Authors: Michael Holroyd
‘Tottering under the burden of parental responsibilities.’
Description of Augustus John by Trelawney Dayrell Reed (1952)
When walking the streets of Chelsea, so the story goes, John had a habit of patting local children on the head ‘in case it is one of mine’.
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Calculations over the number of these children floated high into fantasy, reaching, in James Laver’s autobiography, three figures at which, in the opinion of Max Beerbohm, John stopped counting.
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He was never quick to deny fathering a child. Improbable rumours, incapable of proof, seethed around him, agitated by the readers of newspapers
in which he featured as an archetypal father figure. Adolescents with a liking for art or a connection with Wales, as they grew up and away from their parents, sometimes speculated over their hidden kinship with Augustus John. One middle-aged woman in North Wales has written in a Welsh magazine the elaborate story of John’s friendship with her mother, ingeniously tracing her own family connections with the Johns to show that, in addition to being her father, John was a cousin. Every detail that can be checked pushes this narrative further into invention.
Another example is sadder and more revealing. In about 1930, Sheila Nansi Ivor-Jones, a schoolgirl, was sent by her parents to see a Dr Clifford Scott. Although she was not unintelligent, Sheila had done badly at school. She could not stick to any routine. Her father, Robert Ivor Jones, headmaster of West Monmouth School at Pontypool, and his wife Edwina Claudia Jones (née Lewis) were worried. But Sheila did display some artistic ability and, after going up to an art school in Tunbridge Wells, her troubles seemed over. In October 1937 she transferred to the Slade and by the 1940s had become an art instructor at the Chelsea School of Art. Then, on 15 February 1948, she again consulted Dr Scott, complaining of terrible nightmares about horses, fighting and hysterical love scenes; and adding that she had discovered herself to be the illegitimate daughter of Augustus John – to which she attributed this trouble. The nightmares and delusions persisted throughout this year, growing worse. She seems to have neglected herself, lost her job, and in February 1949 was admitted to West Park Mental Hospital, Epsom, where on 28 February she died. The cause of her death was recorded as bronchial pneumonia and acute mania.
Sheila Ivor-Jones (she hyphenated her name in London) had been born at Llanllwchaiarn in Montgomeryshire on 28 September 1912 and, from the evidence that exists, it seems most unlikely that John could have been her father. If, then, this was fantasy, it seems to have taken possession of her after the death of her real father. She may have seen John fairly frequently in Chelsea, since she lived round the corner from Mrs Fleming’s house (and no distance from John’s various studios) at 77 Cheyne Walk above the Cheyne Buttery – tea and supper rooms and a guest house run by a man called Stancourt, whose christian names were John Augustus.
Whatever the source of her delusion, it represents, in an extreme form, a tendency that was surprisingly widespread. The irony was that, as an actual father, John was extraordinarily difficult. ‘I have no gifts as a paterfamilias,’ he admitted.
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For all his children self-help was the only salvation – the key for entry into, as to liberation from, the powerful John orbit. Fryern Court ‘wasn’t my home’, wrote his daughter Amaryllis Fleming, ‘but it was the only place I ever felt utterly at home in’.
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Another daughter who was not at Fryern felt her exclusion to be a paralysing deprivation of love, leaving her ‘doubting my own validity as a human being, a boring thing to feel’. But the magnetic field rejecting her threatened to devour others, Ida’s sons and the son and daughters of Dorelia, who needed supreme willpower to escape.
John was like a Victorian father. Children were to be seen and not heard, painted and glared into silence. An incorrectly pronounced syllable would provoke pedantic wrath. ‘I apologise for my poor handwriting, syntax, spelling (probably) and faults of style and punctuation,’ David ended a letter written when in his early fifties. One morning when Poppet arrived at breakfast wearing her dress the wrong way round, she was picked up, deposited behind some curtains, and left. Another time when Vivien was at fault, John refused to speak to her and all communication had to pass via a third party. ‘As a child I can only say I feared him greatly,’ Vivien wrote, ‘and if spoken to by him would instantly burst into tears.’ But he was proud, if a little disturbed, when his two daughters, aged seventeen and fourteen, saved a young man from drowning. ‘They dived into the river at Fordingbridge and fished him out and applied artificial respiration and kissed him so frantically’, Ralph Partridge told his friend Gerald Brenan, ‘that he returned from unconsciousness to find he had an erection.’
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John was even more severe with the boys. The tension between them was sometimes agonizing. Edwin had a habit of smelling his food before starting to eat, and this infuriated Augustus so much that he pushed the boy’s face hard into the plate. His son retaliated by flinging the plate out of the window, but Augustus made him go out, collect every morsel from the gravel and eat it. It was a battle of wills and Augustus, with all the advantages, won. As for Dorelia, she ‘had a mysterious way of disappearing when anything troublesome cropped up’.
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Augustus’s silences could last thirty hours or more and were echoed back at him by his pack of brooding sons. ‘Why don’t you say something?’ he growled at David, whose silence darkened. But it was the quality of Robin’s silence, grimmer than any of the others’, seeming to accuse him of something literally unspeakable, that maddened Augustus most. ‘He hardly utters a word and radiates
hostility
,’
he wrote to Mavis. ‘I fear I shall reach a crisis and go for him tooth and nail. That happened once here and I soon floored him on the gravel outside.’ He affected to believe that all his sons were slightly mad. Should he hire straitjackets? ‘Do you think it would be a good idea’, he asked Inez Holden, ‘to have the lot of them psycho-analysed?’
‘As children,’ Romilly acknowledged, ‘we made no allowances for, since we had no conception of, the despairs of an artist about his work.’
Augustus’s glooms, charged with an intense hostility to those near by, cut him off from easy companionship. Yet he resented not being confided in, and wanted in a discreet way to be loved by all of them. ‘On rare occasions when Augustus and I talked, it was almost invariably about Sanskrit,’ remembered Romilly, ‘a subject neither of us knew much about.’ When another of his sons wrote to him in personal distress, Augustus confined his reply to matters of prose style which ‘I find overweighted with latinisms’, and to the envelope itself upon which ‘you have, either by design or carelessness, omitted to place the customary dot after the diminutive
Hants.
In an old Dane Courtier this seems to me unpardonable but I put it down to your recent bereavement.’ Nothing intimate could be spoken. At the end of a letter to a Dartmouth schoolmaster (a retiring bachelor of thirty-eight) Augustus had added a timorous postscript suggesting something might be mentioned to his son Caspar about sex: ‘Boys of Caspar’s age stand particularly in need of help and enlightenment on certain subjects, don’t you agree?’ The best he could do was to use conversation as a neutral territory where he and his sons might guardedly meet without giving anything away. It was a tragedy, Caspar thought, that, by the time they could talk on easier terms, his father was so deaf that everything had to be shouted.
To his severity Augustus added a bewildering generosity and freedom. He gave all his sons good allowances into their twenties and thirties when he could not well afford it. He also allowed them at the ages of ten or twelve to choose their own schools. If ‘all that is learned at public schools is football, cricket and buggery’, he wrote to Dorelia after reading Alec Waugh’s
The Loom of Youth,
‘I cannot see that these accomplishments need be so expensive myself even if they
are
indispensable.’
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Nevertheless he always stumped up the fees. David had gone to Westminster, Caspar to Osborne, Robin (‘the slackest youngster I’ve ever come across’) briefly to Malvern and then to Le Rosey in Switzerland, Edwin and Romilly to a strange school, the College de Normandie, near Rouen. As for the girls, when asked at the ages of nine and seven whether they would like to go to school, Vivien again burst into tears and Poppet said ‘No’. A procession of tutors and governesses (one of whom Romilly married) were erratically employed, but the two sisters passed more of their time with ponies than people. Augustus showed interest only in their art work, though when Vivien went up to the Slade she was under specific orders that there was to be no instruction. ‘Little’, she remembered, ‘came of this.’
The sisters had served almost as stern an art apprenticeship as the boys. ‘I had to look at him,’ wrote Poppet, ‘and if I caught his eye he would ask me very politely to come and pose for him, and this would mean the whole morning gone… all our plans for swimming at Bicton
or riding in the forest with Vivien...’ These ‘gruellings’, as Vivien called them, continued until the girls married, ‘then ceased abruptly’. A considerable number of nude drawings of them both were hurried off to Australia, Canada, Japan.
As they grew up their relationship with their father became more complicated. Vivien, like Caitlin Macnamara, wanted to be a dancer. In 1930 the two of them caught the Salisbury bus to London, hoping to start their careers with C. B. Cochran’s ‘Young Ladies’ on the revue stage. Arriving at the door of Ethel Nettleship’s house, they sent a reassuring telegram to Augustus and Dorelia back at Fryern: ‘DON’T WORRY, WITH RELIABLE FEMALE’. But Augustus objected to Vivien going on the stage, and it was a relief to him when she took up painting. She received some help from Matthew Smith and the Euston Road artists William Coldstream and Victor Pasmore before going on to the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. ‘You can do it,’ Augustus wrote encouragingly.
Towards both Poppet and Vivien he was jealously possessive. No boyfriend was good enough. ‘Why should you bother with boy-friends when you have such a magnificent father?’ he once asked Mollie O’Rourke, and this appeared to be his general attitude. After Poppet’s wedding to Derek Jackson, he hopped into the car at Fordingbridge beside his daughter and, happily acknowledging the cheers, was driven off with her while Jackson took his place disconsolately next to the chauffeur.
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‘He was like an old stag,’ Poppet’s second husband Villiers Bergne observed, ‘with his herd of women and children round him. Interlopers were beaten off.’
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It had been hard for boyfriends, and it was harder still for husbands. Vivien’s husband, a distinguished haematologist, was known as her ‘medical attendant’. At least, Augustus reminded the family, he could congratulate himself on not having gone to their wedding. Why such a gorgeous girl as Vivien, or an enchanting creature like Poppet, who had given exquisite relief after the death of Pyramus, should want to end up as a
hausfrau
was inexplicable to him. At meals, he would sometimes draw caricatures of his in-laws, passing them round for comic appreciation; and his letters to all the family contain many invitations to disloyalty between his sons and daughters, their wives and husbands who, at one time or another, were ‘revolting’, ‘villainous’, or ‘repulsive little swine’ and who would generally learn this through some third party. His daughters-in-law (‘no oil-paintings’), who he affected to believe had been chosen for their plainness so that his sons ‘need fear no competition from me’, had a scarcely easier time of it. A recurring question was how to do away with all this proliferating family. He had a double-barrelled gun ready in the house, but was open to other suggestions. ‘I know little of toxicology
but have heard the merits of
ratsbane
well recommended. The only question is: should the whelps be included in the purge? Personally I am all for it.’
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Possessive over his daughters, he was fiercely competitive with his sons; and it was with them that the most bitter battles were fought. One developed an eczema that would visibly spread over his skin during a quarrel. ‘He is quite insupportable. I shall kill him soon,’ Augustus promised Dorelia. In certain moods this did not seem an exaggeration. He genuinely wanted all of them to succeed yet could not prevent himself putting obstacles in their path.
Outside the family, the sons were treated like a branch of the nobility. When they were due to arrive at a party, the news was buzzed about,
Augustus John’s sons are coming!
They grew anxious to disguise themselves, to avoid this vicarious limelight, play down the possession of the awful name John. The eldest son David, for example, never referred to ‘my father’ but always to ‘John’ as if to underline his detachment.
All of them were good looking and all of them had talent but, in the shadow of the Great Man, they dwindled. At Dane Court, David had been considered ‘a dreamer’. But his dreams of becoming an aviator like his brother Caspar (a ‘regular boy’) flopped. Influenced by the Nettleships, he took up music and played the oboe in several orchestras before giving it up and becoming a postman. ‘David has not been in the public eye recently,’ Augustus commented to his brother Edwin.
Romilly, who had joined Francis Macnamara on the River Stour for philosophical explorations of
Robinson Crusoe
and the Book of Genesis, later became apprentice to a farmer, then a teetotal innkeeper at John Fothergill’s public house the Spread Eagle at Thame, before ‘commencing author’ with a volume of poems, some detective works and a minor masterpiece of autobiography,
The Seventh Child,
which Augustus advised him not to publish.
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When Romilly pressed for a reason, his father looked harassed and, after casting round for several minutes in silent agony, thundered out that Romilly had misspelt the name of a Welsh mountain. Besides, the title was of dubious accuracy. To which Romilly replied he would be ‘the last to assert that my book is perfect’.
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His book did not make much money and he sometimes felt ‘rather a lout having to be subsidised’. But he was the humorist in the family, and in the company of literary friends – Gerald Brenan, Gamel Woolsey and the Powys brothers – he began to feel better. ‘It’s a wicked world, and yet, well, is it?’ he asked Augustus. ‘Personally I’m beginning to enjoy it.’
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