Augustus John (85 page)

But he had left many unfinished things in Paris from the conference days and had no idea how to deal with them. ‘Here I have met the Duchesse de Guiche who invites me to store my things in her house,’ he wrote from Deauville to Gwen. ‘You see in what exalted company I move!’

In March 1920, again at the Alpine Club Gallery, John exhibited his war and peace portraits. They were not flattering likenesses, nor were they satirical: with few exceptions they were neutral. The tedium released by the company of this exalted band is very adequately recorded, and to that extent he remained uncorrupted. But he had succumbed to the temptation to waste time. His two exhibitions at the Alpine Club were exercises in the higher journalism of art – commissions that gave little evidence of his special talent. John knew this himself. No amount of social success could conceal the truth for long. His melancholia deepened. In April 1920 he entered the Sister Carlin Hospital for an operation on his nose to make breathing easier. He had been ‘in a state of profound depression’, he told Ottoline Morrell. ‘…I feel always as though practically poisoned and must not shirk the operation. I look forward to it indeed as a means of recovering my normal self.’
155
It was essential to keep morale high. ‘It took an uncommon amount of ether to get me under,’ he bragged to Eric Sutton.
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Under the ether, with a deep sigh, he uttered one remark: ‘Well, I suppose I must be polite to these people.’ He recovered with his usual facility and ‘am doing rather brilliantly’.
157

For his convalescence he went with Dorelia and some of the family to stay with his father in Tenby. A new era was beginning in Britain, and many were curious to know what part John would occupy in it. He was no longer the leader, as the
Observer
art critic had reported in 1912, of ‘all that is most modern and advanced in present day British Art’. Nor, in his forty-third year, was he yet a Grand Old Man. To the younger artists he had once been the apostle of a new way of seeing: now he was the embodiment of a way of living. He wanted to start again and be more like Gwen. ‘I want to dig myself up and replant myself in some corner where no one will look for me,’ he declared to Cynthia Asquith. ‘There perhaps – there in fact I know I shall be able to paint better.’

*1
A two-masted fishing-boat of Dutch origin used off the west coast of Ireland. John had a scheme for buying one for fifty pounds.

*2
See Appendix Five.

*3
Stuart Gray, an ex-lawyer, hunger marcher and future ‘King of Utopia’.

‘Après la guerre

There’ll be a good time everywhere.’

And there was. Everyone wanted to be young again, and to forget not only the war but the ideals that had been contaminated by it. Enjoyment was to be the new currency – enjoyment spent as an unprecedented freedom to act, to experiment, to travel. The Continent became transformed from a battlefield into a playground. It was as if youth had suddenly been invented and pleasure become compulsory. There was no one who had been unaffected by those four years of terrible fighting: the whole country was scorched. Now it set about applying a balm.

To no category of people did this freedom seem to apply more directly than the New Woman. During the war her capabilities had been astonishingly displayed in the police, the munitions factories, and on the land. In the twenties she changed into a boy. No longer did she take up her hair and let down her hems to signify at sixteen that she was an adult: her hems went farther up and her hair was cut, redefining the frontiers of gender and adulthood.

People began exploring new entertainments – nightclubs, cocktails, cinemas, open-air breakfast parties and the
th
é
dansant.
‘I have a thé dansant to-morrow,’ John announced from Mallord Street, ‘ – about 3,000 people are coming.’ Parties grew more informal and gyrated to more syncopated rhythms, jazz on the gramophone and exotic dances – the shimmy, the Charleston, the black bottom, the foxtrot. The handsome woman in the hansom cab was overtaken by a fast woman in a fast car. Glamour had come to London. There was a whirl of glass beads and pearls, sparkling paste, rouge, plucked eyebrows, brilliantined hair, sticky scarlet lips, surprised faces. Coloured underclothes broke out in shades of ice-cream: peach, pistachio, coffee. Young men sported plus-fours, big bow ties, motoring caps, gauntlets, co-respondent shoes. John himself sprouted a dazzling waistcoat and suits of decisive check tweed.

There was an epidemic of health. ‘Vapours’ were no longer admired, neurasthenia went out of date. Young wives drilled themselves in natural-childbirth exercises, practised art and craftwork for charity. At weekends everyone seemed to stay with everyone else in draughty country houses, playing bridge and tennis. Nature was again important: a million women cycled out beyond the suburbs.

The twenties was not a cynical but a sentimental decade. Under the high kicks lay a deep disillusionment, beneath the quickstep slow disintegration. Social divisions were being creakingly readjusted. The social centre of gravity in Britain was on the move.

To the Old Guard, those dinosaurs from Victorian and Edwardian England, Augustus John was still ‘disgusting John’, a rascal in sinister hirsute league with those other dangerous spirits – D. H. Lawrence, Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey – all of them plotting to do away with what was decent in the country. But to the Bright Young Things, John was a ready-made hero, one of the pioneers of the new freedom. This postwar mood seemed sympathetic to him. He appeared to recover himself and gain a second wind. He travelled greater distances, drank greater quantities, made more money, did more portraits. He painted popular people: film actors, airmen, matinée idols, beauties and beauticians, Greek bankers, infantas, Wimbledon champions, novelists, musicians. The Emperor of Japan called one morning and was polished off in an hour. The new cosmetics made a false barrier between the painter and his subject, but John knew about barriers. His most glittering portraits – of the smouldering Marchesa Casati posed before Vesuvius, and of Kit Dunn seen as the arch flapper, and Poppet as a provocative sex-kitten – are extraordinarily vivid.

The spirit of the age was a fair-weather friend to John. The sun shone, the breeze blew, he sped along: it did not matter where. He was invited everywhere, though the weather of his moods made the journey tempestuous. Wherever he went, his gift for boredom dramatically asserted itself. ‘What a damnable mistake it is to go and stay with anybody,’ he cried out in one letter to Dorelia. Many of the London hostesses were too sophisticated for his appetite. He was sometimes abominably rude to them, but his apologies were full of charm, and all was forgiven this half-tamed society artist.

He had become one of the most popular men in the country. In Soho restaurants ‘Entrecôte a la John’ was eaten; in theatres any actor impersonating an artist was indistinguishable from him; in several novels he was instantly recognizable as ‘the painter’.
1
He began to use a secretary. ‘Is there room for Kathleen Hale?’
2
he asked Dorelia somewhat desperately. There was, and he started to employ this twenty-two-year-old girl (later
to become celebrated herself as the creator of the marmalade cat Orlando) primarily, he explained, gesturing his hand across his stomach as though guarding against onslaught, to provide a barrier between him and the hostesses, journalists and probationary models who solicited him.

‘He offered me £2 a week, a spare bedroom in his Chelsea house, and meals,’ Kathleen Hale remembered. When she took up her duties, she found piles of unanswered letters (often commissions for portraits), unpaid bills and beautiful drawings lying all over the table, chairs, piano, floor, mostly stained by teacups, marked by wine and whisky glasses, dusted with cigarette ash. ‘We had lots of silly fun, but getting him to start work was always a tussle of wills,’ she wrote. ‘The minute he had finished his morning painting session, his only idea was to join his friends at a local pub… There were moments of leisure when he taught me how to play chess… and how to play shove-ha’penny… jabbing at those highly polished ha’pennies, skidding them across the slippery wood.’

After a few days Dorelia came up to inspect John’s new secretary. Seeing them teasing each other, ‘she looked piercingly at me as if she doubted our relationship. A moment later the suspicion had changed.’ But it was some time before Dorelia trusted her; though Kathleen Hale was captivated by Dorelia who ‘was to have more influence on me than anyone I had ever met’.

Though John was then at the height of his fame, he seemed unspoilt. To his new secretary he appeared tired, his moustache tobacco-stained, beard grizzled. ‘But the man had panache, and his character was magnetic,’ she wrote. ‘He was a bit of a dandy, only wearing… the best silk shirts, and wonderful wide-brimmed hats… He was broad-shouldered, and muscular, and moved surprisingly lightly on his small feet… He had a feminine ability to draw people out.’ Nevertheless he always seemed on ‘a knife-edge of sensibility’, she saw, ‘poised to take things the wrong way and snap off a few heads. I never heard him shout; rather he would rumble, puff, or growl.’

But the overriding impression John made on her was of a paralysed giant. ‘I always felt that there was more to Augustus than he could ever express, and, though he appeared uninhibited, he seemed to me to be always trying to break through tremendous frustration – as if there was a volcano inside him that might erupt at any moment,’ she wrote. ‘…To his little daughter Vivien, Augustus was “the King of Men”; but I thought him a king in captivity, hounded by two black dogs: one his shyness, the other his despair.’
3

He seemed best able to escape these two black dogs in the blurred tobacco smoke of his Mallord Street parties. They would begin at five and last till five, and they appeared to have what the painter Christopher
Wood called ‘a remarkable feature… there was not one ugly girl, all wonderfully beautiful and young’. Though they regularly ended ‘in the most dreadful orgy I have ever seen’, Christopher Wood concluded: ‘One always enjoys oneself so much at his house, he is such a thorough gentleman.’
4

More coveted still was an invitation to Alderney. ‘He has lots of ponies, dogs and all kinds of animals which roam quite wild all round the house,’ Christopher Wood explained to his mother (n October 1926).

‘…We arrived to find old John sitting at his long dining table with all his children and family followers. We took our places quite naturally at the table where there was a perfect banquet with all kinds of different drinks, which everyone – even the children going down to ten years of age and even seven, and all the cats and dogs partook of. Afterwards we took off our coats and waistcoats and had a proper country dance. John has a little daughter of fifteen, like a Venus, whom he thinks a lot of… [He] is the most delightful person.’

Dancing and motoring were the obsessions of the twenties. ‘We often had afternoon jazz sessions,’ Vivien wrote, ‘dancing the Charleston, Black Bottom, or anything new.’
5
Dorelia never danced, though she was often near by, watching and smiling. John could not be prevented from taking the floor. ‘The tango can’t be resisted,’ he admitted. More irresistible still were motor cars. He had first been infected with this virus in 1911 when, throwing Mrs Strindberg off the scent, he was chauffeured through France with Quinn. ‘It can’t be denied there’s something gorgeous in motoring by night 100 kilometres an hour,’ he told Ottoline Morrell.
6
Two or three years later he had had a whack at steering Gogarty’s canary-coloured Rolls-Royce through the west of Ireland, and concluded that he ‘must get a Ford’. But it was not until 1920 that he acquired, in exchange for a picture, a powerful two-seater Buick with yellow wheels and a dicky. After enduring half an hour’s lesson in London, he filled it with friends and set off for Alderney. Apart from barging into a barrel organ and, so far as the passengers could judge, derailing a train, the car enjoyed an immaculate journey down – and this despite the fact that John’s lesson had not touched upon the philosophy of gear-changing, so that it had been in first gear from start to finish. ‘The arrival at Alderney was rightly considered a great triumph,’ Romilly John recalled.

All his sons insisted on being taught immediately – in fact they taught one another. It was then Dorelia’s turn. By evening the house was full of brand-new drivers. ‘After that we always seemed to be whizzing… up to London,’ Romilly remembered. ‘In those days the roads were still fairly
empty, and motoring was still a sport. We nearly always came up with another fast car, also on its way to town, and then we would race it for a hundred miles. No matter who was driving, we made it a point of honour never to be outdone, and we very seldom were. When our car and its rival had passed and repassed each other several times, emotion would work up to a white-heat, and every minor victory was the signal of a wild hilariousness.’
7

Though the family inherited his talent, the John style of motoring was seen in its purest form whenever Augustus took the wheel. In fine country, on a good day, he was apt to forget he was driving at all, allowing the car to pelt on ahead while he stared back over his shoulder to admire some receding view. Indeed the car often performed better like this than when he bent upon it his fullest attention. Then, roaring like a wounded elephant, it would mount hedges, charge with intrepid bursts towards corners, or simply explode. Once, when hurtling towards a fork in the road, John demanded which direction to take, and, his passenger hesitating a moment, they bisected the angle, accelerating straight into a ploughed field until brought to a halt by the waves of earth. Another time, he ‘awoke to find himself driving through the iron gate of a churchyard’.
8
Because of feats like these, the car soon began to present a dilapidated appearance, like an old animal in a circus: the brakes almost ceased to operate, and the mechanism could only be worked by two people simultaneously, the second taking off the handbrake at the precise moment when the first, manipulating the knobs, pedals and levers as if performing on an organ, caused the engine to engage with the wheels. But though he occasionally admitted it to be suffering from a form of indigestion known as ‘pre-ignition’ or to be unaccountably off colour (‘pinking somewhat’), John would loyally insist that his Buick was ‘still running very sweet’. It was true that sometimes, ‘like a woman’, the car refused to respond and had to be warmed up, cajoled, petted, pushed. At last, yielding to these blandishments, she would jerk into life and, with her flushed occupants, drag herself away from the scene of her humiliation to the dispiriting cheers of the assembled voyeurs. In her most petulant moods, she would react only to the full-frontal approach. But once, when John was winding the crank (the car having been left in gear on the downward slope of a hill), she ran him down. His companion, the music critic Cecil Gray, ‘frantically pushing and pulling every lever I could lay my hands and feet on’,
9
was carried off out of sight.