Augustus John (2 page)

I went first to gaze at the memorial statue of Augustus John by Ivor Roberts-Jones, standing like some chocolate pugilist near the river. This statue had been the seat of some recent embarrassments. Originally the memorial was to have been of Augustus and Dorelia, but Augustus was such a big fellow that, to Dorelia’s relief, there wasn’t enough money or materials for anyone else. The single figure was discreetly placed behind a large tree by the parish council. But one night shortly after the unveiling ceremony there had been a violent thunderstorm, and in the morning the tree lay on the ground while Augustus stood dramatically revealed. It was, everyone said, typical of him. But the question that occurred to me was: could I do something equivalent in a biography?

Next I went to his grave, a simple white stone in a triangular field. Finally I came to Fryern Court, Dorelia’s home and her creation. The lane coiled between azaleas and magnolias, then opened out into a crunchy gravel sweep with a fringe of grass. I parked flamboyantly, but there was no one to see me. Except for a small herd of kittens, the place seemed deserted. On the walls hung pink roses and an ancient clematis in whose matted stems the cats had made their nests. They lay, sleepy in the sun, watching me as I hammered at the open door. Through the windows, which were also open, I could see dark empty rooms. I called, but no one answered. I retreated a little into the foliage, and when I turned back there was Dorelia watching me from the doorway.

The purpose of our interview, she explained, was to find out if my ‘intentions were honourable’. She led me into the dining-room and sat down at the end of a long refectory table. I was seating myself on her left when she shook her head and pointed to a chair on her right. ‘Sit there,’ she said, ‘where the light is on your face.’ As we were rearranging ourselves, her son Romilly edged in, apologized for being late, and took off his hat. Since Romilly, then in his early sixties, was the writer in the family – at that time, he told me, he was contemplating a humorous work on engineering – his involvement in our discussion seemed sensible. But not to Dorelia. Gently, firmly, she suggested he should run out into the garden and amuse himself there – perhaps even do something useful – while we debated literary and artistic matters indoors. We would come and see how he was getting on when we had finished. He went out as obediently as a child.

Our talk was not a very precise affair. Dorelia asked me several questions and I explained that I wanted to present an accurate account of Augustus John’s life, correcting the wayward chronology of his own writings. Since
he was largely an autobiographical artist, obsessively drawing and painting his family and friends, I hoped that the story of his life might prepare readers for looking again at his work. Was not the work of a portrait painter analogous to that of a biographer? George Steiner had recently argued that ‘it is the minor master… whose career may be important in that it has crystallized the manners of a period, the tone of a particular milieu’, who makes the most valid subject for biography. My belief was that Augustus John’s career would provide a natural frame for a number of pen-portraits and conversation pieces, and enable me to exhibit a post-Victorian, pre-modern phase of our cultural history, a transition period, the tone and manners of which he had greatly influenced. The challenge was to find an imaginative means of recreating the milieu of someone whose concepts appeared primarily in pictures rather than as words.

Dorelia listened politely, but she was more interested, I sensed, in finding out what sort of person I was than what sort of book I wanted to write. Perhaps, to an extent, the two are the same. We spoke a little of Lytton Strachey and Carrington, of my contact with Augustus John in Chelsea, and the peculiar habits of motor cars. The whole John family, I gathered, were fearless and imaginative drivers, and it struck me that by immersing myself in their world I might gain some of their wit and inventiveness behind the wheel. Yet it was difficult for me to understand how any of this conversation could help Dorelia – unless it was to discover how I might apply my biographical methods to myself. Dorelia, however, had her own method for determining things. This made use of a ring and a piece of cotton – equipment that never failed her. She would tie the cotton to the ring, suspend it between two fingers, and examine the direction in which the ring floated. Since she said little to me that day, I had no doubt that my fate depended upon the behaviour of this pendulum. I felt we had got on well, and my hope was that, below the ritual of these magic operations, lay a subconscious willpower that would direct the movements of the ring.

At any rate I could do no more. We went out into the garden to find out how Romilly was getting on. Dorelia was at home in that garden. Though smaller than I had imagined, and white-haired, she looked more like the mythical Dorelia of Augustus John’s pictures than I had thought possible – perhaps she had grown to look like this. We followed a path that ended in nettles and a rubbish dump where we found Romilly. He sprang up as we approached and walked back eagerly with us for tea. Dorelia, like a good general, never wasted words. A few syllables, and I was put to work cutting the bread. But when I showed her the slices, immaculate to my eye, she raised her hands to her face and hooted with
laughter. We ate what she called my ‘doorsteps’, while the cats weaved in and out among the plates and cups, and outside the light began to fade.

Before I left, Romilly took me to one side. Should I in the heat and struggle of my researches, he asked, stumble across the date of his birth, would I let him have it? They both came out to hear me race the engine and waved as I started back to London. It had been a strange day, a journey into a world very different from my own, which is one of the fascinations of writing biography.

After this there was a Dorelian silence. Then in June a letter arrived. ‘I am very sorry to be so long answering… But I am advised
not
to give you permission to write a book about A.J.’ the first paragraph began. In despair I read on: ‘…until I have an agreement that it will not be published unless approved of by me or my executors Sir Caspar and Romilly.’ My spirits rose. At the end of this formal note, Dorelia had added a conspiratorial postscript. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I will help you in any way I can.’

So I began my research. There were periods in Somerset House, the Public Record Office, in the storage rooms of museums and galleries, the cellars of solicitors’ offices, the reference sections of libraries, or simply at home writing questionnaire letters, when this research seemed particularly dusty and unrewarding. But then came moments of discovery, like delayed dividends from an arduous investment of time.

From my accumulating knowledge I mapped out a number of research trips into Wales, to the United States and through Europe.
Augustus John
was to be my road book, my sea-and-air book. It began with a wonderful summer in Tenby and Haverfordwest, and became, despite the inevitable anxieties, the most purely enjoyable of my books to write.

In the United States, lecturing as I went to help pay for my travels, I took my first tentative steps into some of the famous manuscript libraries: the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Widener and Houghton Libraries at Harvard, Cornell University Library, Yale University and the Paul Mellon Center for British Art at Yale, and the ‘Morgue’ at
Life
magazine in New York. I had been used to working in the casual surroundings of people’s houses, and I found it somewhat intimidating to be searched for concealed guns or photographed for police records before I entered these halls of scholarship. Such precautions, I reflected, support the illusion that the written word is greatly in demand. Once inside, I might have any sharp object confiscated together with part of my clothing, and be required to sign forms that were linguistically more interesting than the documents I wanted to consult. I found it sometimes difficult to account for myself in a convincing style on these forms or as I sat in windowless cells scribbling against time with
borrowed pencils on pencil-coloured paper. But I was a hardened scholar by the end.

After reading through the Augustus John–John Quinn correspondence at the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, looked down on by John’s intimidating portrait of Quinn, I took a train to Schenectady and spent a few hours with the poet Jeanne Foster, who had been Quinn’s mistress. In the 1920s she had met Gwen John in Paris and also Augustus John in New York, and though she was now in her early eighties and I in my early thirties, we seemed to hit it off very well. Afterwards we wrote one or two letters to each other, but I did not see her again. A few years later I received a letter from an American lawyer, and an explanatory note from Quinn’s biographer B. L. Reid, to say that Jeanne Foster was dead and that she had added a codicil to her will leaving me her Gwen John papers and pictures. The pictures arrived in their original 1920s frames as I was finishing my biography. I was infinitely touched by this gift from beyond the grave in memory of our day together, which now appeared like an augury for the book itself.

I had always been taught with some pride that the English are the most insular race in the world. But in matters of art and literature, I discovered, the French are much superior. The indifference with which the English treat all artists, the French reserve for foreign artists alone. There is a special blank look, a specially emphatic shake of the head they use when you mention an artist who is not French. They love to smile incredulously when they hear of such phenomena, and lingeringly mispronounce the names. It was not even possible for them to confuse Augustus John with Jasper Johns: they knew of neither. They knew nothing too of Gwen John, who had spent most of her painting life in Paris – nothing beyond the fact that she was one of Rodin’s models catalogued under the more easily pronounceable name Mary Jones.

Before I set off for France I had armed myself with bilingual letters of introduction and permission statements from various keepers, curators and copyright holders. These gained me a number of appointments, in particular with one
conservatrice
who, it was said, saw no one. As I entered her office, she rose from her chair to tell me she was off that very hour for Venezuela. I sat down as if for life; she reluctantly subsided and continued talking French. But I was equal to this. My French, in which I never make a mistake, is completely silent (the result of having been taught it as a dead language for ten years at privileged preparatory and public schools). She, equally well-educated, spoke no English. We had therefore equipped ourselves with seconds: she with a teddy bear of an old gentleman twice the age of anyone and deaf; I with a girl, indispensable I hoped to the pursuit of John scholarship, who was afflicted in several
languages with an ingenious grasp of malapropism (‘masturbate’ for ‘masticate’ was one I remember with affection). The contest between the four of us was fantastic, but finally the girl’s misnomers won over the teddy bear’s mishearings, and I triumphantly entered the archive.

Further south I was met by the drastic improvements inflicted by the French on the fishing villages Augustus John had sought out as refuges from twentieth-century commercialism. Aerodromes, huge glue factories, bauxite hills, red, barren and misshapen, had obliterated much that he had loved and painted in Provence. But it had not been possible to erase everything, and I saw a little of what he had tried to celebrate: the curious blue light over the inland sea at Martigues; and the Alpilles, spotted with green aromatic scrub and the spiky plumes of the cypress trees above St-Rémy.

Over several years I was to be paid advances on royalties of £4,000 from Heinemann in Britain and $40,000 from Holt, Rinehart in the United States. A good part of this money was not due until completion and delivery of the book, but I was also given several hundred pounds as the recipient of a Winston Churchill Fellowship. With some of this money I extended my travels into Italy, where I saw the pictures that had inspired some of Augustus John’s most ambitious work, and to Spain where I made a short attempt to live a simple mountain life as the guest of some quite genuine demi-Johns. I was not very good at this. To earn goodwill I took on the duties of gardener, a job that needed the skills of an alpinist. I could spy the sea, glimmering with the prospect of escape. But among outdoor people there appears to be a rule of timelessness any interruption of which is judged to be bad manners. As I scaled the rocks with my watering-can, I plotted an acceptable escape. A telegram to my mother requesting her to send an urgent SOS mentioning illness seemed, at that height, the most sensible arrangement. I sent it from a village near by, but it arrived in England reading as if I were gravely ill and requesting her presence at my deathbed. She set out and, miraculously, she found me. She had expected a vigil beside some hospital bed. I was delighted to see, in the face of such a dismal prospect, she had not omitted to pack bathing suits and evening dresses.

One of the privileges of writing biographies is that you meet, often on friendly terms, some extraordinary people. In Liverpool I came across the legendary ‘Romani Rawnie’ Dora Yates, incredibly old but still very game, who introduced me to that sane centre of nomad studies, the Gypsy Lore Society. Later on there was the fine sight of Anthony Powell dancing over a Somerset lawn wearing a striped apron, a Burmese cat on his shoulders, in his hand a wooden spoon, asking me whether I liked curry. Rather different was an afternoon on the floor of David Jones’s room trying to
coax tea out of some primitive machinery. Then there were some rain-swept Welsh days with the novelist Richard Hughes and his wife Frances, a painter of bonfires and waterfalls. We passed much of the time reconstructing a farcical drama, complete with doors, windows and haunted shrubbery, that Augustus John and Dylan Thomas had waged at their home nearly forty years earlier. The bearded Hughes was excellent in the role of Caitlin Thomas.