Authors: Michael Holroyd
Le Havre, which they reached on 2 September, was in terrible confusion. There were no porters, the last boat was preparing to leave and passengers were told they must abandon their cars and take only what luggage they could carry. John’s car had now run dry of petrol and rested on a rival passenger’s baggage. Money changed hands, and somehow the cars were hauled on board. John, in a huge chequered overcoat, was the last to embark, tugging a large travelling rug out of which splashed a bottle of Châteauneuf du Pape. ‘Really it was a magnificent exit,’ wrote Vivien, ‘if one hadn’t already been overdosed with similar rich occurrences...’
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They motored back to Fryern. Next morning John was painting ‘plump little’ Zoë in the orchard studio. During a rest, he switched on the radio and they listened to Chamberlain’s speech announcing that Britain and France had declared war on Germany. Then he turned it off and without a word went on painting until the bell rang for lunch.
‘[Augustus’s] varnish was cracking visibly.’
Dylan Thomas to Henry Treece
(1 September 1938)
‘The disastrous decade’, Cyril Connolly called the 1930s.
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For John, if in no other way a thirties figure, it was truly disastrous – ‘the worst spell of my bloody life’, he called it.
The world around him, as it plunged towards war, had grown horrific, and in its place he had created little. Once the early lyricism had faded, his flashing eye, searching for new wonders, found little on which to focus. The happy accident, travelling through the dark, came to him less often. And beyond this dark, lending it intensity, rose the shadows of fascism and Nazism. In such circumstances John’s pretty girls, wide-eyed and open-legged, his vast unintegrated and unfinished compositions, his vacant landscapes, gaped irrelevantly.
Yet he worked hard. Reviewing his exhibition at Tooth’s in 1938,
The Times
critic had expressed ‘admiration for what is achieved and regret, with a touch of resentment, that so great a natural talent for painting, possibly the greatest in Europe, should have been treated so lightly by its possessor… This is not to accuse Mr John of idleness… As everybody knows there is a kind of industry which is really a shirking of mental effort… ’
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In the opinion of the poet and artist David Jones, who admired John, it was the company he kept that finally ruined him: in particular ‘that crashing bore’ Horace de Vere Cole. John had known Cole since before the Great War. He was a commanding figure, with needle blue eyes, a mane of white hair, bristling upswept moustaches and the carriage of a regimental sergeant-major. This exterior had been laid on to mask the effects of having only one lung, a shoulder damaged in the war and, like John himself, encircling deafness. Fighting pomposity was what he claimed to be doing, repunctuating life with absurdity so that it no longer read the same. His whoops and antics were often better to hear about than be caught up in. When John learnt how Cole, dressed as ‘the Anglican Bishop of Madras’, had confirmed a body of Etonians, he laughed out loud. But when Cole took some of John’s drawings, sat in the street with them all day in front of the National Gallery, and, having collected a few coppers, came back with the explanation that this was their value on the open
market, John was less amused. Cole liked to ruffle John’s feelings, ‘for I think he gets too much flattery’. Rivalry and rages interrupted their friendship, but the bond between them held. John used Cole as his court jester; while Cole ‘seemed to have no friends – except John’, the painter A. R. Thomson noted. ‘People who knew him avoided him.’
In the autumn of 1926 they had set out together on a walk through Provence. ‘Horace was a famous walker in the heel and toe tradition,’ John recorded, ‘and, with his unusual arithmetical faculty, was a great breaker of records, especially when alone.’
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Their expedition quickened into a fierce walking match and, in the evenings, contests for the attentions of village girls. It was an exhausting programme and Thomson, who joined them for part of this competitive tour, remembered, ‘in the bright moon, Horace flanked by John and I marched along the bridge over the Rhône – swinging arms, hats tilted, cigars. John’s swaggers were natural, not put on. I watched Horace impersonating John. His plenty white hair, busy moustaches, fierce eyes. He was “Super-John”.’
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A caricature that Thomson drew, ‘John and Super-John’, catches much of their pantomime relationship – John leading, Cole an extravagant shadow behind, mocking, but needing John to parody.
It was a fantasy friendship they enjoyed, part of a make-believe life; and when it collided with the actual world there was trouble. In 1928, at the Café Royal, Cole had met Mabel Wright. ‘Mavis’, as she was always to be called, was a strikingly tall girl of nineteen with big brown eyes, curly blonde hair, wonderful legs and a forthcoming manner. About her background she was secretive, confiding only that her mother had been a child stolen by gypsies. In later years she varied this story to the extent of denying, in a manner challenging disbelief, that she was John’s daughter by a gypsy. In fact she was the daughter of a grocer’s assistant and had been at the age of sixteen a scullery maid. During the General Strike in 1926, she hitchhiked to London, clutching a golf club, and took a post as nursery governess to the children of a clergyman in Wimbledon. A year later she was a waitress at Veeraswamy’s, the pioneer Indian restaurant in Swallow Street.
John was one of those that night at the Café Royal who had witnessed Cole break through a circle of men and make an assignation with Mavis. ‘To a great extent we get on splendidly… but our pitched battles are devastating affairs,’ Cole later wrote to John. Nevertheless, ‘Mavis and marriage is the only logical outcome.’
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For two years they lived together and in January 1931, after Cole obtained a divorce from his first wife, he did marry Mavis. From that time on everything went wrong for him. But not for Mavis. On coming to London she had learnt the astonishing power of sex. She had an extraordinary talent for it. Already a winner of beauty
contests, she was naturally affectionate and liked touching people. But sex appeal, she felt, was not enough; she must acquire education, and she selected Cole to play Professor Higgins to her Eliza Doolittle. To have married him was a triumph, for was he not a famous Old Etonian, a cousin of Neville Chamberlain (who in 1937 was to become Prime Minister), and a cultivated aristocrat whose ancestor Edward de Vere, seventeenth Earl of Oxford, had written all Shakespeare’s plays?
Cole, now fifty and a sufferer from what John called ‘pretty-girl-itis’, was very possessive of his twenty-two-year-old wife. But Mavis had no wish to be restricted, and their marriage was full of plot and tension. Under this strain, Cole’s antics grew more extreme. After a hard day’s joking, he would set out late at night to haunt houses. Then, a last bad joke, he had lost almost all his first wife’s money in an unlikely Canadian venture and was obliged to leave Mavis immediately after their marriage to live in France.
It was soon afterwards that John stepped forward to help. ‘You must be frightfully lonely I fear,’ he sympathized with Mavis, who was spinning back and forth across the Channel. In 1934, she became his mistress and on 15 March 1935 she gave birth to a son, Tristan Hilarius
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John de Vere Cole. ‘What a whopper!’ John exclaimed in delight. One thing was certain: Horace, disconsolately exiled in France, could not have been Tristan’s father. John himself immediately brushed aside other candidates and assumed that role. In a letter to Wyndham Lewis, he explained: ‘Tristan is not Cole’s son, though born in wedlock… at my last meeting with Cole, before he departed for France, he stung me for £20 which, of course, he never repaid. So when Mavis deserted him after four years of matrimonial bliss, I felt no compunction in taking it out in kind.’
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But the initiative was less with John than he cynically suggests. Mavis was not only affectionate, she was shrewd. She knew how potent her attractions were for John. She was his ‘sweet honey-bird’, eye-catching and easy going. She brought a zest to his life, made him feel young again. He sent her ‘tasty poems’ about orgasms, did drawings of her with legs kicked high and wide. ‘She is really a good wench,’ he urged Dorelia, ‘and has a good deal of
gumption
.’
But Dorelia saw a different Mavis: someone who was using her sex appeal to lure John away from Fryern. One of the guests there, Andrea Cowdin, remembered Mavis playing on the floor with Tristan, rolling about and laughing and ‘being delightful’, but always with an eye on John who sat there gloomily without a word or sign. If only for the sake of his ‘nerves’, John wished Mavis and Dodo to be friends. But they were never more than outwardly polite.
Mavis was not ‘mysterious’ but she could be elusive. She would disappear down to her cottage in the west and suddenly stop answering
letters. In her absence John became an old man. There were weeks of suspense, and ‘I cannot bear it’. He knew she had affairs with other men and would imagine her in bed with all manner of travellers. The trouble was that everyone liked her. ‘She seemed so amiable and gay and I was rather taken by her,’ admitted Carrington. But so too was Carrington’s lover Beacus Penrose. There was no telling in what plot or story Mavis would land up. ‘Try to hold yourself in till our next,’ John would beg. Then she would return to London, generous, beautiful, irresistible; so the sun would shine again and he was young.
Nevertheless, though Mavis pulled hard, and John wobbled a little, she could not pluck him from Dorelia. By 1936 she had switched tactics. Putting Tristan into a children’s home, she went down to Cornwall from where she announced her impending marriage to a man she called ‘the Tapeworm’, six feet seven inches tall, who ‘looks as if he has come from another planet’.
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Dorelia’s response was an offer to bring up Tristan at Fryern.
Because of Mavis’s indecisiveness, John proposed legally adopting her son. ‘Are you clear about adopting Tristan?’ he asked Dorelia (September 1936). She was. But Mavis was not clear, and when Tristan went to Fryern in 1937 it was under an informal arrangement. Mavis herself was now free to cast her eyes on a target even loftier than her tapeworm. One day in the summer of 1937 John had taken her to Maiden Castle, where the archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler was working. ‘I was wandering about at the eastern end of Maiden Castle when I saw a curious entourage on its way towards me,’ Mortimer Wheeler recalled. ‘It consisted of Augustus John and his party, in the odd clothes they always wore. Mavis was skipping in front on long legs; very distinctive that skipping walk of hers – I was greatly taken with her straight away. All work stopped as the cavalcade arrived.’
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The following year Mavis elected to marry Mortimer Wheeler and let him ‘run in harness’ with John. ‘It will be like an amputation to let you go,’ John protested. ‘…I felt you were part of
me
.’
He did not accept this operation without a fight. Now in his sixtieth year and seeing himself
in loco parentis,
he declined to give Wheeler his consent: ‘You must wait. I haven’t finished with her yet.’ On one occasion, reduced to ‘a mass of nerves and brandy’ by Wheeler’s ‘grinning mask’, he most alarmingly lost his temper. Next day he sent an apology. ‘I was in a wrought-up state and have been for some time… Do write and say you will be friends again.’ In a desperate moment, after Wheeler had climbed into Mavis’s room at Fryern, John had challenged his rival to a duel. ‘As the challenged party,’ Wheeler related, ‘I had choice of weapons. Being a field gunner I chose field guns.’
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John, declaring this to be ‘very ungentlemanly conduct’,
bowed to the inevitable, and, putting the best face on it, advised Mavis to accept this ‘distinguished personality’ as her husband. He might be a cad, but at least he had been Director of the National Museum of Wales. They were married in March 1939,
*2
occasioning a brief interlude in John’s relationship with Mavis.
But there was an awkward corollary. In many of his letters to her, John assures Mavis that Tristan is ‘full of beans’, ‘in the pink’, ‘incredibly beautiful’ and ‘eating well’. ‘Don’t disturb yourself,’ he urges her. ‘Dodo seems absolutely stuck on him.’ But Mavis was never reconciled to leaving Tristan at Fryern, and one day in January 1941 she abducted him. John at once sent off an indignant letter protesting at this ‘Rape of Tristan’ to Mortimer Wheeler who in his tactful reply (31 January 1941) explained: ‘Mavis has always regarded Fryern Court as her real home and you and Dodo as an integral part of her life. This little episode is entirely subordinate to that overwhelming factor… The fact is, Mavis does not want to feel that T’s destinies are completely beyond her control and that she is merely a name in the visitors’ book.’
‘The Battle of Fordingbridge’, as Wheeler called it, was quickly over. John and Dorelia had no legal rights and in any case Tristan continued to spend numerous holidays at Fryern. ‘The violent offence which you will give’, Wheeler had advised Mavis, ‘…will disappear in time.’ And so it turned out. ‘The incident is closed,’ John assured Mavis. Almost at once they were back on friendly terms. But he remembered – this and much else that he tried to banish into oblivion.
*
Mavis was John’s chief mistress-model in these years. ‘Soon I will be ready to paint you off in
one go
,’
he had written to her. ‘That is what I live for.’ But though he drew and painted her often, this ‘supreme picture… which I know would come off at the right time’ never did come off. On almost any occasion, in taxis or at dinner parties, she rejoiced in flinging off her clothes. She would strike provocative attitudes before John who, when severe, restricted his drawing to her face. In Cornwall or Provence he led her out into the country, posed her achingly against some expert expanse of rocks and trees, then painted landscapes without a figure. Yet he needed her company: she still gave him the ‘authentic thrill’. ‘I cannot forget that last marvellous embrace,’ he was still writing to her in the 1940s. ‘A real wonder! How was it possible?… I don’t know what I should do without you.’ His feelings were intensely sentimental. Though Mavis could disguise the fact, the pictures proclaim it: he was losing his
sexual drive. At the beginning of the war he was in his sixty-second year. His age, the psychological uncertainty of his work, and alcohol which ‘provokes the desire and takes away the performance’ had left their mark. His letters to Mavis, with their vigorous signing off, ‘Yours stiff and strong’, urge a degree of potency that she alone could summon up. ‘I drink but I am not a “Boozer”. I have affairs of the heart but I do not womanize,’ he wrote to the art critic D. S. MacColl. ‘Drinking helps (for a time) to overcome the horrors of a world into which I rarely seem to fit; love renews (alas for a time) the divine illusion of beauty. By which you may perceive that my soul is sick.’
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