Authors: Michael Holroyd
‘John’s fascination is almost infamous; the man, so full of lust and life and animality, so exorbitant in his desires and in his vision that rises in his eyes.
His mother, who died young, was artistic, did some lovely paintings his father still keeps in Tenby. There he got some of his gift – as I did from mine. I for verse, he for painting. Our fathers never really understood us… John’s father hated art and artists; the mother, imaginative. So was mine: both imaginative: one derives enormously from one’s mother.’
Augustus lived vividly in Symons’s imagination. ‘Arthur Symons has sent me a poem he had dedicated to me – all about bones and muscles and blatant nakedness,’ Augustus wrote to Alick Schepeler. ‘I ask myself what I have done to merit this?’ The poem, ‘Prologue for a Modern Painter: to A. E. John’ is a hymn to vitality, a declaration of his faith in the kind of life he could never make his own, except through someone else:
Hear the hymn of the body of man:
This is how the world began;
In these tangles of mighty flesh
The stuff of the earth is moulded afresh...
Here nature is, alive and untamed,
Unafraid and unashamed;
Here man knows woman with the greed
Of Adam’s wonder, the primal need.
The spirit cries out and hymns
In all the muscles of these limbs;
And the holy spirit of appetite
Wakes the browsing body with morning light.
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But what
had
Augustus done to merit such a rhapsody? For one of the paradoxes of their friendship was that where Augustus dreamed, Symons, in his tireless search for ‘impressions’, often acted. He had breathed in the fantastical air of Dieppe deeper than Augustus, stopping impatiently for a night while in pursuit of some prehistoric fishwomen, could ever have done. And he had actually gone to many of the places, especially in
Italy, that Augustus had merely read about. Yet because Symons dreaded action ‘more than anything in the world’,
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he was determined to see Augustus as a great man of action. What mesmerized him was the apparent lack of that guilt which so weighed down his own actions wherever he went.
The flow of poems was for some years their main line of communication. It formed, for Symons, a kind of umbilical cord attaching him to a creative source of life. ‘Dear Symons,’ Augustus replied from Church Street, ‘Today I’ve just come back to find another beautiful poem for me! I would have written columns of gratitude for the others you sent, only the words, not the will, failed me.’
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Then, in 1908, disaster had overtaken Symons: he had gone mad in Italy. From Venice, urged on by exasperation, he fled to a hotel in Bologna where his wife Rhoda, dressed like a dragonfly, hurried to his side. She found him racked by terrible phantoms, but her concern seemed only to sharpen his torment. For repeatedly she would demand: ‘Do you
really
love me, Arthur?’ One night he disappeared: he had given his answer. ‘So it has come at last!’ she soliloquized. ‘He no longer loves me!’ Next morning, however, Symons returned and created some dismay by failing to recognize his wife, and then, with foul curses filling his mouth, rushing off chased by horrible shapes and shadows. The hotel manager then explained to Rhoda: ‘Madam, your husband is mad. He has bought three daggers.’ In hysterics she raced back to England, to be arraigned by a herd of Bowsers for having deserted her husband. Symons, meanwhile, had lost himself, drifting day after day in ever-increasing fatigue from one ominous spot to another. ‘I walked and walked and walked – always in the wrong direction.’ At last he was arrested in Ferrara, manacled hand and foot, and thrown into a medieval gaol. It was only with great difficulty that his friends and family got him released and dispatched back to England where, in November 1908, he was confined to Brooke House, a private mental home.
The doctors were confident they could not cure him. They had diagnosed ‘general paralysis of the insane’, which could proceed, they confirmed, through hopeless idiocy to death. They spoke matter-of-factly, were kind, but firm: all hopes, they promised, were ignorant and vain. Symons (who lived thirty-seven more years in perfect sanity) had, they declared, a life expectancy of between two months and two years – it could not be more. His manner of life at Brooke House, though described by the specialists as ‘quiet’, was in some ways unusually active. He took
off his clothes and assumed the title of Duke of Cornwall. He frequently dined with the King and kept forty pianofortes upstairs on which he composed a prodigious quantity of music. He rose each morning at 4 a.m., and worked hard on a map of the world divided into small sections; he also wrote plays, devoted endless time to the uplifting of the gypsy, and, when not occupied as Pope of Rome, involved himself in speculations worth many thousands of pounds. But his main duty as a lunatic was to arrange for Swinburne’s reception in Paradise, and when Swinburne died in 1909 the pressure of these delusions began to ease. ‘Had it not been for [Augustus] John,’ he wrote later, ‘whose formidable genius is combined with a warmth of heart, an ardent passion and will, at times deep, almost profound affection, which is one of those rare gifts of a genius such as his, I doubt if I could have survived these tortures that had been inflicted upon me.’
Already by the summer of 1909, Symons was being allowed out from Brooke House in convoy, followed by Miss Agnes Tobin, a West Coast American lady bitten with a passion for meeting real artists, and, at some further distance, a hated ‘keeper’ from the asylum. This procession would make its serpentine way to the home of Augustus who, after losing the keeper ‘without compunction or difficulty’, would set them high-stepping to the Café Royal, where he prescribed for Symons medicines more potent than any administered at Brooke House. ‘At the Café Royal, between five and eight, we each drank seven absinthes, with cigarettes and conversation,’ Symons wrote excitedly.
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There were many of these splendid occasions: visits to the Alhambra Theatre and to the Russian ballets; glorious luncheons at the Carlton and sumptuous suppers with young models in Soho; all for the sake of what Symons called ‘la débauche et l’intoxication’.
Augustus was good to Symons. ‘Although I like him,’ he later explained to his sister Gwen, ‘I find it difficult to support his company for more than 5 minutes.’
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Nevertheless, under the impression that the poor man was shortly to die, he set out to make his last few weeks enjoyable. ‘I have seen Symons a good deal,’ he informed Quinn (25 October 1909) ‘ – he keeps apparently well but one can see all the same that he is far from being so. The doctors give him 2 or 3 more months… he reads out his latest poems – which are all hell, damnation and lust.’
Augustus had not calculated that, a dozen years later, he would still be entertaining Symons ‘a good deal’, and that Symons would still be counting on him to be (14 April 1921) ‘as wonderful as ever’.
What he did for Symons was to blow into his life and keep blowing, ventilating it with humour, filling it with people, elbowing out Symons’s morbid introspection. The delusions melted into nothing before the heat
of actual events. But part of Symons’s recovery was due, Augustus maintained, ‘to the kindness and devotion of Miss Tobin’.
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She was forty-five with the light behind her, hailed from San Francisco, had translated Petrarch, and now lived at the Curzon Hotel in Mayfair. She was observed to be ‘a little bit flighty’.
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Conrad (who dedicated
Under Western Eyes
to her) called her Inez; Francis Meynell, however, called her Lily ‘because of the golden and austere delicacy of her head and neck’; and she called Augustus ‘my poor butterfly’. He stood up to it well. ‘I’ve been seeing Symons and Miss Tobin,’ he told John Quinn (18 December 1909). Symons, he added, ‘keeps pouring out verses’.
The three of them had been brought together (while Augustus was briefly in London following his escape from Liverpool’s Lord Mayor) by John Quinn, the New York lawyer reckoned to be ‘the twentieth century’s most important patron of living literature and art’.
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Quinn arrived in England that summer to buy some pictures by Charles Shannon, Nathaniel Hone and ‘Augustus John, the artist who is much discussed in London now’.
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He had heard tell of both Symons and Augustus from W. B. Yeats and, not content to meet them separately, had arranged for them to see one another too. There appeared to be advantages in this for everyone. Miss Tobin, who was coming into contact with more artists and authors than she could have dreamed possible, made the suggestion that Quinn acquire manuscripts by Symons and her friend Conrad. ‘Your bringing A.S. and Mr John together was a miraculous success and will, I think, be an immense solace to A.S.,’ she assured Quinn (16 September 1909). ‘Mr John told me he would keep up the friendship – and wants A.S. to sit for him.’ Augustus’s portrait of Symons, one of his subtlest interpretations of writers, was delayed until the autumn of 1917 when, though described by Frank Harris
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as showing ‘a terrible face – ravaged like a battlefield’, it was warmly praised by the Symons family. ‘John has done a fine portrait of A[rthur],’ Rhoda confided to Quinn (29 October 1917). ‘…What an odd fish he is; but he has great personal qualities. He has been true to A[rthur] all thro’ these years, and it’s few who have… he’s a great artist, isn’t he?… A[rthur]’s portrait is very El Grecoish!’
Of Quinn Augustus did a number of drawings (one of them described by a friend as ‘the portrait of a hanging judge’) and a large formal portrait in oils – all during a single week in August 1909. On the fifth and final sitting, as Augustus was about to take up his brushes, Miss Tobin stepped forward and exclaimed that the canvas was perfect – ‘at the razor’s edge’. Augustus at once laid down his brushes and began drinking – so the picture was perforce finished.
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Although Quinn affected to think well of his portrait – ‘I liked the portrait John made of me,’ he wrote calmly to Lady Gregory (21
December 1909). ‘And I liked John himself immensely’ – it was not an encouraging likeness. When it was exhibited that autumn at the NEAC under the title ‘The Man from New York’, the critic of the
English Review
(January 1910) wrote: ‘The peculiar note of hardness which Mr. A. E. John has could not have found a better subject than “The Man from New York”. It shows exactly that hardness which we look for and find in this type of American.’
Quinn insisted that, on reading this, ‘I howled out loud with glee’.
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There are few more doleful sounds than the laughter of a man without humour. Quinn’s lack of humour was a very positive quality and he enjoyed drawing attention to it by cracking jokes.
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His response to Augustus’s portrait was indeed partly the result of its being a very funny picture. It presents him at three-quarters length, seated with his left hand on his hip and his right hand extended, resting on a cane. The shape of his figure is that of a tent and upon a face of tiny proportions at the apex of this design there sits an expression of the sternest vacancy, the mouth of the ‘garrulous Irish American’ for once firmly sealed. Quinn, his biographer B. L. Reid tells us, ‘felt baffled and unhappy about it’,
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though Symons, Pissarro and others considered it ‘extremely good’.
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Bravely, he hung it over his mantelpiece for as long as he lived, but would indignantly protest that Augustus ‘painted me as though I were a referee or umpire at a baseball game or the president of a street railway company with a head as round and unexpressive and under-developed as a billiard ball. Thirty or forty years of life in school, college, university and the world has I hope put a little intelligence into my face. Intelligence is not predominant in the John painting of me, but force, self-assertion and a seeming lack of sensitiveness which is not mine!’
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Quinn’s interpretation of the portrait was right. ‘Do not expect any subtle intelligence from him [Quinn] or any other Yankee,’ Augustus warned Will Rothenstein (20 September 1911). ‘…Money has literally taken the place of brains and character, and the American mind is a metallic jungle of platitude and bluff.’
In an earlier letter to Rothenstein Augustus had lamented the dearth of ‘millionaires of spirit’. In Quinn he had found a millionaire of the purse. He would have liked to like him. ‘We became very friendly,’ he wrote after their first meeting.
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But they valued each other for qualities other than friendship. ‘He’s a treasure,’ Augustus told Dorelia (August 1909). ‘He’s offered me £250 [equivalent to £11,800 in 1996] a year for life and I can send him what I like. He’s a daisy and will do much more than that.’ It seemed to Augustus that so liberal a patron, and one tactful enough not to inconvenience him by living in the same country, presented an ideal solution to his problems. This extra money would release him
from a lot of commissioned work and allow him to paint imaginative pictures. ‘I can tell you honestly you did me a lot of good that week in London,’ he wrote in his first letter to Quinn (September 1909), ‘and that quite apart from pecuniary considerations. You will help me to keep up to the scratch.’
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The figure of Quinn, hopelessly beckoning, stood at the end of a long road lavishly paved with good intentions. When, for example, he asks for a complete set of etchings, Augustus willingly consents, adding (4 January 1910): ‘I mean to methodize my work more and put aside say one or two months every year to etching – it can’t be done every day or any day.’ In another letter (25 October 1909) he tells Quinn: ‘I am extremely anxious to study Italian frescos as I am fired with the desire to revive that art… I am quite ready to say goodbye to oil painting after seeing the infinitely finer qualities of fresco and tempera.’ But when Quinn replies with dismay, Augustus hurriedly gives way (18 December 1909):