augustus was in his studio painting by artificial light on some huge murals intended for exhibition at the next year’s Academy Show. (I fear they will never be completed.) Dodo sent the Italian servant-boy to fetch him, but confessed her inability to communicate in his language.

  Augustus came in holding a pipe in gnarled right hand. As he shook hands with me a sharp pain nearly caused me to shout. A thorn had gone into my first finger — how or why I can’t imagine. Perhaps, in a hundred-to-one chance, a splinter from his match had just struck at the right angle. The pain forgotten, we sat talking about Augustus’ desire to do a portrait of me. I told him that Francis Bacon had painted me looking like a piece of raw offal against an emerald green background. ‘You deserve it for sitting to him,’ Augustus said and then, with infinite sarcasm: ‘These idiosyncrasies are the prerogative of genius.’

  I told him that I had recently read a description in my diary of his being at the Eiffel Tower with a lot of young girls dressed as lesbians. ‘I love lesbians,’ said John as the door opened to his natural daughter, Amaryllis Fleming, the cellist, a glorious figure of a woman with tumbling curls. Talk then switched to her mother. The triangle of Mrs Fleming, Lord Winchester, and Miss Bapsy Pavry, the Indian, is infinite in its variations on the theme of love, marriage of convenience and divorce.

  Dodo is not an easy person to know. Yet she must have realised with the years my enormous admiration for her. Not only am I spellbound by her Luini-like beauty, but I love her calm and dignity. She is mysterious, or perhaps I should say she is one of the few women I’ve known who possess a sense of mystery. I don’t know anything about her antecedents; she is Scottish, she wears clothes unlike anyone else, she is completely amoral. She looks after her hordes of children, and it does not seem to worry her that some are illegitimate. She leads the life of a wife, busy in the kitchen, bottling things, going to Salisbury market; and withal she has a quality so that one knows that she is unlike other women.

  With a patience that shows itself in her deep brown eyes, she tends Augustus with the greatest devotion. It is not an easy task. Augustus is selfish, wild and bad-tempered. He loves Dodo, he loves the children, Tristram, David, Romily, Robin, Edwin and Kaspar,[6] Poppet and Vivien — but they are often terrified of their father. Friends and strangers too can be alarmed by Augustus. Fryern used to be like an island surrounded by a dangerous sea. Only the most intrepid visitors were able to make a landing. When I regretted to David Herbert that I had not spent more time in the John colony when I lived at Ashcombe, David replied: ‘But they didn’t want us!’

  With the years, Augustus has become gentler, more mellow. This evening he was positively benign.

  I left, full of red wine, to battle my way home through the cloudbursts, with the happy feeling that both John and Dodo were weathering the winter extremely well and that they were in better health and spirits than they had been for some years.

  PALAMOS WITH TRUMAN CAPOTE

  Palamos, Spain: May

  One of the pleasures of my visit to Truman at this tiny fishing village was that we could talk uninterruptedly without his being diverted by the activities of unrewarding cafe-society personalities. We discussed the difficulties of writing — he with particular reference to his new work In Cold Blood. Truman complained that not more than a few hundred people appreciated the merit of his writing. He was not jealous of the success of hack writers, but it appalled him that his own publishers did not recognise the quality of his work. He felt it was created out of such loneliness, such painful concentration, that sometimes he exhausted himself. His paragraphs were constructed with great care, immaculate punctuation and never a repetition of words or sounds.

  Once Truman came to my room saying he had become dazed by a sentence. Did I think it was euphonious? He could no longer tell. It ran something like — ‘Still the temperature of the evening had been lowered by the prior incident which had had the effect of making Mr Clutter late for his accustomed bedtime.’ Wasn’t ‘prior’ wrong? How could it be simplified? We discussed alternatives; we argued, and all my suggestions were crude. Eventually Truman admitted defeat and cut out half the sentence. After he had left the room I realised the amount of work that he puts into every line. Truman said that the whole investigation of the Clutter murder had been, for him, the most thrilling adventure of his life: that it was terrible, sordid and ghastly in many ways, but he at least had been alive.

  During the days on the island Truman and I managed to do quite a bit of sightseeing as well as work. One afternoon we made air unexpected discovery of the house that once belonged to Sert, the Spanish painter of murals. The house was unoccupied, but it still showed the simple yet luxurious taste of its former owner. It was decorated in white — white walls, muslin curtains, white or indigo linen chair-coverings and dark Spanish furniture polished like glass. It brought back to my mind all sorts of forgotten impressions of the extravagance of the thirties. The house was no doubt built with the proceeds from the murals he had done in houses in Florida at a time when they were almost regarded as an essential decoration in the homes of millionaires.

  SITTING TO AUGUSTUS JOHN

  June 1960

  Augustus sent a message through McNamara that he was serious about wanting to paint me and when could we start. The proposal is flattering but somewhat appalling too, for the chances of the picture ever being finished are slight. Augustus must be over eighty. Even at the best of times he was apt to ruin his pictures by going on too long; lately he has chalked up few successes. If only he had asked me when I was a neighbour at Ashcombe he could have done something quite wonderful. For then I was less unworthy of being painted. Instead of this dreary grey creature, I was in the pink of romantic perfection; and I had all the time in the world. Now I work so hard that it is difficult to find time. But in the Ashcombe days Augustus and Dodo were an alarming couple and they did not encourage visitors. Augustus would sometimes come over to me but never suggested my going over to him. Now his two studios at Fryern are filled with discarded portraits and murals. The portions that have
not been repainted a dozen times are quite beautiful, but he seems incapable of making up his mind even about the position of legs or arms, and in his indecision, or due to his dissatisfaction, has even taken to embellishing the compositions with silver paint.

  Augustus himself realises that he is ‘through’ — that he cannot overcome the onslaught of old age. Yet the other day Ralph Pitman managed to salvage a portrait of his daughter Jemima before it was ruined. Augustus, although angry at first (‘What business is it of yours if I ruin it?’) was later grateful; in fact, so moved at having completed a portrait that he burst into tears.

  I went over to Fordingbridge in my panama hat and almond suede coat and without more than a glance at me the old boy began to scratch noisily at a large canvas with a piece of charcoal. For an hour he grunted stertorously. He looked like an elderly porpoise staring at me with an expression of desperation in his wild eyes, enlarged by his spectacles. His mouth, under the tobacco-stained moustache, hung open. Every now and again he gave a little jump in the air and landed heavily. His determination to some extent seemed to conquer his inabilities. The first morning produced quite a good, but slight, drawing.

  On arrival for the second sitting the charcoal had been wiped into a misty mess, and Augustus started to do another more finalised rendering on top of the original. He took a long time to decide what colours to use; then at last he bashed on a bit of paint. His jargon is ‘old student’: ‘Shall we have a go?’ ‘Another dodge is to put a curtain there’; no theorising about his intentions and beliefs. Although Augustus has a keen intellect, real understanding about painters and painting and had a classical training at the Slade (where he won a prize for a composition that is one of the school’s proud possessions), he is an intuitive painter and he does not, I suspect, know why he works the way he does. It just happened that at a certain time his taste and dynamic strength produced canvases, based on Rubens and sometimes influenced by Greco, that created a shock in the twenties and thirties. Today he is an ‘old master’.

  I returned next morning and sat without moving an inch for two hours. Augustus liked my hat. By the end of the morning he shouted, ‘We’d better stop!’, and for good reason: he had started daubing the sensitively painted face with green. Maybe he will right the damage, but the turgid, solid green is of that particularly unpleasant variety that they use to paint cricket pavilions. I realise I have let myself in for a painful experience and one that is a time-killer.

  As I drive round the gravel path to his house I can see the old boy, his beret on the back of his head, glaring up at my portrait from his corner of the large studio window. Today he was talking to himself as I went in. It is sad to see this great man in his dotage. The coiled wire of his hearing aid loops like a worm and it seems the apparatus is useless, sometimes emitting a low hum that angers him so much that he flings the delicate contraption to the floor. His skin is pitted with dirt and blackheads, his fingers holding the brush between first and second fingers, the fourth discarded like an old banana, and the palette rattling in his shaky left hand. He spills ash and turpentine on the floor, and his box of matches becomes covered with paint on his palette. Augustus does not notice the electric stove on the floor and falls over it — ‘Damn!’ He tries clumsily to knock the keys into the back of the frame with a hammer. It is remarkable that he can achieve anything effective under such physical disabilities. His life has become one long struggle against odds.

  My portrait continues to make slow progress. I suppose it is taking its inevitable course. But frankly I don’t know what Augustus is trying to do. I feel his sense of colour — never his best point — is strangely erratic. One day the green paint on my face is dominant, then the face becomes orange, but when he suddenly finds a very violent blue, he makes this the background for my green coat and pink shirt. It is all very haphazard.

  My criticism of the painting is its flatness; it is like a large cartoon or poster.

  Today Augustus asked me if I’d been to the theatre in London, and when I told him how impressed I’d been by Finch in the film The Trials of Oscar Wilde he reminisced about Wilde. ‘I knew him quite well: lunched with him every day for two weeks or more. It was when he’d just come out of prison and he was in Paris. Such a nice chap, so full of fun and a delightful conversationalist. But I didn’t think so much of his entourage, and sometimes I crept away. They sat around adulating Wilde and getting him to show off. Who were they? Oh, anybody who’d buy Wilde a drink. He had no money, you know, but he never complained — never about his punishment, never mentioned prison. They’d cut his hair, you know; that was a pity. Yes, he was a bit fat — flabby, I’d say: the skin hung a bit loose. But he was so full of fun. He’d say about Robbie Ross: “He’d defend me within an inch of my life.” All the time the trouble was on Frank Harris had a boat waiting; he wanted Wilde to escape. But Wilde said he couldn’t face the prospect of being alone on a boat with Harris; anything was preferable to that!’ Augustus gave his rich, fruit-cake laugh.

  He talked of Picasso — ‘The finest draughtsman in the world today’ — but when Picasso was painting the Demoiselles d’Avignon, Augustus asked him what he was trying to do as he could not understand it. Picasso replied: ‘Je cherche la liberté.’

  I look at the accumulation of muck on the window-sill; I see the discarded goblets of milk and brandy (his medicine), the mound of paint brushes. I look at the discarded portraits of the twenties and thirties. I am reminded of Mary Alington, so luscious, so kind, so full of charm; Lord Tredegar, very birdlike and spiky; the Duveen daughter (a brute of a painting, this).

  Monday: another morning given up to sitting. There has been, in the meantime, the gaiety, noise and abandon of the party surrounding the Wilton ball. After the long, quiet period that my house has known, with my mother and myself making only sporadic attempts at conversation, the dining room (without its carpet since the storm and flood) reverberated from the stone floor to the vaulted ceiling with the chatter, hilarious screams and yells of six outspoken friends. The ball is now over, but the memory will remain of the Double Cube room filled — but not overfilled — with a sea of dancers watched by the ancestors painted by Vandyck.

  Now, once more, back to the picture. Today it was as if every aspect of the picture was closing in on him for attack. He looked suddenly like a bewildered old bull. It was one of his deaf days.

  He gave up early. ‘Come back tomorrow.’ Weakly I said I would. But I warned him that I have only a few more days before I go to the United States. ‘I think we can finish it in that time.’[7] He has no sense of time whatsoever. Augustus is great and grandiose, like a figure in the Old Testament. He has completely the manner of an artist. He can be lustful and he can drink to excess but he never uses bad language. He is a gipsy but he is also a great gentleman.

  Part VII: Travelling Again, 1960-61

  STAYING WITH FREDDIE ASHTON

  Suffolk: July

  The weekend was painfully wet. Fred’s sad eyes greeted me from the shade of an umbrella. It was particularly sad for him for this was his only holiday and for most of the time it had rained. I, however, was content to bask in the summery atmosphere of his pretty 1800 Gothic house with roses in Victorian vases, on china and on chintz. The house is like the house of an old aunt or of the girl in Spectre de la Rose.

  Elizabeth Cavendish was the other guest. We were fortunate to enjoy Freddie at his best. He has become not only portly in frame, but has acquired with the years weight of character. He speaks with great authority and seriousness combined with a frivolous cynicism. He is never hurried, knows his limitations and does not try to do too much. He does not attempt to read many books, but those he does he imbibes with intensity. Things that impress him are never forgotten. Freddie gets on surprisingly well with the common man or woman. He chuckles delightedly when there are family rows and shocking language is used. His eyes fill with amusement: ‘It’s so human!’ When I told him how much I envied him his sense of leisure, he said: ‘It’s
merely laziness. I’m the laziest person in the world: I like to do nothing. When I’m alone my mind isn’t meditating — it’s merely a blank. I like looking at the ceiling, and when I have to work hard it is just in order to get through it as quickly as possible.’

  At dinner on Saturday (a meal which started at about ten o’clock at night) Freddie talked of his favourite, the adored Pavlova. Once or twice he rose from the table to do an imitation, to run as she did, take a pose for the photographer or make an entrance in her grand manner. Despite his plumpness he was able to impersonate the first ballet dancer to make thinness admired; his eyes conveyed his intention so forcibly that one imagined one was witnessing the original. These were moments of real genius. He told us that from today’s point of view, Pavlova was technically not a good dancer; that she had no strength, and that half a dozen of today’s Covent Garden ballerinas could dance her off her feet. She had poor taste in her choice of composers and in the quality of her ballets; for instance, The Gavotte, danced to the most hackneyed of tunes, and The Christmas Doll were of appalling banality. Nevertheless, her showmanship was so remarkable that the audience were given the impression that they were seeing more than they were. She might dance for three minutes on end, then take five minutes for curtain calls. She would suddenly appear from an unexpected entrance on the stage, or leap from behind the back curtains, run forward at great pace, or merely subside by the side curtain. He described how the arc-light trembled on one spot while awaiting her arrival on stage. In The Christmas Doll she was seen to stand motionless for a long time but, in order not to appear dead and inanimate, she would occasionally breathe enough to encourage the sequins to glint on her tutu, or she would flicker her eyes. Those eyes were magnetic and wild, and were the focal point of a gaunt, birdlike face. In many ways Freddie judged she was inferior to Karsavina, but superior in that she did possess genius.