Augustus John (5 page)

For the first time I was able to examine holographs the contents of which had previously been given to me as copies. For example, there was the single long letter to Gwen John from the painter with whom Dorelia had eloped to Bruges in 1904.
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His first name was Leonard and his family name (indicated by another piece of correspondence) began with the letter B. Looking at the written copy I was given in the early 1970s, it had seemed to me that his address had been shortened to ‘kplaas 5’. So I
had gone to Bruges, found the only ‘plaats’ or square beginning with the letter K and deduced that Leonard and Dorelia were living in a house belonging to Lodewyck Van den Broucke and his wife Leonie (née Huys). The records that might have revealed their son’s name had been destroyed, but I surmised that he might have been named after his mother and was therefore Leonard Broucke. Thus he stands as a hypothesis in my footnote and more definitively in the index.

But when Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan came to examine the holograph, she saw that a corner of the letter had been torn and that ‘kplaas 5’ or ‘kplaats 5’ was not the whole address. It was now a matter of searching for a plaats the previous syllable of which ended with a k. There were three such addresses in Bruges: Jan van Eyckplaats 5, for which the records were destroyed by fire in the 1940s; Memlinckplaats 5 (now Woensdagmarkt) which was a convent occupied by five nuns; and Parkplaats 5 which had no identifiable occupants. So in this edition of my biography Leonard fades away more deeply unremembered, which is aesthetically fitting if bibliographically unsatisfactory. ‘It would be ironical if a pile of Leonard’s paintings were one day discovered in a barn and found to be great masterpieces!’ Romilly John had written to me. Unfortunately I have been unable to find any artist of the right period and nationality with such a name and initial. So Romilly’s discovery remains to be made.

Altogether I worked for some eighty hours in the Department of Manuscripts and Records at Aberystwyth quarrying out new material. There also turned out to be John correspondence I had not seen first time round at the Royal Academy of Arts, University of Reading Library, University of Liverpool Library, BBC Written Archives Centre, as well as in two private collections. I had kept, in desultory fashion, a file in which I placed, as if for oblivion, letters from readers with corrections and additions. This I retrieved from the dark and put to use. Finally I brought myself up to date by reading those publications on Gwen and Augustus John and their contemporaries that had appeared over the last twenty years.

There is much that is new.

In 1974 Caspar and Romilly John had consulted lawyers about some aspects of my typescript and requested me to remove passages that might have made the family liable to financial penalties. Caspar wrote to thank me for ‘so readily, if so reluctantly’ agreeing to this excision. ‘We are both sorry to have had to ask you to do this, but in view of the enclosed lawyer’s letter we had small option.’ That legal threat has now lapsed with time, and I have restored my original account of, for example, how Augustus John was awarded the Order of Merit.

After drastic cutting, the biography remains approximately the same length. There are new pages on Augustus John’s family, on Gwen John and their Slade School friends; new information concerning artists, such as Henry Lamb and Wyndham Lewis, who played significant roles in his life, and other supporting characters – for example Dylan and Caitlin Thomas, and the great gypsy scholar John Sampson – all of which has enabled me to improve the continuity of the narrative. That narrative is cast as comedy: romantic comedy, domestic comedy, the comedy of morals and of manners, absurdist comedy, black comedy, tragi-comedy.

Some papers I saw twenty-five years ago have disappeared but more have risen to the surface, and this shifting archaeology of sources has inevitably altered John’s place in the artistic landscape. There are new passages about some of his pictures and those, from W. B. Yeats and Sean O’Casey to the Marchesa Casati, Eve Fleming, Lady Ottoline Morrell and Madame Suggia, who sat for his portraits.

John’s artistic reputation, once so high, has plummeted. In place of ‘the last of the great masters’ who worked directly from life in the manner of Rembrandt, Tiepolo or Watteau, stands a banal and flashy manufacturer of pastiches and the simulacra of genuine masterworks. The famously gifted painter who led the revolutionary artists in Britain into the twentieth century has by the end of the century retrospectively dwindled to an inferior talent which in old age grew more obviously vulgar and sentimental.

Neither judgement is definitive. John’s work, blown here and there by contemporary criticism and conventional art history, appeared to fall off the map when in 1987 it was omitted from the Royal Academy exhibition ‘British Art in the Twentieth Century: the Modern Movement’. This technical knockout, unthinkable during the first half of this century, emphasized the difficulty critics and historians have when treating individual talents that do not fit into ideological or narrative patterns. But John’s exclusion was felt to be unsatisfactory, and the placing of his work remains a problem unsolved. Nor are those proper judges of his work who presume to say, as Samuel Johnson wrote of his biographical subject Richard Savage: ‘Had I been in Savage’s condition, I should have lived or written better than Savage.’

John’s artistic reputation is a background theme in my book, charted through the contemporary criticism of Roger Fry and Clive Bell, Sickert, Rothenstein and Wyndham Lewis, Anthony Blunt, Herbert Read and others. It is the story of a visual lyricist whose early accomplishment, interpreting English, French and Welsh landscape through poetic eyes, belonged ‘essentially to youth (as so often in poetry)’,
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Richard Shone has argued. His inability to transform these ‘magnificent beginnings’ into
a mature body of work in later years clouded his life and moves as a shadow through this book.

But this is a biography, not an art book, and I have used the pictures to illumine the life. For me the virtue of biography is the humanizing effect it can bring to history. To see people as being ‘worth’ a Life on account of their greatness and goodness is a nineteenth-century concept. The aim, I believe, of modern biographers, who live so long with their subjects, is to find some connecting current of energy, travel with it across time, as it were, and, from loneliness perhaps, make contact with other human beings. In that contact, if they are fortunate, may be found a literary pattern, a story with clues and signposts that forms a parallel world to that of the subject’s work. Biography is no longer simply an instrument of information retrieval, though historical and cultural information that is retrieved from these expeditions is a bonus. The biographer’s prime purpose is to recreate a world into which readers may enter, and where, interpreting messages from the past, they may experience feelings and thoughts that remain with them after the book is closed.

‘The most innocent, wicked man I have ever met.’

W. B. Yeats to John Quinn (4 October 1907)

THE YEARS OF INNOCENCE

‘Who
am
I in the first place?’

Augustus John,
Finishing Touches

A regiment of women, monstrously feathered and furred, waited at Tenby railway station. The train that pulled in one autumn day in the year 1877 carried among its passengers a young solicitor and his wife, Edwin and Augusta John. With his upright figure, commanding nose, his ginger whiskers, he had more the bearing of a soldier than lawyer. She was a pale woman of twenty-nine, with small features, rather fragile-looking, her hair in ringlets. She was expecting their third child.

The landladies of Tenby fell upon the new arrivals. But the Johns stood aloof. By prior arrangement the most regal of these beldames escorted them to her carriage and drove them up the Esplanade along the ‘fine houses of coherent design’ fronting the sea to a building on the edge of South Cliffs: No. 50 Rope Walk Field.
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From their windows they looked over to Caldy Island and to a smaller island, St Margarets, later a bird sanctuary, that at low tide seemed to attach it to the mainland of Wales.

Augusta’s other children were born in Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire. But she and Edwin had decided that, for safety, she should give birth to their third child in Tenby, Haverfordwest having recently been hit by an epidemic of scarlet fever. Soon after the New Year her labour pains began, and at five-thirty on the morning of 4 January 1878 the new baby was born. It was a boy, and they named him after both of them: Augustus Edwin John.

*

Victoria Place, Haverfordwest, had been built in 1839 to commemorate the opening of the new toll bridge. The houses were narrow, and all had small square windows with wooden frames that sloped inwards, and window-sills a child could sit on.

The John family lived at No. 7.
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Almost immediately behind the front
door ascended a steep staircase. Small alcoves had been cut into the wall. From the second floor it was possible to see into Castle Square opposite, one side of which was formed by the Castle Inn, with its ramparts and its archway through which coaches drove to the stables behind. Above the inn rose the ruined Norman castle, its stone windows gaping at the sky. All around stretched the uneven slate roofs of the houses, now high, now low, undulating away to the perimeter of the town. And beyond the town lay green hills that on summer evenings grew blue and hazy, and in winter, when there was frost, stood out hard.

In the eleven years of their marriage Edwin and Augusta John had two boys and two girls. Thornton was nearly three years older than Augustus: Gwen eighteen months older; and Winifred was born almost two years later.
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For all of them, Haverfordwest was an exciting town in which to grow up. On market days the streets and square heaved with a pandemonium of people and animals – women from Llangwm in short skirts, bright shawls and billycock hats carrying baskets of oysters on their backs; philosophical-looking tramps wandering through with an air of detachment and no obvious purpose; and gypsies, mysterious and aloof, shooting down sardonic glances as they rode by in ragged finery on their horse-drawn carts. From this continuous perambulation rose a cacophony of barking dogs, playing children, the perpetual lowing of cattle, screaming of pigs and the loud vociferation of the Welsh drovers.

Papa warned all his children against walking abroad on market days in case they should be kidnapped by the gypsies and spirited away in their caravans, no one knew where.
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The lure of danger made it a warning Augustus never forgot.

At weekends, Edwin John would lead out his children on well conducted expeditions in the outskirts of the town. Augustus loved these walks. One of his favourites was along a path known as ‘the frolic’ which ran southeast, parallel to the River Cleddau, where barges were pulled in over the marshy ground to dilapidated wharves. Beyond the tidal flats, in the middle distance, a railway train would sometimes seem to issue from the ruins of an ancient priory and rumble on under its white banner till, with a despairing wail, it hurled itself into the hillside: and vanished.

Another popular walk was along a right-of-way called ‘the scotchwells’. Under a colonnade of trees this path followed the millstream past the booming flour mill from which the terrifying figure of its miller, white from head to toe, might emerge. Sometimes, too, Papa would take them high above the Cleddau valley and perilously close to the cottage of a known witch.

On all these walks Edwin John marched in front, preserving a moderate
speed – the pace of a gentleman – only halting, in primrose time, to pick a few of his favourite flowers and make a nosegay against the frightful exhalations of the tannery, or, when on the seashore, to gather shells for his collection. Behind him, heard but not seen, the children crocodiled out in an untidy line, darting here and there in a series of guerrilla raids.

On Sundays there was church. Augustus preferred being sent with the servants to their Nonconformist chapels, bethels, zions and bethesdas. He loved the sonorous unintelligible language, the fervour of the singing, the obstinacy of prayer, the surging and resurging crescendos of the orator as he worked himself towards that divine afflatus with which good Welsh sermons terminated.

The religious atmosphere of Victoria Place was for several years fortified by two aunts, Rosina and Leah Smith – Aunts ‘Rose’ and ‘Lily’. They were younger sisters of Augusta, both in their twenties, and both ablaze for God. They had come to Haverfordwest from Brighton when Augusta’s health began to fail. After the birth of Winifred, Augusta seldom seemed well. She suffered from chronic rheumatism which the damp climate of Haverfordwest was thought to aggravate, and she travelled much in search of a cure.

In her absence Rosina and Leah took charge of the children’s upbringing. One of the aunts’ first demands was for the dismissal of the nurse, on the grounds that she had permitted the children to grow abnormally fond of her. They had gone to her cottage on the lonely moors above the Prescelly Mountains north of Haverfordwest, where they would sit wide-eyed over their bowls of
cawl
,
staring at the dark-bearded woodmen with their clogs, thin-pointed and capped with brass, and then argue on the way home whether their feet were the same shape. Few of these men knew a word of English. Old pagan festivals still flourished, and on certain dates the children were given sprigs of box plant and mugs of water, and told to run along the stone flags of the streets asperging any stranger they met. These were habits of which the aunts could not approve.

The new regime under aunts was a bewildering change. Both were Salvationists and held rank in General Booth’s army. Aunt Leah, a lady of ruthless cheerfulness and an alarming eloquence, had once ‘tried the spirits’ but found them wanting. Also found wanting was a young man who had had the temerity to propose marriage to her. But she had been seduced by the Princess Adelaide’s Circle, of which she soon became a prominent member.