Augustus John (107 page)

Such work still loomed large in the public mind where even his worst failures were regarded as ‘controversial’. The peculiar conditions of war held him in the limelight. He was asked to open exhibitions, to donate pictures for war victims. But it was on behalf of artists he exercised himself most energetically. He had been one of those, along with Eric Gill, Henry Moore and Ben Nicholson, who in 1933, the year of Hitler’s ascendancy, had helped to form the Artists’ International Association. The aim of this body had been to establish an army of artists opposing the advance of ‘philistine barbarism’ with periodic exhibitions ‘Against Fascism and War’ to which John prominently contributed. He also presented several pictures to sales for war funds and used his influence to free a number of German and Austrian refugee artists who had been interned by the British government.
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He joined (rather late in the day) the Voluntary Contraception League, the committee of the National Campaign for the Abolition of Capital Punishment and, though not interested in party politics, he persistently petitioned Members of Parliament on behalf of the gypsies.
*1
He also kept in faithful correspondence with Sampson’s Liverpool friend Dora Yates
who, since the death of Scott Macfie, was ‘the best Romani scholar going’.
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The gypsies still looked on John in good times as a brother and in bad times as their champion; and he had felt genuinely honoured in 1936 to be elected President of the Gypsy Lore Society. ‘It is a distinction I had never dreamt of attaining,’ he told Dora Yates.
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Dora Yates came to depend on his commitment, reinforced by a ‘noble cheque’ now and then, to this society which ‘keeps alive the great work of the Baro Rai [Sampson]’.
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Without gypsies, and this centre for gypsy scholarship, ‘life indeed would be bleak for me,’
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she admitted. And he responded: ‘Be sure that I (and others) know you to be a very precious person.’
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Though they almost never met these days, they had become curiously indispensable to each other. As academic and economic officialdom in Liverpool trampled over ‘the great Sampsonian tradition’, she sometimes needed John to pull her ‘out of the gulf of dark despair’.
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On reading through her letters, her ‘Recollections of a Romani Rawnie [Lady]’ called
My Gypsy Days,
and the
Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society
which she regularly sent to Fryern, the clamorous affairs of Egypt would rise up in his mind, reminding him of his ups and downs with Sampson, filling him ‘with mixed regret and elation’,
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until he felt ‘a good deal younger than I am’.
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Then the clock would jerk forward again and ‘I hardly ever see a Gypsy now-a-days.’
32

The war affected everyone. ‘People carry on marvellously through it all I must say,’ he wrote to Conger Goodyear on 19 April 1941. ‘…Life in London goes on much as usual except that people don’t go out so much at nights – though I do.’ It was an uneventful time, ‘punctuated with pinpricks’. There was less to eat and drink, but they had plenty of vegetables at Fryern and from friends and family in the United States came parcels of food, whisky, pipes. No longer could he rove and ramble round France, but there was Mousehole in Cornwall where one of his daughters-in-law now lived – ‘very pleasant. I go to Penzance for my rum.’ Petrol rationing had made travel even in England difficult (‘we hardly move a yard’), but the trains still ran between London and Fordingbridge, and since his journeys were ‘really necessary’ he could admit to being ‘moderately gregarious’.

The country, in wartime, was ‘like a paddock which one grazes in, like a cow, but less productive’. To enliven the scene at Fryern ‘we must get a lot of children’, he announced.
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He was particularly keen to attract black children – ‘darkies’ as he called them – and by the spring of 1940 he and Dodo had five evacuees, all white. Dodo herself appeared to take no notice of the war, spending it in the garden; but John’s letters are full of gibes against ‘old Schicklgruber’ (Hitler). In London no one could ignore the bombardment. ‘London is being badly bombed,’ he wrote to
his sister Winifred on 18 October 1940. ‘I was up there with Vivien the other day and saw a good deal of devastation… The row at night is hellish.’

He was determined not to allow these disturbances to interrupt his work even if it sometimes endangered his sitters. One of them, Constance Graham, remembers posing for him when an air raid started. John ‘was utterly unperturbed, and we were seated by the enormous studio window while the bombs buzzed overhead. They might have been blue bottles for all he cared so of course I felt obliged to remain equally unmoved.’

London had become a village. People stopped each other in the streets, swapped stories about last night’s raid, drank together, made one another laugh. John, ‘the oaktrunked maestro’ as Dylan Thomas called him, swaying between one pub and the next, was a cheerfully reassuring sight. ‘He is like some great force of nature,’ noted Chips Channon, ‘so powerful, immense and energetic.’
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It was out of the question that anything Hitler could do might disturb him. While the ‘doodle-bug’ or ‘buzz-bombs’ were falling, twice ‘buggering up’ his Tite Street studio, he would sit with Norman Douglas and Nancy Cunard in the Pier Hotel at Battersea Bridge, where the ‘drink supply had generously expanded – to steady the clients’ nerves’.
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There was a marvellously enhancing quality about his presence. After an evening here, or at the Gargoyle Club in Dean Street, or the Antelope in Chelsea, he liked to invite his companions back to Tite Street for a last drink or two. At such times there seemed something undeniably lovable about him; by turns generous then angry, an old gentleman wobbling through the black-out. Back at Tite Street, on one fuddled occasion, he laid himself down vaguely on top of the artist Michael Ayrton, as if, Ayrton recalled, quite shocked, ‘I were his daughter’. The third member of the party, Cecil Gray, snatched up his Quaker hat, shouted: ‘I’m not going to remain here to watch this’, and opening a door, walked into the broom cupboard. ‘He’s gone into the broom cupboard,’ John declared, sitting up. ‘By God he has!’ Ayrton agreed, also sitting up. They stared at the closed door from which faint scufflings could be heard. Then Cecil Gray knocked, came out and took off his hat: ‘I think I’ll stay after all.’ After which they all went to sleep.

Such stories, revealing an innocence not altogether lost, endeared him to his friends. ‘Look at Augustus John!’ proclaimed Norman Douglas. ‘Take away his beard, close-crop his hair and Augustus would be as impressive as before. Him I admire not only as a fine man but for his way of thinking about life. Alas! I fear
he’s
the last of the Titans.’ In wartime John’s stature appeared to grow. He was unafraid, almost grateful, for there was an external enemy to account for his look of suffering. People needed parties, drink and the boosting of their morale in much the same
way as he needed these things in peacetime. Homes and buildings were everywhere being destroyed; friends, families, lovers killed. The marks of torture on John’s face reflected what everyone was feeling. But his real enemy was invisible. Late one night, when Michael Ayrton was being driven home, his taxi, swerving suddenly to a halt, nearly ran over a pedestrian. It was John. Tears were streaming down his face. At Ayrton’s insistence he got into the taxi to be taken back to Tite Street. ‘It’s not good enough,’ he kept murmuring to himself. Disliking histrionics, and believing the old actor to be up to his tricks again, Ayrton tried to tease him out of this mood. ‘What girl is that, Augustus? What girl’s not good enough?’ John gave a dismissive wave. ‘My work’s not good enough,’ he said. Nor would he be comforted: ‘My work’s not good enough.’

It was seldom he could speak of anything about which he felt deeply. ‘The only English thing about me is my horror of showing emotion,’ he confessed to Mary Keene.
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‘This makes my life a hideous sham.’
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This ‘sham’ was a necessary covering over ‘the ghastliness of existence’. He hated this war. His five adult sons were in different services; Vivien had become a nurse, Poppet worked in a canteen. Everyone, even the girls, seemed to be in uniform. In such circumstances it was ‘not amusing’ to remain a civilian. ‘I think of joining the Salvation Army,’ he joked, ‘though I believe the training is severe.’
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What depressed him was ‘this foul and bogus philosophy of violence’.
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It was a world war to end all worlds he could recognize as his own. ‘I can hardly bear to think of France being overrun by those monsters,’ he told Will and Alice Rothenstein.
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He kept working. ‘What else is there to do?’ he wrote to Conger Goodyear in the first week of October 1943. But he feared that his painting might become impossible. ‘There seems nothing (in my line) in London just now,’ he told Emlyn Williams. Yet the war, which was to transform the art world, eroding the influence of figurative painters and setting up an international style of abstract art, at first produced the reverse effect. Owing partly to Britain’s isolation and the difficult conditions for young painters, the public’s attention was forced back to previous generations of artists, to Whistler, Sickert and John himself.

A black-out stretched over London. ‘It extended to every form of pleasure, recreation or enlightenment,’ wrote Kenneth Clark, Director of the National Gallery.
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‘Theatres and concert halls were in darkness, museums and galleries were closed, most art dealers shut up shop.’ The permanent collection at the National Gallery was evacuated to an ‘unknown destination’ (Wales), and the building was used as a canteen for war workers. But every lunchtime concerts were put on and, ‘to uphold the traditions of art in the winter of the Blitzkrieg’,
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special exhibitions were also held. The most popular of these exhibitions was ‘British Painting
since Whistler’, to which one hundred and twelve Augustus John drawings were added between 21 November 1940 and 22 March 1941. Twice the opening was delayed by bombs which destroyed part of the roof and courtyard and some of the galleries themselves, and the drawings were moved for safety into the ground-floor room of the east wing previously reserved for Dutch pictures. Over eleven thousand people made their way round the craters and down into the long room divided into bays where John’s drawings, ‘representative of various aspects of my draughtsmanship from student days to the present’, were hung. ‘It is an astonishing record,’ wrote Herbert Read, ‘and it is doubtful if any other contemporary artist in Europe could display such virtuosity and skill.’
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A year later Lillian Browse produced her volume of
Augustus John Drawings,
and in 1944 Phaidon Press published John Rothenstein’s
Augustus John
which, despite wartime paper restrictions, went into three editions in two years.

Rumours of a knighthood had been blowing around, and when it was offered to John early in the war he felt unaccountably pleased. Unfortunately there was a fly in the ointment. Buckingham Palace soon discovered that he was not officially married to Dorelia, and he was discreetly requested to put matters on a regular footing. He had no objections. Dorelia and he might well have married if there hadn’t been so many paintings to finish and so much work to do in the garden. But the thing had to be done properly. So, after almost forty years and the birth of four children, he went down on one knee and formally asked for her hand in marriage – and she turned him down! It was ridiculous to marry so late and for such a reason. Besides, she had no wish to be known as ‘Lady John’. So the knighthood receded and, brooding in the pub, John felt strangely out of sorts. Then in 1942, three months after the death of Wilson Steer, he was offered the Order of Merit – a much more distinguished award, it was explained, which did not have repercussions on one’s marital status. He brightened at once. ‘It is of course a matter both of pride and humility to succeed Steer in this order,’ he instructed D. S. MacColl on 25 June 1942.
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‘Daddy got what Tristan calls his “medal” on Thursday,’ Dorelia wrote to Edwin on 4 July 1942, ‘& the ceremony went off quite well.’ He was engulfed with congratulations. ‘I knew it was a great distinction,’ he told John Freeman, ‘and I thanked them for it, whoever they were. But I wasn’t oppressed by the grandeur.’ There were some, however, who deplored the old republican having accepted recognition from the monarch. His response to all criticism was that people should be allowed to do whatever they liked, and benefit by whatever gave them pleasure. He disapproved of hereditary titles but found in other awards a romantic appeal. He supported Anthony Wedgwood Benn’s fight against disqualification as a Member of Parliament
because of his inherited peerage,
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but also defended Herbert Read’s ‘courageous decision’ to take on a knighthood in 1953 when his fellow anarchists were sharply critical. ‘Although we may diverge in some matters, I think you were quite right to accept a knighthood (though I feel it should have been a baronetcy),’ John wrote to him. ‘If there is one thing certain, it is that there is no such thing as “equality” in human society, and your Order, symbolizing this truth, justifies itself in admitting you.’
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As for his own award, though not to be overvalued, it gave him a momentary glaze of harmless pleasure. ‘Would you believe it?’ he asked in a letter to his sister Winifred. ‘It is the rarest of all orders.’ He treated it in the manner of a private transaction between himself and George VI – and particularly good of the monarch considering how much of his wife’s time he had squandered. But he discouraged outsiders from concerning themselves with it. ‘I only remember the O.M.,’ he reprimanded D. S. MacColl, ‘when others forget it.’