Augustus John (134 page)

93
  
Chiaroscuro
pp. 64–5.

94
  
Song of Love. The Letters of Rupert Brooke and No
ë
l Olivier
(ed. Pippa Harris 1991), pp. 14–15.

95
  John to Ottoline Morrell, 22 July 1909.

96
  
Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell
pp. 181–2.

97
  Augustus John to Ada Nettleship, n.d. (July 1909). NLW MS 22775C fols. 78–9.

98
  Chaloner Dowdall to Vere Egerton Cotton, 6 November 1945.

99
  
Ibid.

100
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (August 1909). NLW MS 22776D fols. 93–4.

101
  
Chiaroscuro
,
p. 154.

102
  Dora E. Yates
My Gypsy Days
p. 71.

103
  John to the Rani n.d.

104
  He later reversed this opinion. In 1911, when he had an opportunity to add to the head, he decided against doing so. ‘I sent your portrait to the N[ew] E[nglish],’ he wrote to Dowdall. ‘I couldn’t decide to touch it, merely gave it a thin coat of varnish. I think it looks well.’

105
  
Daily Dispatch
(4 October 1909).

106
  
Scotsman
(September 1909).

107
  Albert Fleming in a letter to Dowdall, 16 December 1911 (Liverpool Public Library).

108
  In July 1911 Augustus painted another Liverpool portrait that, amid much controversy, was exiled overseas. This was of the Celtic scholar Kuno Meyer. It shows him lolling in a chair, his waistcoat thrown open and also part of his trousers (‘this I really must get him to change’, Meyer ineffectually wrote) to display a large expanse of shirt and a claret-coloured tie. It is a weighty and effective piece of portraiture, highly praised by the art critic Sir Claude Phillipps, and ‘all agree that it is a masterpiece’, wrote Meyer rather dubiously. Presented, through subscription, by some two hundred Liverpool friends, and shown at the NEAC (winter 1911) and the National Portrait Society (spring 1915), it was much admired by Sir Hugh Lane who, Lady Gregory told Quinn (16 March 1912), ‘hopes to buy John’s picture of Kuno Meyer for the [Irish National] Gallery. The Liverpool people don’t like it, and he could sit to someone else for them. It is a fine thing.’ But once again, though Liverpool did not like it, the city did not especially want others to enjoy it elsewhere. Then, at the beginning of the Great War, Kuno Meyer came out on the side of the Germans, and left Britain for the United States. The portrait continued to hang at the Liverpool University Club, greatly to the embarrassment of the authorities who, by way of compromise, turned its face to the wall. Though it still belonged to the absent professor, Liverpool in its anxiety now to be rid of the traitorous object tried to remove
it to the care of the Public Trustee as the property of an alien enemy. As the war continued, Ireland, England, America and Germany fought for the right not to have it, and it remained in a state of suspended ownership. ‘I have been thinking that I ought to sell John’s portrait of me,’ Kuno Meyer innocently wrote to Quinn on 3 November 1915, ‘although this is not the best time to do so. Besides, John wouldn’t like it, and I should be very sorry to hurt his feelings. For, unlike most of my English friends, he is one who will not put politics – and such dirty politics – above friendship… the portrait (which my English friends no longer care for) is unsuited to my small flat and – entre nous – not liked by my family as a portrait, while it is one of John’s masterpieces, as everybody admits.’

The portrait which Augustus had begun at Dingle Bank, a ‘Rotten’ place, and finished in two sittings at Gethin’s studio in the Apothecaries Hall at the corner of Bold Street and Colquitt Street, went after the war to where Lane had originally wanted to send it: the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. See Seàn Ó Lúing
Kuno Meyer
(1991), pp. 98–9, 113, 203.

109
  Charlie Slade, whose brother Loben had married Dorelia’s sister Jessie, was known as ‘the half-a-potato man’ on account of his curious mysticism which,Romilly John explains, ‘originated in an experience of his own nothingness in the ruins of Pompeii, and the revelation that came to him that the cut surfaces of a potato sliced in half, however asymmetrical in shape the potato, were exactly similar. He was subsequently promoted to station master at Cambridge, where I became deeply involved in his ideas and was urged (in vain) to produce a book on the subject.’ Romilly John to the author, 28 July 1972. Felix Slade, Charles Slade’s son, objects that ‘the half-a-potato man exists only in Romilly’s imagination. My father did, however, often propound informal theories, which were put to us for study and topics of conversation… I remember the potato theory but was only slightly intrigued by it… My father was the District Engineer, Cambridge (1924–27), and not the Station Master.’

110
  See Malcolm Easton
Augustus John: Portraits of the Artist’s Family
p. 52.

111
  Arthur Symons
The Fool of the World
(1906), p. 69.

112
  Arthur Symons to Rhoda Bowser, 6 May 1900. See Roger Lhombreaud
Arthur Symons: A Critical Biography
(1963), p. 175.

113
  Arthur Symons to John Quinn, 29 June 1914 (Berg Collection, New York Public Library).

114
  Augustus to Gwen, 23 June 1920. NLW MS 22305D fol. 133.

115
  See
Agnes Tobin: Letters
,
Translations
,
Poems. With some account of her life
(Grabhorn Press for John Howell, San Francisco 1958), p. xii.

116
  Quinn to Joseph Conrad, 12 April 1916.

117
  Alice B. Saarinen
The Proud Possessors
(1959), p. 206.

118
  Quinn to Josephine Huneker, 10 April 1909 and 14 July 1909.

119
  ‘[Augustus John] has painted Symons with the relentless truth we all desire in a portrait,’ Harris wrote: ‘the sparse grey hair, the high bony forehead, the sharp ridge of Roman nose. The fleshless cheeks; the triangular wedge of thin face shocks one like the stringy turkey neck and the dreadful claw-like fingers of the outstretched hand. A terrible face – ravaged like a battlefield; the eyes dark pools, mysterious, enigmatic; the lid hangs across the left eyeball like a broken curtain. I see the likeness, and yet, staring at this picture, I can hardly recall my friend of twenty-six years ago.’

120
  John’s portrait of Quinn now hangs in the New York Public Library. In a letter to his wife (25 August 1909) Symons gives rather a different account to Miss Tobin’s. ‘We went to John’s studio at 3. The Quinn was finished: a very fine portrait: 5 days!’

121
  Quinn to John, 31 January 1910.

122
  A fair example may be taken from a letter Quinn wrote to James Huneker,
the American art critic (4 February 1913): ‘In my cable to Fry I expressly said that I bought the picture on your recommendation only so that if you have any fish to fry or bones to pick with Roger of the same name, then why not fry Fry. Personally, I never take fries; I always go in for roasts or broils...’

123
  B. L. Reid
The Man from New York. John Quinn and His Friends
(1968), p. 73.

124
  
Ibid.
p. 76.

125
  
Ibid.
p. 77.

126
  
Horizon
Volume IV No. 20 (August 1941), p. 125. This descripton and comment were omitted from
Chiaroscuro
twelve years later.

127
  This letter is not in the Quinn Collection at the New York Public Library, but belongs to the author.

128
  In a letter sent the previous day (31 January 1910) Quinn had written: ‘Syphilis is the national disease of Italy. Before a white man has intercourse with an Italian woman or a white woman with a “dago” (our word for an Italian) male or female should be examined by a physician, a non-Italian of course, to see there is no gonorrhoea or syphilis… and even
then
there is danger. For Heaven’s sake, if you do go to the rotten place look out for this. Whisky and syphilis are two of the greatest enemies of the human race and the latter often follows indulgence in the former… Youth is a precious thing.’

129
  Wyndham Lewis to John n.d. NLW MS 22783D fol. 32.

130
  John to Quinn, 18 December 1909.

131
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. NLW MS 22777D fols. 12–14.

132
  From, in fact, Lord Grimthorpe’s villa at Ravello.

133
  
Chiaroscuro
pp. 104–5.

134
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (January 1910) from Hôtel Olympia, Place de l’Horloge. NLW MS 22776D fol. 104.

135
  Augustus to Dorelia, 27 January 1910 from Restaurant Gelet, Aux Lices, Aries. NLW MS 22776D fol. 111.

136
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (January 1910) from Café Gilles Roux, Paradou, Bouches-du-Rhône. NLW MS 22776D fols. 107–8.

137
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (January 1910) from Grand Bar des Glaces, Avignon. NLW MS 22776D fols. 109–10.

138
  Interview with Marie Mauron, September 1971.

139
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (February 1910) from Grand Bars des Cinq Parties du Monde, Marseilles. NLW MS 22776D fol. 117.

140
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (February 1910). NLW MS 22776D fols. 118–19.

141
  John to Ottoline Morrell, 11 February 1910.

142
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (February 1910). NLW MS 22776D fols. 125–6.

143
  
Horizon
Volume VI No. 36 (December 1942), p. 422.

144
  Helen Maitland to Henry Lamb, 23 February 1910.

145
  Like Augustus, Boris Anrep had landed himself with two wives in the same house – number two being useful, it was said, for selecting books from the public library for Helen on the principle of their not being the sort she would choose for herself. But Boris disappointed Helen ‘by his literary Philistinism and preference for legshows to those concerned more with the head’, Romilly John remembered (29 July 1972). ‘…It was rumoured that she came from California which might account for her devotion to Culture and her eventual rejection of Boris and Hampstead in favour of Roger Fry and Bloomsbury.’

146
  In the first draft of his autobiography, Augustus referred to Helen as ‘censorious’, adding: ‘I have always disappointed her, being somewhat earth-bound and unable to rise to the lofty stratosphere, where, without oxygen, she seems most at home… For, feeling myself accursed, her strictures left me
subdued but with an inkling at least of higher things beyond my grasp.’ Dorelia, however, considered these observations too sarcastic and they do not appear in
Chiaroscuro.

147
  Dorelia to Ottoline Morrell, February 1910.

148
  Romilly John
The Seventh Child
(1932), p. 8.

149
  Rebecca John
Caspar John
pp. 26–8. After Augustus’s death, Caspar made arrangements for the correspondence between his father and Bazin to be given to the Musée Aéronautique in Paris.

150
  John to Scott Macfie, 2 May 1910.

151
  John to Arthur Symons n.d.

152
  John to Scott Macfie n.d.

153
  
Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell
p. 199.

154
  
Ibid.
p. 200.

155
  John to Chaloner Dowdall n.d.

156
  
Horizon
Volume VI No. 32 (August 1942), pp. 135–8.

157
  Frank Harris
Contemporary Portraits: Third Series
(1920), pp. 181–9.

158
  
Chiaroscuro
p. 128.

159
  Hesketh Pearson
Extraordinary People
(1962), p. 212. Also private information.

160
  ‘I WENT TO NEECE TO STAY WITH SOME PEOPLE BUT I FOUND THEY WERE SO HORRIBLE I RAN AWAY ONE MORNING EARLY, BEFORE THEY WERE UP NEECE IS A LOVELY PLACE FULL OF HORRIBLE PEOPLE.’ Augustus to David John, March 1910.

161
  The Gertz papers are in the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

162
  ‘I wired to a young woman to come and assist,’ he gruffly explained to Wyndham Lewis (July 1910), ‘Lamb accompanied the young woman and spent 2 or 3 days in this town; possibly with the object of making himself useful or perhaps with some purely sentimental motif or both.’ In fact Lamb seems to have spent about ten days there. ‘John’s alarm was naturally exaggerated by past experience,’ he explained to Ottoline Morrell.

163
  ‘One evening Helen experimentally served up an untried Greek vegetable which I rashly pronounced delicious. A deathly silence ensued. It was as if I had praised Alma Tadema. Such are the pitfalls of associating with the aesthetes!’ Romilly John wrote (29 July 1972).

164
  John to Quinn, 25 May 1910.

165
  John to Quinn, 25 August 1910.

166
  John to Quinn n.d.

167
  John to Ottoline Morrell n.d.

168
  John to Quinn, 25 May 1910.

CHAPTER VI: REVOLUTION 1910

1
  In her lecture ‘Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown’ delivered on 18 May 1924 at Cambridge.

2
  
The Times
(7 November 1910), p. 12.

3
  
Morning Post
(1 November 1910), p. 3.

4
  
Ibid.
(16 November 1910), p. 3.

5
  Michael Holroyd
Lytton Strachey
(1994 edn), p. 271.

6
  Frances Spalding
Vanessa Bell
(1983), p. 91.

7
  
Ibid.
p. 92.

8
  Diary entry 14 December 1910. See Richard Shone
Bloomsbury Portraits
(1993 edn), p. 61.