Augustus John (109 page)

As soon as
Chiaroscuro
was published he started ‘writing on the sly’
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a second series of fragments. ‘I’ll get on with the next with renewed energy,’ he promised Caspar. John Lehmann, editor of the
London Magazine,
and Leonard Russell at the
Sunday Times
assisted one section or another into print, and ‘Book-lined Dan’, as he now called Daniel George, continued with him to the end. As with
Chiaroscuro,
there are good pages.
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But generally this second volume is scrappier than its predecessor. John had become so ‘literary’ that he had lost the innocent style. Compared to his paintings, simple and primitive at their best, the deviousness of this writing is extraordinary. In the book he focused his mind retrospectively on the actual world which, in these last years, held for him a lessening interest. ‘My second book languishes,’ he reported to John Davenport. It was uphill work. In almost ten years he completed a hundred and ten pages. Early in 1960 Jonathan Cape died, but his partner wrote to assure John that the company’s policy and plans remained unaltered. So did John’s until his own death eighteen months later. Not until 1964 was this doubly posthumous work published.

There could be no amendments this time to the title, which pointed to what for so many years had troubled him most:
Finishing Touches.

*

Gwen’s will surprised everyone. ‘It could hardly have been more succinct,’ Augustus remarked. She left a small legacy to Thornton, and made her nephew Edwin her heir and executor. ‘Our meetings were few and far between & more often than not my communications by letter remained unanswered,’ Edwin had told his brother Henry early in the 1930s. The reason she ‘shunned my society’, he explained, was that ‘I indulged in the horrible and degrading pursuit of boxing.’
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But by the mid-1930s Edwin was no longer ‘Teddy John of Chelsea’,
the hefty humorous fellow whom Augustus had so much liked. He had taken up painting instead of boxing, and gone to live in Paris for three years with his wife and small son. Gwen was still rather suspicious of him. When she had told him that she believed Georges Rouault to be ‘the greatest painter of our day’,
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it seemed to her that he had given a contemptuous snigger – though later, having perhaps heard Rouault praised by others, he volunteered that at the exhibitions Rouault put everyone else in the shade. Coming up with her opinions as if they were his own discoveries was merely the awkward process of his education. By the time he left Paris in 1938, he had picked up a good deal of artistic knowledge. The following year, when she died, he was still only thirty-three.

Edwin went over to France in September 1939 to wind up Gwen’s estate. ‘I retrieved a mass of beautiful drawings in various mediums, pencil, gouache, water colour, charcoal, etc.,’
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he wrote to Maynard Walker, a gallery owner in New York. Augustus was ‘deeply impressed’
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by these pictures when Edwin brought them to England. A number of galleries wanted to show Gwen’s work, and the Matthiesen Gallery in London was chosen to represent her estate. In 1940 Matthiesen held an exhibition of her paintings and drawings at the Wildenstein Gallery in Bond Street. ‘I am flummoxed by their beauty,’
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wrote Augustus, who offered to pay for the mounting and framing of the pictures. Because of the war it was impossible to show more of her work for another half-dozen years. The easy beginnings were now over and difficulties began to accumulate.

During the war Augustus and Edwin got terribly on each other’s nerves. ‘What’s eating you?’ Augustus demanded. Edwin was vexed by the feeling that his father treated him ‘like muck’ because he was a ‘miserable private’ in the Military Police. ‘Come off it!’ Augustus exclaimed. But it was true that he had always felt the police to be his natural enemies, and hated thinking of his son among them. ‘It is an impossible situation,’ he protested. ‘…The Police is hardly the correct service for an old Collégien de Normandie and Pooleyite.’
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But it was no joking matter for Edwin. He attributed his difficulties to the carelessness Augustus had lavished over his education. ‘Forget it!’ Augustus commanded. When Edwin somewhat unrealistically asked his father to ‘pull some strings’ on his behalf with General Montgomery during one of their portrait sittings, Augustus bluntly answered: ‘I did mention your case [to Monty] but failed to interest him.’
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They could not avoid paining each other. Though they tried to make peace, spending ‘some precious beer-time’ together in pubs that had escaped the Blitz and swapping useful wartime tips (‘Bird’s Custard
Powder is the best lubricant’), provocation and insult were as natural as breathing to them. Both suffered from ‘neurotic inversion’, Augustus diagnosed after reading a book by the Russian emigré philosopher Nicholai Berdyaev. ‘It’s a pretty prevalent complaint among people with over delicate sensibilities,’ he explained.
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Edwin could no more escape this complaint than he could escape being Augustus’s son – indeed they were virtually the same thing. Throughout their long correspondence, he tried calling his father ‘Augustus’, but almost always it came back to ‘Dear Daddy’.

After the war their battle centred itself on Gwen’s affairs. The struggle as to who could serve her reputation the better reached deep into them, and was aggravated by legal complexities. Edwin, as the executor and chief legatee, was in authority; which is to say he occupied the father’s role – he even had the same name as Augustus’s father. Augustus himself felt an instinctive protectiveness towards Gwen arising from their childhood days together. In 1946 Edwin gave Matthiesen permission to hold a large memorial exhibition of Gwen’s paintings and drawings in London, and Augustus (who had written an article on his sister for the
Burlington Magazine
in 1942) agreed to contribute a foreword to the catalogue. ‘I don’t fancy strangers writing about her somehow,’ he told Edwin. ‘As I blame myself continually for having even appeared to be unkind to her at times, the task seems doubly fitting.’
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His unkindness now turned towards Edwin, and he took offence at the Matthiesen catalogue for which he had eventually ‘coughed up’ an introduction. ‘While this fiasco has been arranged,’ he chided Edwin, ‘I presume you have been conspicuously absent in your mousehole.’
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He needed to make an imaginative act of reconciliation with Gwen, and proposed publishing a memoir of her. ‘I am prepared to do this myself,’ he announced to Edwin at the end of November 1946, ‘being the sole person living competent to do so. If there were anyone else equally or better equipped I would gladly retire as writing is a great labour.’
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Edwin appeared anxious to relieve Augustus of this great labour. But the suggestion that Romilly’s wife publish a memoir of Gwen infuriated him; while a more interesting proposition for a volume by Wyndham Lewis about both Gwen and Augustus came to nothing. It seemed to Augustus that his son was continually frustrating the act of atonement he wished to make with Gwen. ‘I am perplexed to know what it is that is expected of me,’ Edwin protested. In fact they were both profoundly perplexed. Whatever they did ended up with ‘brickbats’, and though the ‘door to conciliation is never closed’,
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neither of them could walk through it. It was acutely distressing. Sarcasm had become their form of intimacy, and like a poison it paralysed them.

So, through a fog of pomposity, father and son went on exchanging brickbats, both of them perpetually outraged by the misery of it all. ‘Obviously you have completely misunderstood my letter… If I have failed to get the correct meaning of your letter you have equally misunderstood mine… I had no idea that my last communication, re the book, was going to arouse so foul an exhibition of bad taste (and worse). It is an unpleasant surprise… Your reasoning faculties are still in eclipse… Is your presence really necessary?… my advice is, Keep away… Let us call it a day then… One has, so far as possible, to protect one’s peace of mind.’
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Augustus finally gave up his idea of writing a memoir of Gwen after Winifred appealed to him to give it up. ‘There is no one in the world who would be more averse to having their private life made public,’ she wrote in 1956. ‘Gwen would wish to be forgotten. I think I knew her better than anyone else ever did, and now I know this to be true. Thornton feels the same way.’
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Later scholarship has shown up factual errors in the pages about Gwen that appear in
Chiaroscuro
and
Finishing Touches.
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But these glimpses from their shared attic in Tenby and rooms in London, his oblique references to her passions at the Slade and in France, the clues about her nature scattered through notes and letters which he quotes, and his celebration of the talent she so methodically disciplined, are illuminated by genuine understanding and happiness. ‘Few on meeting this retiring person in black, with her tiny hands and feet, a soft, almost inaudible voice, and delicate Pembrokeshire accent, would have guessed that here was the greatest woman artist of her age, or, as I think, of any other.’
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‘Our late Victory has left us with a headache, and the Peace we are enjoying is too much like the morning after a debauch.’

Augustus John, ‘Frontiers’,
Delphic Review
(Winter 1946)

For John, the war had been a winter, long, dark, ‘immobilizing me for a devil of a time’. Six years: then all at once ‘a whiff of spring in the air, a gleam of blue sky… renewal of hope and a promise of resurrection’.
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It was impossible not to feel some tremor of optimism: ‘the age-old fight for liberty can recommence.’ Though the world had been spoilt ‘there must be some nice spots left.’
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He was still able-bodied – it was time to
be on the move again. ‘We sometimes refer to St-Rémy,’ John wrote to his son Edwin, ‘and, in monosyllables, wonder if we might venture there with car.’ It was not until the late summer of 1946 that he came again to the little
mas
‘au ras des Alpilles’.

He had raced away in 1939, after much anguish and delay. ‘I think of it as a shipwreck, this journey,’ Van Gogh had written to his brother Theo on leaving St-Rémy fifty years earlier. ‘Well, we cannot do what we like, nor what we ought to do, either.’ That was very much how John felt at the beginning of the war. ‘Il regarda au mur les toiles qu’il laissait inachevées,’ his neighbour Marie Mauron remembered, ‘les meubles qui avaient charmé sa vie provençale de leur simplicité de bon aloi, les beaux fruits de sa table et de ses “natures mortes”, ses joies et ses regrets… Sur quoi, Dorelia et lui, émus et tristes mais le cachant sous un pâle sourire, nous laissèrent les clés de leur mas pour d’éventuels réfugiés, amis ou non, qui ne manquèrent pas, et de l’argent pour payer le loger, chaque année, jusqu’à leur retour.’
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Seven years later they collected their keys. St-Rémy had been a place of no military importance and the damage was not spectacular. Yet ‘everything and everybody looked shabbier than usual,’ John noted.
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The
mas
had been broken into and a number of his canvases carried off: one of a local girl – ‘a woman at St-Rémy I simply can’t forget’ – he missed keenly. French feeding wasn’t what it had been and the wine seemed to have gone off. But in the evening, at the Café des Variétés, he could still obtain that peculiar equilibrium of spirit and body he described as ‘detachment-in-intimacy’. The conversation whirled around him, the accordion played, and sometimes he was rewarded ‘by the apparition of a face or part of a face, a gesture or conjunction of forms which I recognize as belonging to a more real and harmonious world than that to which we are accustomed’.
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To fit together these gestures and faces so that they came to reveal a harmony below the discord of our lives – that was still John’s aim. ‘I began a landscape to-day which seemed impossible,’ he wrote to Wyndham Lewis in October. ‘At any rate I will avoid the
violence
of the usual meridional painter. In reality the pays est très doux.’ For two months he went on painting out of doors, and the next year he painted in Cornwall. Then in the summer of 1950, in his seventy-third year, he returned to St-Rémy, tried again, ‘and I despair of landscape painting’.
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That summer, they gave up the lease of the Mas de Galeron. After this there was little point in travelling far. Each summer they would prepare for a journey west or south; the suitcases stood ready but the way was barred by unfinished pictures; autumn came, the air grew chill, and they began unpacking.

There seemed so little time. John could seldom bear to leave the illusory
lands he was striving to discover in his studio; for the actual world had little to give him now. ‘After the Hitler war he seemed a ghost of himself,’ Hugh Gordon Proteus remembered. He moved about it uncertainly. The writer William Empson recalled a last meeting with him in the 1950s.

‘I came alone into a pub just south of Charlotte St, very near the Fitzroy Tavern but never so famous, and found it empty except for John looking magnificent but like a ghost, white faced and white haired… it was very long after he had made the district famous, and I had not expected to see anyone I knew. “Why do you come here?” I said, after ordering myself a drink. “Why do you?” he said with equal surliness, and there the matter dropped. I had realized at once that he was haunting the place, but not that I was behaving like a ghost too. It felt like promotion...’
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For John, as for Norman Mailer, the fifties was ‘one of the worst decades in the history of man’. Industrial corrosion seemed to have attacked everything in which he once took pleasure. ‘Our civilization grows more and more to resemble a mixture of a concentration and a Butlin camp,’ he wrote to Cyril Connolly.
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Even the public houses were being made hideous by ‘manifestations of modern domestic technology’. Young girls walked about dressed like the Queen Mother. The food, the rationing and economic restrictions all contributed to ‘the sense of futility and boredom which, together with general restlessness and unease, marks the end of an epoch’.
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