Augustus John (95 page)

There was another aftermath to John’s American period. Ann and Joan from New York, Doris from Massachusetts, Karin in
Runnin’ Wild,
wrote giving times and addresses. Myrtle, a music student ‘particularly interested in art’, wondered ‘if you would like to see me’; Margaret and her friends wished to know whether he would ‘consent to stimulate our interest in art’; could he, another correspondent inquired, ‘spare a few moments to look at four paintings by my sister, who is in a lunatic asylum?’ Some letters, mentioning cocktails, are anonymous; others, providing names and ages of children, affectionate. Others again, containing financial calculations, were torn up. A ‘celebrated squawker’ offered her services as vocalist ‘at any social function’. Another Vera, who had stopped him in the street one day to demand his ‘opinion as to the future of art’ wrote
to inform him that ‘I interrupted my artist’s career in order to find out the meaning of things’, adding: ‘It seems to me that a great figure in the art world like yourself ought to give your contribution to this problem.’

And it was true that, in some manner, John was still seen as ‘a great figure in the art world’, with all the clarity of a mirage. Whenever his name burst into their newspapers – on the cover of
Time
magazine and of
Life
,
or as the first artist to wireless a drawing across the Atlantic – curiosity was quickly rekindled. But there was too little of his best work on public view to sustain interest, so there remained only a vague impression of his bloodshot personality, some memory of those powerful party manners, a rumour of exploits; then a vanishing trick.

*

On one of his voyages back from the United States, the ship touching at Cherbourg, John had disembarked. ‘I was unable to resist the urge to land first of all on the soil of France,’ he wrote.
169
It was soothing after the glitter and turmoil of New York to find himself in the quiet of a Norman town such as Bayeux and taste again a dish of moules marinière with a litre of
rouge.
The gentle aspect of the country, the leisureliness of life, the detachment and intimacy mixed; these were virtues of the Old World that now appealed to him. In the past, he had speculated on the existence of a better land to the west. After 1928 he knew it did not exist. When asked whether he would return to the United States, perhaps to paint Franklin D. Roosevelt, he replied no: Goethe’s dictum ‘America is here’ was turning out to be literally true, and saved him the journey. It was the answer of someone who felt himself to be getting old.

The New World, once it invaded Europe, revealed itself as his enemy. Like a Canute, John held his hand up to halt the tide of history; and such was the force of his personality and the sphere of his influence in style and fashion that, for a time, he appeared to succeed. The waves held back, there was a frenzied pause – then the sea of modern life flooded past him and he was in retreat.

‘We have to give up Alderney Manor or buy it,’ he had written to Gwen. ‘We have been looking about in Dorset & elsewhere for another house without success.’
170
In March 1927 they finally packed up and moved on. For a while the strange castellated bungalow, in which they had lived for more than fifteen years, stood empty, a shell behind its broken-down garden wall and the rising screen of rhododendrons. Then it vanished altogether, and in its place rose a brand-new housing estate. The old site, purged of its pagan associations, became consecrated ground, the site of Alderney Methodist Chapel.

By April the following year, ‘in submission to the march of progress as
conceived by business men or crooks’, the Johns also left the Villa Ste-Anne. It was later converted into the Hostellerie Ste-Anne, credited with three knives and forks in the
Guide Michelin,
though still with its
‘vue exceptionelle’
over the blue Étang de Berre.

It was the same story in Mallord Street. The Chelsea fruit and flower market opposite their house was obliterated; blocks of flats and a telephone exchange blotted out the sun. In the early 1930s they sold the house to the singer Gracie Fields; the Anrep mosaics were covered up, the structure altered, the house and its surroundings becoming almost unrecognizable.

Everywhere the old world was vanishing, and John was part of it. Though he might blare his defiance, though he would heave out an announcement from time to time about ‘turning a corner’, there seemed only one direction for him to go. The retreat was sounded on all fronts, and everything would depend upon the subtlety with which he conducted it.

*1
The operation was performed by Dr Johann Hell after Kelly ‘laid the fire’ to which John and Leverhulme’s grandson ‘put the match’. ‘Sir Gerald Kelly has talked to me about the portrait of your grandfather,’ John wrote to Viscount Leverhulme in May 1953. ‘I had the lower part of it knocking about for years but I haven’t seen it lately… Kelly said he liked the head very much, and it would be very satisfactory if it could be restored to its proper position.’ At the beginning of April 1954 John sent Kelly a ‘rapturous letter’ saying that he had found the late Lord Leverhulme’s belly. The headless torso and the head were joined together ‘in hospital’ later that month. ‘It was a great pity that when the head alone was framed the edges were turned back around the panel thus destroying two strips, but the reconstruction of these two narrow pieces has been beautifully done by the ingenious Dr Hell. The picture is now very much more worth looking at than it was… [it is] the best possible solution to what was a very difficult problem.’ The complete picture was first shown at the ‘Exhibition of Works by Augustus John, OM, RA’ in the Diploma Gallery of the Royal Academy of Arts in 1954. The painting is privately owned.

*2
See Appendix Six.

‘I got stuck here.’

Augustus John to Bill Duncalf

(23 May 1959)

Fryern Court had originally been a fourteenth-century friary which, in the early nineteenth century, was converted into a farmhouse. Later a Georgian-style front had been stuck on to the old farm building, and it was transformed into a manor house.

It was on the edge of the New Forest, a mile from Fordingbridge. A porch ‘like a nose’
1
divided the windows that reached almost to the ground. At the rear of the house stood a whitewashed courtyard with a figtree and stables, a garage and outhouses stretching away into garden and meadow. The sitting-room and dining-room, the dark pantry with its slate floor and a fourteenth-century kitchen with carved stone heads (then heavily painted over) protruding from the walls – all had their floors level with the ground. The cellars were crammed with wine, apples and cobwebs. Upstairs there was more the feel of the old farmhouse than the manor, the passages rambling crookedly past eight bedrooms.

They moved there early in 1927. Augustus descended from London and ‘like the traditional clown’
2
busily did nothing. Everything that could be prised from Alderney was taken. Poppet and Vivien, in great excitement, rode over on their horses; the old vans and carts, soon to be embedded as garden furniture, set out on their last rusty journey; cats, dogs, pigs joined in the stampede past the large copper beeches, magnolias, yellow azaleas up the curving gravel drive to their new home.

The routine and rituals at Fryern were to be arranged as a supportive background for John: but, as with Alderney, it was Dorelia’s arrangement and far removed from the wild emptiness that stimulated his painter’s imagination. He saw, with despair, all round a beauty he could not use. ‘Here’, exclaimed Cecil Beaton,
3
a frequent visitor, ‘is the dwelling place of an artist.’ The irony seemed invisible, though the changes that were
made to Fryern, in particular a mammoth new studio, on stilts like a child’s playhouse and ‘entirely based on mathematical calculation’,
4
were expressions of John’s discontent. In an agony of guilt, disappointment, incomprehension, suddenly released in thunderous bursts of temper, he worked on amid these tranquil surroundings.

Meanwhile Dorelia ‘busies herself in the garden’, John noted. She spent hours studying horticultural catalogues, ordering plants and bulbs. It was a grander garden than at Alderney, and more formal. The avenue of dark yew trees was neatly clipped; the lawn, with a pond converted from a tennis court at its centre, was enclosed by hedges; in the orchard, the pear and apple trees were hung with little bags against the wasps. Up the walls of the house roses and clematis twined, the matted stems making nests for cats; and on the north side, a hazard for drivers, bunched the holly and laurels. There were garden seats, tables of stone and teak, a hammock strung between the Judas and an apple tree, medlars, and little chequered fritillaries in the grass. It was a place for animals and children to play, a place to relax in and read.

It was also a place to be used for keeping the house replenished with fruit and herbs, bright yellow goat’s butter, quince and raspberry jam, grape juice from the vine in the greenhouse, sweetcorn, lavender, flowers. During the 1930s Dorelia was helped by two gardeners. One, a fine man, landed up in hospital. The other was Mr Cake. He and his wife, Mrs Cake the cook, had been brought from Alderney and, though often promising to leave, remained with the family for over thirty years. Old Cake was a small man with a limp and a bright buttonhole who would go swinging off each evening to the pub over a mile away. He seldom spoke, and his wife, who ‘did wonders’ with fish, could not read. Larger and more voluble than her husband, and always grinning, Mrs Cake appeared (on account of her wall eye) a fearsome creature. ‘Trouble with ’im’, she was heard to say of John, ‘is ’e’s got too many brains and they’ve gone to ’is ’ead.’ Mrs Cake was immensely proud of her hair, which was long and thick and washed, she would explain, in juice of rosemary. She spoke with a strong Dorset accent. ‘Old Cake was very lucky to get me,’ she would say. ‘All the boys were after me. It was my hair.’ Old Cake, pursued by several goats, said nothing.

There were the same smells of beeswax, pomanders and lavender, wood- and tobacco-smoke, coffee, cats as at Alderney; the same disorder of vegetables, tubes of paint, nuts from the New Forest, saddles, old canvases, croquet mallets, piles of apples. The furniture was not grand nor the pictures specially valuable: it was the opposite of a museum. Alongside those paintings of John’s which had eluded fire and finish were some lovely Gwen Johns, including one of her paintings of Dorelia at Toulouse,
a watercolour by Augustus’s son Edwin, a Henry Moore sketch, small Wilson Steers and Conders, an Alvaro Guevara, a beach scene by Boudin and some Matthew Smiths. An Epstein head of a small child stood on a table, and in the hall, crowned with a cactus, one of the two Modigliani stone heads John had bought in Paris. In her bedroom, Dorelia hung some tinfoil pictures by Carrington and two drawings by Augustus of Pyramus. Then there were paintings by friends: Eve Kirk, Adrian Daintrey and a passing number of gypsy artists.

It was not a smart house, and it had much of the farm about it. The colours were rich, the atmosphere lavish yet shabby. ‘There is no beguiling, ready-made impact of beauty,’ wrote Cecil Beaton; ‘rather, an atmosphere of beauty is sensed. No intention to decorate the house ever existed. The objects that are there were originally admired and collected for their intrinsic shape. They remain beautiful… the colours have gratuitously grown side by side. Nothing is hidden; there is an honesty of life which is apparent in every detail – the vast dresser with its blue and white cups, the jars of pickled onions, the skeins of wool, the window sills lined with potted geraniums and cacti… ’
5

Fryern was the most open of houses, a mandatory first stop between London and the west. Many were invited, many more came. But the informality was testing and the welcome to strangers deceptive. Hugo Pitman remembered every window of the house lit up (though it was still light) when he first approached: ‘It was like arriving at a stage set’. Through the long windows of the dining-room, he saw two figures sitting by a blazing fire. On the other side of the front door, some children moved about in the drawing-room. ‘Upstairs, Augustus could be seen in bed...’ The bell did not work, so they rattled the front door. ‘Instantly every light in the house went out, except Augustus’s – and his blind came down immediately.’
6

John was emphatic about people enjoying themselves. He liked anyone who was good-looking, anyone who made him laugh. Though quickly bored he was a keen listener, shooting out scornful comments and darting from subject to subject in search of relieving entertainment. His speech was somewhat formal, old-fashioned, full of rounded phrases, though he was a good mimic and could give a wonderfully fruity impersonation of Oscar Wilde during his last years in Paris. Up in London, his deep laugh volleying round the Eiffel Tower; or seen striding about the sunlit gymkhanas where Poppet and Vivien loved to ride; or picnicking with the family on the phallic giant of Cerne Abbas; or in the evenings, seated at one end of the long scrubbed oak table opposite Dorelia, with twenty people between them, and candles, bottles of wine, he seemed lit up by joie de vivre. Broad-shouldered, athletic still in his fifties, capable of
princely gestures, there was yet ‘a touch of tragedy in his appearance’, Adrian Daintrey observed.
7

Parties were conspiracies of self-forgetfulness. At Fryern someone would put on the gramophone or begin playing the guitar, then singing and dancing would break out round John’s Jove-like figure. Fierce fits of depression had made him dependent upon the momentary gaiety of a clamorous public whom he did not honestly admire but whom he allowed to play him out of his gloom. Hating publicity, he had become an object of this gala-world’s ‘image-making’. But the praise was counterfeit: fan-club hot air. As numerous letters of apology testify, he could behave rudely when drunk, but there was some integrity in this rudeness. The good things they said about him he did not believe. He could suspend disbelief, but never for long.
‘La bonne peinture
is all the praise I want!’ he wrote to Will Rothenstein (26 May 1936). ‘I am painting better than ever before,’ he growled one day to Lady Waverley. But when she congratulated him – ‘How happy you must be’ – he snapped back: ‘You have never said anything more silly!’