Augustus John (108 page)

‘I feel writing a great labour and takes up too much time when I should be painting. However it is often too dark to paint.’

Augustus John to Sean O’Casey (1952)

‘I am two people instead of one: the one you see before you is the old painter. But another has just cropped up – the young writer.’ With these words at a Foyle’s Literary Lunch in March 1952, John announced the publication of
Chiaroscuro,
his ‘fragments of autobiography’. It had been a lengthy cropping-up – a month or two short of thirty years. ‘I think we must all write autobiographies. There would be such side-splitting passages,’ he had urged Henry Lamb on 13 June 1907. But it was not for another fifteen years that he was seriously importuned by publishers. ‘I’ve been approached by another firm on the subject of my memoirs,’ he wrote to the publisher Hubert Alexander on 21 February 1923. The approaches multiplied, grew bolder; the delay lengthened, became confused. A synopsis – three-and-a-half sides of Eiffel Tower paper in fluent handwriting reaching forward to 1911 – was probably done before the end of 1923, but sent to no one; and another fifteen years slipped by before a contract was signed. The interval was full of speculations: the whispering of vast advances
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and extraordinary disclosures.

‘Other people’s writing has always interested me,’ runs the first sentence
of
Chiaroscuro.
He was surprisingly well-read – surprisingly because he was never
seen
with a book. At Alderney and Fryern visitors were made to feel it was somehow reprehensible to be caught in the act of book-reading. John himself read in bed. He devoured books voraciously, reading himself into oblivion, to escape the horrors of being alone. His library reflected the wide extent of his tastes – occultism, numerology, French novels, Russian classics, anthropology, anarchy, cabbala – and the ill-discipline with which he pursued them all.

He had long dreamed of writing. Privately he composed verse – ballads, sonnets, limericks – and was immoderately gratified when Dylan Thomas exhorted him to pack in painting for poetry. But he had also written for publication: first, with the encouragement of Scott Macfie, for the
Journal of the Gypsy Lore Society
;
then, with the approval of T. E. Lawrence, a preface for a J. D. Innes catalogue; some pieces for A. R. Orage’s
New Age
;
a few pages, under the guidance of Cecil Gray, about the composer ‘Peter Warlock’ (Philip Heseltine); and, with the help of T. W. Earp, eight articles on painting for
Vogue.
More recently, with Anthony Powell’s support, he had completed an essay on Ronald Firbank. He needed encouragement. ‘I have not a practised hand at writing & am quite aware of the howlers a novice is capable of,’
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he told Cecil Gray. In the spring of 1930 Jonathan Cape wrote to say that he ‘would be very proud to be the publisher’ of his reminiscences. Eight-and-a-half years later, in the autumn of 1938, John was able to assure him: ‘I have thought of a good opening – which was holding me up.’

Their contract was an engaging work of fantasy. John would deliver his completed manuscript by All Fools’ Day 1939 ‘or before’. The length was to be ‘at least 100,000 words’ and it should be ‘copiously illustrated’. The prospect excited everyone. ‘I believe this to be a big book on both sides of the water,’ enthused his publisher in the United States.
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Much correspondence crossed this water over the next twelve months from one publisher to the other and back: but from John, nothing. He had equipped himself with a literary agent
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to whom, on 2 May 1939, he expressed his appreciation of their dismay. Nevertheless ‘the idea of the book has developed and interests me more and more,’ he maintained. ‘…When I am quite myself again it will unroll itself without much difficulty and turn out a success.’ The war, seen by his publishers as a cause for acceleration, he saw as a fresh reason for delay. He continued distressingly to play the optimist. Already by January 1940 he had made ‘an important step forward in destroying what I have already written’, he promised Cape. In vain his agent would expound John’s method of allowing ‘his work to accumulate until everybody loses patience and subsequently complete it in an incredibly short time’. It was a case of ‘this year, next year,
sometime – ’ growled Cape.
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‘Each time I have seen him [John], he has told me how busy he is, painting portraits.’
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The publishers formally conceded defeat in the autumn of 1940, the fabulous contract expired and this first stage of negotiations was at an end.

But Jonathan Cape himself had not surrendered. ‘I have the strong conviction that John is a natural writer,’ he had told the United States publisher Little, Brown and Company. The book had been conceived; what it now needed was a team of midwives to nurse it into the world. First of these
aides-m
é
moire
was Cyril Connolly, who had recently launched his monthly review of literature and art,
Horizon.
In conversation with Connolly one day, John volunteered to write something for the review, and this led to an arrangement whereby Cape allowed Connolly to have, without fee, what amounted to serial rights in John’s autobiography. Between February 1941 and April 1949, John contributed eighteen instalments to
Horizon.
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He liked writing in short sections and, knowing how ‘a little food and drink [can] make things move along’, every time he had a few pages ready he would arrange an evening in London with Connolly, without whose support it is unlikely that the book would have been written. John’s letters are full of author-complaints. He seized upon air raids, black-outs, apple-tree accidents, electricity cuts, bouts of ‘Mongolian’ or ‘Korean’ flu, broken ribs, dislocated fingers, operations, thunderstorms – any narrow squeak or Act of God that made painting impracticable – to turn to ‘my literary responsibilities’. Over a decade of such setbacks he gradually edged forwards.

At the beginning of 1949 Jonathan Cape tiptoed back into the arena, and John was persuaded to reorganize his
Horizon
pieces into a book. He made heavy weather of this ‘colossal task’.
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‘I lack paper,’ he cried out. Secretaries were provided; he changed his agent and joined the Society of Authors. He was full of ideas, eager for advice (with which he sometimes lit his pipe). In place of Cyril Connolly, Jonathan Cape dispatched John Davenport, a friend of Dylan Thomas, to be his literary philosopher and the two of them ‘spent many pleasant days together at odd intervals’.
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As a way out of his difficulties Davenport proposed that John simply abandon the autobiography, and instead commission him to write a biography. But John reluctantly demurred. ‘I feel if anybody is to do it, it will have to be myself.’

Back in London, Cape was foaming with impatience. He began to petition some of John’s friends and, a bad blunder, girlfriends. Learning this, John fell into a passion. His publisher was excavating for ‘scurrility and scandal which I’m not able or willing to provide’. He would stand no nonsense. ‘I’ve done nothing drastic about Cape yet,’ he threatened. ‘…I would have to seek advice.’ To John Davenport he pointed out the terrible
lesson this had taught him against overfamiliarity with tradespeople. ‘I regret having been inveigled into getting on friendly terms with this business man… He had incidentally an eye on Mavis.’

In 1950 Cape sent his last ambassador to Fryern, the tenacious Daniel George. ‘My function was merely that of the tactful prodder, the reminder of promises, the suggester of subjects, the gentle persuader,’ Daniel George wrote.
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John’s writing technique, similar to his method of painting, depended upon short bursts and timeless revision. ‘I would receive from him two or three quarto sheets of small beautifully formed and regular script,’ Daniel George remembered. ‘…On one such sheet now before me are twenty-five lines, only seven of which are without some emendation. One line reads: “I am a devil for revision. I cannot write the simplest sentence without very soon thinking of a better one.” Here the words “very soon” have been changed to “at once”.’

John called it ‘putting my stuff in order’. Once a few pages had been typed, they were sent back to him, and after further copious corrections (‘I keep thinking of fresh things’) he would submit them for retyping. They were then returned to him and he would set about ‘improving certain recent additions and making a few new ones’.
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This process would jog on until the typescript was mislaid. ‘I am most unmethodical,’ John admitted, ‘and have been troubled too by a poltergeist which seizes sheets of writing from under my nose and hides them, often never to reappear.’
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It was Daniel George who released him from this predicament by inventing a conspiracy of forgetfulness. He ‘forgot’ to send the revised revisions back to John who forgot never having received them. It worked perfectly. After this John’s area for revision was restricted to the title, which he altered a dozen times before uniting everyone in opposition to his final decorative choice,
Chiaroscuro,
‘a forbidding mouthful for the timid book-buyer’.

The book was reviewed widely when it appeared in 1952. Lawrence Hay ward in the
Guardian
called John ‘a writer of genius’. Desmond MacCarthy, Sacheverell Sitwell and Henry Williamson also praised what Will Rothenstein had called the ‘splendidly baroque’ quality of his prose style.
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‘Augustus John is an exceptionally good writer; and upon this most reviewers have dilated, with a tendency to compare him with other painters who have written books,’ criticized Wyndham Lewis in the
Listener.
‘This is the obvious reaction, it would seem, when a painter takes to the pen: to see a man of that calling engaged in literary composition, affects people as if they had surprised a kangaroo, fountain-pen in hand, dashing off a note. The truth is that Augustus John is doubly endowed: he is a born writer, as he is a born painter...’
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These reviews were a measure of the affection in which John was now
held in the country – an affection that ignored the unhappy complications of his character. ‘What a pleasure it is to read this robust autobiography of a man who has achieved all he has desired from life,’ exclaimed Harold Nicolson in the
Observer.
To such devastating irony many readers were blind.
Chiaroscuro
presents John as an enigma. It gives a sense of his powerful personality and a feeling of great waste. It is ‘a tragic record’, in Quentin Bell’s words. John ‘had gained the whole world and lost his talent’. The atmosphere is of expanding fame and deepening loneliness, a general disgust, and a sardonic humour through which he gave that disgust expression. ‘A great character emerges, a giant covered with the dust of a falling world,’ wrote a reviewer in the
Twentieth Century.
‘…A Celtic melancholy underlies all: Chiaroscuro is an apt title.’

Tom Hopkinson in Britain and Geoffrey Grigson in the United States attacked the book in print; otherwise criticisms were voiced in private. One of the more severe critics was the man who, perhaps more than any others, had helped to get it written: Cyril Connolly. In Connolly’s view, despite the long years of preparation, John had not gone through enough agony. ‘For someone who was such a brilliant conversationalist he was terribly inhibited when he wrote… He would fill his writing with the most elaborate clichés. He couldn’t say “She was a pretty girl and I pinched her behind”. He would say: “The young lady’s looks were extremely personable and I had a strong temptation to register my satisfaction at her appearance by a slight pressure on the
derri
è
re.”
’
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Only in the opening pages, recalling his boyhood in Pembrokeshire, did John achieve sustained and imaginative narrative. The rest of the autobiography arranges itself into a scrapbook, brief brilliant moments and haphazardly plotted incidents with little reference to their sequence. Increasingly he relied on indistinct anecdotes relating the misfortunes of his friends and the loss of their women implicitly to him – traits that were to be amusingly parodied by Julian Maclaren-Ross.
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Sometimes he felt like writing ‘with less bloody diffidence and reserve’, but usually found he had hidden more than he revealed. In a passage which the editor, J. R. Ackerley, removed from Wyndham Lewis’s review in the
Listener
(20 March 1952), Lewis asked: ‘Why should there not be something in the way of a “Confession”? He informs us at the end of “Chiaroscuro” that he does not lay bare his heart, which, he adds, concerns no one but himself. I think he is wrong there, everyone would be delighted to look into his heart; and so great a heart as his is surely the concern of everybody.’ But John did not wish, he claimed, to ‘spoil other people’s fun’ later on. ‘Much of the portraiture in the book is sketchy and incomplete,’ he admitted to Dora Yates (10 March 1952). ‘Perhaps a kind of
shyness has often led me to conceal my true feelings or camouflage them under a show of bravura & high-spirits I was far from feeling.’

John’s preference for a combination of reverberating syllables to a single short word encumbers his prose, but does not conceal his genuine enjoyment of language. There are many passages of sudden beauty, of wit and penetrating irony: but being unattached to anything they do not contribute to a cumulative effect. Also: ‘There is too much facetiousness’, he told John Davenport, ‘…this is a form of evasion’. He had laboured long at these fragments, but never to connect them, and the result, he concluded, was ‘a bit crude and unatmospheric’. Contrasting Caitlin Thomas’s
Leftover Life to Kill
with
Chiaroscuro,
he wrote to Daniel George: ‘As a self-portrait it’s an absolute knock-out. Unlike me she cannot avoid the truth even at its ghastliest.’