Authors: Michael Holroyd
What Dorelia did not perhaps appreciate was that the first phase of a successful cure must be the patient’s admission that he needs special treatment for alcoholism. This admission John was never required to make. He stayed at the nursing home a month, and his treatment appears to have been largely custodial, with a few vitamin supplements, nuts, caraway seeds and some tranquillizing drugs served on silver platters by footmen. ‘They are making a good job of me, I feel,’ he announced.
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‘…I am a different being and they tell me in a week or two I’ll be as strong again as a horse.’ He was allowed out with another inmate for a ‘debauch of tea and toast’ and by himself to Cambridge for a drink ‘of coffee with Quiller-Couch and a bevy of exquisite undergrads’, as well as for walks to the church and, more recklessly, drives in his car. In the absence of gypsies, he made friends with ‘some nice animals’, cows and sheep mostly; while indoors there were erotic glimpses of a remarkable chambermaid. He read voraciously, but was sometimes ‘rather forlorn’. ‘If I were not beginning to feel as I haven’t felt for years I
might
be bored,’ he threatened in a note to Ottoline, who had entered the nursing home herself for a few days, ‘ – as it is – I am smiling to myself, as at some huge joke.’
The presence of Ottoline helped to reconcile John to Preston Deanery Hall. He insisted that she came and sat by his bed and, after his morning exercises on the ‘electric belly-waggler’, photographed his new etherealized figure. Ottoline was likewise convinced that she looked ‘much younger since I went to Dr Cameron. Everyone exclaims so.’ It was, she added, ‘so depressing to look like a wreck’. John gallantly affirmed that she was ‘more paintable than ever’, at which she suddenly took fright. So they discussed other people such as Henry Lamb, who was said to be curing himself of his Augustus John ‘infection’ in the company of Stanley and Gilbert Spencer, but whose case (so Dorelia had told Ottoline) ‘was more serious than John’s’.
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As for John himself, Ottoline couldn’t help reflecting ‘how like he has become to Asquith, who had his two failings, drink and women.’ Every day he entreated her to keep him company, and when Philip Morrell arrived to fetch her away, he came down to the front door to wave them off. He looked, she thought, ‘like the boy who had been left behind at the school gate’.
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After Ottoline had gone, John could not stay there long. Instead he
‘had it out with the doctor’ and left a week earlier than planned. ‘No doubt I’ll have to follow a regime for a while,’ he warned Dorelia. ‘They say I’ll be marvellously well in about 10 days after leaving.’
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His aftercare came in the form of a diet. ‘Unfortunately I have lost that almost ethereal quality which I had so welcomed,’ he told Ottoline (23 May 1930). ‘…I blame the cook for giving me unauthorized potatoes and beef steak.’
‘You’d be all right if you lived sensibly,’ Eve Fleming instructed him. ‘You’re as strong as twelve lions by nature.’
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But sense of this sort was unavailable to him: ‘I who always live from hand to mouth and have so little practical sense.’
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He was awash with optimism. His strong constitution, with its extraordinary powers of recovery, quickly misled him. Austerity, he claimed, had made him ‘much more like myself’ – though he had also bought a new hat which was making him ‘a different person and a better’. One way or another he felt like ‘a giant refreshed’.
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It was not long before he relapsed into drinking, and the deterioration went on. ‘John is in ruins,’ T. E. Lawrence noted in 1932, ‘but a giant of a man. Exciting, honest, uncanny.’
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He never quite became a chronic drinker – ‘I was never a true alcoholic,’ he admitted to Mavis Wheeler. From time to time he went back to doctors who tried to remove him from alcohol altogether. But Dorelia’s tactics worked better. She rationed him with lock and key at home, and in restaurants would furtively empty his glass. Without drink he tended to avoid people: ‘I find my fellow-creatures very troublesome to contend with without stupéfiant,’ he told Christabel Aberconway. He still retreated into the comforting womb of pubs ‘to get alone for a bit’.
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A solitary figure in a muffler, booted and corduroyed, he sat quietly in a corner, drinking his beer. Latterly he consumed far less, because his tolerance to alcohol had diminished. Conger Goodyear, who had been so struck by his capacity at the Saturn Club in the 1920s, was regretting by the 1940s that ‘his ancient alcoholic prowess had departed’, and after a few drinks ‘Augustus did not improve’.
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The loss of confidence, the upsurges of temper, the tremulousness of his hands, his inability to make decisions – all grew more pronounced. He knew the truth, but would not hear it from anyone. But it amused him sometimes to make people connive at his inventions – then, with disconcerting relish, come out with the facts. ‘I have heard of a new treatment for my complaint – it consists of total abstention from liquor.’
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At other times he would innocently complain of Dodo that she smoked too much; or of J. B. Manson (who was dismissed as Director of the Tate Gallery) that ‘the fellow drinks’, deliberately slurring his words as he spoke.
Intermittently between bursts of renewed effort, he drank to destroy himself. If he could not paint well, and could not disguise his inability to
do so, then he was better dead. But Dorelia, who had tolerated so much, would not tolerate this. Her watchfulness, care, relentless programme of regular meals and early nights, propped him up and pulled him through – the ghost of an artist he had once been.
‘I still draw a little.’
Augustus John to T. E. Lawrence
The first test came that summer of 1930. He had been invited by Gogarty to assist at the opening of his hotel, Renvyle House, in Connemara. Yeats was also coming, and Gogarty arranged for John to do a ‘serious portrait’ of him. ‘I would think it a great honour,’ Yeats had murmured. But standing before the mirror, he began to examine himself with some apprehension, ‘noticing certain lines about my mouth and chin marked strongly by shadows’, and to wonder ‘if John would not select those very lines and lay great emphasis upon them, and, if some friends complain that he has obliterated what good looks I have, insist that those lines show character, and perhaps that there are no good looks but character.’
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Early that summer Yeats learnt that the city of Cork had rejected John’s earlier portrait of him ‘because of my attack on the censorship & my speech about divorce’, choosing instead ‘as an expression of Cork piety and patriotism’
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a picture of the Prince of Wales by the Irish painter James Barry. At about the same time he received a letter from Gogarty saying that John wished to paint a portrait of him in his maturity. ‘John is to paint me at Renvyle,’ he wrote from Italy to Lady Gregory (27 June 1930), ‘and I will try to go there at once...’ The sittings began in the third week of July, and Yeats himself was soon writing that it ‘promises to be a masterpiece – amusing – a self I do not know but am delighted to know, a self that I could never have found out for myself, a gay, whimsical person which I could never find in the solemnity of the looking-glass. Is it myself? – it is certainly what I would like to be.’
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But a couple of days later, John ‘somewhat spoiled that portrait & has laid it aside’, so Yeats reported; adding, ‘ – I like him will endow it later with vice or virtue according to mood… He started another much larger portrait to-day which is more “monumental” – his word – [and] has less comedy. It is a fine thing.’
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It was at this point that John laid down his brushes and, joined by Caspar, who had flown over in his little Avro
Avian, went off for three days to ‘Galway races & attendant activities’ where the enjoyment rose to such a level they ‘had the ambulances out’.
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John seems to have been in two minds about Yeats. He noticed, with surprise, that Yeats had made the mistake of growing older, and was ‘now a mellow, genial and silver haired old man’.
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He had put on weight, seemed vaguely distrustful and, despite the vastly poetical manner, looked somehow less Yeats-like. Yeats himself had noted ‘marks of recent illness, marks of time, growing irresolution, perhaps some faults that I have long dreaded; but then my character is so little myself that all my life it has thwarted me.’ This was a development very close to John’s own, explaining why observers such as Robert Graves could dismiss them both as poseurs. ‘Lord and Lady Longford had fetched him [Yeats] over to be painted,’ John remembered.
‘The conversation at dinner consisted of a succession of humorous anecdotes by Yeats, chiefly on the subject and at the expense of George Moore, punctuated by the stentorian laughter of his Lordship and the more discreet whinny of his accomplished wife. I was familiar with most of these stories before, or variants of them: for the Irish literary movement nourished itself largely on gossip… My difficulties while painting Yeats were not lightened by the obligation of producing an appreciative guffaw at the right moment, and I fear my timing was not always correct.’
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It was Yeats’s melancholy that John recognized, and shied away from. ‘The portrait represents the poet in his old age,’ Gogarty records. ‘He is seated with a rug round his knees and his broad hat on his lap. His white hair is round his head like a nimbus, and behind him the embroidered cloths of heaven are purple and silver. It is the last portrait of Yeats.’
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Once this portrait was finished, John was free to do whatever he wanted. What he wanted was to go to Galway City. Denouncing Renvyle as too ‘new and raw’, off he went. From O’Flaherty’s bar and from parties flowing with barmaids on and around Francis Macnamara’s boat
Mary Anne,
he was eventually fished up and carried back to Renvyle where an admiring entourage had assembled – the painters Adrian Daintrey and George Lambourn, and any number of painterly girls including ‘the ladies Dorothea and Lettice Ashley-Cooper’, and their sister Lady Alington who ‘has been posing for him and does not confine it to that’.
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To this number a beautiful American, Hope Scott, added herself, arriving in Dublin straight from Pennsylvania and being rushed across Ireland in a hearse. Her first sight of John, his beard caught by the sun, his eyes gleaming with anticipation, was at a ground-floor window. The hearse door was flung open, and ‘I fell out on my head.’
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John painted most days, Adrian Daintrey and George Lambourn acting as pacemakers. But every evening there were parties, and the effect of these began to infiltrate the day. His seclusion in Preston Deanery Hall seems to have precipitated two reactions: a greater urgency in his pursuit of girls, and a crippling anxiety over his work. ‘Though I was sitting, I did not lack exercise. Most of Augustus’s models found themselves doing a good bit of sprinting round the studio,’ recalled Mrs Scott, the original for the heroine in Philip Barry’s play
The Philadelphia Story
(later refilmed as
High Society
),
into whose bed John was prevented from blundering by the presence of a bolster he angrily mistook for Adrian Daintrey. But Hope Scott also noticed: ‘He was enormously concentrated, at times he seemed actually to suffer over his work.’
Dodo and Poppet, who had gone with him to Ireland, left early. To them, arranged as a compliment, he confided his depression: ‘J’étais dans un gloom affreux quand tu et Dodo êtes parties. Tu pourrais bien m’avoir embrassé...’
To shed this black mood in some new climate became the theme of this decade. He travelled to the Hebrides, to Jersey, Cornwall and, for short visits, back to Wales. Now that he no longer had the Villa Ste-Anne, he stayed during part of two winters at Cap Ferrat with Sir James Dunn ‘the friendly financier’.
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But John failed to please Dunn. ‘Dunn’s quarrels with John over the various portraits were furious,’ Lord Beaverbrook wrote, ‘and much tough language was tossed to and fro, without reaching any conclusion… John, however, gave as much as he got.’
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These fashionable pleasure grounds, full of millionaire property owners flying like migratory birds of prey back to Big Business after the season was over, increased John’s depression. ‘I could find nothing in Cap Ferrat to excite me, and with a violent effort of will we pulled ourselves together and decamped.’
Other journeys were rather more productive. In October 1930 he set off with Dodo to see a ‘tremendous’ Van Gogh exhibition in Amsterdam, and from there went on alone to Paris, where he polished off some drawings of James Joyce. ‘He sits patiently,’ John noted in a letter to Dodo. A photograph of the two of them, in which John appears the more anxious to take part, shows Joyce as upright and foursquare, his head rigidly tilted back and with dark glasses (‘his mug is largely occluded by several pairs of powerful lenses,’ John told T. E. Lawrence) – and John gripping him, brandishing his pipe, apparelled in a pugilist’s dressing gown. Joyce wanted a drawing for what John called his ‘quite unsingable “Pomes”’, which had been set to music by various composers and edited for the Sylvan Press by Herbert Hughes under the title
The Joyce Book.
But had John done justice to the lower part of his face? Some of the
drawings were so spare, so ‘School of Paris’, that Joyce could hardly make out the lines at all. ‘Praise from a purblind penny poet would be ridiculous,’ he later wrote when thanking John for the portrait in the book. ‘…Do you remember that you promised my wife one of the others you made – the one that made her cry?’
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All these places – France, which he loved; Wales, where he belonged; Ireland, which had once suggested great pictures to him – recalled a past John could not re-enter. What he now sought was somewhere without associations. It was this need that persuaded him, in December 1932, to try what he described as a ‘health trip’
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to Majorca. But there had been rain and heavy air. The island might have been what he was looking for, but ‘big operations’ were going on ‘with screeching rock-drills and a general banging of machinery’. The developers had arrived; he was too late. Feeling ‘like death’, he returned with the news that Majorca was ‘not paintable’.
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