Augustus John (141 page)

16
  Cecil Gray
Musical Chairs
(1948), p. 278.

17
  William Rothenstein to John, 25 March 1907. NLW MS 22784D fols. 135–6.

18
  Rupert Hart-Davis
Hugh Walpole: A Biography
(1952), p. 272. John’s portrait of Walpole (Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge) is reproduced opposite this page, and a chalk drawing as frontispiece.

19
  John to Christabel Aberconway, 3 November 1928. See also Christabel Aberconway
A Wiser Woman? A Book of Memories
(1966).

20
  John to Ottoline Morrell n.d.

21
  Leonard Woolf
An Autobiography
Volume 2
1911–
1969
(1980 edn), pp. 114, 128. See also Volume I p. 64.

22
  
Lady Ottoline Morrell to Augustus John, 31 March 1930, 1 April 1930, from Gower Street. NLW MS 22783D fols. 162–5.

23
  John to Ottoline Morrell n.d.

24
  Eve Fleming to John, 8 April 1930. NLW MS 22780E fols. 95–6.

25
  John to Ottoline Morrell n.d.

26
  Sandra Jobson Darroch
Ottoline. The Life of Lady Ottoline Morrell
(1975), p. 273.

27
  Miranda Seymour
Ottoline Morrell. Life on the Grand Scale
(1992), p. 386.

28
  Augustus to Dorelia, 16 April 1930. NLW MS 22778D fol. 133.

29
  Eve Fleming to John, 8 April 1930. NLW MS 22780E fols. 95–6.

30
  John to Ottoline Morrell, 20 July 1932.

31
  John to Tallulah Bankhead, 12 May 1930.

32
  T. E. Lawrence to G. W. M. Dunn, 9 November 1932.
The Letters of T. E. Lawrence
(ed. David Garnett 1938), p. 752.

33
  John to Al Wright, 13 August 1946.
Time
magazine ‘morgue’ (8 June 1948).

34
  Conger Goodyear
Augustus John
(privately printed), p. 35.

35
  John to Viva King n.d.

36
  W. B. Yeats ‘Pages from a Diary Written in Nineteen Hundred and Thirty’. The Cuala Press (September 1944).

37
  W. B. Yeats to Lady Gregory, 25 May 1930, from via Americhe, Rapallo.

38
  W. B. Yeats to George Yeats n.d. (
c.
25 July 1930).

39
  W. B. Yeats to George Yeats (27 July 1930).

40
  W. B. Yeats to George Yeats, 3 August 1930. This big picture, which Yeats used as frontispiece for his philosophical works
A Vision
,
is at Glasgow City Art Gallery. ‘John has done a fine portrait – a large oil. I am sitting on a chair in the open air with my legs in a fur-bag,’ Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory (30 July 1930). ‘There is also an amusing smaller portrait but John no longer likes it so it may remain unfinished.’

41
  
Horizon
Volume IV No. 22 (October 1941), p. 291. For a variant description see
Chiaroscuro
p. 101.

42
  
Horizon
Volume IV No. 22 (October 1941), p. 291.

43
  Oliver St John Gogarty
It Isn’t This Time of Year at All
(1954), p. 242.

44
  Hope Scott to her mother n.d.

45
  Hope Scott to the author, 29 November 1968.

46
  
Horizon
Volume XII No. 72 (December 1945), p. 428.

47
  
Courage. The Story of Sir James Dunn
pp. 247–8. See also
The Diaries of Sir Robert Bruce Lock hart 1915–38
(ed. Kenneth Young 1973), 25 January 1931, p. 149.

48
  James Joyce to John, March 1933, from 42 rue Galilei, Paris. NLW MS 22782D fols. 132–3.

49
  
Daily Telegraph
(1 December 1932).

50
  
Ibid.
(20 December 1932).

51
  Vivien White to the author, June 1973.

52
  John to Bapsy Pavry, 1 December 1933. NLW MS 21622D.

53
  
Horizon
Volume XIII No. 73 (January 1946), pp. 51–2.

54
  John to Casati n.d.

55
  John to Mavis de Vere Cole n.d. (January 1937).

56
  
Chiaroscuro
pp. 264–74.

57
  John to Mavis de Vere Cole, 22 February 1937.

58
  
New Statesman and Nation
(4 June 1938), pp. 952–3.

59
  
Spectator
(27 May 1938), p. 96.

60
  Richard Shone
Augustus John
(1979) p. 3.

61
  
Listener
(25 May 1938), pp. 1105–7.

62
  ‘History of the Largest Independent Society in England’
Blast
No. 2 (July 1915), pp. 80–1.

63
  
The Letters of Wyndham Lewis
(ed. W. K. Rose 1963), pp. 70–2.

64
  
Wyndham Lewis
Rude Assignment
(1950), p. 128.

65
  Wyndham Lewis
The Demon of Progress in the Arts
(1954), p. 3.

66
  
Listener
(13 July 1972).

67
  NLW MS 22780E fol. 139, 22787D fol. 43, 22780E fol. 100.

68
  O’Casey to Gabriel Fallon, 13 May 1926. Quoted in Garry O’Connor
Sean O’Casey. A Life
(1988), pp. 213–14.

69
  Garry O’Connor
Sean O’Casey
p. 213.

70
  The other portrait is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The one which he gave to O’Casey as a wedding present is now at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin. ‘Blue-green coat, silver-grey sweater, with a gayer note given by an orange handkerchief flowing from the breast-pocket of the coat,’ O’Casey described it; ‘the face set determinedly in contemplation of things seen and heard, the body shrinking back right to the back of the chair, as if to get further away to see and hear more clearly; a sensitive and severe countenance with incisive lines of humour braiding the tightly-closed mouth.’ ‘He [John] is evidently intensely interested in what he sees behind what is understood as my face,’ Sean O’Casey wrote on 16 May 1926.

71
  Sean O’Casey to John, 15 January 1929. NLW MS 22784D fol. 12.

72
  Eileen O’Casey
Sean
,
edited with an Introduction by J. C. Trewin (Pan edition 1973), p. 77·

73
  Raymond Massey
A Hundred Different Lives
(1979), pp. 90–91.

74
  The set proved too heavy for the scene-shifters. It was designed, like an oil painting, on canvas stretchers. ‘John’s scene was an exterior with a derelict church, with a fine stained glass window,’ Alick Johnstone, the scene painter, remembered. ‘He designed this originally on cartridge paper… and I suggested he should do it on a linen panel in thin oils or aniline dye; which he did, and it was an enormous success, and, as it was in scale to the scene, was inserted in the church construction.’
Apollo
(October 1965), p. 324 n.3.

75
  Shaw to John, 31 October 1929.

76
  Malcolm Easton ‘The Boy David: Augustus John and Ernst Stern’
Apollo
(October 1965) pp. 318–25.

77
  
Finishing Touches
p. 89.

78
  Lady Cynthia Asquith
Portrait of Barrie
(1950), p. 206.

79
  John to John Davenport n.d.

80
  Later renamed ‘Mas de la Fé’, it was taken over by Alphonse Daudet’s granddaughter-in-law.

81
  
Chiaroscuro
p. 257.

82
  Marie Mauron to the author, 1969.

83
  Vivien John to Edwin John, September 1939. NLW MS 22312C fol. 123.

84
  Cyril Connolly
The Modern Movement
(1965), p. 67.

85
  
The Times
(12 May 1938).

86
  
Horizon
Volume VIII No. 44 (August 1943), p. 136.

87
  A. R. Thomson to the author n.d.

88
  Cole to John, 17 July 1930. See Roderic Owen with Tristan de Vere Cole
Beautiful and Beloved
(1974), p. 43.

89
  He was born in the Parish of Woodstock St Hilary: John had suggested the names Iolo Gabriel Augustus Caesar Imperator while Mavis was pregnant.

90
  John to Wyndham Lewis, 15 August 1954.

91
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (1936).

92
  See Roderic Owen with Tristan de Vere Cole
Beautiful and Beloved
pp. 89–90.

93
  He later attributed this procedure to a speech made by Shaw’s Captain Bluntschli: ‘…I’m in the artillery; and I have the choice of weapons. If I go, I shall take a machine gun...’
(Arms and the Man
,
Act III).

94
  John to D. S. MacColl, 14 January 1945.

95
  
Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (September–October 1915). NLW MS 22777D fol. 93.

96
  John’s portrait of Brigit is at the Southampton Art Gallery.

97
  Nicolette Devas
Two Flamboyant Fathers
pp. 269–70.

98
  Dorelia to Augustus n.d. (1938), from Mas de Galeron. NLW MS 22783D fols. 122–3.

99
  Paul Ferris
Caitlin. The Life of Caitlin Thomas
(1993), p. 34.

100
  This portrait, painted in 1937, is at the Glyn Vivian Art Gallery, Swansea. The National Museum of Wales, Cardiff, has four nude drawings of Caitlin, two unfinished oils, and a portrait of her wearing a striped cardigan dated
c
. 1930.

101
  Paul Ferris to National Museum of Wales, 27 June 1992.

102
  Kathleen Hale
A Slender Reputation
(1994), p. 91.

103
  
The Diaries of Sylvia Townsend Warner
(ed. Claire Harman 1994), p. 37.

104
  Caitlin Thomas to the author, 16 September 1968. ‘It was merely a question of a brief dutiful performance for him to keep up his reputation as a Casanova ogre,’ Mrs Thomas hazarded. ‘…I may add that this lofty favour was not reserved for me alone, but one and all of his models, of whatever age and social category, suffered the identical treatment. I hope I have been able to add a drop of at least truthful spice, no doubt unprintable, to enliven your cleaned-up eminently respectable book, plodding in the heavy-going dark (God help you and your public).’

105
  
Finishing Touches
p. 114.

106
  
Aquarius
,
ITV, 3 March 1972.

107
  In an interview with the author.

108
  Augustus to Vivien John, August 1938. In a letter to Dorelia (NLW MS 22778D fol. 138) he described Dylan and Caitlin as ‘living in frightful squalor and hideousness… The Dylans are impossible to stand for long.’

109
  
Listener
(5 October 1972), pp. 433–4.

110
  Dylan Thomas to Henry Treece, 1 September 1938.
Dylan Thomas. The Collected Letters
(ed. Paul Ferris 1985), p. 324.

111
  
Finishing Touches
p. 111.

112
  
Museum Piece, or The Education of an Iconographer
(1963), p. 95.

113
  John to Amaryllis Fleming, 27 November 1953.

114
  Amaryllis Fleming to the author, 25 July 1969.

115
  Ralph Partridge to Gerald Brenan, 22 July 1929.
Best of Friends. The Brenan-Partridge Letters
(ed. Xan Fielding 1986), p. 84.

116
  Vivien John ‘Memories of Carrington’
The Charleston Magazine
(Spring/ Summer 1995), p. 35 col. 1.

117
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (August 1916). NLW MS 22777D fol. 130.

118
  These were John’s usual tactics. In a letter to Frances Hughes (29 March 1939), Dylan Thomas wrote that Augustus is ‘out and more or less about now, although Mavis’s wedding put him back a few beds. We saw the newsfilm of the departure from the registry office, and Augustus, blowing clouds of smoke, hopped in the first car before bride and groom could get in...’

119
  ‘I hope it will be their last visit,’ he wrote after Poppet and Bergne had gone to Fryern for the first time. But he made an exception of Wilhelm Pol, the Dutch painter who became Poppet’s third husband. ‘This time I favour the match,’ he told Caspar (1 March 1952). ‘…Poppet, a thorough bourgeoise, provided there is plenty to laugh at, reasonable access to food and drink, and of course the indispensable privileges of matrimony, will stay put.’ NLW MS 22775C fol. 5. To others he exclaimed, with an oblique slap at Edwin, Robin, Vivien and perhaps himself: ‘Thank God there is a painter in the family at last!’ In David Herbert’s autobiography,
Second Son
(1973),
p. 61, Poppet is described as ‘extremely attractive, she had almost as many boy friends as her father had mistresses.’

120
  Augustus to Caspar John, 13 November 1956. NLW MS 22775C fol. 26.

121
  Augustus was pleased to accept compliments from others on behalf of Romilly John’s book. ‘It has been very well reviewed but badly advertised,’ he wrote to Charles Reilly (7 November 1932), ‘so do recommend it if you get a chance.’

122
  Romilly John to Augustus n.d. (1936). NLW MS 22782D fols. 106–7.

123
  Romilly John to Augustus n.d. (1936). NLW MS 22782D fol. 108.

124
  Augustus to Edwin John n.d. (1940). NLW MS 22312C fols. 19–20.

125
  Robin to the author, 13 January 1969. See also
Horizon
Volume VII No. 37 (January 1943), pp. 65–6: ‘Robin displayed also, or rather attempted to conceal, a remarkable talent for drawing; but in the course of his studies lost himself in abstraction, which he pushed finally to the point of invisibility. Thus his later efforts, hung on the walls of his studio, presented no clear image to the physical eye. Refinement carried to such a pitch ceases to amuse. Art, like life, perpetuates itself by contact.’