Authors: Michael Holroyd
The months moved on and ‘I work from morning to night on the big panels which are developing well but seem to need
years
of work.’
162
In May 1954 he reported that they were showing ‘signs of “coming out” like a game of Patience’.
163
Four years later, however, he was still labouring at them and admitting: ‘Unfinished things are often the best.’ But there was no chance this time of supplanting his obsession with another. For this was love and must give birth to beauty. ‘My wall decorations keep changing and evolving like life itself,’ he had told Cecil Beaton. But ‘the sureness of hand and mind’, Sir Charles Wheeler records, ‘…was waning and more than ever he scraped, altered and hesitated… I was charmed by the design which had all the Celtic poetry so characteristic of his figure work. Each time I saw it, it became less and less resolved...’
164
At Fryern he could sometimes be heard alone in his studio, roaring in distress. ‘What the hell do I know about art?’ His right hand was partly crippled with arthritis and, as he smoked, it trembled. Canvases lay everywhere, hanging on the walls, stacked in cupboards and on ledges, propped up or lying on the floor. People scurried in and out taking what they wanted. John stood, a skullcap on his head, dressed in a woollen sweater and jeans, scraping and hesitating before the triptych, caring for nothing else. Sometimes he drew in chalk on top of the paint; sometimes he splashed on gold and silver paint, or pasted it over and over again with dozens of pieces of paper to try out modifications; sometimes it seemed to him that even now, after all these years, he was about to pull it back from the precipice and have a ‘triumph of a sort’.
165
He was impatient with sympathy, but longed for the expert encouragement of another artist. After seeing the work, the gallery owner Dudley Tooth wrote to him calling it ‘magnificent… among the finest things done in this generation’. But John was not fooled, knowing Tooth was simply a ‘man of affairs’ interested in the money. In 1960 a private collector offered him up to eight thousand pounds (equivalent to £99,500 in 1996), but John would not let it go. Over the last two or three years he relied increasingly on the President of the Royal Academy, Charles Wheeler. ‘I think he needed someone to lean on,’ Wheeler wrote, ‘so that I received many letters begging me to visit him at Fryern Court.’
166
They would lunch together with Dodo, then pass most of the afternoon in John’s studio discussing the composition. ‘When it was time to leave Augustus would hug us and, standing side by side with Dorelia at the tall Georgian windows, wave us goodbye.’ He had undertaken to show his triptych at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition of 1960. The sending-in day was 22 March. On 10 February ‘a strange thing happened’, he told Philip Dunn. ‘I rapidly made some bold changes and the results have delighted me beyond measure!’
167
But a month later he was writing to Wheeler: ‘I think it
impossible
to finish the triptych in time… I shall have to keep the big panels for another time.’
168
Early in 1961, on the evidence of some photographs
169
of the cartoon, the Edwin Austin Abbey Memorial Trust offered to purchase the central panel for five thousand pounds and present it for the decoration of Burlington House. It was hoped that this ‘magnificent proposal’
170
would give John the stimulus he needed. But after five agonizing days, he could not keep back the truth any longer:
the triptych was not good enough and never would be.
Before, locked up with his fantasies, he could pretend and try to conjure something from this pretence. But studying the panel with the objectivity that the Abbey Trust’s offer now compelled, he could see only the truth. The letter he wrote ‘in great distress’ to Wheeler on 9 March 1961 bows to this truth:
‘I have some bad news for you. After working
harder than ever
I have come to the conclusion that I cannot continue without ruining whatever merit these large pictures may have had, nor can I expect to recover such qualities as have already been lost. I want to ask you to release me from my promise to have these things ready for the coming show while there is still time to replace them.
I cannot work against time.
That is now quite obvious: it will be a disappointment for you, and perhaps a disaster for me… I will not again make unnecessary promises but will return to the work I love with renewed zest and confidence...’
Wheeler at once replied with a wire, following this up with a letter accepting John’s reasons and absolving him from his promise: ‘They saved me and I am almost myself again,’ John answered.
But nothing could be the same. In a real sense it had been
against time
he sought to work: to reach out and reassemble the past – a legendary past that had never existed otherwise than in his imagination. ‘This working from the imagination is killing me,’ he had written on 5 May 1960. ‘I find myself so variable that sometimes I lose all sense of identity and even forget my name.’ So, at the end, he had been brought back to the central predicament of his life: ‘Who
am
I in the first place?’ In the early visual lyrics, he had revealed a paradise composed in the image of his desire which, though mysterious in its origin, was immediate and actual in its observation. But his desire, arising perhaps from the loss of his mother, had been overlaid by other desires. What had been damped down could not now be rekindled. In his triptych the dream paled into nebulous shadows miming the sensuous beauty and stately gestures of earlier days.
John never abandoned the triptych, but was freer in this final year to turn to ‘lesser and handier things’. Almost his last portrait was of Cecil Beaton. It had been begun in June 1960, but much to John’s fury Beaton left shortly afterwards for the United States. John felt mollified, however, on being introduced to Greta Garbo. ‘I fell for her of course,’ he assured Beaton. ‘…Quel oiseau!… I really must try to capture that divine smile but to follow it to the U.S.A. would kill me. I wouldn’t mind so much dying
afterwards...
’
171
The sittings started up again after Beaton’s return, and became increasingly painful for them both. John seemed at his last gasp. The portrait would change and change again. John daubed it with green paint like a cricket pavilion, then with pillar-box red. He stumped about, lunging at the canvas to add a pupil to one eye or, it might turn out, a button. His hands shook fearfully, his beret fell off, he glared; and Beaton, exquisitely posed, watched him suffer. ‘I think’, John puffed, ‘…this is going to be… the best portrait… I have ever… painted.’
Sex had been one medicine that, in the past, could lift him clear of melancholia. In the summer of 1961, Simon John having left to marry a neighbour, John’s daughter Zoë came to stay at Fryern. John, then in his eighty-fourth year, was sleeping on the ground floor. One night, carrying a torch and still wearing his beret, he fumbled his way upstairs to Zoë’s room, and came heaving in. ‘Thought you might be cold,’ he gasped, and ripped off her bedclothes. He was panting dreadfully, waving the torch about. He lay down on the bed; she put her arms round him; and he grew calmer. ‘Can’t seem to do it now,’ he apologized. ‘I don’t know.’
After a little time she took him down, tucked him up, and returned to her room. It was probably his last midnight expedition.
There was no escape now from the tyranny of the present, no land of hope in his studio, no forgetfulness elsewhere. ‘I have been struck deaf and dumb,’ he told Poppet, ‘so that the silence here is almost more than I can bear.’ Old age had become a nighmare. ‘I feel like a lost soul at Fryern!’ he cried out to Vivien. Honours, now that he cared little for them, came to him from the United States, Belgium, France.
*2
‘I’d like to quit and get away from it all,’ he told a friend. ‘But where is there to go?’
The end, when it came, was simple. He caught a chill; it affected his lungs; and after a short illness he died of heart failure, his heart having been greatly weakened by previous illnesses.
During the last weeks, his abrupt exterior largely fell away and he revealed his feelings more directly. He was agitated at being a ‘blundering nuisance’ to Dodo and Vivien, worried lest they were not getting enough rest. The night he died, they left him alone for a minute and he at once got up and sat in an armchair, complaining that he could not sleep. ‘You try it,’ he suggested, indicating the bed. They got him back and when his eldest son David arrived later that evening, he was ‘breathing very quickly and with difficulty but just about conscious’. Vivien told him that David had come, and he spoke his name. In his sleep he rambled about a picture of an ideal town which he claimed to have finished. The doctor came and John lay very quiet, rousing himself suddenly to remind the women ‘to give the doctor a drink’.
Dodo, Vivien and David took turns sitting up with him that night. At 5.30 a.m. on Tuesday 31 October, with Dodo beside him, he died. ‘His face looked very fine,’ David wrote, ‘calm and smoothed out, in death.’
172
*
The funeral service was at Fordingbridge Parish Church. Apart from the many members of John’s family, there were few people – Charles Wheeler and Humphrey Brooke from the Royal Academy; one or two students who had ‘footed it’ from Southampton. ‘I didn’t have any great feeling of disturbance or deprivation,’ remembered Tristan. ‘…But suddenly half way through the service I burst into tears… I couldn’t stop myself and it went on and on.’ Afterwards, at Fryern, they had a party. Dodo, tiny but regal, seemed to have taken it wonderfully well, as if she could not believe yet that John was really dead.
He had been buried in an annexe of Fordingbridge cemetery, an allotment
for the dead up one of the lanes away from the town. To this rough field, in the months that followed, odd groups of hard-cheekboned people, with faces like potatoes, silent, furtive-looking, made their pilgrimage. Sven Berlin, man of the road, took Cliff Lee of Maghull. Under the great expanse of sky they stood before the gravestone. ‘He rested with councillors and tradesmen of the area,’ Sven Berlin wrote. ‘…His name was carved in simple Roman letters.’ Cliff Lee stood holding a rose he had torn from the hedge on the way.
‘“The first time I’ve seen you take a back seat, old
Rai
,”
he said… “Here is a wild rose from a wild man.” He threw the rose on the grave and turned away; perhaps to hide from me the grief in his dark face though he was not ashamed.’
173
The newspapers were covered with obituaries, photographs, reproductions of pictures that would soon be hurried back to their dark repositories. ‘A man in the 50 megaton range,’ wrote Richard Hughes.
174
‘We lose in him a great man,’ declared Anthony Powell.
175
He had personified ‘a form of life-enhancing exhibitionism’, said Osbert Lancaster, ‘which grew up and flourished before the Age of Anxiety’.
176
His death was treated as a landmark. ‘In a very real sense it marks the close of an era,’ recorded the leader writer of the
Daily Telegraph.
177
More remarkable, perhaps, was the admiration felt by artists, such as Bernard Leach and David Jones, whose work and manner of life were different from his own.
On 12 January 1962 a memorial service was held at St Martin-in-the-Fields. To the large crowd, many with curiously similar features, Caspar John read the lesson and Amaryllis Fleming played Bach’s Prelude and Fugue from Suite No. 5 in C Minor for unaccompanied cello. In his address, Lord David Cecil spoke of the heroic scale of John’s personality, the strength and sensibility of his imagination, and the pictures in which these qualities found expression. ‘A visionary gleam pervades these rocky shores, these wind-blown skies… the earthy and the spiritual in his art expresses the essence of the man who created it… it was rooted in the sense that the spiritual is incarnate in the physical, that the body is the image of the soul.’
In questioning how future generations would assess his work, many agreed that it was essential to discount most of what he had done during the last twenty-five years. Public estimation even of his earlier pictures had changed, and would change again. But one day these pictures would be brought out again – ‘Caravan at Dusk’, ‘Dorelia Standing Before a Fence’, ‘Ida in a Tent’, ‘The Smiling Woman’, ‘The Red Feather’, ‘The Red Skirt’, ‘The Blue Shawl’, ‘The Blue Pool’, ‘The Mumper’s Child’ – passing moods and moments of beauty that he had made permanent.
John’s reputation was sent into a deep decline by the many sales and exhibitions that were held shortly before and following his death.
178
The market was flooded with very inferior work that he had never intended to be seen.
Romilly and his wife Kathie came to Fryern, and Dodo lived on. She still wore the same style of clothes, sitting as if posing for, walking as though out of, another John painting. At work in the garden, or seated at the refectory table over tea – Gwen John’s ‘Dorelia by Lamplight at Toulouse’ behind her – she appeared extraordinarily like the mythical Dorelia of John’s imagination. ‘Her white hair’, noted the Gwen John scholar Mary Taubman, ‘ – strange and unexpected but accentuating the unchanged features… very kind and smiled quickly… her whole face quick and intelligent. Self-contained, rather frightening, though charming. Conversation conducted very much on her terms.’ Brigid McEwen, who visited Fryern in December 1963, observed her ‘long dress of saffron cotton patterned in black, a neckerchief, long cardigan, long earrings, pierced ears, rings on wedding finger, white stockings & no shoes. She kept playing with her spectacles rather like an old man. Her asymmetrically done hair – a long plait & a white comb. Very young voice… and young expressions “Jolly difficult” (to write life of John so soon)...’
For years she had seemed pliant, sensible, undemanding. But following John’s death she flexed her muscles and rather enjoyed being ‘difficult’. Though she travelled more to France, staying with her daughter Poppet, for most of this time she remained at Fryern.