Augustus John (96 page)

That it became, with time, more difficult to flatter him stood awkwardly to his credit. But it did not make him easier. False praise, like alcohol, was ultimately a depressant, allowing him briefly to ‘take off while it drilled a deeper cavity into which he fell back. Among his family who, reflecting only distorted versions of himself, provided no escape, he was often most hostile. ‘Daddy has returned to the scene so it will be gloom, gloom, gloom,’ Vivien wrote in one of her letters from Fryern. Meals could be ‘absolute killers’ with the silence and fear that had filled his father’s dining-room at Tenby. When the going was bad, John would sit, a crazed look on his face, his eyes staring. Something odd was going on inside him as he sat watching the gangway of brooding children. Almost anything they did could provoke him – the way a knife was held, the expression of a face, a chance sentence. To others he spoke in a mild cultivated voice, volunteering academic speculations about the birth of language or the origin of nomads. Then he would relapse into silence, and again something nameless appeared to be torturing him. But sometimes, when he thought no one was observing him, his whole body quivered with silent laughter.

The house was controlled by these moods. Intrigues and hostilities moved through the rooms, threatening, thundering, blowing over: and all the time something within John was shrinking. His generosity, the largeness of his attitude, these he still communicated. ‘I never met any man who gave me such an immediate effect of being a great man,’
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remembered Lord David Cecil. He was a big man: but inside the magnificent shell his real self was diminishing. One sign of this was his handwriting, which
had been wild in youth, handsome and expansive in middle-age, and from the 1930s began to contract until it grew tiny – a trembling crawl across conventional small-scale writing-paper. Fryern remained a beautiful cobweb spun by Dorelia round John. Like a fly, suspended, exposed, he buzzed and was silent, buzzed and grew smaller.

Dorelia was caught too. After the war, Henry Lamb had been invalided back to England ‘in a desperate state’.
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From the General Hospital at Rouen he was sent to a hospital in London where Dorelia went to see him. ‘He’s not allowed more than one visit a day so it’s very maddening,’ she had written to Lytton Strachey (11 December 1918). ‘…His heart and nerves are in a very bad state. He’s in a very comfortable place [27 Grosvenor Square] which is a blessing, and being looked after properly for the first time.’ In so far as she could – though ‘it’s very difficult for me to get away’ – Dorelia had helped him back to health. He was often at Alderney, and to be near her he set up house at No. 10 Hill Street in Poole. To the children he had been an uncle; to Dorelia he was still her other artist, the theoretical alternative reconciling her to actual life. But for John, who knew his clever criticisms, Lamb was a sparrow imitating an eagle.

There were not many opportunities for Lamb and Dorelia to escape together. After a few precious hours, ‘that old tarantula Augustus’ would reappear ‘in his customary nimbus of boredom, silence and helpless gloom’. Dorelia would then step back into the shadows and Lamb retire bitterly alone. A drawing he did of her in 1925 shows the poignant feelings she aroused in him, and his letters to Carrington (who was herself very close to Dorelia) declare them.
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Her sexuality trapped him. A photograph he took of her with an inviting expression, sitting naked on the wooden edge of a bath, still had the power to startle the novelist Anthony Powell over sixty years later. ‘I saw at last her charm,’ he wrote,
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‘sexual attraction, hitherto hidden from me, as a force people used to talk about.’ She continued to absorb Lamb’s waiting life. When she fell ill he felt ‘terrified’, blaming John for thoughtlessly loading her with work. He tried to extricate her from the ‘cataract’ of hangers-on in the country, to rescue her when ‘bemallorded with the old monster’ in London. ‘I find her quite inaccessible,’ he sighed to Carrington (12 September 1925), ‘and of course she makes no effort.’ But there were glimpses of her, secret times when she would slip away to him, bringing plants for his garden or accompanying him to concerts.

He thought her ‘as supreme as ever’. A letter from her would make him ‘more éperdument [madly] amoureux than ever’; and after a telegram telling him to meet her at the station ‘imagine the volcano in my soul’. It was amazing how, after a few days in his company, she would recover
from ‘that old wreck of a millstone round her neck’. When conducting her home to ‘a very copious bed’ and spending four nights with her while John was away, he felt ‘some tremendous affirmation of that Spring that glimpsed on me with curious rays...’

Then there would be the prolonged anguish of separation. What aggravated everything was his sense that, by making Dorelia one of the most famous icons in twentieth-century British art, John had forever tied her to him. ‘I have had some glimpses of her,’ Lamb wrote. ‘But in spite of some occasional gleams I cannot escape from the terrible feeling of a great cloud descending – dark & immoveable.’
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Still he persisted in the hope that she would come to him, ‘and then perhaps part of the day dream could be realised… when that strange woman is less perplexed and all our nerves less raging.’
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Seeing her with John’s friends, it was inexplicable to Lamb why Dorelia ‘willingly inflicts herself with such trials’. But by the summer of 1926 it seemed as if she were finally ready to leave. He came for her and they set off together. But ‘it was no use,’ Lamb wrote afterwards, ‘the rain & the hopelessness of the houses seemed to penetrate her and she wanted to turn back at Salisbury. Although I carried out the plot to programme, waiting till the last minute at Upavon before springing it on her she flatly refused.’ It was not until the next day that she gave Lamb the reason why she would not run off with him: ‘we should never have been able to get away,’
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she said. It would have been like her escapade with Leonard all those years ago in Bruges.

Lamb’s hopes were finally extinguished by the move to Fryern. ‘I think she [Dorelia] is already pretty well bored there,’ he wrote sourly to Carrington not long afterwards. He had managed at last to get a divorce from Euphemia, and the next year, 1928, he married Pansy Pakenham, the eldest daughter of the sixth Earl of Longford, springing the news on Dorelia a few days beforehand.

Dorelia’s life with John had been growing more difficult. She made at least two attempts to leave. Once she got so far as the railway station. A pony and trap was sent off in scalding pursuit, arriving just before the train, and she was persuaded to return. The letters John wrote whenever he was abroad reveal his dependence on her, and it was this need that held her back. Finally it was too late, too unthinkable that ‘Dodo’, as everyone now called her, should not always be there. She grew more fatalistic, relying on the swing of her pendulum – a ring harnessed to a piece of string – to decide everything from the wisdom of a marriage to the authenticity of a picture. From anything that might cause pain she averted her attention, though she might seem to stare at it without emotion. The range of her interests narrowed. She had stopped drawing,
now she read less, and eventually would give up the piano. Nothing got on top of her, nothing came too near. She grew more interested in the vegetable world. The sounds at Fryern matched her equanimity: no longer the jaunty duets with Lamb, but a softer noise, the purring, amid the pots and plants, of the sewing-machine as she sat at it, for life as it were.

‘They don’t give it a name, but it seems to me rather like Winston [Churchill]’s complaint.’

Augustus John to Caspar John

In the first four years at Fryern a physical change came over John. ‘He had aged very much in those years,’ Diana Mosley remembered. ‘…John was fifty-three in 1931, but he seemed old, his hair was grey, his eyes bloodshot, and he already looked almost as he did in the cruelly truthful self-portrait he painted after the war.’
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The immediate cause of this change was alcohol. ‘I drink in order to become more myself,’ he stated once to Cecil Gray.
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At Fryern he was king of the castle; but outside this castle he felt ill-at-ease. He remained loyal to one or two places – Stulik’s, or the Queen’s Restaurant in Sloane Square – he had made homes-from-home.

Drink changed him into a different person. It was the passport that enabled him to go anywhere, giving him the gift of tongues. After a glass or two the terrible paralysis lifted, and the warmth that had been locked up within him flowed out. But then there was a third stage, when the geniality and amorousness gave way to senseless aggression – such as punching out a cigarette on someone’s face – about which he would afterwards feel baffled and ashamed.

Though he nowhere laments his mother’s death when he was six, his obsessive theme as a painter – a mother with her children in an ideal landscape – illustrates the lasting effect this loss produced. If his father represented the actual world, the deprivation of his mother became the source of that fantasy world he created in its place. It was an attempt to transmute deprivation into an asset. He was still haunted by those ‘delectable regions’ into which Ida had disappeared. To recreate this miraculous promised land in his large-scale imaginative work – a simple, self-sufficient, tribe-like way of living, vital and primitive – within the pressure of the contemporary world, with its bureaucracy and bombs, soap kings
and tax inspectors, was a lonely struggle. But alcohol, which blurred the distinction between dream and reality, lessened this sense of loss. Ida ‘will always live on in your drawings’,
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Will Rothenstein had assured him. About her death, as about his mother’s, he was reticent, but she had been a casualty in the warring of these worlds, committing him, if he were to find any justification for it, more deeply to the fantasy of his art.

But alcohol fulfilled another function: it screened the truth. It did so in many ways, numbing his disappointment, leading him into moods of self-deception. In the fictitious jollity of the bar, he acted happy and almost felt so. Acting, which had begun as a means to self-discovery, became a method of self-forgetfulness. It was this remoteness that people sensed about him. ‘I’m sure he has no human heart,’ noted Hugh Walpole in his diary (3 July 1926), ‘but is “fey”, a real genius from another planet than ours.’
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But if he was not of this planet, he did not now belong to any other. ‘Sometimes one feels positively the old
horror vacui
overwhelming one,’ he admitted to Christabel Aberconway.
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Although alcohol promoted a temporary sense of well-being, John had long recognized it as an enemy. ‘I have never really been captured by alcohol,’ he had told John Quinn in 1910, ‘and I’m not going to run after it. I think any sport can be overdone; and I’m taking a real pleasure in dispensing with that form of entertainment. In a short while I shall be able to get as drunk as I like on green tea.’ He made many of these ‘experiments in temperance’, but his drinking had got worse in the war, and worse still during his trips to the United States which seemed to prohibit temperance. Driving home in the pink light of dawn, he had been shocked to see a small herd of elephants, not realizing that they belonged to a travelling circus. He tried to pull himself together, but towards the end of the 1920s he began to have attacks of delirium tremens and appeared to be suffering from some sort of breakdown. Lamb believed these were ‘some of his melodramatic methods’ for stopping Dorelia from leaving him. ‘I think Augustus’s threatened breakdown is all fiddle dedee,’ he wrote to Carrington, ‘…though I suppose he is quite plainly, though slowly, breaking up if not down.’ Treatment was made difficult because John never admitted his addiction to alcohol. He prevaricated, referring to ‘Neurasthenia’ or even (to account for his unsteady walk) ‘water on the knee’. ‘There’s nothing the matter with me except occasional “nerves”,’ he diagnosed in a letter to Ottoline Morrell (8 June 1929). On this matter of nerves he consulted Dr Maurice Wright who was ‘very eminent in his own line – psychology, and he is already an old friend of mine’.
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According to Leonard Woolf, Wright was ‘an exceptionally nice and intelligent man’. He had failed to cure Leonard of his trembling hands and Virginia of her suicidal troughs of depression, though he was a man of high principle who ‘knew as much
about the human mind and its illnesses’
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as any of his contemporaries – which, Leonard Woolf adds, ‘amounted to nothing’. Discussing his difficulties with Wright, John used a rich supply of euphemisms, inviting the psychologist to treat symptoms which, masking the real complaint, he saw as diseases in themselves. Some of them were so bad, he joked, they could drive a man to drink. ‘You are quite right,’ he wrote to Dr Gogarty, ‘catarrh makes one take far more drink than one would want without it.’ Pretending to treat a variety of sicknesses, from lumbago to sinusitis, while achieving a cure for alcoholism, was too stern a test for even so eminent a psychologist, and these consultations came to nothing. But by the end of March 1930, on the advice of Ottoline Morrell, John was attending her doctor. ‘Dr Cameron has done me worlds of good,’ she assured him. ‘He is the only really honest doctor I have found, and I have tried so many!… So do, dear John, give Cameron a trial.’
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Dr Cameron, ‘nerve specialist’, was fairly knowledgeable about alcohol. When drunk one day he ran over a child, and was sent to gaol. But he was a persuasive man, with a nice bedside manner, and many of his patients returned to him. Later, after a number of them had died from his drugs, he committed suicide.

John took to Cameron at once. ‘I shall bless you to the end of your days for sending me to Dr Cameron,’ he thanked Ottoline. ‘Would that I had seen him years ago. He put his finger on the spot
at once.
Already I feel happy again and ten years younger.’ The treatment involved no surrender of pride, and John’s relief came from having escaped a long process of humiliation. Both he and Cameron knew that alcohol was the real cause of his ‘nerves’, but they entered a conspiracy to gloss over this truth. ‘The defect in my works has been poisoning me for ages,’ John reported. ‘It explains so much...’
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Cameron’s diagnosis was delivered with a vagueness very dear to alcoholics. John had been ‘overdrawing his bank account’ and should go to a convalescent home where (though expensive in terms of money) he would make a sober investment. Under the guise of tackling a rigorous rest cure, John allowed himself to be sent to Preston Deanery Hall in Northampton, a briefly fashionable private nursing home full of fumed oak, leatherette, beaten copper and suburban mauve walls, that had opened in 1929 and was to close in 1931. Here, as if by accident, he was removed from all alcohol though permitted to equivocate as much as he liked. He was ‘travelling in the midlands’ or suffering from a ‘liver attack’ or undergoing ‘a thorough spring-cleaning’ because ‘my guts weren’t behaving harmoniously’. His friends were generally optimistic. ‘Any place apart from the world is a good idea for a bit, and it will do no harm to try it,’ Eve Fleming wrote to him. ‘You must get well, & I do hope this will do the trick.’
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Expressing her gratitude
for Ottoline’s ‘great brain wave’, Dorelia wrote on 5 May 1930: ‘Of course J. would be perfectly well without wine or spirits. Many a time I’ve managed to keep him without any for
weeks
and then some idiot has undone all my good work in one evening. He may be impressed this time. All the other doctors have said the same, Dr Wright included. One can only hope to do one’s best… ’