Authors: Michael Holroyd
A pessimistic sentimentality was replacing the lyrical romanticism of his early years and the ‘hectic sexuality’ of the 1920s. His portraits of women between the 1930s and late 1940s are sweet and feeble echoes of eroticism. Far better were his paintings of exotic flowers which did not agitate him.
His emotionalism over Mavis became one reason ‘why I haven’t had much success painting of late’. Other models were sometimes less unsettling. Two of them were daughters of his old friend Francis Macnamara.
John’s involvement with the Macnamara family was working steadily through the generations. ‘I love him above all men,’ Francis Macnamara had declared. This hero-worship was a guiding force in Macnamara’s life as he took on several mistresses including, it was rumoured, Euphemia Lamb, and also Alick Schepeler’s friend Frieda Bloch. The most extraordinary of these women was Erica Cotterill, who had previously chosen Rupert Brooke and then Bernard Shaw as ‘the gorgeous thing I have to live for and love with every atom of my soul’. But Francis Macnamara was not so gorgeous, and in her anonymous book
Form of Diary
(1939) Erica laid a trail of clues pointing to his cruelty before he left her to marry Dorelia’s sister Edie.
John himself had incidentally enjoyed a brief affair with Macnamara’s first wife Yvonne, and indeed with her sister Grace. Both of them were, he assured Dorelia, ‘beyond praise’.
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But this intermingling was so indiscriminate and comprehensive that the Macnamara children sometimes wondered whether they were actually John children. The eldest daughter Nicolette, on her visits to the family, had certainly ‘adopted’ Augustus as her father – going on to the Slade School and later marrying two artists, first Anthony Devas, then Rupert Shephard who had been in love with her sister Caitlin.
John seems to have grown fonder of Caitlin Macnamara and her sister Brigit as they grew into their late teens. Everyone trusted Brigit. She was good with animals, good with children (Mavis was always happy to leave Tristan in her care), and especially good to John. In his portrait of her
she appears, clasping a tankard of ale, as a companion fit for Falstaff.
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She seemed in some respects rather a masculine countrywoman, yet was shy, sensitive, oddly reliable for a Macnamara, and the repository of many secrets. She felt an instinctive sympathy for John, independent of words. ‘An intonation, a pause, a movement from Brigit’s… hand was answered by Augustus with a smile that started slowly all over his face and faded in his beard,’ Nicolette observed. ‘…In this shorthand of long-term sympathy, the eaves-dropper might catch a hint or two, yet the depth of the meaning was a secret kept between them.’
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Brigit saw the terrifying glare, the tremendous male arrogance: but she saw through them to someone more complex and interesting. Intermittently over many years they kept up a love affair. Even at sixty, she remembered, his body was good – well-shaped hands and feet, narrow hips, small bones. Unfortunately Brigit was also engaged to Augustus’s son Caspar – at least, everyone expected them to marry. In the late 1930s Dorelia, who was fond of Brigit, wrote to ask Augustus why the marriage ‘seems indefinitely postponed’.
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There is no record of his answer, though the probable reason was Caspar’s inability to accept Brigit’s sexual intimacy with his father. According to Brigit herself, she and Caspar were in bed ‘at the home of one of his sisters when, two days before the wedding, he told her he couldn’t or wouldn’t marry her’.
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Caitlin, the youngest sister, was also caught between father and son. Augustus did several nude drawings of her, some unfinished oils, and a couple of completed portraits, the best of which shows a sparkling eyeful of a girl, pink and precocious.
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But she failed to entrap Caspar John even when, ‘all dolled up and ready’ at the age of fifteen, she came to his bed wearing her special n
é
glig
é
.
Remote, handsome, a powerful man who would subdue her to his will, Caspar stood in her imagination as a prince in the fairy tale of her life. Only her life was not a fairy tale. Having been neglected by her father, and then being cut off from her mother (who was absorbed in a lesbian relationship), Caitlin needed attention – the dramatic attention of a romantic rescuer. She wanted to give herself to Caspar, but he had only thoughts of the navy in those days. Besides, she was too young.
She was not too young, however, for Augustus. Unlike Nicolette, Caitlin did not treat Augustus as a father: she physically hated her father. But having been rejected by Caspar she turned to Augustus, flirting with him, enjoying the glamour of his fame. She was a luminous girl, spectacular, and he could not stop staring at her. She led him on; and, as she bitterly remembered in the leftover years of her life, then or later he raped her.
‘Caitlin’s relationship with John is important and difficult to unravel,’
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wrote her biographer Paul Ferris. Unlike Brigit, she was not trustworthy,
and her later memories of John were opposite to those of her sister: he was simply an ‘old goat’, a ‘hairy monster’, ‘a disgusting old man who fucked [everyone]’. And of course it was true that he did ‘pounce’ on attractive girls. ‘I felt a frisson whenever he came into the room,’ Kathleen Hale remembered of the 1920s. ‘…Sometimes there would be mock battles between us, when he would try to “rape” me, scuffles that always began and ended in laughter – hardly the atmosphere for passion. I have always found laughter as good as a chastity belt. Once, though, out of curiosity, I allowed him to seduce me. The sex barrier down, this aberration only added a certain warmth to our friendship.’
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But such sophisticated laughter did not come naturally to very young girls like Chiquita and Caitlin. And perhaps, in any case, there was less laughter in the 1930s. As late as 1929 Augustus still appeared an attractive man. Describing a party given in June that year by the writer Arthur Machin and his wife, Sylvia Townsend Warner wrote:
‘Then Augustus John came, and I could have no other eyes. He is very long and lean, his hair is grey, his eyes are bright, he was rather drunk, he is the Ancient Mariner… He is perfectly young still, and with a sad drunken youthfulness and guileless-ness he embraced my waist in the taxi, and begged me to go to Wales with him… I loved him terribly, he is so simple, intent in the true world, astray in the real. It is awful to think that this youth must go down quick into the pit of senility.’
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This descent accelerated after he left Preston Deanery Hall, and his pouncing on women seemed to grow cruder. ‘Not the best introduction to the carnal delights of the marriage bed,’ wrote Caitlin – for she was perhaps sixteen and he was over thirty-five years older. In his poem ‘Into her lying down head’, written almost three years after he married Caitlin, Dylan Thomas conjures up the priapic figure of John:
A furnace-nostrilled column-membered
Super-or-near man
Resembling to her dulled sense
The thief of adolescence.
The affair continued spasmodically over several years, each using the other, neither very happy about it. John seems to have felt some affection for ‘my little seraph’, especially when, in his confusion, he ‘thought she was his daughter as well’.
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Caitlin later denied any feeling for John, claiming only one ‘luridly vivid memory… pure revulsion… and inevitable
pouncing… an indelible impression… of the basic vileness of men’.
She was, John noted, ‘apparently in a perpetual state of disgust with the world in general’.
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But he had no sense of contributing to that disgust. She came to see herself as ‘the Avenger of wrongs’. The ‘merciless vengeance’ she had sworn on Francis Macnamara embraced John and almost all men.
It was John who introduced Caitlin to Dylan Thomas. In Constantine FitzGibbon’s version John had met Dylan at the Fitzroy Tavern and it was at another pub, the Wheatsheaf, that he brought the two of them together: ‘Come and meet someone rather amusing.’ Caitlin, ‘quite mute’,
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nervously approached Dylan and ‘within ten minutes’ they were in bed together, spending several days and nights at the Eiffel Tower and charging everything to John’s account. But however ‘deaf and obtuse’ John might be, Caitlin explained, there was a danger he might find out. So they parted, Dylan for Cornwall, she back to Fryern Court.
They met again in the summer of that year, 1936, in the novelist Richard Hughes’s castle at Laugharne, Dylan in the interval having contracted gonorrhoea.
Caitlin, Hughes remembered, was very pretty and gauche and, though now twenty-two years old (she concealed her age from Dylan), impressed him as being about ‘the equivalent of eleven years of age’.
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She arrived with John in July and during their stay there was much giggling and kissing in the passages, and no visible evidence, at least to his eyes, of Caitlin disliking this. One morning John (possibly at Caitlin’s prompting) suggested that the Hugheses invite Dylan (who had written to say he was ‘passing awfully near Laugharne’) over for lunch. He came, and stayed the night. Dylan and Caitlin gave no sign of knowing each other.
*3
John was judging a painting competition at the National Eisteddfod in Fishguard, and motored there next day in his six-cylinder Wolseley, ‘the Bumble-Bee’. Dylan and Caitlin went too; but when John arrived back at Laugharne that night he was alone with Caitlin who looked, Hughes noticed, ‘like a cat that’s been fed on cream’. ‘Where’s Dylan?’ Hughes asked. ‘In the gutter,’ drawled John, slurring his words horribly as he lurched in. ‘What happened?’ ‘I put him there. He was drunk. I couldn’t bring a drunk man to a house like this.’
It transpired that at Carmarthen there had been a fight. All day John
had felt irritated by Dylan and Caitlin’s lovemaking. It may also have been that, knowing of Dylan’s gonorrhoea, he felt justified in protecting Caitlin. At Carmarthen, Dylan had insisted that John drive him back to Laugharne. But John refused and, tempers rising, they raised their fists in the car park.
Caitlin remembered John being ‘on top of me’ that night. The following morning as John was stepping outside into the sunlight, Dylan turned up and the stage was set for a spectacular castle farce. Laugharne, though somewhat roofless, had a good cellar, a watchtower, plenty of surrounding shrubbery which was said to be haunted, and three entrance doors. No sooner had Dylan gone out by one of these doors than John would appear through another. Though the plot was confused, a tremendous atmosphere of melodrama built up. Caitlin was on stage for most of the performance, but when the exigencies of the theatre demanded it, she would make a quick exit, while the two men made their entrances. The timing throughout was remarkable, and there were many rhetorical monologues in the high-flown style. To the spectators, wiping their eyes, the outcome appeared uncertain. But, a year later, Caitlin married Dylan at Penzance Register Office; and when their first child was born, Richard Hughes and John were godfathers.
*4
They had then moved, the Thomases, to Laugharne and, as neighbours of Richard Hughes, were understandably ‘nervous’ of John’s visits there. John too seemed nervous. He put up at their house, Sea View, for a night or two ‘in circumstances of indescribable squalor’.
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It had been to relieve this austerity that he gave them some furniture, including ‘a wonderful bed’. At night, when he went up to his room, Mervyn Levy remembered, John ‘used to stuff ten-shilling notes and pound notes in his pockets, rich sort of reddy-brown notes, and hang this vast coat of his over a chair. Then we would creep upstairs and nick a few, because it was the only way of gaining any money from Augustus.’
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Though ‘bloated and dumb from his deafness’
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John was well aware of these raids. In
Finishing Touches
he remarks that Dylan had once been a Communist, and ‘could always be relied upon as a borrower...’
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There is a grudging tone to everything John wrote of Dylan who, he owns, was ‘a genius’ – though his shove-ha’penny was superior to
Under Milk Wood,
in which ‘there is no trace of wit’. Such sallies were themselves attempts at wit which misfired. ‘There is no
rancour,’
he explained to D. S. MacColl, ‘only a little playful malice.’ The affection between them,
much enlivened by this malice, lurked behind a prickly barricade of gibes. ‘Dylan has a split personality of course,’ he wrote to Matthew Smith’s mistress Mary Keene. ‘He can be unbearable and then something else comes out which one loves.’
Of the two oil portraits John did of Thomas in the late 1930s one, now in the National Museum of Wales, is possibly his best painting of this period – a ‘diminutive masterpiece’, as Wyndham Lewis described it, that matches his pen-portrait in
Finishing Touches:
‘Dylan’s face was round and his nose snub. His rather prominent eyes were a little veiled and his curly hair was red, or auburn rather. A pleasant and slightly sardonic smile registered amusement and, I think, satisfaction. If you could have substituted an ice for the glass of beer he held you might have mistaken him for a happy schoolboy out on a spree.’
Both John and Dylan were ‘bad Welshmen’ whose ruin was hastened by their visits to the United States, where they broke records in drinking. There are passages in John’s essay on Dylan in
Finishing Touches
that could equally well refer to himself since, perhaps unconsciously, he identified himself with the younger man. Having passed on some of his own traits in this way, he is able to deplore them more wholeheartedly. It was a technique he often used to pep up his writing, and accounts for his sharpest sallies being directed towards those with whom he had most in common.