Authors: Michael Holroyd
Old age had become his schoolmaster but he was always playing truant, darting up to London. Some of these trips were memorable for others, if not himself. After one terrific beano at a Chelsea pub, the crowds ‘gathered together to do me honour… some of them claiming
intimate
acquaintance’, he woke up ‘safely in bed at my dosshouse’ next morning completely mystified. He sometimes claimed ‘my tempo has slowed down,’ but ‘when he comes to town, [he] seems to set a terrific pace,’ Mavis wrote admiringly in the 1950s. ‘I wonder how the old boy doesn’t drop dead in his tracks.’ Almost always he would demand her presence for ‘an hour or two’s sitting and a sweet embrace’. ‘Must get hold of the old cow,’ he would gruffly tell other people. She could still – ‘how was it possible?’ – make him forget his years, and their battles at the bar of the Royal Court Hotel, or at the Queen’s Restaurant, were precious to both of them.
He had given up Tite Street in the autumn of 1950 ‘and am on the pavement till I find another studio’.
104
The new studio he found was in Charlotte Street, the very one he had shared with Orpen and Albert Rutherston after leaving the Slade in 1898. It belonged now to his daughter Gwyneth Johnstone, who lent him a room there. For an easel he turned a chair upside-down, but the light was not good and he did little work in town.
He came to London to escape the ‘decrepit’ household at Fryern and, by implication, his own decrepitude, and would put up at 14 Percy Street, where Poppet kept a flat. He never gave warning of these trips, but expected everyone to fit in with him the moment he arrived. Otherwise he would grow depressed and begin dialling old cronies – anyone who might be free to lead him astray for a few hours. Robert and Cynthia Kee, who had a room next to his at Percy Street, could sometimes hear the stentorian blast of his snores, mixed with powerful swearing, through the dark. At night, it seemed, he fought again the old campaigns, vanquished long-dead rivals. But during the day his manner was guardedly courteous, sinking periodically to disconcerting troughs of modesty.
He was still, even to the age of eighty, apparently in the thick of life. ‘He could outdrink most of his companions and engage in amorous – if that is the word – relations that would have debilitated constitutions
generally held robust,’ remembered Will Rothenstein’s son John.
105
The two of them would go off into Chelsea and be joined by others. ‘After a longish visit to a bar he would apprehend that his guests might be inclined to eat. “I want to stay here for a bit longer. There’s a girl who’s going to join us. Sturdy little thing… ” We would wait. Sometimes she would turn up and sometimes not. Augustus did not seem to mind, assured that before the evening was finished there would be others.’
He still distributed love poems – only now it was the same poem he shamelessly handed out to everyone; he was still given to sudden lunges at women, but took no offence at their rebuffs. ‘A little of Augustus went a long way,’
106
wrote Diana Mosley. With his sparse hair and bloodshot eyes he was no longer attractive, especially to women who did not relish pubs and shove ha’penny. ‘May I fig-and-date [fecundate] you?’ he politely inquired of Sonia Brownell. These days he felt relief at being spared such duties, but he was seldom so discourteous as to forget them. Nor were they always refused. Late one night at Percy Street a girl with long fair hair came beating on the door, shouting that she loved him and must be let in. The Kees cowered beneath their bedclothes, and the old man’s snoring halted and he eventually heaved himself downstairs. There followed a series of substantial sounds, then silence. Next day several of the banister supports were missing, there seemed to be blood on the floor and, more mysteriously, sugar. John looked sheepish. ‘’Fraid there was rather a rumpus last night,’ he muttered. Later that day he visited the girl in hospital and came back elated. ‘Said she still loved me,’ he declared wonderingly.
There is no greater misfortune, Disraeli said, than to have a heart that will not grow old. This was John’s misfortune. ‘No Romanichale can fail to diagnose my trouble on sight,’ he wrote to Dora Yates in November 1959, ‘a trouble which he would do nothing to allay, but on the contrary, will at once set about adding coals to what should rightly be a dying flame.’ To everyone’s consternation he had fallen for an art student in 1950. To separate them, Poppet dragged him and Dodo through France to her house at Opio. John arrived very crestfallen. For days he was abominably rude to Dodo, who sat silently absorbing his insults. Eventually Poppet flared up into a red-hot temper. ‘Didn’t know you had it in you,’ John exclaimed, beaming. He quickly regained his spirits. ‘Not going to lose your temper again, are you?’ he asked hopefully from time to time during the rest of their holiday.
From the prison of old age, he treated his family as gaolers. Dodo, he complained, kept everything dark, barred all visitors, never spoke, was ‘illiterate, dumb and ill-natured’, and had made Fryern into a tomb. ‘No gatherings of the clan – no community singing after breakfast – no
wrestling on the green after dinner.’ On good days he took most delight in his grandchildren and liked to league with them against their ‘respectable’ fathers. On bad days it was often Dodo he attacked, because she was there. ‘She comes from a stinking cockney breed,’ he wrote to Robin on 3 September 1961. Gwen, he seemed to remember, had felt the same. When the two girls had ‘walked to Rome’, Dorelia had preferred to take a passport than a pistol. It proved what ‘a fishy lot’ the McNeills were. ‘I’m glad you at least are a true-bred Nettleship,’ he congratulated his eldest son David (27 October 1956). This querulousness showed his agony: his vanished talent and the irreversible change of life. Who was there to blame except Dodo, who had kept him alive and so helped to make him old? By identifying her as an enemy and deliberately making his complaints absurd, he tried to numb the truth and lessen the pain. But the side-effects were unpleasant. Then the effects would wear off and he was confronted by the full horror of his condition. ‘Hell seems nearer every day. I have never felt so near it as at Fryern Court. There must be a bricked-up passage leading straight to it from here. I see no way of escape. Meanwhile I have to pretend to work away gaily and enjoy my worldwide renown...’
The pretence, though still accepted by the world, had become very brittle. It took little to crack it. Cyril Connolly remembered him having lost his temper with a taxi-driver, bursting out of the taxi and measuring up to fight him in the road.
107
‘I’m sorry, but it’s the right fare,’ insisted the driver. ‘Why, so it is,’ hesitated John, lowering his fists. ‘I apologize.’ In a moment he had changed from an angry giant to a Lear-like old man, confessing his error and touchingly polite to the driver, who was himself overwhelmed with remorse.
In 1951, though warned by mutual friends against it, Alan Moorehead suggested to John that he write his biography. ‘I was captivated by John at that time,’ Moorehead records, ‘…and I believed that my genuine admiration for him would smooth over any difficulties that arose between us.’ At John’s suggestion they met in the saloon bar of the Royal Court Hotel, a quiet spot, he described it, where they could chat undisturbed. ‘Directly he walked in… all conversation among the other customers ceased while they gazed at the great man and listened with interest to the remarks I shouted into his hearing-aid.’
John was inclined to think a biography not possible. He had no head for dates and many of his friends were dead, ‘usually through having committed suicide’. Yet the past for him was not a different country. ‘He appeared to look back on his life as he might have looked at a broad large painting spread out before him, all of it visible to the eye at once, and having no connection with time or progression,’ Moorehead noticed. ‘It
was the sum of his experiences that counted, the pattern they presented… Once one grew accustomed to this approach it had a certain coherence and I believed that with persistence I could enter, in terms of writing, into that close relationship that presumably exists between a painter and his sitter.’ It was agreed he should start work at once, calling on those friends who had so far failed to commit suicide and seeing John from time to time to check his notes. After several months Moorehead ventured fifteen thousand words on paper ‘as a sort of sample or blueprint’ of the projected book, and sent them to John. ‘This typescript’, he records, ‘came back heavily scored with a pen, whole pages crossed out and annotated with such comments as “Wrong” and “Liar”.’ It was accompanied by a letter:
‘All
your statements of fact are wrong. I prefer the truth. Your own observations I find quite incredibly out of place. I must refuse to authorize this effort at biography.’
108
‘I can remember’, wrote Moorehead, ‘feeling appalled and humiliated – indeed after all these years the rebuff is still fresh and it remains in some ways the worst set-back I have ever experienced in my attempts to write.’
The two of them were due to meet that March at a Foyle’s lunch. Moorehead was ‘determined to go to this lunch and to have it out with him’. As soon as the speeches were over John made for the door, with Tommy Earp growling out at Moorehead as he passed: ‘Come on.’ The three of them went by taxi to a Soho wine shop, and there Moorehead tackled him. ‘I thought for a moment he was going to strike me. Where, he demanded, had I obtained the information about his father’s Will? I had gone to Somerset House, I replied, and had got a copy. What business had I going to Somerset House? That was spying… ’
The argument went on long, reaching nowhere, until Moorehead revealed that he had abandoned the biography and was sailing to Australia next week. John then grew calmer, the eyes glared less, and when they said goodbye he was gruffly amiable. A week later Moorehead’s ship reached Colombo. There was a cable waiting for him from John:
‘For heavens sake lets be friends.’
‘I remember now the feelings of intense relief, contrition and happiness with which I read those few words,’ Moorehead wrote. ‘In an instant all was well again… After all these years I am left admiring him as much as I ever did. If there was pettiness in his life and much ruthlessness, he was also a mighty life-enhancer and a giant in his day… Reflecting, long after our contretemps, about his really passionate anger at my mentioning such matters as his father’s Will, I saw that in a way he hated his own wealth and notoriety. These things diminished his true purpose which was to paint to the final extent of his powers.’
Difficulties lay like watchdogs about his work and it was almost impossible
not to stir them up. Over a book of fifty-two of his drawings that George Rainbird published in 1957, no one escaped censure, because as usual no one was ‘able to tell the difference between a drawing and a cow-pat’.
109
Lord David Cecil, who contributed an introduction, came from a good family but clearly knew nothing about art; Rainbird was a philistine businessman; and from the expert advice of Brinsley Ford, John sought relief through referring to him by his initials. ‘I prefer’, he told Joe Hone, ‘to make my own mistakes.’
110
To other people’s eyes these mistakes arose from his preference for his current work. ‘References to my early efforts sometimes make me sick,’ he grumbled to D. S. MacColl, ‘ – as if I had done nothing since.’
111
The contrast between the old and new was often painfully marked, particularly when, in 1954, four hundred and sixty exhibits from all periods of his career were shown together in the four rooms of the Diploma Gallery in Burlington House. It was almost unprecedented for the Royal Academy to hold an exhibition of work by a living artist. John, however, initially failed to answer the formal invitation. ‘I don’t repudiate the great compliment but only doubted my capacity for deserving it,’ he later explained. ‘…I’ld love to make the show you suggest more than anything in the world, now that I am (apparently) on the way to a kind of rebirth.’ Nevertheless, he queried, might it not be ‘more safely deferred till after my death when [my] responsibilities will be lessened?’ But for the President of the Royal Academy, Sir Gerald Kelly, the arranging of this show was a lifetime’s ambition and he would not be deterred. ‘I have good reason to beware of hurry,’ he was warned by John, who succeeded in delaying ‘this threatening show’ of the ‘collection of my misdeeds’ by two years. What he feared were the ‘appalling distractions, fatal to the activities which still lie ahead and which may lead me a little nearer to the light’. The Royal Academy was also eager that he should not be distracted. ‘We should never have got anywhere if it had been left to John,’ Kelly explained to Tommy Earp. For months, to everyone’s dismay, John worked feverishly to have as many of his recent pictures as possible ready for the exhibition. ‘If I survive the strain,’ he told Kelly, ‘I shall need a powerful restorative followed by a trip to the South Seas where, I am told, work is at a discount.’ Everyone was exhausted by the time of the opening. ‘I hope John won’t come up when we are hanging the show,’ Kelly nervously wrote to Earp. But he did come, twice, and took advantage of these visits for ‘weeding’ out a dozen early canvases (‘by no means enough’), modestly claiming some of them to be forgeries – a charge that, as soon as it was too late to reintroduce them, he withdrew. ‘I sometimes wonder if all artists are not the worst judges of their own
work,’ John’s friend Hugo Pitman commiserated with Kelly. ‘…I can well imagine how in need of a holiday you must feel.’
112
John had not received much serious critical attention since the 1930s. This Royal Academy exhibition gave critics an opportunity to estimate his work after a long interval. ‘The freedom, sureness, versatility and sheer voluptuous accomplishment’ of the early drawing, wrote John Russell in the
Sunday Times,
‘befit them to hang in great company.
‘They have, moreover, a note of wonder and bemusement which is carried over into the group of panel-paintings… these radiant Tennysonian panels are Mr John’s great accomplishment, not only to English painting, but to the English poetic imagination. It is in them, and in the drawings… that his private mythology comes wonderfully to fruition and he persuades us that the whole of life may be illumined by what happened to him, and his family, and his closest friends, in the Welsh mountains and around Martigues.’
113