Augustus John (83 page)

To be caught up by events, to be on the go again was exhilarating. The blood began to move more swiftly through his body. Cheerfulness broke through. With his rank came a car and a melancholy batman. Before long they were patrolling the Vimy front held by the Canadian Corps like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. The Canadians were ‘excellent fellows’ though the work of the Canadian painters was ‘extremely bad’. ‘I go about a good deal and find much to admire,’ he wrote.
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After an immense fall of snow everything looked wonderful. He had discovered ‘quite a remarkable place which might make a good picture’. This was a medieval château, converted into a battery position, with towers and a river running through its grounds, at Lieven, a devastated town opposite Lens. Near by were several battered churches standing up amid the general ruin and, further off, a few shattered trees and slag heaps, like pyramids against the sky. It was here, among this strange confusion of ancient and modern, that he planned his big ‘synthetic’ picture, bringing in tanks, a balloon, ‘some of the right sort of civilians’, and a crucifix. ‘There is so much to do out here,’ he wrote to Arthur Symons. ‘All is glittering in the front; amidst great silence the guns reverberate. I shall take ages to get all I want done in preparation for a huge canvas. France is divine – and the French people.’
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The desolation seemed to hearten him. It was ‘too beautiful’, he told Dorelia, adding: ‘I suppose France and the whole of Europe is doomed.’

Also stationed at the château was Wyndham Lewis. For both these war artists it was an untypically peaceful time: guns were everywhere, but for painting not firing. John, Lewis noted with approval, did not neglect the social side of military life and was everywhere accorded the highest signs of respect, largely on account of his misunderstood beard. ‘He was the only officer in the British Army, except the King, who wore a beard,’
Lewis explained. ‘In consequence he was a constant source of anxiety and terror wherever he went. Catching sight of him coming down a road any ordinary private would display every sign of the liveliest consternation. He would start saluting a mile off. Augustus John – every inch a King George – would solemnly touch his hat and pass on.’
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On one occasion, after a successful party, the two war artists commandeered a car and careered off together almost into enemy lines. It was probably the closest John got to the fighting, and Lewis, the ex-bombardier, was soon poking fun at his friend’s mock-war experiences. But John, noticing that Lewis had retreated home following their exploit, pursued him vicariously. ‘Have you seen anything of that tragic hero and consumer of tarts and mutton-chops, Wyndham Lewis?’ he asked their mutual friend Alick Schepeler. ‘He is I think in London, painting his gun pit and striving to reduce his “Vorticism” to the level of Canadian intelligibility – a hopeless task I fear.’

Occasionally John would ‘run over’ to Amiens, Paris or, more surreptitiously, back to London. At Amiens he ‘found Orpen’,
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whose welcome seemed a little agitated. ‘They are trying to saddle me with him [John],’ Orpen protested to Will Rothenstein, ‘ – but I’m not having any! Too much responsibility.’ He also came across the painter Alfred Munnings who was there to ‘do some horse pictures’.

In Paris he put up at the Palais d’Orsay as the guest of Lord Beaverbrook, who had arranged a special entertainment for his ‘Canadians’ in a suite at the Hôtel Bristol.
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At supper, John recalled, ‘the guests were so spaced as to allow further seating accommodation between them. The reason for this arrangement was soon seen on the arrival of a bevy of young women in evening clothes, who without introduction established themselves in the empty chairs.’ These girls, the pick of the local emporium, came strongly recommended: ‘one or two of them were even said to be able to bring the dead to life.’ Beaverbrook, at this critical moment, tactfully withdrew, and was followed by the impetuously cautious Orpen (‘I’m afraid he’s a low lick-spittle after all,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia). Bottles of champagne then appeared and the atmosphere became charged with conviviality. ‘Yet as I looked round the table, a curious melancholy took possession of me,’ John recorded. ‘…I had no parlour tricks, nor did my companions-in-arms seem much better equipped than I was in this line; except for one gallant major, who, somehow recapturing his youthful high spirits, proceeded to emit a series of comical Canadian noises, which instantly provoked loud shrieks of appreciative laughter.’ To keep his melancholy at bay, John also attempted an outburst of gaiety, raising ‘in desperation’ one of the girls to the level of the table and there effecting ‘a successful
retroussage,
in spite of her struggles’.

Despite all this ‘rich fun’, he felt curiously islanded. Before starting out, he had promised Cynthia Asquith to keep a diary while at the Front, but ‘the truth is I funk it!… I am in a curious state,’ he had explained from Aubigny,

‘ – wondering who I am. I watch myself closely without yet being able to classify myself. I evade definition – and that must mean I have no
character
… To be a Major is not enough – clearly – now if one were a Brigadier-General say – would
that
help to self-knowledge if not self-respect...? I am alone in what they call the “Château” in this dismal little town. I am very lucky, not having to face a
Mess
twice a day with a cheerful optimistic air. When out at the front I admire things unreasonably – and conduct myself with that instinctive tact which is the mark of the moral traitor. A good sun makes beauty out of wreckage. I wander among bricks and wonder if those shells will come a little bit nearer...’

The wearing of a uniform seemed to have imposed another self on him, and he had no centre from which to combat this imposition. The devastation of the fields and trees reflected a devastation within him. At Beaverbrook’s party or in the mess, he could not lose himself; alone, in the château where there was ‘no romance’, he felt characterless. Yet to paint he had to establish a sense of character, and if he could not do this then he felt it might be better to be killed, suddenly, pointlessly, by some shell. A sudden bellicose joy surged through him at the great news that thirty German divisions had been repulsed with ‘colossal slaughter’. There was ‘a wonderful show last night’, he wrote to Dorelia, ‘when we discharged five thousand gas drums at the Boches followed by an intense bombardment. Things are getting interesting out here.’ But this joy quickly passed and he fell into ‘a horrible state of depression’.
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The crisis erupted in a sudden act of self-assertion when he knocked out one of his fellow officers, Captain Wright. ‘The gesture had only an indirect relation to my codpiece,’ he assured Gogarty.
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Captain Wright had said something that, interpreted by John as an insult, acted as the trigger for this explosion. The situation was serious and John was rushed out of France by Lord Beaverbrook. ‘Do you know I saved him [John] at a Court-martial for hitting a man named Peter Wright?’ Beaverbrook complained in a letter to Sir Walter Monckton, the lawyer and politician who had been serving in France (30 April 1941). ‘I cannot tell you what benefits I did not bestow on him. And do you know what work I got out of John? – Not a damned thing.’

John arrived back in London at the end of March ‘in a state of utter mental confusion’.
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There was no chance of getting back to France, and
for four months the threat of military punishment hung over him. ‘I think this trouble must be over,’ he eventually wrote to Gogarty on 24 July 1918. ‘The Canadian people seem to think so, and it’s now so long since.’

It remained to be seen whether he could salvage something from his few months at the front. ‘I am tackling a vast canvas,’ he had told Innes Meo (22 February 1918), ‘- that is, I shall do.’ Cynthia Asquith, who saw this canvas on 29 July, recorded her impression in a diary: ‘It is all sketched in, but without any painting yet… it rather took my breath away – splendid composition, and what an undertaking to fill a forty-foot canvas!’ On 18 November he is writing to Gwen: ‘I am hard at work on the Canadian war picture. The cartoon will be finished by Xmas after which there will be an exhibition.’
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This cartoon went on view in January 1919 when the
Observer
art critic P. G. Konody organized a Canadian War Memorials exhibition at Burlington House showing war pictures by Bernard Meninsky, C. R. W. Nevinson, William Roberts, the Nash brothers and others. ‘Even Mr Paul Nash may grow old-fashioned with the years,’ commented
The Times,
‘but it is hard to imagine a time when Major John’s cartoon (not yet finished) “The Pageant of War” will not interest by its masterly suggestion of what war means.’
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In an article for
Colour Magazine
,
Konody described John’s summary of all he had witnessed during his five months in France, and his portrayal of it as a vast gypsy convoy.

‘His picture may be described as an epitome of modern war. In it are introduced crowds of refugees, men, women and children with their carts and cherished belongings, detachments of soldiers in their trench outfits, officers on horseback, trucks carrying soldiers to the front line, wounded sufferers and stretcher-bearers, a camouflaged gun position, bursting shells, an observation balloon, a ruined château, Vimy Ridge, all the movement and bustle, all the destruction and desolation of war. But this astounding accumulation of motives is organized with classic lucidness, with a sense of style unrivalled by any other living painter. Full of animation, movement and seething life, the design is controlled by a rare sense of order.’

Konody, who wrote books on Velazquez, Filippo Lippi and Raphael, as well as a study of C. R. W. Nevinson’s war paintings, believed that John’s prodigious decoration would stand comparison with the work of ‘Michelangelo, Signorelli, Raphael or Leonardo, to whose best tradition John is faithful in spite of his essential modernity… [if he] has the staying power to carry out consistently with the brush what he has so triumphantly accomplished in charcoal’.
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Intermittently during that year
John grappled ‘with my Canadian incubus… I must try to get quit of the whole business. No more official jobs for me.’
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He did not have the staying power. The erection of the art gallery in Ottawa, planned to house the entire Canadian War Memorials collection, was postponed, and forty years on Beaverbrook and John were still in correspondence, Beaverbrook asking after the picture, John parrying with inquiries about the gallery.
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But there is one large oil painting, ‘Fraternity’,
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at the Imperial War Museum in London, that seems to justify the time he spent in France. Executed in muted greens and browns, it depicts three soldiers against a background of ruined brickwork and shattered trees, one giving another a light for his cigarette. It is a touching picture, emotionally and literally in the swirl of arms and the two cigarettes held tip to tip. But though the background is an authentic record of what John actually saw in France, the figures are a straight copy of a mass-circulation postcard from the
Daily Mail’
s
Official War Picture Series 2, No. II – ‘A “Fag” after a Fight’. It is a studio artist’s picture.

The fact was that John had little aptitude as a war artist. A caricature by Max Beerbohm that appeared in
Reveille
in 1918 shows him in his neat uniform and tin hat behind the front lines staring into a field of French peasants in Johnesque attitudes with spades, buckets and hoes, exclaiming: ‘Ah, now there really is a subject.’

*

‘Peace has arrived,’ Gus wrote to Gwen on 18 November. ‘London went mad for a week & Paris too I suppose.’
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He had called on Gwen in December 1917 on his way to the Canadian headquarters at Aubigny and ‘at the fourth call caught her & we dined together’ at the Café de Versailles in Montparnasse. The change in her since he had last seen her four years ago was rather terrible. Before the war Henry Lamb had thought her ‘really quite a gay person who could be full of fun’;
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and Duncan Grant, seeing her ‘living with her cats on the old fortification’,
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did not find a recluse but someone eager to go out picnicking and talk of Rodin. But Rodin had died on 17 November 1917 and Gwen, so Gus reported to Dorelia the following month, ‘has been getting more and more hypochondriac’.
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During these war years she had not seen much of Rodin, though they corresponded and she still thought of herself as his ‘true wife’. But then she did not see much of anyone over these years. The fortifications rose. ‘I don’t like meeting people,’ she explained to Quinn. In 1913 she was admitted into the Catholic Church. As Rodin was a Catholic, she explained, this made no difference to their relationship. ‘I was born to love,’ she had written. The advantage of loving God was that He did not fall ill, get old, die. ‘He loves me,’ she wrote in her child’s hand. But
He could not protect her from grief over Rodin’s death. ‘I don’t know what I am going to do,’
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she admitted to Ursula Tyrwhitt five days after he died. ‘I have not seen Gus yet.’

Gus trusted to Gwen’s ‘esprit’ not to get morbid over Rodin. Yet he was bothered by her. ‘I trust you to believe that my infrequent letters don’t mean that I don’t think of you very often,’ he assured her.
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The morning after their dinner, he drove round to her ‘garret at Meudon’ and borrowed five pounds off her. ‘She says my visit did her a lot of good,’
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he assured Dorelia. That sounded like typical bravado, almost comic in its insensitivity. Yet it was true. Gwen confided to Ursula that she had surprisingly enjoyed his visit. Somehow he broke the spell of death and connected her again, however randomly, with living energy. By February 1918 she was feeling ‘nearly normal’ and beginning to paint again. She had particularly liked learning about Gus’s family (and was ‘surprised to hear of Vivien’s existence’).