Augustus John (92 page)

On 22 October 1925 John had received a letter from Dudley Tooth
explaining that his gallery in Bruton Street was no longer to be exclusively associated ‘with the academic works of deceased masters of the British School’, but intended to ‘deal in the best modern art of to-day’. The letter, asking John to let the gallery handle his future work, apparently went unanswered. Then, in 1926, John held a joint exhibition with his sister Gwen at Knewstub’s New Chenil Gallery. When Dudley Tooth wrote again, on 9 February 1928, Mrs Fleming, acting as go-between, gave him little chance of success. But by that time Knewstub had collapsed and John, who had tried unsuccessfully to find someone to take over the Chelsea art emporium, finally decided to invade the West End. At a meeting on 12 March 1928, Tooth proposed setting up an agency to deal with all John’s pictures (excluding portraits painted to private commission), and holding a one-man show to identify the gallery as John’s sole agents. To these proposals John agreed, his first exhibition at Tooth’s being held in April 1929. It was into this exhibition that Virginia Woolf dashed and ‘was so shocked that I came out again’, she told her sister Vanessa Bell (28 April 1929). ‘You can’t conceive – if I’m to be trusted – the vulgarity, banality, coarseness and commonplaceness of those works, all costing over £400 [equivalent to £10,800 in 1996] and sold in the first hour.’
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Though he could still rake in the money, the ‘age of Augustus John’ was well and truly over.

All this postdated Knewstub’s period of utmost need. After 1927 his friendship with John ceased. When J. B. Manson appealed for a fund to assist him, he received from John a categorical reply: ‘I shall certainly not help Knewstub or any other crooked swine.’
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To many this smelt of ingratitude. But he believed that, in addition to making a hole in his own pocket, Knewstub had taken advantage of Gwen John’s financial innocence to cheat her of fifty pounds. Yet he did help Knewstub’s wife and at least one of her children ‘on the understanding that K[newstub] is to know nothing,’ he instructed Manson. ‘I gather that K’s family see nothing of him and don’t particularly want to.’
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For years Knewstub had modelled himself on John, training his wife to resemble Dorelia; and now John had deserted him. He retired to Hastings, to the singing of the birds and of his kettle. ‘A well-fitted cellar of the best would certainly rejuvenate me,’ he suggested. But in vain. He fell back pitiably on tea. ‘Possibly’, he estimated, ‘the outstanding comfort I have is being able to make good hot tea
very easily
in the morning… It is an almost indispensable stimulant and restorative.’ He luxuriated in the ‘humiliation’ of National Assistance – which showed how far ‘on the downward path’ he had travelled. He threatened to ‘sell my few possessions’, even his ‘worn out lot of rubbish and rags’; he threatened to live to a hundred so that he might receive a royal telegram for his ‘dear
ones the generations ahead’; he threatened, most embarrassingly, to start again: ‘I think I must somehow refit myself with Evening Dress,’ he calculated. Refitted thus, he proposed to write doggerel for charity, in particular the Women’s Voluntary Service. Or else: ‘A lavatory attendant would not be too great an effort,’ he told one of his sisters, ‘and would allow me ample time for quiet meditation.’ But when the family, responding to this blitzkrieg, implored him to visit them, he shook his head. ‘I have had nearly half-a-gallon of my blood drawn from my arm by way of donation to the Blood Transfusion Service,’ he explained, refusing the invitation. ‘…I am by far and away the oldest in the whole of this South-East Area Service. The true “Blue Blood” is graded “O” – as mine is – and is the most suitable for a child, or even the most delicate of patients. So you will understand, my dear, that I cannot abandon my interests in this town – only a fortnight ago I was called upon for another pint… Courage as always, until the final peace comes to us.’

So he lived on, an old man ‘making my own bed; blacking my own grate; washing my own shirt; darning my own socks; and doctoring myself. Upon his family, he took revenge for the bitterness of his life, smiling with self-pity, bragging of his modesty, rubbing his poverty into their faces like an enormous scab. Had he mentioned the time, he often wondered, Augustus John ‘said to me nearly forty years ago that in his opinion your tactfulness was the greatest of your many charms’? He would have liked to remind John of that now, face to face, here in Hastings.

But John had escaped and was moving into new territories.

‘I am employed mainly in accepting invitations & getting out of keeping them.’

Augustus to Dorelia (27 April 1924)

‘Whenever I see a bottle of Chateauneuf du Pape I am reminded of him,’ wrote the painter A. R. Thomson. Most years, ‘to refresh myself’, John would ease his way down to Provence, taking the wine ‘with great gusto’.
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One day he would suddenly announce that they were off, and everything was dropped. Cats, daughters, perhaps a son or governess – all filed into the train and by night meandered through the charging carriages, while John sat peacefully asleep in the corridor.

But Martigues was no longer the place it had been before the war.
More cafés were opening up on the cours de la République, more motor cars herded under the plane trees. A new bascule bridge was put up, useful but unbeautiful. Creeping industrialism was beginning to mar that air of innocence which had first attracted John to this little community of fishermen. Progress did not stampede through Martigues: it infiltrated. For ten years he and his family continued to come and then, submitting to the advance of commercialism, left for ever.

Bazin, that essayist of the air, was now dead and his daughter, it had to be admitted, ‘rather mad’.
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Once intended as mistress for Quinn, she was recast as Poppet and Vivien’s governess. The two girls loved the Villa Ste-Anne. ‘It seems to me’, wrote Poppet,
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‘that life went by very smoothly on these visits to Martigues. There were great expeditions round the country and picnics as many as we could wish for… Saturday nights were very gay’, dining ‘chez Pascal’, then descending to the Cercle Cupidon and dancing to their heart’s content while John, a glass of marc-cassis at his elbow, sat proudly watching them. Like the village girls, Poppet and Vivien danced together until, tiring of this, Poppet took to lipstick. ‘After that we hardly missed a dance with the young men.’ These young men would present themselves at John’s table to ask for his permission then, after the dance was over, escort the girls back to him. ‘Augustus seemed to enjoy watching us and sometimes would whirl us round the floor himself,’ Poppet remembered.

‘Then suddenly one Saturday night at dinner he looked at me with a glaring eye and growled: “Wipe that muck off your face!” Whereupon Vivien piped up with: “But she won’t get asked to dance without it – they’ll think she’s too young.” Augustus was furious. “Wipe it off!” he shouted, “and stop ogling the boys!” Then I lost my temper (always a good thing to do I later found) and I flew at him, telling him it was he who ogled all the time and that I must have picked up the habit from him – also that I noticed the girls he ogled used lipstick and I was jolly well going to do so too! This made him laugh, the whole thing passed off and I continued to dance with le joli garçon every Saturday night… So life went on.’
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For John, life depended upon weather, flowers, girls. If the sun shone there was a chance of happiness. Though ‘there was a brothel near John’s villa I always found him playing draughts,’ protested A. R. Thomson. ‘…He liked to wander in back streets of old France, smell of wine-and-garlic or wine-and-cheese in his nostrils.’ Then, if he spotted an unusual-looking woman he would rise and with swollen eyes, pursue her. But more often he found the models he needed from among his family, posing them
in a setting of olive or pine trees, the speckled aromatic hills beyond and, further off, bordering the blue Étang, distant amethyst cliffs.

But there were other days when the sun refused to shine and he would energetically tinker with plans to be off elsewhere, anywhere. ‘The weather is cold and grey,’ he wrote to Dorelia. ‘…There’s nothing much in the way of flowers here and I have no models. I might as well be dead.’ He would decide to leave, return to London, paint portraits; then the clouds dispersed and he was suddenly negotiating to buy another house there. ‘Martigues is like some rustic mistress one is always on the point of leaving,’ he confided to Mitchell Kennerley, ‘but who looks so lovely at the last moment that one falls back into her arms.’
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*

John’s scheme, ‘quite wise for once’,
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was to pass his winters in Provence painting intermittently out of doors, and then, in the spring or summer, explore new regions. In May 1922 he found himself in Spain. His son Robin was then in Granada studying Castilian affairs with the tutor. ‘I don’t know if I can get painting materials in Spain,’ John had hesitated; and then: ‘Spanish people, I imagine, are hideous.’
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But he went.

But he went first to Paris for a hectic week with Tommy Earp, then descended south. ‘Down here in the wilds life is much calmer,’ he assured Viva Booth, ‘indeed there are perhaps too many vacant moments and unoccupied gaps.’ Like all his random travels, there was no plot or continuity. Spain was a series of impressions: in Madrid the sight of Granero, the famous matador, limping from the ring where, the following Sunday, he would be killed; at the Café Ingles other heroes of the bullring in Andalusian hats and pigtails ‘looking rather like bulls themselves’,
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vibrating with energy; the blind, hideously deformed beggars crouching in the gutters and appealing for alms; and, at evening, the ladies of the bourgeoisie collecting in the pastry-shops to ‘pass an hour or two before dinner in the consumption of deleterious tarts and liqueurs’.
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Then, in the Alhambra, a glimpse of two friends: Pepita d’Albaicin, an elegant gitana dancer, and Augustine Birrell again, until quite recently Chief Secretary for Ireland – ‘a surprising combination’; and at Ugijar the spectacle of Robin full of silent Spanish and the tutor taking very bad photographs.

By mid-June his white paint had ‘just about come to an end’
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and he started back, crossing the Sierra Nevada and descending on the north to Guadix, where he was to catch a train to Barcelona.

‘The ascent was long. Snow lay upon the heights. At last we reached the Pass and, surmounting it, struck the downward trail. A thick fog veiled
the land. This suddenly dispersed, disclosing an illimitable plain in which here and there white cities glittered. The distant mountains seemed to hang among the clouds. At our feet blue gentians starred our path, reminding me of Burren in County Clare… the country became more and more enchanting. As we rode on, verdurous woods, grassy lawns and gentle streams gladdened our eyes so long accustomed to the stark and sunbaked declivities of the Alpujarras.’
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Spain, John told Dorelia, was ‘very fine in parts, but there are
immense
stretches of nothing’. The spirit of the counry had come near, but it had not taken hold of him. ‘Art, like life, perpetuates itself by contact,’ he wrote. The moment of contact came as he was leaving Barcelona. ‘I was walking to the station, when I saw three Gitanas engaged in buying flowers at a booth. Struck numb with astonishment by the flashing beauty and elegance of these young women, I almost missed my train.’ He went on to Marseilles, but the vision of these gitanas persisted: ‘I was unable to dismiss it.’ In desperation he hired a car and returned all the way to Barcelona. But ‘of course I did not find the gypsies again. One never does.’

Spain incubated in his mind, but never hatched. When he flew back there in December 1932 on his way to Majorca, rain was to make the world unpaintable; after which Franco, like a hated bird of prey, kept him off until too late.

‘I am sure it will stimulate me,’ he had written to Ottoline Morrell, ‘and I shall come back fresher and more myself.’
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In fact he came back as someone else. He had seen many pictures in Spain. ‘At the Prado I found Velasquez much greater and more marvellous than I had been in the habit of thinking,’ he told Dorelia. ‘There is nobody to touch him.’ He went to the Academy of San Fernando and the shabby little church of San Antonio de la Florida to see the Goya frescoes of the cupola: ‘My passion for Goya was boundless.’ The streets of Madrid seemed to throb and pulse with Goyaesque characters afterwards, bringing the place alive for him. There were other paintings too that ‘bowled me over’: Rubens’s ‘The Three Graces’ and, ‘a dream of noble luxury’, Titian’s ‘Venus’. Only El Greco, at the Prado, disappointed him. Yet, mysteriously, it was El Greco who was to affect his painting. John’s ‘Symphonie Espagnole’ of 1923 is a self-confessed essay in the El Greco style that marshals all the mawkishness and conveys little of the ecstatic rhythm. These weeks in Spain form a parallel to his journey through northern Italy in 1910. From Italy he had discovered a tradition to which he belonged; in Spain he lost himself. ‘He is painting very much like El Greco now since his visit to Spain,’ Christopher Wood noted in December 1922. This influence of El
Greco became a mannerism. The lengthening of the head worked well for few of his sitters, and the elongation of the body seemed to draw life out of it. It was an attempt by John to speak a new language, but he could say little in it that was original.

*

It was as a Distinguished Guest of the Irish Nation that in the summer of 1924 John went with Eve Fleming to Dublin. The occasion was a festival of ‘fatuous self-glorification’ called the Taillteann Games. Oliver St John Gogarty, as commander of the social operations, had billeted him with Lord Dunsany in County Meath. ‘Here I am entrapped,’ John wrote desperately from Dunsany Castle. ‘…Mrs Gogarty has developed into a sort of Duchess. I must get out of this. It was very fool-hardy to have come over.’
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Gogarty had warned Dunsany not to give John any alcohol – which made Dunsany determined to offer his guest as much as he could want. This would have suited John well, had Gogarty not confided to him that Dunsany was a fierce teetotaller. The result was that, in an agony of politeness, John persisted in refusing everything until, according to Compton Mackenzie, ‘Dunsany started to explain how to play the great Irish harp… After they went to bed Augustus climbed over the wall of Dunsany Park and walked the fourteen miles to Dublin.’
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