Augustus John (60 page)

‘What you say about my remarks on fresco and oil-painting are words of wisdom – I wrote under the enthusiasm of the moment. But I have had time to realise that oil-painting has its own virtues and have given up despising my own past – a thing one is too apt to do, when struck with a fresh idea. I suffer from being unduly impressionable – and often forget the essential continuity of my own life: the result being I am as often put back on my beam’s ends rather foolishly. What you say is true that one is apt to despise one’s own facility – whereas one should recognise it as the road to mastery itself. I shall keep your letter and read it over whenever I feel off the track –
my own track.
It will be medicine for me who am occasionally afflicted with intellectual vapours.’

One of the contradictions of Quinn’s character was that, while being financially generous, he was a triumphantly mean man. His letters to Augustus and other artists and writers are always business letters, and almost always interchangeable – what has been the main body of one is quoted in another. Essentially this correspondence is a form of memoranda for his files; it is pitted with headings and sub-headings, listings and recapitulations of earlier correspondence. He is not afraid of recounting events out of which he comes extremely favourably and everyone else greatly to their disadvantage. He confesses being partial to ‘juicy girls’, but at the same time he is a sexual puritan much given to amatory philosophizing, for which Augustus seemed an obvious target.

Quinn perfected the art of boredom. Dullness by itself was not enough. He ensnared his victims in the web of his money and inflicted on them his terrible jokes, appalling lectures, his deathly political harangues. Many of his ‘friendships’
disintegrated under this treatment, invariably, on Quinn’s part, with a sense of moral relish. He fed greedily on gossip, extracting confidences and, ‘in confidence’, passing them on. It continually amazed him how extraordinarily stupid people were, and sometimes he wrote to tell them so – though he preferred telling their friends.

But in Miss Tobin, Quinn had met his match. Before long she was seeking to employ him for legal advice about her nightmares. ‘I had a frightful dream which told me efforts were being made to make me out mentally unbalanced at some time or other,’ she informed him (24 July 1911). ‘This is a dreadful stigma. But… the only side of it that is of importance is the legal side. Can you find out for me if I have been found “incapable” at any time for any cause – that is the legal term (“incapable”) isn’t it? Irresponsible, I mean.’ This was a subject upon which Quinn found some difficulty in taking instructions. Miss Tobin was sympathetic. She would cross the Atlantic and call at his office. She would travel with an English nanny who would be seasick. So would he please ‘have a man sent out on a pilot- boat’. There is real pathos when Quinn suddenly cries out: ‘I am a dreadfully driven man!’ But in his legal opinion to Miss Tobin can be detected the seeds of his own lunacy: ‘My conviction [is] that the origin of most dreams is in the stomach or intestines.’

Quinn had rapidly diagnosed Symons’s complaint as venereal disease. Symons might ‘fool them all yet’, he guessed, but Quinn himself would not be fooled. His duty was clear: CABLED FIFTY POUNDS PLEASE WARN FRIEND AGAINST DANGER VENEREAL INFECTION ITALY.

Such cables, which were intended for Augustus and no ‘friend’, reached him wherever he travelled. However far he went, however fast or uncertainly, by van or train or erratically on foot, the venomous torrent of Quinn’s goodwill, choked with the massive boulders of punning and unintentional double entendres, overtook him. At Arles, for instance, Augustus read (February 1910):

‘For God’s sake look out and protect yourself against venereal disease in Italy. Remember the Italians aren’t white people. They are a rotten race. They are especially rotten with syphilis. They don’t take care of themselves. They are unclean. They are filthy. Whatever their art may have been in the past, to-day they are a degenerate, filthy, diseased race. They are professional counterfeiters, professional forgers, habitual perjurers, blackmailers, black-handers, high-binders, hired assassins, and depraved and degenerate in every way. I know two men who got syphilis in Naples… I know another man who got syphilis in Rome. Therefore for God’s sake take no chances. Better import a white concubine than take
chances with an Italian. The white woman would be cheaper in the end… Your future is in your own hands, my dear friend. I am convinced you have the intellect to keep the rudder true.’
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In time, Quinn’s medical lunacy took a deeper hold on him, spreading from venereal disease to diseases of the feet and teeth. He became a specialist in sciatica (‘sciatica is a term of ignorance and a disease arising from ignorance’); in lumbago (‘lumbago is a term of ignorance and a disease arising from ignorance’); and in the relationship between fornication and eye strain. The cure for such distempers was soup, eight glasses of water a day and plenty of X-rays. In dentistry, a new American science ‘like chiropody’, lay the secret of ‘healthful’ life. To all writers and artists he was generous with his expertise. Whether they had bad eyesight or bad feet, he would urge them to visit their dentist. ‘I think I wrote to you two years ago I told [James] Joyce that the trouble with his eyes was due to his teeth,’ he reminded Symons (15 November 1923). ‘I could see it.’

What was common to both Symons’s and Quinn’s relationship with Augustus was a form of vicarious living. In Symons this vicariousness is plain: ‘What I am certain of is that John – of all living men – has lived his life
almost
entirely as he wanted to live it,’ he wrote to Quinn (21 October 1915). ‘So – he is the most enviable creature on earth.’

The vicarious quality in Quinn is more complicated. He led two lives. In the present he worked hard as a lawyer and amassed a considerable fortune; and with this fortune he bought his paintings for the future. He had a good eye for pictures, but he neither enjoyed them much aesthetically nor treated them primarily as financial investments. He collected them so as to shore up his immortality. ‘All my life, or rather for twenty years, it seems to me I have been doing things for others,’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein (25 March 1912). The thought gave him no pleasure.

Augustus was one of those for whom, Quinn later came to believe, he had done too much. He initially cast Augustus as an angel on whose back he would ride heavenwards – only to discover that this was not necessarily Augustus’s destination. By 1910 Quinn had arranged to pay him three hundred pounds a year (equivalent to £14,100 in 1996) for the pick of his own work, and a further two hundred pounds to select, on his behalf, work by other British artists. In short, Augustus was to act as his patron’s agent. Quinn’s delusion, almost as fundamental as Symons’s, was that a man who, by his own admission, was inconsistent, temperamental and had different tastes from his own, would be a good choice as his British representative. Nevertheless the plan worked reasonably well for a few years, and it was the eccentricities of Augustus that killed it.

Augustus’s eccentricity was compounded of several ingredients. Between his promise and the fulfilment of that promise fell an almost endless pause. His incompetence over small matters tuned Quinn up to a marvellous pitch of exasperation. What should have been simple was made complicated with radiant ingenuity: paintings were sold twice, or painted over, set fire to, sunk, never begun, or lost for ever. But there was another ingredient – a motive, for all this purposeless perversity. Augustus hated these patron-and-artist dealings: they reminded him of father-and-son arrangements, and he felt an increasing itch to behave badly. He attracted hero-worship – then punished it.

‘We were rather afraid he’d go mad again,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia about ‘poor Arthur’. He was certainly ‘very gaga’ sometimes. But, from among the four of them – Augustus, Quinn, Symons and Miss Tobin – it seems that Symons, protected by an official certificate, was suffering less grievously from ‘intellectual vapours’ than his friends.

‘What’s the good of being an island, if you are not a
volcanic island
?’

Wyndham Lewis to Augustus John (1910)

‘I am overwhelmed with work just now,’ Augustus wrote to Alick Schepeler, ‘and have to scorn delights (or pretend to) and live laborious days.’ He had it in mind during the autumn of 1910 to prepare a catalogue of his etchings, and to make a book about the gypsies of Europe; he would exhibit some paintings at the NEAC and drawings at the Chenil; and then he would paint all his children, separately and together. He had already started a large new portrait of Dorelia – ‘it ought to be one of the best portraits of a woman in the world,’ he told Quinn (4 January 1910), ‘ – the woman at any rate is one of the best.’ Newest and best of all were two other big enterprises. ‘There’s a millionairess from Johannesburg [Mrs Lionel Phillips] who proposes sending me abroad to study and do some decorations for a gallery at Johannesburg which she is founding,’ he wrote to Quinn (25 October 1909). ‘If she is sufficiently impressed by what I will show her all will be well.’ This opportunity had almost certainly come through Sir Hugh Lane, who was then forming the collection at the Johannesburg Municipal Gallery. Augustus had started work this autumn decorating Lindsay House, Lane’s home in Cheyne Walk – ‘exciting
work’, he told Ottoline Morrell (1 October 1909). Wyndham Lewis wrote to encourage him: ‘Let it be an authentic earthquake.’
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Suddenly, at the beginning of December, he was attacked by the most dreadful melancholia. ‘I have been working at little Lane’s walls,’ he explained to Ottoline (4 December 1909). ‘It is an absolutely futile thing to undertake that kind of work in a hurry. I should like to have years to do it in – and then it might
last
years. Lane himself is a silly creature and moreover an unmitigated snob. It seems my fate to be hasty but I have serious thoughts of quitting this island and going somewhere where life is more stable and beautiful and primitive and where one is not bound to be in a hurry. I want absolutely to grasp things plastically and not merely glance at their charms, and for that one needs time. – As for these commissions such as Lane’s or Phillips’, they are misleading entirely – one is not even asked to do one’s best – merely one’s quickest and convenientest.’

He went on being misled by this ‘house job’ for another two weeks of deepening gloom: then came the earthquake. ‘I have made a drastic move as regards Lane’s decorations,’ he confided to Quinn (18 December 1909). ‘I found doing them in his hall impossible, subjected to constant interruption and inconsequent criticism as I was. Lane himself proved too exasperating in his constant state of nervous agitation… So I exploded one day and told him I’ld take the canvases away to finish – which I have done.’

In a letter Dorelia sent to Ursula Slade at about this time, she reveals that Augustus had spotted ‘a lovely gypsy girl and asked her to sit for him’. This sitting took place next day at Lane’s house, where the two of them were soon joined by ‘a whole band of ruffians’ who made merry in every room and ‘nearly frightened Lane out of his wits’. When the danger had passed and they were gone, Lane ‘was very angry and said it wasn’t at all the thing to do’. It was after Lane’s protest that Augustus erupted against ‘this island’ and carried off his canvases; while Lane himself, in high dudgeon, descended into Monte Carlo.

Dissatisfaction was everywhere. There seemed no light in England, no space in Church Street. ‘Il me faut de l’air, de l’air,’ de l’air,’ Augustus cried out to Wyndham Lewis. By Christmas, his son Robin had fallen ill with scarlet fever. He sat quarantined in one corner of the room with Dorelia’s sister Edie, while the rest of them huddled in the opposite corner. When the Rothensteins, with implacable timing, called round bearing the compliments of the season they were shooed from the door. ‘Our house’, Augustus apologized (4 January 1910), ‘was more hospital than hospitable, I fear.’

Even Dorelia’s cheerful detachment faltered. She felt unwell and, to Augustus’s fury, refused to see a doctor. It was as if she cherished her
symptoms, like a list of unspoken complaints. In retaliation he developed catarrh: but as an argument it was hardly satisfactory. Dorelia’s lethargy drained all energy from him, as if she were an electric current and he a mere bulb, growing dimmer. ‘The days are leaden as a rule,’ he confided to Quinn (18 December 1909). ‘…I don’t seem to be cut out for family life… The crisis which takes place at least weekly leaves me less and less hopeful as regards this ménage. It is a great pity as I am fond of the missus and she of me.’

Despite all they had come through together, Augustus felt that they must now live separately. He would take a studio; she could remain at Church Street. Of course they must see each other, but not live together. ‘I think it would be fairer on us both to avoid the day to day test,’ he wrote, ‘and I should work with less preoccupation. You would scarcely believe the violence of the emotional storms I go through so often – and worst of all those gloomy periods that precede them.’
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Yet a curious adhesiveness somehow kept them together. The discord was often loud, but always tenderly resolved with a forgiveness merging into forgetfulness. For it was not as though they were against each other: they fought a common enemy seeking to divide them.

‘It was a horrible pity we got into that state,’ he wrote to her after one row. ‘…I don’t know what precisely brought it on. It was a kind of feeling you were tugging in the wrong direction or exhibiting a quite false aspect of your nature – not the real one which never fails to bowl me over, but like the moon suffers an occasional eclipse.

‘By living together too casually our manners deteriorate by degrees, “inspiration” ceases to the natural accompaniment of irritation and dissatisfaction till at last the awful storms are necessary to restore us to dignity and harmony and equilibrium. You know very well that “expression” in you or state of mind I shall always love as the most beautiful thing in the world and hate to see supplanted by something less divine and you know how mercurial I am, veering from Heaven to Hell and torn to pieces by emotion or nerves or thoughts – is it any wonder we can’t always be happy? I acknowledge my grievous shortcomings as I acknowledge your superior vision to which I owe so much (that’s what I meant by “being useful”!). I never liked any “tart” as a “tart” but for some suggestion of beauty – and even some faint delusive charm is a concrete fact to a poor artist (!). I can’t help thinking we
can
go on better than we have been by using our wits.’
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