Augustus John (49 page)

‘Pendulous Fate sounds many a varied note on my poor tympanum – my darkness and lights succeed one another with almost as much regularity as if the sun and the Planetary system controlled them; and the hours of
moonless
nights are long dismal unhallowed hours. My life is completely unsettled; I mean to say the circumstances of my existence are problematic; but my art, I believe I can say, does not cease to develop… I shall set about a composition soon – with a motive of action in it, controlling all – as in a Greek play.’
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Nothing could have been easier for Augustus, with his dexterity, than to follow with trivial variations the Post-Impressionists in Paris. But he already had enough influences to assimilate, and was not sure how to assimilate more. ‘I want to start something fresh and new,’ he told Will Rothenstein (April 1907). ‘I feel inclined to paint a nude in cadmium and indigo and orange. The “Indépendants” is effroyable – and yet one feels
sometimes these chaps have blundered on something alive without being able to master it.’

From the way in which he writes of pictures, Gauguin alone among near-contemporary French painters appears to inspire him.

‘I should like to work for a few years entirely “out of my head”, perhaps for ever. To paint women till their faces become enlarged to an idiotic inanimity – till they stand impassively, unquestionably, terrifyingly fecund – fetiches of brass with Polynesian eyes and dry imperative teeth and fitful craving of bowels that surge and smoke for sacrifice – of flesh and flowers. How delightful that sounds! Can you [Will Rothenstein] imagine the viridian vistas, can you hear the chanting in the flushing palm tree groves and the thumping of the great flat feet of ecstatic multitudes shining with the sacred oil. The “Ah Ah Ah” of the wild infant world?’

Primitive inspiration was not to be found in Paris. Parisian women were what Delacroix once described as ‘on stage’.
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There were those who would say that, by leaving Paris, Augustus turned his back on everything exciting that was happening in modern painting; that had he stayed he would have painted like Derain, who had something of the same panache. But he wanted to find somewhere uninvaded by the twentieth century, a place where the inhabitants still lived the life of their ancestors. He did not, however, plan to live in such a place, merely to spend a holiday there.

He set off in April, patrolling the north coast – ‘right across the top of France’, he reported to Will Rothenstein. Finally he came across what he was looking for: Equihen, a village of primitive fisherfolk not far from Boulogne. ‘The fish women are simply magnificent,’ he wrote to Dorelia. ‘I must get a studio or shed here soon and paint ’em – there’s money in it!’ It was good to get away from the ‘steam music, literary society, bugs and other embêtements’ of Paris. At Equihen one could see the
marins
getting the fish out of the sea and the
matelots
selling them – ‘and the women go about in wonderful groups. Just the stuff for me. They resemble a community that live on the river by Haverfordwest distinct from their neighbours – in a village called Langum. The women go all over Pembrokeshire selling oysters in a peculiar costume and the men are supposed to mind the babies.’

To this ‘desolate little place’
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in France he summoned Dorelia and the four babies, Pyramus and Romilly, Edwin and Henry, since there were ‘nice soft sand dunes’ for them to crawl on. After they had settled in, he proposed sending for Ida’s other sons. ‘I am working pretty hard,’ he assured Will Rothenstein, ‘now and then. Having a little studio here is a boon. I like the wenches here and the clothes they wear and I wish I
had more money to spend on them… Pyramus grows more lyrically beautiful every day. He is like a little divine phrase from Shelley or Wordsworth. He is more flower-like and “meaningless” than any child I know. He is the incarnation of the daisy. I think I must try to do a “Mother and Child” of him and Dorelia.’

The Mother was now trying to bring about a miscarriage and for much of the time feeling too ill to sit to Augustus. Once more he experienced ‘those submarine days when one begins to wonder what manner of beings live above the air’.
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The frustration that had consumed him at Ste-Honorine began again to smoulder. ‘Meet me at Boulogne next Saturday will you?’ he suddenly invited Alick Schepeler. But she hurried north again. ‘As to my work, I haven’t got at it really,’ he admitted to Henry Lamb (13 June 1907). ‘But my “head” still yields enchanting suggestions. In fact call it what you will it is my best friend, tho’ I have other loyal parts. Sometimes I feel myself as if slowly and surely settling down on some scrap heap.’

At this critical moment an invitation arrived from Lady Gregory. She asked him to come over to Ireland, stay with her at Coole, and do a portrait of her other guest that summer, W. B. Yeats. Augustus hesitated. ‘It may be that I shall draw Yeats’ portrait,’ he wrote to Alick Schepeler, ‘ – I am so hard up.’

‘Sin openly and scandalize the world.’

W. B. Yeats to John Quinn, describing Augustus John’s moral code

The invitation to Coole Park originated from Lady Gregory’s son, the artist Robert Gregory, at whose marriage Augustus had been best man. He had been helpful to Gregory over his work while in London, and this invitation was in the nature of a repayment. Appropriately, it was a business proposition. Yeats was then revising his collected works in preparation for A. H. Bullen’s edition the following year. This edition was to contain a portrait by some contemporary artist. Yeats had wanted Charles Shannon to do an etching for the frontispiece, but ‘Shannon was busy when I was in London,’ he explained to the American art patron John Quinn (4 October 1907), ‘and the collected edition was being pushed on so quickly that I found I couldn’t wait for him.’ It was then that Robert Gregory
put forward Augustus’s name, to which Yeats nervously agreed: ‘I don’t know what John will make of me.’

Augustus, too, was nervous – financially, ‘I should like very much to visit you – and perhaps Yeats’s drawing would make it possible,’ he wrote from Equihen to Robert Gregory, ‘but just now it is difficult for me. How much will the publishers pay, do you think? I would be glad to do the drawing. But as you see I am a long way off… ’ In reply, Lady Gregory sent him a fee of eighteen pounds in advance (equivalent to £875 in 1996), plus a suggestion that should he wish to draw some of the family, they might buy some of his drawings. The deal thus tentatively struck, Augustus sailed for Galway.

He arrived at Lady Gregory’s big plain house in September, a flamboyant youth in a blue jersey and earrings, ‘with all his luggage hanging from one finger’. Though he had met Yeats at the Nettleships’ and at the Rothensteins’, he had never studied him as a subject. ‘Yeats, slightly bowed and with an air of abstraction, walked in the garden every morning with Augusta Gregory, discussing literary matters,’ he remembered. It was as an embodiment of Celtic poetry that Yeats presented himself to Augustus. The flat dense colour areas of the oil portrait,
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done as a preliminary study for the etching, suggest some comparison with Gauguin; and the design and colour are strong. Yeats, dressed in a white shirt and black smock, wears a loose cravat tied in a bow at the neck. Against the dark mass of his clothes and hair, the flesh-tones are wonderfully pale – a whitish-yellow; and this consumptive complexion with its dreamy expression is enhanced by a brilliant backcloth of emblematic viridian that isolates and freezes the poet by its density and airlessness. It is a romantic portrait: this is what Augustus did best. For a moment Yeats fulfilled his ideal of a poet, and this ideal has been beautifully caught.

Apart from the oil portrait, Augustus did numerous other studies
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from which to work up his etching for the frontispiece. ‘I felt rather a martyr going to him [Augustus],’ Yeats had reported to John Quinn (4 October 1907). ‘The students consider him the greatest living draughtsman, the only modern who draws like an old master. But he makes everybody perfectly hideous, beautiful according to his own standard. He exaggerates every little hill and hollow of the face till one looks a gipsy, grown old in wickedness and hardship. If one looked like any of his pictures the country women would take clean clothes off the hedges when one passed as they do at the sight of a tinker.’

Having glimpsed his studies with pen and brush, Yeats was certain at this stage that Augustus’s ‘best work is etching, he is certainly a great etcher with a savage imagination.’ Shortly afterwards, to his horror, the etching arrived. It made him, he complained to Quinn, ‘a sheer tinker,
drunken, unpleasant and disreputable, but full of wisdom, a melancholy English Bohemian, capable of anything, except living joyously on the surface.’

Part of the trouble lay with the reactions of Lady Gregory and of Annie Horniman, who was financing the Bullen edition. ‘I send one of the John etchings,’ Yeats wrote to Lady Gregory. ‘I admire it very much as an etching & shall hang it on my wall with joy but it is of course a translation of me into tinker language. I showed it to Miss Horniman… & she flew into a rage over it. If she could afford it she would buy up the plate and destroy it.’

Lady Gregory agreed with Annie Horniman. The etching was a horror. If it showed a tinker, then it was a tinker in the dock for chicken stealing. ‘John has done a terrible etching of Yeats,’ she had written to Quinn (22 December 1907). ‘It won’t do for the book but he may do another, he promised to do two or three. Meanwhile I am trying to get Shannon to draw him. It is rather heartbreaking about John’s for he did so many studies of him here, and took so much of his time… But if they are not like Yeats, and are like a tinker in the dock, or a charwoman at a prayer meeting they and the plate shall go into the fire.’

Yeats, swinging this way and that, drifted into a complex panic. He could not use John’s ‘melancholy desperado’ as the sole portrait. ‘I confess I shrink before the John thing,’ he told Florence Farr. But what should he say to John? ‘I don’t know what to write to John,’ he confided to Lady Gregory, ‘ – whatever I say he will think I want to be flattered.’ Eventually he wrote praising the etching but telling him that he expected a violent letter about it from his publisher – who indeed did refuse it in violent language.

Augustus seems to have remained philosophical – at any rate his confidence was unshaken. ‘Lady Gregory, much as I love and admire her, has her eye still clouded a little by the visual enthusiasms of her youth and cannot be expected to
see
the merits of my point of view,’ he explained to Alick Schepeler, ‘tho’ her intelligence assures her of their existence. Painting Yeats is becoming quite a habit. He has a natural and sentimental prejudice in favour of the W. B. Yeats he and other people have been accustomed to see and imagine for so many years. He is now 44 and a robust, virile and humorous personality (while still the poet of course). I cannot see in him any definite resemblance to the youthful Shelley in a lace collar. To my mind he is far more interesting as he is, as maturity is more interesting than immaturity.’

It was almost impossible for any artist to see Yeats as Lady Gregory saw him. If Augustus had portrayed him in her eyes as an ugly ruffian, Shannon, by an unlucky chance, was to make him look damnably like
John Keats; Jack Yeats, of course, could only see him through a mist of domestic emotion; Mancini turned him into an Italian bandit; Sargent into a dream creature. And so on. Yeats flirted with the idea (‘it will be fine sport’) of introducing the lot of them into his collected works, one after the other, ‘and I shall write an essay on them and describe them as all the different personages that I have dreamt of being but never had the time for. I shall head it with this quotation from the conversation of Wordsworth: – “No, that is not Mr Wordsworth, the poet, that is Mr Wordsworth, the Chancellor of the Exchequer”.’

In Bullen’s edition a mild Sargent drawing took the place of Augustus’s etching. But in subsequent editions it is most often one or other of Augustus’s portraits that have been chosen as the frontispiece.
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‘I enclose a photograph of a portrait painted by Augustus John in 1907,’ Yeats wrote to Harold Macmillan on 2 October 1933; ‘I suggest it as a frontispiece of my forthcoming volume of
Collected Poems…
John is, I think, more admired by the readers of books today than Sargent.’

Yeats was never really so opposed to Augustus’s interpretation as Lady Gregory. This first etching had been a shock, but the more he looked at all the etchings and drawings and the portrait in oils, the more convinced he had become of their merit. On leaving Ireland he wrote to Quinn (7 January 1908): ‘I would like to show you Augustus John’s portrait of me. A beautiful etching, and I understand what he means in it, and admire the meaning, but it is useless for my social purpose.’ Years later he wrote: ‘Always particular about my clothes, never dissipated, never unshaven except during illness, I saw myself there an unshaven, drunken bar-tender. And then I began to feel John had found something that he liked in me, something closer than character, and by that very transformation made it visible. He found Anglo-Irish solitude, a solitude I have made for myself, an outlawed solitude.’

Though fearful of his ‘savage imagination’, Yeats was taken with Augustus. His attitude, like Augustus’s towards him, mingled romance with an ironic perception of character.

‘He is himself a delight,’ Yeats told Quinn (4 October 1907), ‘the most innocent, wicked man I have ever met. He wears earrings, his hair down to his shoulders, a green velvet collar and had two wives who lived together in perfect harmony and nursed each other’s children on their
knees till about six months ago when one of them bolted and the other died. Since then he has followed the lady who bolted and he and she are gathering the scattered families. Of course, nobody round Coole knew anything of these facts. I lived in daily terror of some benevolent gossip carrying on conversation with him like this,