Augustus John (93 page)

During the festival banquet the Commander-in-Chief of the Irish Free State Army delivered a long speech in Gaelic during which the municipal gas and electricity workers decided upon a strike. Unperturbed by the blackness, the Commander spoke on. After a minute, John leant over to Compton Mackenzie, and whispered: ‘What’s going on?’ Mackenzie explained. ‘Thank God,’ breathed John. ‘I’m only drunk then. I thought I’d gone mad.’

*

For one month in the spring of 1925 John stayed at the British Embassy in Berlin and, with a key to the side entrance, was free to explore this ‘strange and monstrous city’ at all hours. His impressions were scattered: Max Liebermann at eighty painting better than ever; ‘some marvellous wall decorations brought back from Turkistan by a German digger’;
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beer ‘like nectar’; and girls, ‘hearty creatures and sometimes very good looking’ who, on a more vital inspection, were revealed as being men ‘devoted to buggery’ and ‘furnished by the police with licences to adopt female attire’.
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As for embassy life, it was all very swell but ‘too strenuous for me… there are hours of
intense
boredom.’

Of the three portraits John painted while in Berlin with Eve Fleming, the most important was of Gustav Stresemann, the German Foreign
Minister. It was Lord D’Abernon who arranged the sittings during which the Locarno Treaties advanced to the point of signature. In Lord D’Abernon’s diplomatic language, Stresemann’s ‘lively intelligence and extreme facility of diction’ inclined him ‘to affect monologue rather than interchange of ideas’.
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The British Ambassador could not get a word in. By early March, when sittings began, their negotiations had reached the verge of collapse. It was then that he had his idea. Since John knew little German, D’Abernon reasoned, there could be no grounds for not carrying on their discussions while he worked. The advantage was that Stresemann would be ‘compelled to maintain immobility and comparative silence’. John, by treating the German Foreign Minister as one of his own family, exercised his role strongly. At the first sitting, after a sentence or two from Lord D’Abernon, Stresemann broke in and was about to go on at his customary length when John ‘armed with palette and paint-brushes’ asserted his artistic authority. ‘I was therefore able to labour on with my own views without interruption,’ D’Abernon records. ‘…The assistance given by the inhibitive gag of the artist was of extreme value… Reduced to abnormal silence… Stresemann’s quickness of apprehension was such that he rapidly seized and assimilated the further developments to which the Pact proposals might lead.’
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The Locarno Pact, for which Stresemann was awarded the Nobel Prize, was eventually less controversial than the portrait. Stresemann faced it bravely and ‘even his wife’, John reported, ‘admits it’s like him at his worst’.
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To Dorelia he wrote: ‘I like Stresemann. He is considered the strongest man in German politics.’ But Lord D’Abernon, who now felt some tenderness for Stresemann, thought the painting ‘a clever piece of work’ though ‘not at all flattering: it makes Stresemann devilishly sly.’
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This proved an accurate foretaste of popular reaction. Nobody much liked Stresemann, and no party trusted him. When the portrait was shown in New York in 1928, John was much acclaimed for his ‘cruelty’. Modestly he rejected this praise. ‘I have nothing to do with German politics, but I thought Stresemann an
excellent
fellow, most sympathetic, intelligent and even charming,’ he wrote on 13 March 1928 to Mitchell Kennerley,
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adding with less modesty: ‘One must remember that even God chastises those whom he loves.’

*

Apart from Stresemann’s silences, John had not greatly relished Berlin. The motor cars, the hard-boiled eggs, combined with a lack of handkerchiefs, unnerved him. He felt ‘very impatient’ to go somewhere new, and paint. ‘For God’s sake learn up a little Italian,’ he urged Dorelia. It was May when he boarded the train for Italy, with Dorelia, Poppet and Vivien.
Romilly too was coming. ‘In a fit of megalomania’,
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he had decided to cross the Alps on foot, aided by the tutor with fourteen schoolgirls ‘on their way to spend a week-end in Paris’.
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Drifting through Italy at the head of the main party John lost his wallet with all their money in it. This calamity, though credited to the quick fingers of Italian train thieves, may in fact have been attributable to Eileen Hawthorne’s abortion for which urgent funds had just then been prescribed. For some days John’s party were luxuriously stranded in the most expensive hotel in Naples (the only one that would accept their credit), and when they finally approached the ‘barbarous island’ of Ischia, their destination, they were irritated to see Romilly, his feet in ruins, waving to them from the harbour.

Skirting the shores, John sought anxiously for some pictorial motif. They were to stay at the Villa Teheran, a little wooden house with a veranda, that stood by itself on a miniature bay. It belonged to Mrs Nettleship and, being loaded with fleas, proved uninhabitable: ‘it was clear this place offered nothing to a painter.’
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John marched his family off to Forio, the next town along the coast, and quartered them more happily above some vineyards overlooking the sea. The oleander, nespoli, quince, orange, lemon and pepper trees, ‘with the addition of a bottle of
Strega
’,
contributed greatly, John recalled, ‘towards our surrender to the spirit of the place. Indeed, at night, when the moon shone, as it generally did… resistance had been folly.’
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But it was as holiday-maker, not primarily as painter, that John surrendered. He would float on his back in the phosphorescent sea for hours, while Dorelia bathed more grandly in a black silk chemise that billowed about her as she entered the waves. There were picnics on the beach, sunbathing on the long flat roof of their new villa, and expeditions through the island behind a strongly smelling horse. ‘Apart from drowning, life on the island presented few risks,’ John grumbled.
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Even the werewolves, reported to range the mountain, remained invisible. So, it was back to portrait painting, ‘finding myself very well occupied here with the two superbly fat daughters of the local Contessa’.
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The cook’s little girls also came to sit, side by side in a window, wearing alarmingly white-starched dresses. But a portrait of Mussolini, arranged by an ardent Fascist they had met, fell through. In his place Dorelia assembled various exotic blooms: and so John added to his flower pictures, the best of which, wrote the art critic Richard Shone, have ‘something of the freshness of Manet’s late flower paintings’.
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*

John was destined to cross the Atlantic six times; and, in one form or another, the United States visited him several times more. The purpose of all this traffic was the innocent one of ‘making a useful bit of money’.
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He had first attracted attention in the United States when, in 1910, his portrait of William Nicholson was shown at the Carnegie Institute’s International Exhibition in Pittsburgh. Travelling there for the first time thirteen years later it was as the guest of the Carnegie Institute, which had invited him to act as the British representative on its jury. He embarked on 28 March 1923, elated to be on his way at last to the land of his boyhood day-dreams. ‘The Americans all wear caps and smoking-suits in the evenings, and smoke very long cigars,’ he wrote to Dorelia from the SS
Olympic.
‘They are very friendly people.’ When his hat flew off into the sea, they rushed up in numbers to offer him their own which, one by one as he accepted them, also flew off. ‘There must be a continuous track of caps along our route.’ On board he met several passengers who petitioned him to paint portraits: Mrs Harry Payne Whitney, ‘quite a pleasant woman but infernally lazy’; a ‘big fat sententious oil king… who argues with me’; and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who told him ‘startling things about the spook world. It really seems quite a good place somewhat superior to this one in fact… Lady Conan Doyle is like people I’ve met in my youth – all spiritual love and merriment and dowdy clothes.’

Of all contemporary British artists, John was then the best known in northern America. At the famous Armory Show of 1913 in New York no other modern painter, with the exception of Odilon Redon, had been so well represented.
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The huge Armory had been packed with the elite of New York ‘cheering the different American artists, cheering Augustus John, cheering the French...’
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Critics and journalists had soon been dispatched to interview John, and many reports of his ‘recent activities’ appeared in American papers. ‘Augustus John is now at the height of his fame,’ the New York magazine
Vanity Fair
had declared in June 1916. ‘Not even the war… has taken public attention off Britain’s most conspicuous native painter.’

On arriving, hatless, in New York harbour he was penned down by a press of journalists who, like pirates, boarded the ship even before it berthed. ‘They sought to get a “story” out of me. I stood them a drink instead.’
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They were delighted by his appearance – ‘thoroughly consistent in living up to what he ought to look like’; he thought them ‘nice boys’.

That evening, after dinner at the Coffee House, Frank Crowninshield whirled him round the city and eventually landed him back at the Biltmore Hotel ‘exhausted and bewildered by an orgy of colour, noise, smartness and multitudinous legs’.
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Of Pittsburgh, where he arrived next day, John remembered little but the boundless hospitality of its natives and the ‘infernal splendour’ of their steelworks. He did not stay long. He had been invited to Buffalo to
paint an impeccable old lady, Mrs Goodyear. On the station platform at Buffalo the sitter’s son, Conger Goodyear, was surprised to see hovering at John’s elbow the Assistant Director of the Carnegie Museum, John O’Connor. O’Connor whispered that he had come to explain away the ‘extraordinary capacity’ of John’s drinking habits. ‘I replied, somewhat haughtily that I thought Buffalo men could take care of themselves in the drinking line,’ Goodyear reported. ‘Pittsburgh might have suffered but I had every confidence in my fellow citizens. I was wrong.’
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John was lodged at the Saturn Club, reputedly – in those days of Prohibition – ‘the most bibulous of our social institutions’. He appreciated the compliment. ‘This club is a very good place’, he acknowledged, ‘full of determined anti-Prohibitionists… There is a little back room with lockers all round the walls in which the members keep their “hootch”. About 6 o’clock this room gets densely packed with a crowd of vociferating men wildly mixing cocktails. I have the freedom of Conger Goodyear’s locker.’
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For part of the first evening, about which he could recall nothing, his host ‘participated lap by lap’. ‘The following afternoon and evening I decided to stay aloof and keep count,’ Goodyear wrote. ‘Some of my friends formed relay teams to pace the visitor. The official score showed seventeen cocktails for our guest without visible effect other than a slight letting down of British taciturnity. There were a few highballs during dinner and after and we sat in a respectful silence as the champion walked a straight path bedwards.’
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Work on the portrait sped along intermittently, and sometimes John would escort the old lady politely to the shops. One morning, as she was emerging from her dressmaker, Mrs Goodyear cracked a joke, fell down a flight of stairs and broke her ankle. ‘Just my luck!’ commented John.
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That afternoon he left for New York.

Over the next weeks a gradual disenchantment with American life may be traced in his letters. Like his brother Thornton, he had hoped to ride over the American West, he told a reporter from the
New York Times
,
to set up camp along the prairies, push up the Mississippi, mix with the black workers on the cotton plantations. His plans were greeted with bewilderment. ‘The prairies had been ploughed; the backwoods levelled; the Indians mostly tamed or exterminated; the frontiersmen replaced by “regular fellows”.’
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In a letter to the ten-year-old Poppet (28 April 1923) he gives a child’s-eye view of New York.

‘This is a strange country. There are railways over your head in the streets and the houses are about a mile high… The policemen chew gum and hold clubs to knock people down. The people don’t say “yes”. They say
instead Yep, yeah, yaw, yawp, yah and sometimes yump. Otherwise they simply say “you bet” or “bet your life”. They eat clams, fried chicken, chives, slaw soup and waffles with maple syrup. They drink soda-ices all the time. The rich people drink champagne and whisky for dinner and go about with bottles of gin in their pockets. When a policeman catches them they have to pay him about 1,000 dollars after which he drinks their gin and locks them up.’

John did not seek publicity in New York: the more publicity, the less freedom. So far as possible he kept his whereabouts secret from journalists.
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He put up initially at the Plaza Hotel on Fifth Avenue, then at the Hotel des Artistes at sixty-seventh and Central Park, and finally moved to a studio owned by Harrington Mann. To this studio numbers of Americans trekked, convinced that they were discovering a new Sargent, the famous American portraitist. ‘It’s been a fearful grind,’ John wrote to Dorelia. Everyone wanted to give parties for him. ‘The telephone rings continuously.’ There was always something to do: a boxing match, a cocktail party, the theatre, a trip to Philadelphia, another party. His best hours were in the company of a decorative artist called ‘Sheriff’ Bob Chanler, ‘a Gargantuan creature, as simple as a babe’, with great flapping arms and hands, ‘indescribably improper but… as good as gold’ at whose house he met ‘easy-going ladies, eccentrics and hangers-on’. It was almost like home. But John was cautious. ‘I walked down Fifth Avenue,’ he told Dorelia,