Augustus John (4 page)

The block purchase of Augustus John’s studio contents had established the National Museum of Wales as what Mark L. Evans, one of the future Assistant Keepers in the Department of Art, described as ‘the principal repository of [Augustus] John’s work and the main centre for research on his art’.
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It had already become such a repository and centre for the art of Gwen John.

But the group of papers in Romilly John’s keeping was not chiefly associated with the art of Augustus John. It did contain a few sketchbooks and some correspondence from painters (including Carrington, Epstein, J. D. Innes, Wyndham Lewis, William Rothenstein and Matthew Smith), but most of the fifteen hundred letters written by John or addressed to him involved writers (James Joyce, T. E. Lawrence, Sean O’Casey, John
Cowper Powys, Bernard Shaw, the Sitwells, Lytton Strachey, Dylan Thomas), members of the Gypsy Lore Society (Scott Macfie, John Sampson, Dora Yates) and his family (Ida John, Gwen John and Dorelia McNeill). As he went through this archive, Romilly John began to think that ‘perhaps the National Library of Wales would be the right depository’.
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It was expected that the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth would purchase these papers when they came up for auction at Sotheby’s on 17 December 1979. But the library was outbid, and the archive went for £52,000 ($127,600) to an anonymous bidder from the United States who employed the booksellers Bernard Quaritch Ltd to act as his agent. The papers then mysteriously went missing. Several national newspapers attempted to follow the trail, but got no further than discovering that the material had been taken to Ireland from where it was illegally exported to the United States. The matter was reported to the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, but since no special licence for export had been applied for, and since Quaritch could not professionally reveal the identity of the collector for whom they had acted (the ethics of manuscript dealers being similar to those of journalists and unlike those of biographers and historians, who must constantly refer to their sources), there seemed nothing that could be done.

But something, drop by drop like a Chinese torture, was to be done over the next few years. The newspaper speculation persisted. There were plans for a film by Robert Bolt, a play by Peter Terson, and continual inquiries from scholars and writers who wanted to edit a selection of Augustus John’s correspondence, or publish a biography of Ida John, or write books about John’s contemporaries. Such people were told that the owner of the archive ‘wishes to retain his anonymity’ and ‘is unwilling to share any of that material’. Fortunately there was one important exception to this dull rule of non-cooperation. This was Cecily Langdale, whose scholarly and substantial
Gwen John,
which included a valuable
catalogue raisonné
of the paintings and a selection of the drawings, was published in 1987. ‘The A[ugustus] J[ohn] papers are in storage,’ she wrote to me from New York that year, ‘and the owner, I fear, really doesn’t want to be bothered with requests for information.’ But, she added, ‘he has been extremely nice to me and has helped me in every possible way.’

A fortnight after getting this letter, I received a telephone call from the recently retired Chairman of the Board of Customs and Excise, Sir Angus Fraser, soon to be appointed Adviser to the Prime Minister on Efficiency and Effectiveness in Government. Was I, he wanted to know, Augustus John’s biographer? He had used that invaluable reference work, the telephone directory, and having assured himself that I was the right chap, he
wrote me a letter asking whether I knew of any British institution that might be interested in purchasing the Augustus John archive. ‘I happen to know that the American purchaser of 1979 is divesting himself of a number of his collections and would be willing to part with this one too,’ he explained. He had sent this purchaser an article I had written in the
Sunday Times
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mentioning the disappearance of the John papers.

‘The trouble is likely to be the dollar price expected, given the way the dollar/sterling exchange rate has moved since 1979. As I understand it, the present owner wants to recover his original payment plus an allowance for notional interest over the intervening years. When he bought the John material, the dollar stood at well over $2 to
£
1
.
Allowing for eight years’ interest, the selling price he is looking for is in the range of $200,000–250,000, i.e. about
£
123,000–154,000 at today’s exchange rates. It is going to be very difficult to identify a British institution which can afford that kind of money… I have absolutely no financial interest in this matter; it is simply that, having becoming aware of the opening for a sale, I would be glad to see the papers come back to the U.K.’

Apart from the Tate Gallery, I thought there were two places where these papers would find a good home: the British Library, and the National Library of Wales, which had been the underbidder at Sotheby’s. Unknown to me at that time, the National Library of Wales had started building a Gwen John archive. It rivalled in interest the New York Public Library’s holding of her correspondence with the American patron John Quinn, and her letters to Rodin at the Musée Rodin in Meudon. Edwin John had died in 1978, and half a dozen years later his son and daughter completed the sale of the correspondence, notes and other personal papers that Mary Taubman had been working on, and that had been in Gwen John’s studio along with the pictures bought in 1976 by the National Museum of Wales.

Having made my suggestions I heard nothing more for the rest of the year, and began ruminating on the curiosities of the international manuscript market and the peculiar motives of private collectors.

I remembered that one cold January day in the early 1970s as I was working on
Augustus John,
I had received a letter from an Australian university saying that I might like to know that while I was enduring the snows and winds of an English winter, the manuscript, galleys and page proofs of my
Lytton Strachey
‘sit comfortably at a constant temperature in our Rare Book Room’. It had the advantage of me. I would never have thought such a thing possible when I started writing. I believed then that I could steer clear of most libraries except my own, assembled over the years from secondhand bookshops. Almost all Strachey’s letters had been
in private hands and, once I had prised them out of attics, cellars and studios, I was often permitted to cart them back to my room. But those amateur days, with their privileged access, were coming to an end. Augustus John’s papers were divided between private houses and public institutions, and continually on the move from the former to the latter where they would be more professionally managed.

Manuscript libraries are somewhat like laboratories where, with thousands of fragments, you experiment in the hope of a resurrection miracle. But such sombre places of scholarship often rely on contemporary business of one sort or another for their derivative funds. Business and scholarship are not always easy companions. I first became aware of the difficulties that may arise from these partnerships while tracking down some of Augustus John’s correspondence to a library that informed me I could not examine it because everything was embargoed. I happened to know the original seller of this material. When I asked her about the embargo she was unable to explain it. After further investigations I found out that the dealers themselves had imposed the embargo either because they were shocked by the illustrated contents or more probably because by ‘hotting up’ the material they also hotted up the price. In this case I was able to break the embargo but, having had no description of the material, was disappointed after all my stubborn detective work to discover that the letters were of no real use – until perhaps now – though the temptation to force some of them into my book after such a struggle was strong.

Once a manuscript is sold at auction to a dealer there is no certain way of tracing its destination. The mail is crammed with blind letters of inquiry, and there are many culs-de-sac. I remember sending one of these letters myself and, receiving no answer, following it up after an interval with a second inquiry. This time the answer was swift and helpful. The librarian stated that he had one unspecified item that might be useful. I offered to pay the fee and was eventually rewarded with a luxurious folder complete with a covering letter explaining that, since there was only a single uncatalogued item involved, the library had waived its fee. Full of gratitude I opened the folder and found inside, beautifully copied and presented, my own original unanswered letter stamped with a warning that I did not have copyright permission to quote it.

About the motives of private collectors I find it difficult to speculate. No person who buys the correspondence of the dead can be prevented from doing what he likes with it, except of course publish it: that is the prerogative of the copyright holder. But since holographs lose some of their financial value when published, a period of hibernation may very well suit someone who buys for capital appreciation. Though he may not legally quote anything much without copyright permission, an owner may,
without breaking any law I know, burn or otherwise destroy his papers, thereby robbing himself. Or he may lock everything away in a bank vault. That is the law of property some call theft.

Original manuscripts never lose their power of attracting textual critics, biographers and historians because handling such material is usually the nearest that they come to their subjects. They are almost literally in touch with them. Manuscript research, as Philip Larkin pointed out, can reveal the genesis and evolution of a work of literature and provide us with an archive of the writer’s life as the background of his works. ‘All literary manuscripts’, Larkin argued, ‘have two kinds of value.’
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He called them the magical and meaningful values. The first, which is older and universal, kindles research with a peculiar excitement and intimacy; the second, which is more technical and modern, contributes to our understanding of a writer’s intentions. Together they may enlarge our knowledge of the creative process, while contributing to the recreative process of non-fiction literature.

All this was being frustrated while the Augustus John papers remained in limbo. What I did not know was that the National Library of Wales had been contacted by a third party acting on behalf of the purchaser. Negotiations for a private-treaty sale had started, proceeded, then stopped: and silence fell. Then at the beginning of 1988 I was contacted by a manuscript librarian at the British Library asking me to write in support of his objection, addressed to the Reviewing Committee of Works of Art, to the export of the Augustus John papers. The position seemed somewhat topsy-turvy since we were lodging an objection to something that was apparently being proposed eight years after it had actually happened. Reading between the lines, I guessed that the papers had somehow been smuggled back into the country and now posed something of a problem. In the event, the hearing in front of the Reviewing Committee never took place since the exporters agreed to sell the papers to the National Library of Wales after representatives from its Department of Manuscripts and Records had inspected the collection at Sotheby’s London office. This sale was completed in June 1988 by Sotheby’s, which had now sold the same papers twice.

The price was not quite what the owner had wanted, but then the collection itself was no longer so comprehensive. Only photocopies, for example, of letters from members of the Gypsy Lore Society were included, the originals having been retained by the anonymous American collector. Like Sir Angus Fraser (who edited George Borrow’s letters and published a book on gypsies), he obviously kept up a special interest in travelling people and ‘the affairs of Egypt’.

My biography had gone into paperback in the 1970s and was last
reprinted in 1987. The publication of Ceridwen Lloyd-Morgan’s
Gwen John Papers at the National Museum of Wales
the following year, and the schedule of
Gwen John Papers
and catalogue of
Augustus John Papers
which she compiled in 1988 and 1991, alerted me to the large archive of both artists that had been formed at Aberystwyth since my biography was written. After being given advance notice of a further reprint in 1992, I decided to go and have a look at these collections. What I saw during this reconnaissance persuaded me to buy back the rights in my book and prepare this new edition.

The Augustus John collection has changed considerably since I was handed it in instalments by Dorelia and Romilly John at Fryern, and drove it in great disorder to my room in London. Then the papers had been all muddled together and posted into shopping bags and pillowcases; now they were sorted and filed, bound and guarded by what at first gasp appeared a formidable set of regulations. Traces of their old happy-go-lucky days could be detected in Caspar John’s flowing pencil dates and occasionally, I was surprised to see, my own more tortuous ones. But now there was a systematic dating guide provided by the catalogue calendar, this being all the more necessary because many of the envelopes that had existed twenty-five years before had gone missing. There were a few other items missing from the papers after their long journeys by car, ship or plane, but documents had been added in the mid-1970s when Ronald Hamand was going round the family preparing his catalogue. This material was new to me, as were some of the Nettleship and John papers donated to or bought by the National Library of Wales between the mid-1970s and the early 1990s.
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This group includes approximately three hundred and twenty-five Augustus John letters.

Even more interesting to me was the Gwen John archive. I had used some of the contents and could recognize Mary Taubman’s handwritten dates. But there was a good deal of material I had not seen, including papers that no one else had used while they were in private hands (such as Augustus John’s letters to his son Edwin). There are more than seventy-five letters from Augustus John in the Gwen John archive, as well as correspondence from her father, her brother Thornton and sister Winifred, her nephew (Augustus’s son) Henry John, and from Ida and Dorelia.