Augustus John (112 page)

Gerald Kelly had assured John that ‘the show is going to be really fine’. In fact it turned out to be ‘a far greater success than any of us had dared hope’, as he wrote to Liza Maugham. ‘No one-man show has had a tithe of the success or attraction which yours has,’ he told John. Almost ninety thousand people came, and the catalogue had to be reprinted twice. ‘It is surprising how the young came along,’ Kelly wrote. The Queen also came and, John falling ill that day, she told Kelly that ‘she wished you had painted the King’.
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And John too came away in high spirits. ‘It was such a relief to see Augustus was really pleased,’
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Dorelia confided to Kelly. ‘I have had a wonderful press,’ John acknowledged. ‘…I see some chance now of living down my somewhat lurid reputation.’
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Perhaps the fairest summary of his career appeared in
The Times
.
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The display at Burlington House, this critic wrote, made his ‘neglect seem outrageous, but at the same time explains it.

‘The effect of the drawings, when seen in such abundance, is overwhelming. They do more than explain why Mr John’s contemporaries were convinced that here at last was a great modern artist in England; they suggest even now that a genius of that order had really appeared… His power of draughtsmanship would have fitted him to work in Raphael’s studio, but in 1900 there was no way in which it could be used directly and with conviction.’

With the panels came John’s poetry. Their colour was

‘radiant and clear, and the paint, which has aged very beautifully on almost all the small panels of this time, is laid with a sweet and sensitive touch. At the same time Mr John now found expression for the vein of true poetry that runs through the best of his work. In part the sentiment of these pictures is Celtic, other-worldly, and ideal, but never for a moment did he paint in a Celtic twilight. To these blue distances and golden suns Mr John transferred, not some wraith of the literary imagination, but quite simply and in literal fact his family and friends.’

Finally there was his gift for catching a likeness – at its best not simply a superficial resemblance but that physical identity imprinted upon the features from childhood to old age. As a portrait painter he had chosen an art that was guided by fewer standards than formerly. In consequence he was thrown back on his own judgement ‘and quite clearly Mr John is not a good critic; the unevenness of his later work is really startling, and this even in the simplest technical matters’. Even so,
The Times
critic concluded, ‘he remains a force and a power and every now and then there is a picture, a landscape or a portrait of one of his sons, in which all has gone brilliantly well. But though it is impossible not to see that here is a great man, this is too great a man, one sometimes feels, to practise the painter’s slow and nine-tenths mechanical art.’

Yet since the war John had been applying himself to these mechanical matters as never before. He lacked only the one-tenth of inspiration. However long he waited in his studio, it did not visit him. The only remedy he understood was time; to stay by his easel endless hours, hoping for a miracle. But the hit-or-miss stage was over – it was all miss now. His unfinished canvases lay around him. ‘I fear I shan’t accomplish as much as I intended,’ he confessed to Tommy Earp. ‘Life is definitely too short.’ He had begun to learn something of physical exhaustion through the multiplying illnesses that consumed days and weeks. In November 1954 he entered Guy’s Hospital for a double operation. ‘My bloody old prostate might need attending to and also a stone in my bladder,’ he told Hugo Pitman. ‘Together they are responsible for my condition which has become very troublesome.’
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He lay in a modest room where ‘there is no room for modesty’,
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surrounded by flowers and sending out in vain for bottles of wine. ‘I have instructed… [the surgeon] not to make a new man of me but to do what he could to restore the old one to working order,’ he informed John Davenport. He hated being confined ‘in this horrible place’, watched over by ‘a dozen vague females in uniform. I have considered getting away but it’s difficult… ’ After the operation, his relief flowed out unchecked. He inflated himself with optimism: the vague females blossomed, the invisible future glowed. ‘I had a most successful
op. and am still considered the prize boy of the hospital,’ he boasted.
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‘The only snag is it seems to have increased my concupiscence about 100%! What makes my situation almost untenable is the arrival of a pure-blooded African nurse from Sierra Leone… you may imagine the difficulties with which I am constantly confronted...’

Though he had made a ‘wonderful’ recovery, he was still very weak. His doctor, he later told Caspar, ‘has banned all my favourite sports, such as football, golf etc’. Both he and Dodo, too, needed a convalescence. While grappling with some garden creature, a goat or lawn mower, she had broken her arm. They decided to go away and, on the advice of Gerald Brenan, submitted to Spain. It was a victory of climate over politics, and therefore partly a defeat. ‘I would love to visit Spain again,’ John had written many years earlier to Herbert Barker, ‘but not during the horrible regime of General Franco.’ Like many artists he had backed the Republican cause, but his hatred of Franco was personal and recurs obsessionally through his correspondence over twenty years. He believed that Britain’s failure to come out against the insurgents had led to the Second World War. ‘With our backing the Spanish people would rise and throw Franco and the Fascists into the sea and chase the Germans out of the country,’ he had written to Maud Cazalet on 4 December 1940. ‘…Spain is the key country and our potential friend. Meanwhile Franco continues to murder good men… Remember the Spanish War was the preliminary to this one and our benighted Government backed the wrong horse. We are now expiating that crime.’ With rare passion, too, he spoke of Vichy’s handing over to Germany of Republican refugees in France. ‘What is he [President Roosevelt] or what are we doing for Franco’s million prisoners, imprisoned and enslaved by that foul renegade and his Axis allies?’
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After the liberation of France (‘a real re-birth’) and the defeat of Germany, he looked for the freeing of Spain. ‘When we have dealt with Franco in his turn Europe will be a hopeful continent again and fit to travel in.’
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He attended anti-Franco meetings and contributed pictures for the relief of prisoners (though ‘I cannot approach anything like the munificence of Picasso or any other millionaire’
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) up to the end of his life. But in the winter of 1954–5 he spent four convalescent months in Spain, during which the outpouring of criticism continued – ‘Franco is beneath contempt, he “knows nothing of nothing” I think is the general view.’
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Their son Romilly had bought the tickets and driven them to Heathrow. ‘Almost the last time I saw this remarkable couple together,’ he remembered, ‘they were standing arm in arm, at the entrance to the airport, quite clearly petrified by the monstrosities that, unknown to them, had sprung up since the days of their youth. Augustus was glaring angrily at
me for having got them into this fearful situation, while Dodo, thinking I was about to desert them, cried out in anguish, “Don’t leave us, don’t leave us!”’

They flew to Madrid, travelled by train to Torremolinos where they took rooms at a hotel, the Castello Santa Clara, belonging to Fred Saunders, a castrated cockney who had served with T. E. Lawrence. ‘They have a bed-sitting-room and a private balcony looking over the sea,’ wrote Gerald Brenan who had taken them from the station to their hotel. ‘…They seemed cheerful and to like the place.’
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But both of them were fragile. They were looked after by a staff of sturdy Spanish women, ‘fine girls all’, and visited by a local doctor who was ‘quite a celebrity in the medical world’ on account of having been thrown into gaol as a ‘political firebrand’. ‘This is a Paradise of convalescents, full of elderly English rentiers,’ John recommended on his arrival. ‘…The Bar is hideous’, but ‘the Rioja wine very palatable.’
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Gerald Brenan, whose house they visited at Yegen (the ‘garden made us green with envy’), noted that ‘Augustus had become very genial in his old age’.
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But much of this mildness was attributable to post-operative fatigue – ‘weaker than any cat and hardly able to eat a thing’.
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After a single debauch amid rear-admirals in Gibraltar, he collapsed. The sun shone every day, the roses flowered, there was not a breath of air, and he cast lustful eyes at the ‘superb landscape back of here’,
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but contented himself with Edie, Fred Saunders’s wife – though ‘my bedroom proved unsatisfactory as a studio’.
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Vowing to return to his unfinished canvases in Spain, he left with some relief for Fryern.

‘I get anchored down here’, he had told Matthew Smith, ‘with some endless work.’
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It was to Matthew Smith in France that he cast off for his last journey abroad in 1956. Tickets were bought for him, money of various denominations placed in his pockets, his clothes in a suitcase, and reminders hummed about his ears. A network of old girlfriends along the route was alerted. Most of this planning was conducted in whispers, for John would vastly have objected to the fuss. In Paris, where he was obliged to change trains, it had been arranged that the artist William de Belleroche would meet him as if by accident and chaperone him from one station to the other. John blandly accepted the coincidence. ‘Extraordinary! When I stepped out of the train, there was Belleroche who happened to be passing.’ Even so, he lost his tickets. After a few nights with Matthew Smith and his friends John and Vera Russell at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, he pressed on to Aix to see Poppet, but failed to turn up at the agreed meeting point. They found him, not far off, grazing over lunch, and took him for a few days to their house near Ramatuelle. But he felt physically ill away from his paints and insisted on being driven to St-Raphael so as to catch a train direct to Calais. ‘I would have liked to have stayed in
Provence,’ he told William de Belleroche, ‘but felt still more drawn to my work here. I find I cannot stop working… ’
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Yet it had been a good expedition because of a Cézanne exhibition at Aix. ‘The Cézanne show was overwhelming,’ he wrote to Matthew Smith on his return to Fryern, ‘and painting seems more mysterious than ever if not utterly impossible. Only the appearance of a young woman outside, with very little on, restored me more or less to normality and hope. But she belonged to an earlier and more fabulous age than ours.’
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Most fellow creatures from that age were dead. Among the artists and writers, Will Rothenstein had ‘pegged out’ in 1945, ‘a severe loss’; Dylan Thomas died in 1953, which ‘greatly saddened me’;
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Frank Brangwyn in 1956, though ‘he was a courageous man who made the best use of his talents and could have nothing to regret.’
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Gogarty had long before gone to the United States, a fate worse than death (he died in 1957). Among the women, the Rani had ‘popped off’; Alick Schepeler had disappeared with all her illusory charm, something she had always been threatening to do, suddenly dying after leaving the
Illustrated London News
and bequeathing her tiny savings to a cats’ home; and Dorelia’s sister Edie faded sadly away as Francis Macnamara’s neglected wife.

One of those whose company John missed most was Tommy Earp who pursued his solitary recreation, silence, to its ultimate lair in 1958. He was buried at Selborne. ‘John came with Dorelia – a quiet elderly lady by then,’ the critic William Gaunt remembered.
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He wore a black-varnished straw hat, headgear venerable enough for a dean, yet at a rakish angle. ‘Painted it myself,’ he boasted. ‘Best thing you’ve done for years,’ a friend retorted. William Gaunt murmured something about it being a sad occasion. ‘Oh, awful!’ John thundered enthusiastically. ‘I noticed at the same time,’ Gaunt records,

‘how the artist’s eye professionally functioning in a separate dimension was observing the architectural and natural details of the scene: and when all the mourners were assembled in Selborne Church and all was hushed, suddenly a roar reverberated along the nave. It was Augustus with a superb disregard of devout silence. “A fine church”, he roared. There was… a shocked rustling through the interior. With perfect sang-froid he went on with his meditations aloud. “Norman!” the word pealed to the rafters. There were some who seemed to scurry out into the open with relief at no longer being subjected to this flouting of convention.’

Of the survivors, those who had strayed prehistorically into the bland 1950s, he still saw something of Wyndham Lewis. The jousting between these two artists-in-arms continued to the end. Passages of complimentary
abuse were interrupted by sudden acts of kindness. When Lewis went blind in 1951, John bragged that he had sent him a telegram expressing the hope that it would not interfere with his real work:
art criticism.
When pressed to account for this message, he declared that he wasn’t, through sentimentality, going to lay himself open to some crushing rejoinder. In fact his letter had not been unsympathetic. ‘I hope you find a cure as did Aldous Huxley,’ he wrote. ‘Anyhow indiscriminate vision is a curse. Although without the aid of a couple of daughters like Milton, I don’t really see why you should discontinue your art criticism – you can’t go far wrong even if you do it in bed. You can always turn on your private lamp of aggressive voltage along with your dictaphone to discover fresh talent and demolish stale.’ At other times he treats this blindness as a gift of which Lewis has taken full advantage. Lewis received these ‘impertinent’ congratulations with an appreciative silence. Never once did he allude to his blindness, preferring to make any accusation obliquely: ‘Dear John, I’m told you’ve mellowed.’ John hotly denied the charge, but Tristan de Vere Cole remembers him taking Lewis out to dinner shortly before his death, seeing that his food was properly cut up, deferring to him in their talk.