Augustus John (113 page)

Wyndham Lewis died in 1957; Matthew Smith two years later. The war had devastated him. Evacuated from France, he had abandoned many canvases and later lost his two sons on active service. In 1944 he came to Fryern for some months, and in October that year the two artists painted each other. Smith’s three portraits of John are wild-eyed and florid – John called them ‘landscapes’;
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John’s picture of Smith is full of quietness and sympathy – perhaps his last interesting portrait.

They were often seen about Chelsea in those years after the war: a curious couple – Smith, ‘whose canvases suggest that a stout model has first been flogged alive, then left to bleed to death, slowly and luxuriously, on a pile of satin cushions’,
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looking timid and myopic, a pale, spindly specimen like some bankrupt financial expert; John, with his late-flowering addiction to anaemic prettiness, like an ageing lion full of sound. ‘It is always an amusing experience to see them together,’ Peter Quennell observed, Matthew Smith ‘shrinking into his chair and glancing nervously about the room, John looking too large for the table and ordering the wine in a voice of rusty thunder’.

They went regularly to the Queen’s Restaurant, where the atmosphere – a little French, a little Edwardian – suited them well. John hated dining in a restaurant where he did not know the waiters. Here everything was the same, the waiters, the menu, the tired flowers on the tables, the potted palm at the foot of the staircase. Having a large but dispersed clientele, it was haunted by the past – old friends you could have sworn were long
dead appearing there from time to time like spectres: ‘They were easily distinguishable,’ Lucy Norton remembered:

‘John with his lion-coloured hair, the wisps drawn thinly over the top of his head, and the numerous mufflers that he never seemed to take off… the cavalier-puritan hat on the antlers of the old hat stand, and the black coat below, could have prepared anyone for the sight of him. Matthew Smith was always in the best place, against the wall, facing the room, looking very old now, but serene and gentle, seeming to say very little but a very bright smile unexpectedly lighting up his face… What struck me was John’s attitude, his care for the other old man, the way he turned his attention upon him, leaning forwards towards him over the table, encouraging him to talk and listening to everything he said… I used to join them a moment before I left… and I remember talk about Sickert and his odd clothes (no odder than Augustus’s), of Paul Nash’s illness and death… It was a totally different side to all that I had ever known of John. He had always been the focus of attention whenever I had seen him. In the very distant past, with a circle of people round him, women particularly, trying to flatter him; in later years, when he was growing old, sitting against a wall muzzy and fuddled with drink, waiting to be rescued, to be taken safely home. To see him thus sober, in command, so wrapped up in someone who took all his interest, was extraordinarily moving.’
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The Royal Academy, that ‘asylum for the aged’,
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put on a memorial show after Matthew Smith’s death. ‘Bloody marvel,’ John grunted. Some days it seemed he really wanted to die himself but did not know how to go about it. During a television interview with Malcolm Muggeridge in 1957 he demanded ‘another hundred years’ to become a good painter.
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Otherwise it was a dog’s life, an agony from start to finish. If he had it all over again he would probably do the same.

Early in the 1950s, in an effort to break new ground, he had taken to sculpture ‘like a duck to water’. He had first felt ‘longings to sculpt’ in the summer of 1905, but it was not until 1952, when he met the Italian sculptress Fiore de Henriques, that this ‘new phase in my history opened up’.
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She was a wild young woman ‘of robust physique’, he noted, savagely featured, with coal-black hair, stalwart legs and a grip of iron. She came to Fryern late in 1952 shortly after her monument to the humanist philosopher Don Giovanni Cuome in Salerno had been blown up, and ‘has done a very successful bust of me’.
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He could not keep his hands, while she worked, off the clay, and eventually she gave him some with which to experiment. The result was ‘a prognathous vision of the young Yeats’,
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followed by busts of some of his family, friends and a
model. ‘Getting the hang of this medium’, as he called it, was exciting for John. ‘I visited the Foundry where my busts are being cast,’ he told Lord Alington’s daughter, Mary Anna Marten, ‘…I feel all the excitement of a Renaissance artist who happened on a head of Venus of the Periclean age while digging in his back garden.’
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It may have been that John hoped to overcome in sculpture some of those muscular vagaries that were so affecting his draughtsmanship and painting. In the opinion of Epstein it was ‘the sculpture of a painter; it’s sensitive, but you could stick your finger through it. It’s interesting, but it’s not real sculpture.’
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John had many mighty plans, from a ‘colossal statue’ of St Catherine at the summit of St Catherine’s Rock at Tenby, to a towering statue of the mature Yeats to confront all Dublin – ‘Would you advise trousers,’ he questioned Yeats’s biographer, Joe Hone, ‘or a more classic nudity?’
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But within eighteen months this ‘new phase’ was over, and he was free to pursue with fewer interruptions the big composition upon which the reputation of these post-war years would depend.

The only other interruption was portraiture – often drawings of famous men such as Thomas Beecham, Frank Brangwyn, Walter de la Mare, Charles Morgan, Gilbert Murray, Albert Schweitzer (‘sat like a brick he did’). These drawings provided John with ‘outings’, moments of adventure and respite. His studies of these ‘old buffers’ are probably his best work in these last years. Of the original talent little remains: yet a certain ingenuity has developed, the skill of using a restricted vocabulary. The trembling contours, the blurred and fading lines convey poignantly the frailty of old age. Some, who guarded their public image scrupulously and would have given much for a John portrait before the war, now refused his requests: among them J. B. Priestley and A. L. Rowse. Others refused because of their own great age. ‘I am too old for sittings,’ Shaw wrote (10 May 1949). ‘…I have no longer any outline and am just like any other old man with a white beard. At 90 one must be counted as dead...’
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But one who welcomed him enthusiastically was John Cowper Powys. ‘Here is Augustus John Himself with his daughter [Vivien] as his driver,’ he wrote to Phyllis Playter (26 November 1955). ‘Hurrah! Hurrah! Hurrah! – He himself is a splendid picture.’ In an hour and a quarter John polished off two drawings, retired for the night to the Pengwern Hotel, then ‘like Merlin’ returned next morning for another session. When he rose to depart, Powys told Louis Wilkinson, ‘I leapt at him exactly as a devoted Dog of considerable size leaps up at a person he likes, and kissed his Jovian forehead which is certainly the most noble forehead I have ever seen. I kissed it again & again as if it had been marble, holding the godlike old gent so violently in my arms that he couldn’t move till the
monumental and marmoreal granite of that forehead cooled my feverish devotion. His final drawing was simply of my very soul – I can only say it just
awed
me.’
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Almost his last outing, in October 1959, was to Tenby, which had conferred on him the Freedom of the Borough. It means ‘simply civil amour propre, something good to drink, a few little speeches and jokes, a write-up in the papers,’ Thornton wrote from Canada. But, he warned, Augustus would ‘have to get a new suit’.
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Dodo, ‘under the impression that it rains perpetually in Wales’, did not go, and he was accompanied by his daughter-in-law, Simon John, who ‘was very much admired’.
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He had been quite afraid to go back, but the morbid associations with Tenby had now vanished. The Prescelly Mountains where he had been taken by his nurse, and the Cleddau valley where he had walked with his father were ‘more beautiful than ever… all, all was perfect.’
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He also liked the people, ‘particularly one’, he told Caspar, ‘a blonde of truly classic proportions. With the backing of the mayor, a past owner of the hotel where this paragon works as a waitress I hope to succeed in overcoming this young lady’s scruples, and putting her to the acid test of my brush.’
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He lingered over dinner with the Mayor while a large audience, waiting impatiently for them in the town hall, was assailed by Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an Exhibition.
At last, to the sound of cheers, the diners clambered on to the flower-camouflaged platform with, the
Tenby Observer and County News
reported, ‘an air of deep sincerity and of historic significance’. John, though ‘the piercing eyes still flashed’, seemed enveloped by benevolence. Sandwiched between the Mayor and Town Clerk, flanked by aldermen, councillors and burgesses, buffeted by sonorous compliments, he looked ‘deeply moved and at times somewhat overcome by… an emotion that he did not try to conceal’.
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As he rose to sign the Freeman’s Roll, the audience rose too, singing ‘For he’s a jolly good fellow!’ In a speech of stumbling thanks, he spoke of his walks as a boy over the beaches and burrows: ‘I could take those walks again now and I don’t think I would get lost,’ he declared defiantly. ‘I can find my way about still.’

But to many, in these last years, he looked pitifully lost, the beard stained with nicotine, the listening eyes glaring, the slurred actions menacing the traffic. He was shepherded back by Simon ‘my eldest son’s wife’, he explained to his sister Winifred, ‘or rather ex-wife for I think they are now divorced’. Simon had come to live at Fryern in 1956 ‘and to my astonishment is quite a success’.
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He relied on her as a model (his voluptuous portrait of her, very dashing
en déshabillé,
was shown at the Royal Academy in 1959); and she was devoted to him, though there was
a number of what he lightly called ‘fracas’ – matters of words and tablets, after which they would all return to ‘friendly terms’ again.

John’s face – ‘one of the most remarkable old faces I have ever seen’, the writer Maurice Collis called it
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– appeared on television, was splendidly photographed for the newspapers, and occasionally seen at galleries being ‘assaulted’ by some old lady ‘whose summer costume quite concealed her identity till a warm embrace on parting brought me to my senses’.
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He had little to say. Every birthday the journalists telephoned and every time they reported his words: ‘Work as usual’. No one seemed interested in this work – it was the past for which he was famous. From time to time phantoms from that past would overtake him, dragging his name into the headlines. He was reported as racing to Devizes Hospital after Mavis Wheeler suddenly shot her current lover, Lord Vivian, in the stomach. She was charged at the Assize Court in Salisbury with attempted murder and found guilty of unlawful and malicious wounding. ‘Heard from Mavis, very cheerful and cock-of-the walk at her new prison,’ John told their son Tristan.
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Then Eve Fleming, aged over seventy, began a series of ‘foolish’ court battles, drenched by gusts of public laughter, against one of John’s models, a voluble overweight daughter of a Parsee high priest, and author of
Heroines of Ancient Iran,
for the affection of a penniless nonagenarian aristocrat, the sixteenth Marquis of Winchester, known harmlessly as ‘Monty’. John advised Eve to ‘drop that discredited old ass’, but she persisted, eventually winning her case on appeal, carrying her elderly prize to the Hôtel Metropole in Monte Carlo, and steering him into the
Guinness Book of Records
as the oldest peer in history. ‘How pleased you must be to hear that Mama is about to join the aristocracy,’ John wrote to their daughter Amaryllis.
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But it was to a remoter past that he felt himself tied. The subject of his gigantic triptych, ‘Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer with Sainte Sara, l’Egyptienne’, had first fired his imagination when, with the encouragement of Scott Macfie in 1910, he became involved with the pilgrim mystery of the gypsies. In the years between the wars, the dreams symbolized for John by this legend paled. Then, with the Second World War, he turned back to them. ‘I have begun a picture of Les Saintes Maries de la Mer with Sainte Sara l’Egyptienne,’ he wrote to Dora Yates on 13 March 1946. His first attempt to re-illumine this miraculous land had been ‘The Little Concert’ which, he told William de Belleroche on 1 April 1948, ‘will never be really finished as I want to alter it every time I see it’. He could resign himself to its inconclusive state only by becoming more interested in variation. It was then, in the late 1940s, that his long-slumbering interest in Sainte Sara awoke. It was as if, on opening his eyes, she mesmerized him. ‘I am astonished at my own industry,’ he
declared. She became his reason for not travelling, not taking on profitable portrait work. For over a dozen years, with few pauses, she held him, like some siren, calling him back to his studio day after day, and making his nights sleepless. She enchanted and tortured him; she was to be his resurrection or his death.

The saga of this vast mural and John’s ‘dreadful expenditure of time and effort’ over it can be assembled from his letters. ‘There will soon not be an inch of wall-space left for me to disfigure,’ he had joked to Doris Phillips on 24 July 1951. By 1952 the three compositions appeared to be combining harmoniously. ‘So much depends on them,’ he confessed to Daniel George. ‘They wax and wane like the moon.’
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The spirit in which he met this challenge is conveyed in a letter to the artist Alfred Hayward: ‘It seems to me one wasted most of one’s time when young. At last I feel myself interested only in work and feel always on the brink of discovery. That surely is excitement enough. We are left very much in the dark and have to find a way out for ourselves. One thing becomes clear – nothing worth doing is easy – though it may and should look so, after ages of effort and god knows what failures!’
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