Augustus John (9 page)

‘We don’t go to Heaven in families now – but one by one.’

Gwen John to Ursula Tyrwhitt

‘I am visiting my father,’ Augustus John wrote to William Rothenstein during a stay in Tenby over thirty years later, ‘and suffering again from the same condition of frantic boredom and revolt from which I escaped so long ago. My antecedents are really terrifying.’

Yet he loved Pembrokeshire, the exultant strangeness of the place, its exuberance of shadow and light; and since he was never cruelly treated
some other factor must have accounted for this extremity of ‘boredom and revolt’.

It was the
indoorness
of late Victorian life, the conformity and constraint of his oddly patriarchal background that affected him. For almost forty years, from the death of the Prince Consort in 1861, Britain had been in mourning. Despite the heavy new buildings, the heavy industry, everything seemed at a standstill – everything except for military developments across the Empire. This atmosphere of stagnation was eccentrically reproduced at Victoria House after the death of Augusta John. The widower did something of what Queen Victoria had done. There were no exaggerated manifestations of feeling. The iron will within Edwin John held firm. But though he was calm, he filled the house with darkness – out of which Augustus would burst rather like Edward VII escaping from the formalities of Windsor Castle into the new century.

‘Too shy to be sociable, he made few friends; and these few he often found an embarrassment. Walking at his side through the town, I would be surprised by a sudden quickening of pace on his part, while at the same time he would be observed to consult his watch anxiously as if late for an important appointment: after a few minutes’ spurt he would slow down and allow me to catch up with him. This manoeuvre pointed to the presence of a friend in the vicinity… he was delighted when a bemused soldier from Penally Barracks, mistaking him for a retired officer of high rank, saluted him. In reality he lacked every martial quality, except, of course, honour. Excessively squeamish, he would never have been able to accustom himself to the licence of the camp; even the grossness of popular speech shocked him...’
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To what extent is this picture of his father accurate? Winifred, who was probably Edwin’s favourite but who saw less of him than the others, told her daughters she felt Augustus had been rather unfair. But Thornton approved, and Gwen’s attitude to their father exceeded Gus’s. ‘I think the Family has had its day,’ she wrote.

Edwin had two ambitions. The first was the revival of an old daydream: to enter the church. All his life he entertained an admiration for churchmen, and had once considered preparing himself for the priesthood. In his fifties, he became organist at Gumfreston, a tiny inaccessible church two miles from Tenby. Every Sunday morning, wet or fine, he would make his way there, play the hymns and the psalms loud and slow; then walk back along the fields. He persisted with these duties until he was almost ninety.

His other ambition was to remarry. For a short time he seems to have
become engaged to Alice Jones-Lloyd, and on another occasion was said to have proposed marriage to Teresa George. Both women were considerably younger than himself, handsome and of good family. These matrimonial skirmishes were always discreet, but news of them eventually leaked out bringing down on him the combined rage of Gwen and Winifred. ‘I was furious at this heartless and extravagant outburst, and took his part,’ Augustus records, ‘but my overheated intervention only earned me the disapproval of all three.’
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The ordinary people of Tenby quite liked Edwin. They liked the look of him. ‘I am not clever,’ he boasted, ‘but I am independent, and I believe in a good appearance all the time. With a good appearance I can accomplish much.’ His chief accomplishment was to convert this good appearance into the appearance of goodness. His stamina for church-going, his cast-iron empty routine, above all his unrelenting loneliness and longevity excited a respect uncomplicated by envy. He was no trouble and he seemed a kindly man. He offered to pay for the education of his housekeeper’s son; he taught a number of local children to play the organ; and when he wished to try out some new air he would call on a young chorister and present him afterwards with a shilling. Another of his pupils in the neighbourhood, John Leach, remembers that:

‘my own father in spring and summer often took my sister and me to evensong… and usually we walked home with Edwin John through the woods and lanes. It came about through these walks that he asked my sister and me to go with him to the cinema, of which he appeared to be very fond. These were the days of the early Chaplins, the Keystone cops and the serial with its weekly threat to the life or virtue of the heroine. Perhaps Edwin John was fortified by the presence of children on these occasions… Besides being generous, one recalls [him] as a quiet, gentle, soft-voiced courteous man, who talked to children without condescension.’

But his own children he could not love. He was faced with the obstacle of their existence: an obstacle to remarriage, to the church and to almost any ambition he may have had. ‘He became an object only,’ commented Thornton. ‘Is it any wonder we felt the effects of this?’
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‘What damned ancestral strain is at work?’
35
Augustus later demanded. All of them were afflicted by melancholia. Winifred was probably the most successful at shedding what Augustus called this ‘gloom by day and horror by night’.
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She was to bring up a conventional American family and nourish a belief in the rigorous simplicities of psychic religion. Though she developed ‘strong nerves’
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to combat her timidity, she shared
with Gwen, so she felt, a lifetime’s devotion to privacy and the wish ‘to be forgotten’
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after death. But Gwen, who thought ‘aloneness’ rather than family life ‘is nearer God’,
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believed in the value of her work after death. Gwen’s self-neglect worried Gus and he worried her about it. ‘Leave everybody and let them leave you,’ she exhorted herself. ‘Then only will you be without fear.’
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Thornton, too, came to agree ‘about solitude being a good thing. I didn’t always think so.’
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He would pass much of his own life ‘alone but I am not at all lonely’
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or fishing from his sailing boat.

Winifred, after escaping to the United States in her twenties, was obliged, like all the children, to keep up a regular correspondence with her father so as to receive the quarterly allowance from her mother’s estate. ‘Papa worries me to go home,’ she wrote to Gwen in 1910. ‘I don’t want to’
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– and she didn’t. But Thornton, who left for Canada at the same time as Winifred, did return to Tenby at the end of the First World War. For Edwin still wanted his sons and daughters round him, even if he could not show them affection. He took the opportunity to remind Thornton that he was an executor of his will and, despite there being no work for his son in Tenby, advanced this as a proper reason for his staying there. ‘I said I could return in the event of his death,’ remembered Thornton who, on getting back to Canada, realized that he would never return. ‘Do you think I should write to tell him so?’
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he questioned Gwen.

Gwen, who went to live in France, could not avoid seeing her father occasionally. ‘My father is here,’ she wrote from Paris to her friend Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘ – not because he has wished to see me or I to see him, but because other relations and people he knows think better of him if he has been to see me. And for that I have to be tired out and unable to paint for days. And he never helps me to live materially – or cares how I live.’
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Gwen hardly ever referred to her childhood and her few references to Wales – ‘the mild climate of Tenby means that one has little energy there’
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– are polite metaphors. For ten years, in the optimistic belief that their father was dying, Gus would try to arrange a farewell meeting between the three of them. But he failed, and when eventually the old man died in 1938 Gwen did not go over for his funeral. He had been no more than an ‘unwanted interruption to her work’.
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‘I hold no grudge against him,’ Thornton wrote of Edwin after his death. Nor did Winifred. But Gwen, who spent more precious energy in escaping from him, and Gus, who never really escaped and sometimes felt ‘I ought to have stopped’ in ‘my native town’,
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did hold a grudge.

Augustus had needed a hero, and the hope that his father might somehow reveal himself as this hero had died a slow death. He described his
father to the painter Darsie Japp as ‘a revolting personage’
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and was anxious to erase signs of involuntary attachment. ‘I wanted to be my own unadulterated self, and no one else. And so, taking my father as a model, I watched him carefully, imitating his tricks as closely as I could, but in reverse. By this method I sought to protect myself from the intrusions of the uninvited dead.’
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His actions represented not simply a wish to be different from his father, but to be someone other than his father’s son. His claim to be a descendant of Owen Glendower; his vivid fantasy life, nourished by books, which developed into the cult of the ‘Red Indian’: these were symptoms of his identification with non-John people. The kinship he felt for gypsies, too, and which later became so close that many people believed him to have gypsy blood, arose not just from the fact that Edwin John disapproved of them but from his having warned his son they might capture him and bring him up as one of their own. He longed to be kidnapped. At home he felt an outcast, and at school it was with the outcast he grew most sympathetic – the ‘half-wit’ at Clifton, even the boy he beat in a fight at Greenhill.

This drive to be someone else grew more complicated in adult life. To know Augustus John was to know not a single man, but a crowd of people, none of them quite convincing. His reaction against the paternal environment of his early years was in perpetual conflict with the melancholy characteristics he inherited from his father. Between the two opposing forces in this civil war stretched a no man’s land where Augustus pitched his tent. But this battling against himself produced a state of crisis. In later years everyone else would recognize readily enough the manly and melodramatic form of Augustus John – but he himself did not know who he was. His lack of stylistic conviction as a painter, the frequent changes of handwriting and signature in his letters, his surprising passivity and lack of initiative in everyday matters, the abrupt changes of mood, the sense of strain and vacancy, the theatricality: all these suggested a lack of self-knowledge. ‘When I am in Ireland I’m an Irishman,’ he told Reginald Pound, and it was partly true. He was a chameleon. He had half turned his back on Wales and, while continuing to make sentimental visits, chose to live fifty years of his life amid the lushness of Hampshire and Dorset – a green-tree country he seldom painted and to whose beauty he was not particularly responsive. Like his brother and sisters, he too dreamed of exiling himself far off from the land of their father. But having ‘got stuck’
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in England, he later resented the parental contamination of his homeland. ‘I wish to the Devil I were in Wales again instead of this blighted country,’
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he wrote from Hampshire to his friend John Sampson in 1913. In such moods of disgruntled nostalgia his thoughts veered
wistfully to the Prescelly Mountains and the west coast – and he would suddenly ‘make a dash’ there (‘a pony trap and a spell of irresponsibility’
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). But when in 1929 Sylvia Townsend Warner advised him to ‘go back to Wales’ permanently, he replied that this was ‘impossible’ because his father was there and he ‘was still afraid of him’.
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Yet, had it been possible, it would have been ‘better to try and make the best of one’s own country’,
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he acknowledged. Indeed, he sometimes felt it would have been really best of all if he had never left Wales.

Over the years Augustus became more imaginative at changing his past. He claimed not to know the date of his birthday, and declared that he never celebrated it. In 1946 he told a
Time
magazine interviewer, Alfred Wright, that his mother’s name was Augusta Petulengro; and six years later (14 May 1952) he wrote to John Rothenstein: ‘As for Gypsies, I have not encountered a sounder “Gypsy” than myself. My mother’s name was Petulengro, remember, and we descend from Tubal-Cain via Paracelsus.’ What he did not tell Alfred Wright or John Rothenstein (saving the inverted commas) was that Petulengro was the Romany version of Smith.
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It was deliberate teasing, a fantasy that was irresistible to him but in which he did not actually believe. His real state of mind concerning who he was seems to have been a genuine bewilderment. ‘I am in a curious state,’ he confessed to Lady Cynthia Asquith in 1918, ‘ – 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.
Do you understand yours?’

This void seems to have been created through the rejection of all Augustus knew of his background. He could not remember his mother; he knew nothing of his origins; he disliked his father. Victoria House appeared to enclose him in darkness. His shyness and anxiety cut him off from other people, cut them all off from everyone except themselves. Gwen was to make solitude part of her way of life. Edwin had done much the same but, probably in reaction to him, Augustus could not come to terms with this legacy of melancholia, endeavouring by force of energy to hurl it from him, or to outpace it, like a boy running against his shadow which at evening lengthens and overtakes him. To many who, like William Rothenstein, believed that Augustus had been born ‘with a whole series of silver spoons between his gums’,
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this stampeding through life seemed a thoughtless squandering of his natural gifts. But Augustus took a more sombre view of himself: ‘I am not so perverse as unfortunate,’ he wrote (15 September 1899). All the children had been unfortunate in losing their mother and in having to contend with the family’s isolation. But Augustus seemed particularly unfortunate in having been afflicted while
at school by partial deafness that raised another invisible barrier between him and the world.