Augustus John (79 page)

In Winston Churchill, whom he drew after the Second World War, John was to observe the same inability to keep still. Under his scrutiny, Churchill seemed reduced to the condition of a child. His concern was for his ‘image’. How else to explain, John wondered, ‘these fits and starts, these visits to the mirror, this preoccupation with the window curtains, and the nervous fidgeting with his jowl?’

A less quick-footed target was Ramsay MacDonald, whom John vainly attempted to paint on a number of occasions. The difficulty here seems to have been that the sitter proved too dim a subject to illuminate the romantic interpretation of a ‘dreamy knight-errant, dedicated to the overthrow of dragons and the rescue of distressed damsels’ which John insisted upon trying to fix on him. ‘I have fallen into troubled waters and I do not know when on earth I shall be able to see you,’ MacDonald wrote from Downing Street on 8 April 1933, two days before the Labour Party moved a vote of censure on the all-party government of which he was Prime Minister over unemployment. A fortnight later, MacDonald admitted in a letter to Will Rothenstein that ‘John’s portrait was a melancholy failure. It really was a terrible production, and everybody who saw it turned it down instantly. He wants to begin again, but I am really tired. The waste of my time has been rather bad. He made two attempts and an earlier one some time ago. In all I must have given between 20 and 30 sittings of 1½
hours’ average, and I cannot afford going on unless there is some certainty of a satisfactory result… ’

The most satisfactory of John’s Prime Ministers was achieved at the expense of A. J. Balfour, who appeared to fall asleep. His philosophy of doubt, which always appealed to John, seemed to reach a culmination in
his slumbering posture. ‘I set to,’ John records, ‘and completed the drawing within an hour.’

He relished the prospect of meeting the famous. But invariably the prospect was better than the experience – except in the case of artists and writers. These portraits, especially of writers, comprise a separate section of his work – not private in the same way that ‘Washing Day’ or ‘Woman Knitting’ or ‘The Red Feather’ or ‘The Mauve Jersey’ are private, but not to be classed among what Quinn fretfully described as his ‘colonels and fat women, and… other disagreeable pot-boilers’.
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Among the writers who sat to him in these war years were W. H. Davies,
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Ronald Firbank, the gregarious Gogarty and the ailing Arthur Symons. Perhaps the most celebrated was Bernard Shaw, of whom, during May 1915, he did three rapid portraits in oil.

Shaw was staying at Coole over Easter with Lady Gregory when his industry was suddenly halted by an atrocious headache. ‘Mrs Shaw was lamenting about not having him painted by a good artist,’ Lady Gregory wrote to W. B. Yeats, ‘and I suggested having John over, and she jumped at it, and Robert [Gregory] is to bring him over on Monday.’
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In the event John seems to have travelled more erratically, catching ‘a kind of cold’
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in Dublin, falling into convivial company and arriving ‘in a contrite and somewhat shattered condition’
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a week late. His symptoms deepened on discovering that Lady Gregory (who ‘is just like Queen Victoria] only uglier’) had used Shaw as bait for a portrait of her grandson ‘little Richard’
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whom, until now, he had successfully avoided. Although John made no secret of his preference for little Richard’s sister, Anne Gregory, ‘a very pretty little child with pale gold hair’, Lady Gregory insisted that it must be the son of the house who was honoured. So he began this ‘awful job’, producing what both children found ‘a very odd picture… [with] enormous sticky-out ears and eyes that sloped up at the corners, rather like a picture of a chinaman...’
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,
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Meanwhile, in his bedroom, Shaw was preparing himself. He had recovered from his headache to the extent of having his hair cut, but in the excitement, Lady Gregory lamented, ‘too much was taken off’.
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Despite Shaw’s head and John’s cold, both were at their most winning by the time the sittings began.

Each morning John would strip off his coat, prop his canvases on the best chairs and paint several versions at one sitting. But at night he would, ‘like Penelope’, undo the work of the previous day, washing the canvas clean and then starting another portrait in its place. ‘He painted with large brushes and used large quantities of paint,’ Shaw remembered.
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Over the course of eight days he painted ‘six magnificent portraits of me’, he told Mrs Patrick Campbell.
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‘…Unfortunately as he kept painting
them on top of one another until our protests became overwhelming, only three portraits have survived.’

Between sittings John went off for ‘some grand galloping’
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with Robert Gregory, or, more sedately, would row Mrs Shaw across the lake. ‘Mrs Shaw is [a] fat party with green eyes who says “Ye-hes” in an intellectual way ending with a hiss,’ he divulged to Dorelia. Over thirty years later, in
Chiaroscuro,
John described Shaw as ‘a true Prince of the Spirit’, a fearless enemy of cant and humbug, and in his queer way, ‘a highly respectable though strictly uncanonical saint’.
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In his letters to Dorelia at the time he refers to him as ‘a ridiculous vain object in knickerbockers’ and describes the three of them – Lady Gregory and the Shaws – as ‘dreadful people’. Such discrepancies were odd notes played by John’s violently fluctuating moods, which were agitated at Coole Park by the fact that, though there was plenty to eat, nobody smoked or drank. ‘I smoke still,’ he reassured Dorelia, ‘but only touch claret at meals. In Ireland claret is regarded as a T[emperance] drink.’
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His admiration of Shaw, whom he intermittently thought ‘very pleasant company’, was qualified by the extreme awe radiated towards GBS from the women in the house. This veneration combined with John’s hearty silence to stimulate in Shaw the kind of brilliant intellectual monologues which put John in the shade, and which may have prompted him to paint over the portraits (a sort of silencing) so many times.

‘I find him [Shaw] a decent man to deal with,’ John notified Quinn,
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after Shaw had decided to buy one of these emphatic portraits for three hundred pounds (equivalent to £10,800 in 1996) – the one with the blue background.
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He had been reminded by Wyndham Lewis that Shaw’s beard ‘protrudes for several feet in front of his face’, unlike Darwin’s which ‘grew into his mouth’.
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The head, as Shaw himself pointed out, had two aspects, the concave and the convex. John produced two studies from the concave angle, and a third (with eyes shut as if in aching thought) from the convex – ‘the blind portrait’ Shaw called it; adding in a letter to Mrs Patrick Campbell that it had ‘got turned into a subject entitled Shaw Listening to Someone Else Talking, because I went to sleep...’
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With this sleeping version John was never wholly satisfied. ‘It could only have happened of course in the dreamy atmosphere of Coole,’ he suggested to Shaw.
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Though he had sometimes bridled at having his portrait washed out by John, and rebelled against ‘being immortalised as an elderly caricature of myself, Shaw was generally pleased with these poster-portraits, especially the one he bought and kept all his life – ‘though to keep it in a private house seems to me rather like keeping an oak tree in an umbrella stand’.
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In the regular Irish manner, like Yeats, he boasted that ‘John
makes me out the inebriated gamekeeper’; but in later life he would tell other artists wishing to paint him that since he had been ‘done’ by the two greatest artists in the last forty years, Rodin and John, there was no room for more portraits.
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John exhibited the portrait with the blue background at the summer show of the NEAC in May and June 1915; and in February 1916 he held an exhibition of twenty-one paintings and forty-one drawings at the Chenil Gallery.
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It was, perhaps, his last effort to pursue something of what he had been doing before the war, an anthology of past and present, landscape and portrait. Ursula Tyrwhitt made a point of writing to Gwen to say how much she had liked Gus’s drawings. But they had little connection with the war. ‘Mr Augustus John continues to mark time with great professional skill,’ wrote the art critic of
The Times.
The eyes of critics and painters were now fixed on him to see in what new direction he would go.

‘Mr John, one feels somehow, does not spend all his vitality on painting.’

Manchester Guardian
(23 November 1912)

‘A house without children isn’t worth living in!’ John had once pronounced. His sons, no longer to be classed simply as children, now passed much of their time at schools and colleges: but the supply of fresh children to Alderney continued unchecked. In March 1915, in a room next to the kitchen, John presiding, Dorelia gave birth to a second daughter, described as ‘small and nice’,
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whom they named Vivien. By the age of two she had grown into ‘a most imposing personage – half the size of Poppet, and twice as dangerous’.
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Through the woods she liked to wander with ‘a beautiful Irish setter called Cuchulain… he patiently bringing me home for meals at the toll of the great bell’.
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Unlike the boys, neither Poppet nor Vivien was sent to school. ‘We roamed the countryside,’ Vivien recalled, ‘and a tutor cycled over from Bournemouth to teach us. Finally we punctured his bicycle… ’

In 1917 four more children joined the Alderney gang – John, Nicolette, Brigit and Caitlin. These were the son and daughters, ‘robust specimens’ aged between seven and three, of Francis Macnamara who, after seven years of unfaithful marriage, had left home permanently to live with
Euphemia Lamb (who had briefly left someone else’s home to live with him). His children had circled slowly in the wake of their mother, who was eventually towed down to Alderney out of range of the German Zeppelins. One of the children, Nicolette, elected John as her second father, conceiving for the John
ménage
an exaggerated loyalty not wholeheartedly welcomed by them. Yet her feelings, despite some lapses from fact, give an intensity to her memories of Alderney.

‘In my memory the bedrooms were small boxes with large double beds. Poppet and Vivien shared one of these. On occasions, we three Macnamara girls squashed in beside them for the night. In the morning we always woke up with hangovers from an excess of giggling...

…Poppet and Vivien, the younger boys, my sisters, splashed naked in the pond, while my mother and Dodo stood by with their arms full of flowers. Edie held out a towel for a wet child. And like some mythical god observing the mortals, Augustus the Watcher, sat on a bench leaning forward, his long hair covered by a felt hat, his beard a sign of authority

It was in this garden that I first experienced ecstasy… There has never been another garden like it; it excited me in such a way that it became the symbol of heaven.’
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For those who, like the Macnamara or Anrep children, continually came and went, Alderney seemed an Eden; but for the John children themselves it was an Eden from which they needed to be expelled in order to be born into the world outside. While for a third group, a race of demi-Johns, it was also an Eden, but seen from a place of exile.

The first of this race ‘not of the whole blood’ was the daughter of a music student of generous figure and complexion called Nora Brownsword, twenty years younger than John and known, bluntly, by her surname. On a number of occasions she had posed for him mostly for wood panels, and on 12 October 1914 he wrote in a state of some financial panic to Quinn: ‘By-the-bye I’ve been and got a young lady in the family way! What in blazes is to be done?’ Quinn suggested exporting the lady to France. This advice, which arrived safely at Alderney almost five months later, was invalid by the time John read it. Yet the problem remained. What in blazes
was
to be done?

John explained the position as clearly as he could in another letter to Quinn: ‘Some while back, I conceived a wild passion for a girl and put her in the family way. She has now a daughter and I’ve promised her what she asks: £2
a week and £50 to set up in a cottage. I never see her now and don’t want to, but I’m damned if I see where that £50 is to be found at the moment. Her father is a wealthy man. He has just tumbled
to the situation and I suppose he’ll be howling for my blood.’ Dorelia’s attitude was one of sternness and calm. If matters were made too easy, then the same thing might happen many times. So she hardened herself. In John’s letters to her at this time there is a new note of diffidence mingling with reminders that ‘I cannot exist without you for long, as you know.’ He is apologetic too for not meanwhile having painted better. ‘Sorry to be so damn disappointing in my work. It must make you pretty hopeless at times, but don’t give me up yet. I’m going to improve.’ It was, to a degree, for the sake of his work that Ida had died and Dorelia risked her life: for his work and himself and themselves all together.

As a civilian in wartime John felt at the dead centre of a hurricane. It was this awful sense of deadness, this curious uselessness, that tempted him to rush into new lovemaking, as the only means of self-renewal available. Extricating himself from the consequences of his affair with Brownsword seems to have taken longer than the affair itself. She had often visited Alderney during her holidays from music college; but after the birth of her daughter she did not go back there. ‘She must on no account come to Alderney,’ John instructed Dorelia. ‘…For God’s sake don’t worry about it – don’t think about it.’

This advice John made several lusty attempts to pursue himself. It was not easy Brownsword had been anxious to shield the news from her parents – which, since they could far better afford to look after the child than he, dissatisfied John. In due course she went to live in Highgate, where John sometimes turned up – Brownsword hiding herself away at his approach. She had become extraordinarily elusive even when John pursued her with genuine offers of help. He felt deeply impatient. ‘I dined with her and wasn’t too nice,’ he admitted to Dorelia, ‘but tried to keep my temper and it’s no use allowing oneself to be too severe… She showed every sign of innocent surprise when I asked her why she had bunked away without warning.’
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In a less severe mood still, he confided on one occasion to Theodosia Townshend: ‘I’d marry her if necessary – Dodo wouldn’t mind.’ To what extent he believed this it is impossible to be sure: probably a little, once it was out of the question. In any event the ceremony of marriage meant less to him than it did to many people. Besides, there were other more fantastic plans to fall back on. ‘The Tutor’s plan I think the best,’ John had affirmed in another letter to Dorelia. After leaving Alderney, the boys’ ex-tutor, John Hope-Johnstone, had gone ‘tramping to Asia’, as John explained to Sampson, ‘got as far as Trieste, & then was arrested as a spy, spent 8 days in chokey along with a dozen other criminals mostly sexual, & then was liberated. He doesn’t think he’ll go no further.’ Stopped in his tracks by the world war, he reappeared in London and secretly offered himself in the role of the
baby’s legal father. ‘I must say,’ John acknowledged, ‘the tutor is behaving with uncommon decency.’ From Brownsword’s point of view this ‘best plan’ contained disadvantages. Although Hope-Johnstone entertained some romantic attachments for young men of under twenty, he was physically attracted to girls of ten or twelve, towards whom he would proffer timid advances, placing his hand on their thighs until, their mothers getting to hear of it, he was expelled from the house. The prospect of having a young daughter in his own house was certainly inviting; and it seems probable that he scented money in this
mariage blanc –
to the extent at least of making a household investment, ‘a most expensive frying pan’. But Brownsword was not a party to this. The surname she gave her daughter, the painter Gwyneth Johnstone, suggests that no hope had entered this relationship.