Augustus John (138 page)

63
  John to Quinn, 13 August 1915. In
The Arms of Time. A Memoir
(1979), pp. 63–72, her son Rupert Hart-Davis wrote, ‘the two people who most often advised her to give up alcohol altogether were John and her brother Duff, two of the most persistent drinkers of their time.’ John also introduced her to Wyndham Lewis with whom, ‘her heart as always too soon made glad’, she had an affair. John, too, was fascinated by her and ‘after his fashion, loved her. She thought him a genius.’ He drew several pencil heads of her and of her two children, Deirdre and Rupert, for whom he recommended John Hope-Johnstone as a holiday tutor. ‘He challenged all comers to box with him,’ Rupert Hart-Davis remembered, ‘and the milkman, who was a much better performer, repeatedly knocked him down, saying “Sorry, sir” each time.’

64
  According to Ezra Pound, this verse sprang from ‘the Castalian fount of the Chenil’. In a letter to Wyndham Lewis (13 January 1918) Pound noted: ‘(Authorship unrecognised, I first heard it in 1909). It is emphatically NOT my own, I believe it to have come from an elder generation.’

65
  In the last week of January 1915. Lamb had been in Guy’s Hospital for an operation. ‘I have written to Dodo to know if she can pick me up… It all depends on whether J[ohn] will be gone: his temper not being considered good enough to stand the strain of a visit from me,’ Lamb had explained to Lytton Strachey (15 January 1915). After his visit, he wrote (31 January 1915): ‘They have been discussing the moral effects of being in hospital, saying that one’s sensitiveness is apt to become magnified. I wonder if that is the reason why I was miserable at Parkstone.’

66
  Dorelia to Lytton Strachey, 13 September 1916.

67
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (31 August 1914). NLW MS 22777D fols. 48–9.

68
  Dorelia to Lytton Strachey, 10 May 1916.

69
  John to Quinn, 26 January 1914. See also John’s Foreword to Cecil Gray’s
Peter Warlock, A Memoir of Philip Heseltine
(1934), pp. 11–12.

70
  John to Evan Morgan (Lord Tredegar) n.d.

71
  Frida Strindberg to John n.d. NLW MS 22785D fols. 150–3.

In
Chiaroscuro
John records: ‘I received a letter from her, written on the ship. It was a noble epistle. In it I was absolved from all blame: all charges, all imputations were withdrawn: she alone had been at fault from the beginning: though this wasn’t true, I was invested with a kind of halo, quite unnecessarily. I wish I had kept this letter; it might serve me in an emergency.’ The letter, written from the RMS
Campania,
has since come to light. In it she writes: ‘The chief fault others had, who interfered with lies and mischief. The rest, I take it, was my fault – and therefore I stretch out my heart in farewell… You are the finest man I met in this world, dear John – and you’ll ever be to me what the Sun is, and the Sea around me, and the immortal beauty of nature. Therefore if ever you think of me, do it without bitterness and stripe
[sic]
me of all the ugliness that events have put on me and which is not in my heart… Goodbye John. I don’t know whether you know how awfully good at the bottom of your heart you are –
I
know. And that is why I write this to you – Frida Strindberg.’

72
  See
Finishing Touches,
pp. 84–5.

73
  ‘To the Eiffel Tower Restaurant’, in
Sublunary,
pp. 93–5.

74
  Constantine FitzGibbon
The Life of Dylan Thomas
(1968), p. 163.

75
  
Ibid., loc. cit.

76
  Charles Wheeler
High Relief
(1968), p. 31.

77
  Letter from Dorothy Brett to the author, 7 August 1968.

78
  
See
Carrington, Letters and Extracts from her Diaries
(ed. David Garnett 1970), pp. 74–5, where this letter is incorrectly dated 25 July 1917.

79
  And repeated on 29 July at the Lyric Theatre. It had been organized in conjunction with the Ladies Auxiliaries Committee of the Young Men’s Christian Association. See the Enthoven Collection at the Victoria and Albert Theatre Museum, Covent Garden.

80
  See Appendix Five.

81
  Epstein to Quinn, 12 August 1914.

82
  Epstein to Quinn, 4 September 1914.

83
  
Epstein. An Autobiography
(1955), p. 89.

84
  Epstein to Qµinn, 20 July 1917.

85
  See, for example,
Sunday Herald
(10 June 1917).

86
  Information from Sir Sacheverell Sitwell. Later in life, while not seeing much of each other, Epstein and John remained friendly. Kathleen Epstein remembered that they met once in a street and, in answer to a question, Epstein said he was doing good work but could not sell it and was very poor. John at once took out a chequebook and wrote him a cheque ‘which we will never refer to again’. This was in the 1930s.

87
  
Chiaroscuro
p. 125.

88
  Sir Herbert A. Barker
Leaves from My Life
(1927), pp. 263–5.

89
  By way of payment John offered to ‘do a head’ of Barker. ‘If you will rattle my bones, I should be more than repaid!’ This portrait, the first of two painted during the war, is now in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Barker, who often slept during the sittings, nevertheless observed: ‘It was a wonderful thing to watch John at work – to note his interest and utter absorption in what he was doing… The genius of the born craftsman was apparent in every look and movement. He had a habit when most wrapped up in some master-stroke or final touch of running backwards some feet from the canvas with his critical eyes bent upon the painting. Once when doing this he tripped and almost fell heavily over the stove near by.’ The portrait used to hang in Barker’s waiting-room to encourage the patients. Variously described as ‘Satanic’ or like ‘a Venetian Doge’, it was, Barker bravely maintained, one of John’s ‘best male portraits’: adding ‘I look upon John as one of the greatest portrait painters who has ever lived.’ John himself described the painting, in a letter to Hope-Johnstone, as ‘just like him, stuffy and good’. Early in March 1932 John saw Barker again, this time in Jersey. ‘You have always done me good, and I feel it is high time I put myself in your hands again,’ he had written (17 September 1931). During this visit he began a third portrait. See Reginald Pound
Harley Street
(1967), pp. 80, 123–4. Also unpublished correspondence at the Royal College of Surgeons.

90
  The phrase is Malcolm Easton’s. See his
The Art of Augustus John
(1974).

91
  
The Times
(27 November 1917).

92
  Osbert Sitwell
Great Morning!
(1948), p. 248.

93
  In the
Burlington Magazine
(April 1916). See also his article for February 1916 on the New English Art Club.

94
  
Burlington Magazine
(December 1940), p. 28.

95
  John to Evan Morgan, December 1914.

96
  December 1914.

97
  ‘You are too much like the popular idea of an angel!’ John wrote to her (5 October 1917), ‘(not
my
idea – which is of course the traditional one).’ This portrait (oil 34 by 25 inches) was bought in 1933 from Arthur Tooth and Sons for £1,400 (equivalent to £44,500 in 1996) by the Art Gallery of Ontario. ‘At the time of purchase we were requested to hang it as
Portrait of a Lady in Black
,’ the Curator wrote, ‘and not refer to the fact that it was a portrait of Lady Cynthia.’ In 1968 it was reproduced as the frontispiece to Cynthia Asquith’s
Diaries.

98
  
In
Chiaroscuro
John reveals that Lawrence, despite his eagerness to have Cynthia Asquith portrayed disagreeably, protested that he himself was ‘too ugly’ to be painted. ‘I met D. H. Lawrence in the flesh only once,’ John wrote, and adds that Cynthia Asquith ‘treated us to a box at the Opera that evening’. In fact he and Lawrence met twice, the visit to
Aida
taking place twelve days later, on 13 November – a meeting Cynthia Asquith describes in
Haply I May Remember
and Lawrence in
Aaron’s Rod.

Of John’s portrait Lawrence remarked that it had achieved a certain beauty and had ‘courage’. In 1929, when Lawrence’s pictures were seized from the Warren Gallery and a summons issued against him, John added his name to the petition in Lawrence’s support and stated that he was prepared, if it came to trial, to go into the witness box.

99
  John’s letters to Grant Richards are in the University of Illinois Library, Urbana.

100
  John to Campbell Dodgson, 11 September 1917. Imperial War Museum, London.

101
  NLW MS 218180 fol. 125.

102
  Arthur Symons to Quinn, 22 November 1917.

103
  Lytton Strachey to Clive Bell, 4 December 1917.

104
  William Orpen to William Rothenstein, 23 February 1918.

105
  John to Tonks, 21 February 1918. The Library, the University of Texas at Austin.

106
  John to Lady Cynthia Asquith, 5 October 1917.

107
  John to Alick Schepeler, 2 February 1918.

108
  D. H. Lawrence to Cynthia Asquith, 2 November 1917.
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence
Volume III
1916–21
(ed. James T. Boulton and Andrew Robertson 1984), p. 176.

109
  John to Evan Morgan, 27 October (1915).

110
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d.

111
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d.

112
  
The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield
Volume I
1903–7
(ed. Vincent O’Sullivan and Margaret Scott 1984), pp. 316–17.

113
  From the Dorothy Brett Papers, Department of English, University of Cincinnati, Ohio.

114
  John to Quinn, 13 December 1918.

115
  John to Evan Morgan, 1 March 1918.

116
  John to Arthur Symons, 22 February 1918.

117
  
Blasting and Bombardiering. An Autobiography 1914–26
(1927), p. 198.

118
  Augustus to Dorelia, 3 February 1918.

119
  ‘Lord Beaverbrook Entertains’ was intended to occupy pages 79–81 of
Finishing Touches
but, for reasons of libel, was dropped at proof stage and the chapter ‘Gwendolen John’ was substituted. This was done by Daniel George, of Jonathan Cape, after John’s death. It was subsequently published in the amalgamated
Autobiography
(1975), pp. 369–71.

120
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (February-March 1918). NLW MS 22778D fols. 6–9.

121
  John to Gogarty, 24 July 1918. This correspondence is at Bucknell University.

122
  John to Cynthia Asquith, (April) 1918.

123
  Augustus to Gwen John, 18 November 1918. NLW MS 22305D fols. 122–4.

124
  
The Times,
4 January 1919, ‘War Story in Pictures – Canadian Exhibition at the Royal Academy’.

John Singer Sargent was less impressed. ‘I have just come from the Canadian Exhibition, where there is a hideous post-impressionist picture, of which mine [‘Gassed’] cannot be accused of being a crib,’ he wrote to Evan Charteris. ‘Augustus John has a canvas forty feet long done in his free and
script style, but without beauty of composition. I was afraid I should be depressed by seeing something in it that would make me feel that my picture is conventional, academic and boring – whereas.’ But William Rothenstein thought it ‘superb’. See his
Men and Memories
Volume II p. 350.

125
  P. G. Konody ‘The Canadian War Memorials’
Colour
(September 1918). See also P. G. Konody
Art and War
(1919). John’s decoration, eventually called ‘The Canadians opposite Lens’, is now in the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, together with four compositional studies for the picture, numerous solid drawings of soldiers, and some oils done in thick juicy textures.

126
  John to Cynthia Asquith, 24 July (1919).

127
  ‘My dear Comrade,’ Beaverbrook wrote to John on 26 August 1959, ‘…I was quite willing to build a Gallery in Ottawa but the Canadians did not have a suitable site and also there seemed little enthusiasm for the project.

‘Now there is a beautiful Art Gallery by the River in Fredericton built by me and in it you will find two John drawings and two John paintings with a third on the way.

‘How I wish that big picture might be handed over to us for exhibition there.’

Among those pictures now at the Beaverbrook Gallery, New Brunswick, is a small version (oil on canvas 14½ by 48 inches) of his large war picture, entitled ‘Canadians at Lieven Castle’.

128
  Now in the Imperial War Museum, London. Oil on canvas, 93½ by 57 inches.

129
  Augustus to Gwen John, 18 November 1918. NLW MS 22305D fols. 122–4.

130
  Keith Clements
Henry Lamb
(1985), p. 50.

131
  Richard Shone
Bloomsbury Portraits
(1993), p. 45.

132
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (December 1917). NLW MS 22777D fols. 148–9.

133
  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt, 22 November 1917. NLW MS 21468 fols. 109–10.

134
  Augustus to Gwen John, 18 November 1918. NLW MS 22305D fols. 122–4.

135
  Augustus to Dorelia n.d. (mid-December 1917). NLW MS 22777D fols. 148–9.

136
  
Ibid.

137
  Augustus to Gwen John, 18 November 1918. NLW MS 22305D fols. 122–4.

138
  Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt (September-October 1918). NLW MS 21468D fols. 121–2.

139
  Augustus to Gwen John, 20 August 1919, 17 September 1919. NLW MS 22305D fols. 126–7.