Augustus John (106 page)

It had seemed a pity to leave her cottage empty for so long, so Gus had asked Gwen’s permission to lease part of it to Fanny Fletcher. For years she had been helping Gus and Dodo, looking after the children and animals, doing the wallpapers. Now she wanted to use the cottage as a teashop. ‘The suggestion is that you should [have] two rooms to yourself and your own staircase and that Fanny should pay you say £12 a year while looking after the garden & raising vegetables & flowers. She understands that you want to be left alone and thinks you need not be at all interfered with by the customers she would expect about tea-time. There seems a good chance of her making a success of this scheme if you agreed and the place would be well looked after in your absence.’
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Gwen agreed that this was a sensible arrangement, but when she did not come back, Augustus and Dorelia began to wonder if they had done the right thing. ‘I hope you won’t regret giving up half the cottage, but it will be much better to have someone there,’
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Dorelia explained. And Gus assured Gwen that ‘Fanny Fletcher will vacate your cottage whenever you want to come to it.’
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For more than ten years Dorelia continued giving Gwen news of her cottage. Few people came to the teashop and ‘your rooms are just as they were except there is a round table and armchair… The garden is lovely in the front thanks to Fanny… Your blue room is just the same except that Fanny has taken off the cement on the floor. The bricks look much nicer… It’s such a pity you cannot come sooner… A bit of your roof was blown off in a great hurricane but has been mended...’
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By 1933 Dorelia was asking: ‘Are you ever coming again? Don’t you think you had better sell the cottage?’
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But evidently Gwen did not want to sell it. She often thought of Dorelia and Gus and the family, and thinking of them was less fatiguing than travelling across the Channel to see them. Besides, she occasionally saw one or other of them in France on their way to St-Rémy. It would probably have been easier for her if Gus had bought a house he coveted in Equihen that had belonged to the painter Cazin, but old Mrs Cazin still occupied it in the 1920s and would not sell.

And nor would Gwen sell since, though she was ill, she had not ruled out the possibility of going back to England until Dorelia wrote to her with a definite proposal on 30 May 1939. ‘I don’t suppose you will use it again, and wondered if you would sell it for the price it cost, £500… Fanny is in very bad health & I should like to think she had somewhere
to live if anything happened to me.’
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So Gwen agreed, pretending to make a gift of the cottage to reduce expenses.

On 10 September, a week after Britain and France declared war on Germany, Gwen made her will in Meudon. She was sixty-three. Then, overcome by a longing for the sea, she caught a train to Dieppe, but on arrival collapsed in the street. Though she had ‘not forgotten to make provision for her cats’,
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she had brought no baggage with her and was taken to the Hospice de Dieppe in the avenue Pasteur where, knowing herself to be dying, she gave a lawyer there her will and burial instructions. She died at 8.30 a.m. on 18 September. No cause of death was given on the certificate, and no one knows where she is buried.

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But, Marie Mauron went on, ‘ce désespoir-là éclatait d’un grand rire car, lui, savait qu’il recommencerait une toile le lendemain. Avec la même obstination, le même “désespoir”, le même enthousiasme, le même amour, vif et sans amertume, rancune ou vanité devant, tout de même, de magnifiques réussites!’

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John and the writer A. P. Herbert were witnesses and the guests included Agatha Christie and her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan.

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John, however, was not taken in by this pantomime. In a letter to Dorelia (20 July 1936) he wrote: ‘I drove down to Wales taking Caitlin who wanted to see Dylan Thomas. We stayed at Laugharne Castle and the next day by a strange coincidence Dylan turned up out of the blue!… I drove them to Fishguard, Caitlin and Dylan osculating assiduously in the back of the car.’ NLW MS 22778D fols. (cf. Notes) 136–7.

*4
‘Last week we christened the baby,’ Dylan Thomas wrote to Veronica Sibthorp early in 1939. ‘…Augustus could not follow the service, although he had the text, and broke in with the refrain “I desire it” at intervals.’

*5
But Romilly John remembers that ‘as a small boy I frequently encountered Augustus striding arrogantly down the King’s Road on his way to the Six Bells. He never deigned to notice one on these occasions. Nor did it occur to me to claim any relationship. We passed as perfect strangers.’ Romilly John to the author, 25 January 1973.

‘I am trying to live down my adolescent past, but find I cannot bury it altogether. I have great hopes of my maturity though.’

Augustus John to John Davenport

The hectic drive from St-Rémy to Fordingbridge in the late summer of 1939 had been for John a journey into old age. The Second World War cut off his retreat and confined him to a narrow routine. On the surface there seemed little change: it was business as usual again. ‘I don’t see what I can do but go on painting.’
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But there was a difference. In the past he had often worked ‘like blazes’ in fits and starts (‘mostly fits’). Now he began to feel ‘ashamed of wasting my time… thinking that life went on almost for ever’. He had been studying the papers that were coming to light from Gwen’s studio. ‘Astonishing how she cultivated the scientific method,’ he exclaimed in a letter to his daughter Vivien. ‘I feel ready to shut up shop.’ His own
premier coup
days were long past, and he sought to acquire some of Gwen’s patience, investing time in one or two large imaginative pictures, writing a simple message on the landscape. ‘I want a good 20 years more to do something respectable,’ he had told Herbert Barker.
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During the 1940s he laboured hesitantly over a cartoon in grisaille twelve feet long called ‘The Little Concert’. ‘I’m doing a huge picture of imaginary people – about 25 or 30, life size,’ he told his son Edwin in the summer of 1944. ‘I’ve just provided the females with Welsh top-hats which stiffens things up greatly.’
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The picture represents three itinerant musicians entertaining a group of peasants on the fringe of a landlocked bay. ‘Though the conception is romantic, it is carried out with a classic authority of form,’ wrote T. W. Earp when it was first shown at the Leicester Galleries in 1948, ‘and is easily the most important achievement in English painting since the war.’
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Wyndham Lewis, reviewing the same exhibition, described it as being ‘as fine an example of Augustus John’s large-scale decorative work as I have ever seen’.
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But John himself felt
unsatisfied, snatched the picture back and after some revision re-exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1950, after which it went to a private collection. Even then he could not think of it as ‘finished’, and as late as 1957 was proposing to ‘warm up’ the monochrome. Fortunately he was prevented, and coming across this ‘almost forgotten and very big composition’ unexpectedly in 1961, ‘I was very bucked I can tell you,’
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he reported to his son Caspar.

Over the last twenty years of his life there was always one of these decorative compositions ‘cooking’ in his studio. ‘Imaginative things occupy me mostly now,’ he wrote to Conger Goodyear.
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He worked on them laboriously, with much anguish and persistence, continually revising and from time to time challenging the public to see in them his finest achievement. ‘They interest me very much and take up a lot of my time,’ he wrote. ‘What will become of them God knows.’
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Commissioned portraits, he told Dudley Tooth, had rarely paid off and he was tired of making promises he was unable to keep. ‘The artist doesn’t consider the “Public” – which is the concern of the theatrical producer, the journalist, the politician and the whore.’
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The Great War had obliterated the visionary world he had created in his painting; the Second threatened to devastate the world itself. He resolved therefore to use the opportunity war provided to retire into greater privacy; there, by the magical operation of his art, to re-illumine a peaceful paradise of sea and mountain, women, children, age and youth, music, dancing. From the age of sixty till he died at eighty-three this task overwhelmed all others.

It overwhelmed but it never eliminated his portrait painting, for he was still caught by the visible world. In these war years his portraits were of pretty girls and public men. Drawing girls he could not resist. They were to be seen – ‘living fragments of my heart’
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– in shows at the Wildenstein, Redfern and Leicester Galleries: magnified faces, almost identical, large-eyed and honey-lipped, a parody of his past. ‘My drawing rather large heads appears to synchronize with wearing spectacles which do distinctly magnify,’ he told the critic D S. MacColl (17 January 1945). ‘…It often takes me
l
/
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dozen tries before I get anything satisfactory: at any rate one can choose the best’ (16 February 1940).

After weeks of refuge ‘from contact with a depressing epoch’, weeks in his studio spent painting ‘decorations as remote as possible from the world we precariously live in’,
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a longing to paint people again, to be swept back into the world as an artist-biographer, would gain on him. It was an honourable pursuit in wartime, he believed, for an artist to paint those men who were leading the fight for one’s country. He accepted a number of such commissions, but a lack of interest in his sitters helped to make this wartime portraiture unsatisfactory. ‘He [John] was usually asleep
when I arrived at Tite Street,’ Lord Portal, Marshal of the Royal Air Force, remembered, ‘and loud knocks were required to rouse him. When roused he came noisily to the door, greeted me gruffly and started clearing the space for my chair by kicking away any pieces of furniture that were in the way… I did not get the impression that he enjoyed painting me, but he certainly got a wonderful picture after 5 or 6 sittings. He then asked that my wife should come and look at it, which she did and admired it. She told me that while she was actually watching him at work he turned the portrait, in the course of a few minutes, into the “caricature” which she and others think it now is… I don’t think he ever asked me what I thought… A powerful character, but I don’t think we attracted each other.’

He did not set out to caricature; he wanted to produce noble painting. But the difficult short sittings and the lack of intimacy with his beribboned subjects would tempt him into ambiguously exaggerated concoctions of paint that pleased no one. The most celebrated of these portraits, mopped up shortly before the Normandy landing, was of General Montgomery. At first glance he looked ‘a decent chap’, John told his son Edwin. ‘Without being a great scholar, he is polite, speaks up clearly and to the point and sits still… He is also apparently good at his job.’ Montgomery would motor in his Rolls-Royce each day to Tite Street and sit ‘as tense as a hunting dog on a shoot’
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upon the dais John had positioned for him. ‘Monty has been sitting like a brick,’ John reported to Mavis, ‘and the picture progresses.’ But it did not progress well. Montgomery felt downright suspicious of the whole business. John lurched around dropping cigarette ash into his paints, and Montgomery complained that ‘my right ear was not in the right place.’
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Matters deteriorated after John turned up for one sitting with a broken rib. It smelt very fishy to Monty. ‘Who is this chap?’ he demanded. ‘He drinks, he’s dirty, and I know there are women in the background!’
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John painted away in a spirit of deepening gloom. ‘It’s rather unfortunate the Colonel has to be in the room while I’m working,’ he lamented, ‘as I feel his presence through the back of my head which interferes with concentration. I seem to be a very sensitive plant.’
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To improve the atmosphere between the two men, another figure was imported: Bernard Shaw. ‘Fancy a soldier being intelligent enough to want to be painted by you and to talk to me.’ For an hour Shaw ‘talked all over the shop to amuse your sitter and keep his mind off the worries of the present actual fighting’.
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‘Little was done by me on that occasion,’ John remembered. Monty hadn’t been able to get a word in, but old Shaw liked ‘this soldier who knows his job so well (and doesn’t smoke or drink)’.
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Then, his hour up, Shaw was driven home by Montgomery’s chauffeur (whom he goaded into reaching ninety miles an hour) and sat
down to write John two brilliantly nonsensical letters about the portrait. ‘The worst of being 87–88 is that I never can be quite sure whether I am talking sense or old man’s drivel,’ he admitted.
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According to John, Shaw ‘has a wild admiration for Monty’;
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whereas, in Shaw’s view, John really was not ‘interested’ in him. Nevertheless, ‘I don’t think the result is too bad,’ John hazarded after the sittings were over, ‘though I haven’t got his decorations exact.’ Not knowing what time Montgomery could give to the painting, ‘I couldn’t launch out on a full length in the desert. Besides he only bargained for a head and shoulders,’ John explained to Shaw. ‘…I have been concerned with his remarkable bony structure: a queer combination of massiveness & delicacy.’
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Montgomery was appalled when he finally saw the portrait. An alcoholic blue cloud was suspended over his head, he declared, and it wasn’t ‘the sort of likeness he would want to leave to his son’. ‘I daresay’, commented John, ‘I stressed the gaunt and boney aspect of his face – the more interesting one I thought.’
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But he was familiar with dismay from his sitters, accepting it with particular geniality when, as in this instance, it enabled him to sell the picture for more elsewhere.
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