Authors: Michael Holroyd
‘My outlook on life or rather death… [assumes] a Jeremy Bentham-like gloom,’ John told Tommy Earp.
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‘We shall have little to do with the New World that approaches and, by the look of it, it is just as well.’ He saw a special danger in the effect of architecture upon the conduct of our lives. Already ‘Paris at night has the aspect of a vast garage’; and as for London ‘either it or I or both have… deteriorated greatly since our earlier associations which I so much loved.’ He was ‘reconciled’, he told Thelma Cazalet, ‘to a change of planet in the near future. If we are due to be blown to Kingdom Come, it may be our only chance of getting there after all.’
The anxiety people were feeling about their future under the shadow of the hydrogen bomb was something to which John was acutely sensitive. ‘The bombs improve,’ he wrote to his son Robin, ‘the politics grow worse.’ He had never been interested in party politics. ‘I’ve got a clean slate,’ he swore to Felix Hope-Nicholson. ‘I’ve never voted in my life.’ The endlessly depressing news from the radio increased his despair. He felt a mounting dislike of professional politicians. If he had sympathy for any party, it was for the Liberals, perhaps because they never got into power these days.
But he was more deeply attracted to the concepts of anarchy (‘Anarchism is the thing, anarchism and Bertrand Russell’) and communism, deploring the failure of Britain’s two Prime Ministers in the late forties and early fifties to differentiate between communism (‘which surely lies at the basis of all human society’) and Soviet Kremlinism under Stalin and his successors.
In his years of haphazard reading John had come across the philosophical writings of the nineteenth-century French social reformer Charles Fourier, and saw in his Utopian theory of gregarious self-governing social groups something similar to what he was trying to depict in his large decorations. Despite some socialist pedantry, there was, he believed, ‘a strain of wisdom’ in Fourier.
‘This is shown by his elimination of the state, of national frontiers, armies & trade barriers and in his principle of co-ownership of his Phalansteries without either levelling down or subjection to High Finance. He was indeed “an original” with a touch of genius. As for his oddities, I find them charming and égayant… eg his proposal to harness the Aurora Borealis so as to convert the Arctic regions into a suitable terrain for market-gardening… His “Harmony”, at any rate, has its funny side which is more than can be said for our civilization.’
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Fourier became the hero of John’s later years, uniting the principles of anarchy and communism, comedy with idealism; while in the world of contemporary politics his special villain was General Franco. In 1942 he had joined the Social Credit Party, ‘our only certainty’,
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and in 1945, after the National Council for Civil Liberties had temporarily become a Communist Front organization unhelpful to anarchists, he joined Benjamin Britten, E. M. Forster, George Orwell, Herbert Read and Osbert Sitwell in sponsoring the Freedom Defence Committee ‘to defend those who are persecuted for exercising their rights to freedom of speech, writing and action’.
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But John was not a man for committees. The best elucidation of his beliefs appeared in the
Delphic Review,
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a magazine edited in Fording-bridge. ‘We are not very happy’ – this was his starting point. Looking round for a cause of this unhappiness, he sees the threat of ‘extinction not only of ourselves, but of our children; the annihilation of society itself’. Left to themselves, he believed, ‘people of different provenance’ would not ‘instinctively leap at each other’s throats’. The atmosphere of political propaganda which we constantly breathed in from our newspapers, radios and television sets had set off a reversal of our instincts. ‘Propaganda in the service of ideology is the now perfected science of
lying
as a means to power.’ For someone passionately neutral like himself and ‘no great Democrat either’, the best course had been silence. But silence was no longer a sufficient safeguard to neutrality. So in the age of microphone and media ‘I have decided that a practice of ceaseless… loquacity should be cultivated.’
By the end of the 1940s he was publishing and broadcasting his message. National sovereign states, he argued, were by definition bound to fall foul of one another. All nationalities are composed of a haphazard conglomeration of tribes. But the state, originating in violence, must rely on force to impose its artificial uniform on this conglomeration, transmitting its laws and class privileges like a hereditary disease. ‘The State’, he warned, ‘must not be judged by human standards nor ever be personified as representing the quintessence of the soul of the people it manipulates. The State is immoral and accountable to nobody.’ The real quintessence of all people lay in their ‘needs and in their dreams’ – their need ‘to gain their living; freedom to use their native tongue; to preserve their customs; to practise any form of religion they choose; to honour their ancestors (if any); to conserve and transmit their cultural traditions, and, in general, to mind their own business without interference.’ Their need also to feel planted in the land: though many would not know what to do if they found themselves there.
John’s alternative to ‘the collective suicide pact’ of the 1950s was for a breaking down of communities into smaller groups – the opposite of what has taken place in the last forty years. He began with hedges. The modern hedge, with which the country had been parcelled out by financial land-grabbers, must be dug up:
‘Hedges are miniature frontiers when serving as bulkheads, not windscreens. Hedges as bulkheads dividing up the Common Land should come down, for they represent and enclose stolen property. Frontiers are extended hedges, and divide the whole world into compartments as a result of aggression and legalized robbery. They too should disappear… They give rise to the morbid form of Patriotism known as Chauvinism or Jingoism. Frontiers besides are a great hindrance to trade and travel with their customs barriers, tariffs and
douanes...
’
Without frontiers, John reasoned, the state would wither and the whole pattern of society change from a heavy pyramid to the fluid form of the amoeba, ‘which alone among living organisms possesses the secret of immortality’. Our monstrous industrial towns, our congested capital cities with their moats of oxygen-excluding suburbs would melt away, and a multiplicity of local communities appear, dotted over the green country,
autonomous, self-supporting, federated, reciprocally free. ‘Gigantism is a disease,’ he warned. ‘…Classical Athens was hardly bigger than Fordingbridge.’
Such beliefs, later commonplace among those advocating an alternative society to capitalism, sounded eccentric in the late 1940s. During the last dozen years of his life John found himself part of a gathering minority. What joined him to others was the atomic bomb. Progress by massacre, historically so respectable, seemed no longer morally acceptable.
‘In the practice of some primitive “savages”, warfare is a kind of ritual: should a casualty occur through the blunder of an inexperienced warrior, a fine of a pig or two will settle the business and everybody goes home (except one). Modern warfare is different. We’ll all be in it, the helpless as well as the armed… There will be no quarter given, for the new Crusaders have no use for “Chivalry”. War will be waged impersonally from the power-house and the laboratory… and mankind will survive, if at all, as brute beasts ravening on a desert island.’
Nuclear bombs had been hatched in a climate of self-destruction. ‘With only a limited capacity for emotion, a surfeit of excitement and horror induces numbness, or a desire for sleep: even Death is seen to offer advantages.’ The malignant gloom against which John had partly anaesthetized himself, the anxious uncertainties, ill thoughts of death – these that he had lived with so long he now saw reflected in the faces of young people.
By the late 1950s John’s beliefs had brought him in contact with Bertrand Russell, whose anti-nuclear movement of mass civil disobedience, called the Committee of 100, he joined. This brought him some middle-class hostility. He was called a traitor and told that the sooner he ‘stand in the dock at the Old Bailey on a charge of treason the better it will be for this country’. But ‘you may count on me to follow your lead,’ John assured Russell on 26 September 1960, ‘…it is up to all those of us above the idiot line to protest as vigorously as possible.’ He had planned to participate in the demonstrations against governmental nuclear policy held on 18 February 1961 and on 6 August 1961, ‘Hiroshima Day’, but early in February suffered a thrombosis that ‘forbids this form of exercise’.
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‘As you see,’ he scribbled almost illegibly, ‘I cannot write; still less can I speak in public, but if my name is of any use, you have it to dispose of.’ Later he made a partial recovery, and against doctor’s orders came quietly up to London for the great sit-down in Trafalgar Square on Sunday 17 September. ‘I have quite lost my hearing and am becoming a nuisance to myself and everybody,’ he told Russell. He had not seen
Trafalgar Square so full of people since Mafeking Night over sixty years earlier when, feeling rather scared, he had extricated himself from the pandemonium and crept home. He still loathed crowds, feared policemen, and ‘didn’t want to parade my physical disabilities’. But he would ‘go to prison if necessary’. The public assembly began at five o’clock, and until that time John hid. Unprecedented numbers took part in this demonstration. ‘Some of them were making what was individually an heroic gesture,’ Russell wrote. ‘For instance, Augustus John, an old man, who had been, and was, very ill… emerged from the National Gallery, walked into the Square and sat down. No one knew of his plan to do so and few recognized him. I learned of his action only much later, but I record it with admiration.’
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A month later John was dead.
‘P.S. Is the world going mad?’
Augustus John to Caspar John (29 December 1960)
He had shrunk into old age. Over his lifetime the changes had been remarkable. Emerging from the little renaissance of the nineties, a romantic Welshman in a Guy Fawkes hat, he had imposed a new physical type, almost a new way of life, on British Bohemia. ‘Under his influence’, wrote the novelist Anthony Powell, ‘painters became, almost overnight, a bearded, silent, unapproachable caste… Huge families, deep potations were the order of the day. A new race of models came immediately into being, strapping, angular nymphs with square-cut hair and billowing smocks. The gipsies, too, were taken over wholesale, so that even today it is hard to see a caravan by the roadside without recalling an early John.’
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Then, in his middle years, he had moved from the roadside into town, a commanding personality in shaggy well-cut suits, embracing whole parties at the Eiffel Tower or in Mallord Street. He had swelled into a national figure, one of the legendary demigods round which the post-war carnival was danced.
But after the Second World War there had been no carnival. The caravans halted; the fierce nights in Chelsea and Fitzrovia drifted into dreams; the national figure itself was whitewashed and transformed into a monument to be photographed on birthdays. One art student, visiting
Fryern in 1948, found him ‘old and very deaf… It was rather like visiting Rubens… I noticed various goats and people dotted about in the sun. I noticed too, as we stepped into his surprisingly small and cluttered studio at the end of the garden, that he came alive, his rambling memory returned and he moved about the canvases with the agility of youth.’
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Most of his days were passed in this little studio. ‘I am immobilised with work,’ he wrote to Dora Yates. He painted there each morning, and in winter Dodo would send in a little milk-and-whisky. After lunch he slept for an hour, then returned to the studio until late afternoon when he would come stumping across to the house for two cups of tepid tea. His mood depended upon his work. He would sit, growling complaints, with his hands round the cup. In summer he often went back to the studio again and continued painting until half-past six or so. Then out would come the wine bottles from the telephone cupboard, perhaps a visitor or two would call, and he relaxed.
Dodo, who he claimed was becoming more ‘tyrannical’, sent him to bed at about eight and he would have his dinner brought to him on a tray. He listened to the radio at night, growing frantic with the knobs on the contraption and the wilful obscurities of the
Radio Times.
In bed he would wear his beret at a revolutionary angle or, when it was mislaid, a straw hat, and often fell asleep in it, his pyjamas smouldering gently from his pipe, the radio blaring around him with competing programmes.
In these last years John and Dodo were represented as Darby and Joan. The ‘resentments had faded away with the years,’ Nicolette Devas wrote.
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They were ‘enviable in the peace between them’. There were days like this, and there are photographs that catch these moments of tranquillity. But difficulties persisted almost to the end. Outrage was never far below the surface of John’s melancholia. ‘He said he hated London… he hated where he lived in Hampshire… he hated settling down, and that he was thinking of leaving his family,’
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Stephen Spender recorded after an evening in 1955. He looked ‘quite magnificent’ with his mane of white hair, but his fanatical stare put some people in mind of Evelyn Waugh. ‘Shocked by a bad bottle of wine, an impertinent stranger, or a fault in syntax, his mind like a cinema camera trucked furiously forward to confront the offending object close-up with glaring lens’; Waugh’s description of himself closely fits John.
He found it difficult to accept the limitations of old age. The world closed in on him. ‘Age in my case brings no alleviation of life’s discomforts,’ he told Sylvia Hay, ‘and the way to the grave is beset with potholes.’
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He was often breaking fingers, ribs, legs. ‘I am too old for these shocks,’ he admitted.
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But it was less the accidents that tormented him than the galling disabilities. He hated having to rely on spectacles to see,
a hearing aid to understand. He would borrow other people’s spectacles – ‘I say, these are rather good. Where did you get them from?’ But his hearing aid infuriated him and he would hurl it across the room into a corner where it would lie feverishly ticking. The trouble, he explained to friends, was that Dodo grudged spending the money on batteries: it had come to that. He had reached the age ‘when one is far too much at the mercy of other people. I shall never get used to it – nor will they.’
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