Augustus John (104 page)

In the expectation of miracles, and with the encouragement of Father Martindale, Henry persuaded John to paint him in the robes of a Jesuit saint, Aloysius Gonzaga, to celebrate the two hundredth anniversary of his canonization. ‘Do not discover in this Jesuitical suggestion a conspiracy to baptize you (by immersion),’ he adds.
140
But neither Jesuitically nor aesthetically was the experiment a success.
141
The struggle between them, for all its ludicrous aspects, was serious. ‘I am a person of absolutely feverish activity… I am madly impatient and madly irritable and appallingly critical… yet I have an immense desire to be exactly the opposite of what I tend to be,’ Henry had written. The Jesuit training, he believed, would teach him the secret of self-renunciation, the absolute submission of his rebellious spirit to the Will of God as manifested in Superiors. Was this not similar to what his aunt, Gwen John, had done? Yet while the rest of his family remained blatant ‘bloody fools’ basking in ‘flashy old paganism’, they were an intolerable irritant. He had elected to read philosophy at Campion Hall where Father D’Arcy was the new Master, but he could find nothing to calm his turmoil. His letters, written in a shuddering hand, and relentlessly illegible, are saturated with violence, page after page of it, like a protracted scream. Watching him, Father D’Arcy (who had advised against philosophy) was increasingly worried by what he called ‘your periods of heats… the temperature you rise to, the complications...’

At the end of his time at Campion Hall, Henry gained Second Class Honours in philosophy. But this was not good enough. ‘I often long very greatly to see you and the others,’ he wrote to Augustus from Campion Hall. ‘…There is such an enormous amount I can learn from you.’
142
Should he ‘stick to the J[esuit]s or no’? He needed advice. He was reacting against the scrupulous discipline of his training, but feared he would be misunderstood. ‘He had not lost his faith,’ one of his friends remarked, ‘but maybe he had a bit lost his head.’
143
In the summer of 1934, he submitted a dispensation of his vows. ‘The Jesuit life is not any longer my cup of tea’, he wrote. ‘I am not leaving for intellectual reasons but for physical ones i.e. I do not think I am meant to lead a
life of books only…
nor can S.J. [Society of Jesus] Superiors, generous as they are, be expected
to cater for a permanent eccentric… Having had a determined shot, I failed. I don’t think the chastity question comes into it very much at all – at any rate disinclination for a life of chastity is not a prominent reason in my mind, though of course it is present… I should not mind if people said I was funking disobedience – for that’s quite plausible.’

This letter, far more controlled than anything he usually wrote, was sent to Augustus via Henry’s Provincial ‘to make sure things are quite clear’. But other writings, that sit less politely upon the page, affirm a different truth. Henry appears to have been ‘girl-shy’ but highly sexed. At school there had been a devastating infatuation for another boy; and during his noviciate he seems to have become painfully involved, though in a more sophisticated way, in another unrequited passion. But he was not homosexual: it was simply that he was always in the society of other men. His correspondence to his Provincial and Superiors was preoccupied with birth control and questions of sexual ethics; while to others, such as his friend Robert McAlmon, it was ‘one long wail about carnal desire… and the searing sin of weakening’.
144
Henry also did a series of drawings, harshly pornographic, depicting a Jesuit entering heaven by violently explicit sexual means.

He had won the high opinion of G. K. Chesterton and of Wyndham Lewis, but to follow them would be once more to ‘lead a
life of books only
’.
To Augustus, he insisted: ‘I have got to make what amounts to a fairly big fresh start, do a lot more “abdicating”.’ This took the form of plunging into the East End of London among the poor. ‘He seems as mad as a hatter,’ was Augustus’s verdict. ‘…He is studying dancing – for which he shows no aptitude – and the price of vegetables.’
145
In the newspapers it was announced that, like his brother Edwin, Henry had become a boxer and would wear the papal colours on his pants. Augustus was not pleased. In the past he had often urged his son to ‘quit this stately Mumbo Jumbo’. Yet he had not relished the manner of his quitting: it reeked of failure. Now he poured scorn on Henry for not discovering ‘your own Divinity’, and for still carrying out to the letter the injunction of Loyola by failing to look ‘directly at any female’.
146
The novelist Julia Strachey, who saw him in November 1934, also observed this curious obliqueness:

‘Henry John to tea… Sitting down in the small chair – which he placed sideways on to me – beside the bookcase, he conducted the whole conversation – metaphysical almost entirely – with his face turned away, and looked round at me only three times, I counted, during the whole session, which lasted from 4.30 till 7. What lies behind this habit? Is it, as with Ivor Novello and Owen Nares, to display his profile, which is
beautiful, the shape of his head as in a Renaissance painting. It would be pleasant to indulge my daydreams about him, inhibit my critical faculties and concentrate on – say – his profile, forgetting that his full face is disappointing and makes a certain impression of insensitiveness… He refused both butter, and jam, for his scone.’
147

His experiments at moving from the metaphysical to the physical world over the next six months were unhappy. His chief girlfriend at this time was Olivia Plunket-Greene, a disconcerting creature with bobbed hair, ‘pursed lips and great goo-goo eyes’.
148
She belonged to a generation that had found in the 1920s a new emancipation; but her crazy party goings-on overlaid a character that was strange, snobbish and secretive. She was more fun-loving than loving, more intimate with crowds than single people, a sexual adventuress and religious fanatic with a love of drink, whose mute white face and slim figure dressed in black captivated many men. Among them, most unhappily, had been Evelyn Waugh. But she played him off against a formidable rival, the black singer Paul Robeson, and then sent him for religious instruction to Father D’Arcy. For she had recently ‘gone over’ to Roman Catholicism herself, unable to resist its ‘great, tremendous and dazzling lure’. It was said that, one evening, as she was dressing for a party, the Virgin Mary dropped in with instructions to pursue an anguished life of chastity. This experience, in Waugh’s judgement, was to make her ‘one third drunk, one third insane, one third genius’.
149
She still appeared a fun-loving, party-going raffish girl. But she was now a saint too, who read St John of the Cross as well as
Vogue.
Whenever she began taking off her clothes she would hear the Virgin Mary’s voice, and dress again. It was with her that Henry now sought to make his ‘big fresh start’.

They held hands; she wrote poems; they talked; she let him kiss her: and then there were her love letters.

‘You are rather a darling with your long legs, and your jerky sensitive notions and your mind busy with acceptance, I would like to give you breasts and knees and curved embraces… Wish you hadn’t made me think of loving. I need to be loved, charms and skin and embraces soft and strong… But if I let you hold me in your arms, it is for a variety of reasons… Your embraces are lessons, but most enjoyable, like lessons in eating ice-cream or treacle.’

They had planned to spend part of June at a bungalow belonging to Henry’s aunt, Ethel Nettleship, near Crantock in Cornwall. In the first week of June he received a six-page letter from Olivia explaining some of
the reasons why she could not have sexual intercourse with him. ‘I never knew how anti-birth control I was before but evidently I am.’ He argued abstractedly; she promised to write again. He drove down to Cornwall; she did not come. On the evening of 22 June 1935 he bicycled to a desolate stretch of the cliffs. He was seen walking along, swinging a towel, his aunt’s Irish terrier at his heels. Then he vanished.

Within forty-eight hours police were methodically searching the cliffs; scouts were lowered down on ropes to explore the caves, aeroplanes circled round, and motor boats manned by coastguards with binoculars patrolled the seas. Augustus, who had rushed down, joined in the hunt. ‘I’m searching for my blessed son who’s gone and fallen in the sea,’ he explained to Mavis. ‘I have no hope of finding him alive. His corpse will come to the surface after nine days. A damn shame you are not hereabouts… I suppose I’ll be here a few days although corpses don’t interest me.’ The description of these few days he gave in
Chiaroscuro
has been criticized for its callous tone. Partly this was the result of press reporters tracking him for a ‘story’; and their melodramatic accounts of the artist ‘speechless with grief’ and Henry’s ‘disconsolate terrier’ that went on appearing in the newspapers. Augustus never revealed grief or guilt; he buried it away to reappear as other things. ‘Henry was a wonderful fellow,’ he wrote to Michel Salaman. ‘…As Ida’s last child I thought of him as compensating somehow for her loss – and now...’
150
That the son Ida had died giving birth to should so recklessly have lost his own life troubled him, but he resolved to force the matter from his mind. For the sake of appearance, he stayed in Cornwall a week exploring the coast, but directing much of his attention to the cormorants, puffins and seals. There was some cheerful weather for the search, and almost without thinking he took a pad of paper and began sketching...

On 5 July, thirteen days after his disappearance, Henry’s body was washed up on the beach at Perranporth, dressed only in a pair of shorts. ‘Though it was without a face, from the attention of birds and crabs, I was able to identify it all the same.’
151

In the press Father D’Arcy was quoted as saying that there could be no possibility of Henry’s death having been anything other than an accident. ‘In many ways he was a cheerfully irresponsible young man, and I only wonder that he has not had a serious accident before. He always took risks and loved adventure.’
152
His old schoolfriend, Tom Burns, agreed. ‘Suicide was suggested. But to me that was totally out of the question: he was a lover of life if ever there was one, but from his schooldays he had been madly reckless.’
153

John suspected otherwise. In 1943, travelling from London to Salisbury, the train being held up by an air raid, he suddenly became very talkative
with the young man sharing his compartment about ‘the suicide’
154
of his son. Otherwise he showed his thoughts little enough, even when a fantastic figure from the past, Mrs Everett, wrote from the Portobello Road urging him to ‘send for Mr Littlejohn of Exeter, the greatest Psychic we have’. To many people who wrote offering their sympathy he replied it was a tragedy that, having climbed out of the Society of Jesus, Henry should have fallen into the sea. Dorelia too stayed calm. ‘It’s perfectly all right,’ she assured Lady Hulse. ‘Henry wasn’t mine.’

They invited Father D’Arcy to say a requiem mass. ‘I feel very much the cutting short of so much promise,’ he wrote to Augustus. ‘He & I were such friends when he was young, and I thought the world lay at his feet. He changed much & I did not for a while see eye to eye with him. But only at Whitsuntide did he come to see me. It looked as if he were beginning to recover that spontaneous & happy character with all its brilliance which he had seemed at one time to choke… You have had some wonderful children & he was not the least.’
155

‘As to “going slowly” don’t we all have to sooner or later?’

Augustus John to Charles Reilly

‘In spite of all,’ a friend noted in her diary, ‘he wasn’t dead yet.’ It was the others, family and friends, who kept ‘popping off. ‘People seem to be dying off like flies,’ he complained.
156
In December 1932 it was Mrs Nettleship. Over the years John and she had reached some sort of understanding – particularly strong when they could unite in disapproval of something, such as Henry’s Catholicism. As she lay dying at her home, John burst in with two of Ida’s sons and a supply of beer. He settled down by the fire in her bedroom, Ursula Nettleship remembered, ‘and talked about his life in France, about French literature, what he had read, about the quayside at Marseilles and the people he’d known there, all night replenishing our glasses from the beer bottles, watching mother… had she been conscious she would have vastly appreciated both his presence and the completely unconventional Russian play atmosphere. And somehow, again in all simplicity, proving a very real support… a good memory to treasure up.’
157

The previous year it had been his old crony, the gypsy scholar John Sampson. ‘It’s a ghastly blow to me,’ John wrote to his widow Margaret
Sampson, ‘for the Rai was so much part of my life.’ In his will, Sampson left John ‘as a small memento of long friendship my Smith and Wesson Revolver No. 239892’. He was cremated on 11 November 1931 and ten days later his ashes were carried to Wales. In those ten days mysterious messages passed between the gypsies, and the private ceremony was crowded with Woods and Lees, Smiths and Robertses, the men wearing red bandannas, the women in tattered dresses, their hair jingling with spangles and coins. Farmhands and village girls mingled with illustrious members of the Gypsy Lore Society: judges, architects, professors, ladies in fur coats and gentlemen in plus-fours, and then that other great Rai, Scott Macfie, ill but indefatigable, mounted on a Welsh pony. ‘There is no one I have quarrelled with more often,’ he wrote to Sampson’s son, ‘and nobody whose loss I feel more.’
158
The straggling procession, trailed at a cautious distance by a platoon of pressmen and British Movietone News, was overtaken along the way by John in his ulster and scarlet-spotted scarf, who had been chosen to act as Master of Ceremonies. He led them panting up the slopes of Foel Goch, a mountain where Sampson had often rallied his crew. Here, eyes fixed in the distance, in his hand a smouldering cigarette, he delivered his eulogium.
159
It was a blue day, his words rang out over the bright green fields, the brown woods below. After this oration, a powerful silence. The Rai’s son, Michael Sampson, expressionless, scattered handful on handful of the ashes which swept in showers of fine white dust down the mountainside. The sun shone, the wind lifted their hair a little, blew the ashes round to land, like dandruff, on their shoulders. Then John, ‘with his right hand out-stretched in a simple gesture as if actually to grasp that of his old friend’,
160
spoke a poem in Romany. Everyone murmured the benediction
Te soves misto
(‘Sleep thou well’) and, as the words died away, the music began – first the strings of the harp, then the fiddles, mouth organ, clarinet and dulcimer. Someone lit a match, started a pipe; and ‘we each found our own way down the hilly slopes,’ Dora Yates remembered, ‘…I myself saw the tears rolling down Augustus John’s cheeks as he tramped in silence back to Llangwm.’
161
Then they gathered for the funeral feast at the White Lion at the hilltop town of Cerig-y-Drudion, and there was dancing, merriment and singing. ‘Wouldn’t the Master have been pleased with the scene in that oak-beamed kitchen afterwards?’
162
Dora Yates asked John. But they both knew that with Sampson dead, ‘half or more of the fun has gone out of Gypsying’.
163