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About Augustus John
About Michael Holroyd
Reviews
Biographies by Michael Holroyd
Michael Holroyd’s Memoirs
Table of Contents
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Cover
Welcome Page
Epigraph
Preface
PART I
The Years of Innocence
CHAPTER I: LITTLE ENGLAND BEYOND WALES
1. ‘Mama’s dead!’
2. The Responsible Parties
3. Life with Father
4. A Crisis of Identity
CHAPTER II: ‘SLADE SCHOOL INGENIOUS’
1. New Students – Old Masters
2. Water-legend
3.·A Singular Group
4. Flammondism
5. From among the Living...
6. …Into ‘Moral Living’
CHAPTER III: LOVE FOR ART’S SAKE
1. Evil at Work
2. Liverpool Sheds and Romany Flotsam
3. What Comes Naturally
4. Team Spirit
5. Candid White and Matching Green
CHAPTER IV: MEN MUST PLAY AND WOMEN WEEP
1. Keeping up the Game
2. At the Crossroads
3. From a View to a Birth
4. Channel Crossing
5. A Seaside Change
6. ‘Here’s to Love!’
CHAPTER V: BUFFETED BY FATE
1. The Battle of the Babies
2. Images of Yeats
3. All Boys Brave and Beautiful
4. Or Something
5. Ethics and Rainbows
6. Inlaws and Outlaws
7. In the Roving Line
8. Fatal Initiations
9. Italian Style, French Found
CHAPTER VI: REVOLUTION 1910
1. What They Said at the Time
2. What He Said
3. What He Said about Them
4. What Happened
5. What Next?
PART II
The Years of Experience
CHAPTER VII: BEFORE THE DELUGE
1. A Summer of Poetry
2. The Second Mrs Strindberg
3. Cavaliers and Eggheads
4. Chronic Potential
CHAPTER VIII: HOW HE GOT ON
1. Marking Time
2. The Virgin’s Prayer
3. Corrupt Coteries
4. Augustus Does His Bit
CHAPTER IX: ARTIST OF THE PORTRAITS
1. Everybody’s Doing It
2. Surviving Friends, Women and Children: an A to Z
3. Faces and Tales
4. Methods and Places
5. Undiscovered Countries
CHAPTER X: THE WAY THEY LIVED THEN
1. Fryern Court
2. A Long Love Affair with Drink
3. In Spite of Everything or Because of It
4. His Fifties, Their Thirties
5. Children of the Great
6. Barren Our Lives
CHAPTER XI: THINGS PAST
1. Black Out
2. Fragments
3. The Morning After
4. A Way Out
Preview
Appendices
One. Desecration of Saint Paul’s
Two. John’s Pictures at the New English Art Club
Three. The Chelsea Art School Prospectus
Four. ‘To Iris Tree’: A parody of Arthur Symons
Five. The John Beauty Chorus
Six. John’s Pictures at the Royal Academy
Seven. Augustus John: Chronology and Intinerary
Eight. Locations of John Manuscripts
Acknowledgements
Notes
Index
About Augustus John
Reviews
About Michael Holroyd
Biographies by Michael Holroyd
Michael Holroyd’s Memoirs
An Invitation from the Publisher
Copyright
‘I inherited a vile melancholy from my father, which has made me mad all my life, at least not sober.’
Samuel Johnson, Boswell’s Tour of the Hebrides (16 September 1773)
‘Poor soul, the centre of my sinful earth,
Fool’d by these rebel powers that thee array,
Why dost thou pine within and suffer dearth,
Painting thy outward walls so costly gay?’
Shakespeare, Sonnet CXLVI
‘So must pure lovers soules descend
T’affections, and to faculties,
Which sense may reach and apprehend,
Else a great Prince in prison lies.’
John Donne, ‘The Extasie’
‘If an idea’s worth having once, it’s worth having twice.’
Tom Stoppard
While I was working on my biography of Lytton Strachey during the 1960s, Dorelia John let me see some correspondence from Strachey and Carrington. After I finished the book I sent her a copy. It was so weighty a work, she wrote, that she could read it only in bed. That was where I had written much of it, I replied: in bed. We had never met, but almost at once what felt like an intimacy sprang up between us. There were some impressive protests when Lytton Strachey was published. ‘Can’t think what the fuss is about,’ Dorelia commented. She wanted to know who my next subject would be. ‘What about Augustus John?’ I asked. Dorelia told me she would think about it and that I must come and see her when the winter was over.
By a coincidence, the first person invited to write a book about Augustus John – it was probably no more than an introduction and commentary to a volume of drawings – was Lytton Strachey. That had been in 1913, and Strachey (though he wished John to draw his portrait) refused on the grounds that it was too early for such a publication – a verdict with which John agreed.
Nearly forty years later Alan Moorehead started a biography, but came to a halt under the abrupt pressure of John’s co-operation. Then, following John’s death in 1961, Dylan Thomas’s biographer Constantine FitzGibbon began flirting with the idea, but the affair turned sour. There was also the fashion expert and museum keeper James Laver, who had written books on Tissot and Whistler and who began looking into John’s life too, but his researches turned up very little.
Augustus John had been dead for not much more than half a dozen years – the very period when I had been writing Lytton Strachey – and it seemed to me that my Strachey researches might be a good preparation for a book on John. I liked the idea of a significant minor character from one book evolving into the subject of the next. The process gave me a feeling that they were choosing me rather than the other way around. Besides, some of the Bloomsbury background extended into Bohemian Chelsea where John held court, and I had met a number of people who knew them both. On one occasion in the late 1950s I had even collided with John himself. There had been no formal introductions. The impact took place on the edge of a pavement in Chelsea. John, in his young eighties, had ‘lunched well’. He hesitated tremendously on the kerb. Like a great oak tree, blasted, doomed, he seemed precariously rooted there until, unintentionally assisted by his future biographer, and to a cacophony of shouting brakes and indignant hooting, a whiff of burnt rubber, he propelled himself triumphantly across the road, and was gone. I stood there wondering how he had survived so long. Even in those few blurred moments, his extraordinary physical presence had struck me forcibly. I mentioned the incident to my father, and he remarked that I was bumping into the right people.
How similar, I wondered, were Strachey and John? When Strachey turned up at Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition in 1912, he was immediately recognized by the porter on duty – as Augustus John. It was an understandable mistake since they were both sporting earrings at the time. ‘In our house at Frognal,’ wrote Stephen Spender in his autobiography World Within World, ‘the names of Augustus John, Bernard Shaw, Lytton Strachey, Van Gogh, stood for a diabolic, cunning depravity, a plot of bearded demons against all which should be held sacred.’1 But individually Strachey and John were so dissimilar, I thought, that even their silences were different: Strachey’s an intellectual scorched earth of dismay; John’s an animal brooding which he communicated to the whole pack. As for Bernard Shaw, so I later discovered, he was never silent. But all of them campaigned in their work and lives, or some combination of both, for greater tolerance in a repressive age – then tested our powers of tolerance in more relaxed times, so offering a biographer, in the interests of historical perspective, opportunities for narrative irony.
I filled the interval before meeting Dorelia by studying in the Reading Room of the British Museum, and by learning to drive. The Stracheys had lived not far from London and reaching them, though always problematical, had involved a fleet of trains and buses which the Stracheys enjoyed haphazardly plotting for me. Dorelia lived almost a hundred miles west of London, somewhat inaccessibly placed beyond Fordingbridge on the border of Hampshire and Dorset. I had the loan of a car, but no knowledge of it. So I sent myself to driving school. It was an episode that soon took on allegorical significance. Never having been to a university, I have used my biographical subjects as if they were my professors. But the road adventures to which I treated my instructor, and the ordeal through which I put my examiner, became a parody of the teacher-pupil relationship, indicating my natural ineptitude, vulnerability to boredom, and a pedantic ability to take obedience to subversive lengths. Between each agonizing lesson I continued my reading. By the time I drove off to meet Dorelia in the early summer of 1968 I had become quite scholarly.
I went first to gaze at the memorial statue of Augustus John by Ivor Roberts-Jones, standing like some chocolate pugilist near the river. This statue had been the seat of some recent embarrassments. Originally the memorial was to have been of Augustus and Dorelia, but Augustus was such a big fellow that, to Dorelia’s relief, there wasn’t enough money or materials for anyone else. The single figure was discreetly placed behind a large tree by the parish council. But one night shortly after the unveiling ceremony there had been a violent thunderstorm, and in the morning the tree lay on the ground while Augustus stood dramatically revealed. It was, everyone said, typical of him. But the question that occurred to me was: could I do something equivalent in a biography?
Next I went to his grave, a simple white stone in a triangular field. Finally I came to Fryern Court, Dorelia’s home and her creation. The lane coiled between azaleas and magnolias, then opened out into a crunchy gravel sweep with a fringe of grass. I parked flamboyantly, but there was no one to see me. Except for a small herd of kittens, the place seemed deserted. On the walls hung pink roses and an ancient clematis in whose matted stems the cats had made their nests. They lay, sleepy in the sun, watching me as I hammered at the open door. Through the windows, which were also open, I could see dark empty rooms. I called, but no one answered. I retreated a little into the foliage, and when I turned back there was Dorelia watching me from the doorway.
The purpose of our interview, she explained, was to find out if my ‘intentions were honourable’. She led me into the dining-room and sat down at the end of a long refectory table. I was seating myself on her left when she shook her head and pointed to a chair on her right. ‘Sit there,’ she said, ‘where the light is on your face.’ As we were rearranging ourselves, her son Romilly edged in, apologized for being late, and took off his hat. Since Romilly, then in his early sixties, was the writer in the family – at that time, he told me, he was contemplating a humorous work on engineering – his involvement in our discussion seemed sensible. But not to Dorelia. Gently, firmly, she suggested he should run out into the garden and amuse himself there – perhaps even do something useful – while we debated literary and artistic matters indoors. We would come and see how he was getting on when we had finished. He went out as obediently as a child.
Our talk was not a very precise affair. Dorelia asked me several questions and I explained that I wanted to present an accurate account of Augustus John’s life, correcting the wayward chronology of his own writings. Since he was largely an autobiographical artist, obsessively drawing and painting his family and friends, I hoped that the story of his life might prepare readers for looking again at his work. Was not the work of a portrait painter analogous to that of a biographer? George Steiner had recently argued that ‘it is the minor master… whose career may be important in that it has crystallized the manners of a period, the tone of a particular milieu’, who makes the most valid subject for biography. My belief was that Augustus John’s career would provide a natural frame for a number of pen-portraits and conversation pieces, and enable me to exhibit a post-Victorian, pre-modern phase of our cultural history, a transition period, the tone and manners of which he had greatly influenced. The challenge was to find an imaginative means of recreating the milieu of someone whose concepts appeared primarily in pictures rather than as words.
Dorelia listened politely, but she was more interested, I sensed, in finding out what sort of person I was than what sort of book I wanted to write. Perhaps, to an extent, the two are the same. We spoke a little of Lytton Strachey and Carrington, of my contact with Augustus John in Chelsea, and the peculiar habits of motor cars. The whole John family, I gathered, were fearless and imaginative drivers, and it struck me that by immersing myself in their world I might gain some of their wit and inventiveness behind the wheel. Yet it was difficult for me to understand how any of this conversation could help Dorelia – unless it was to discover how I might apply my biographical methods to myself. Dorelia, however, had her own method for determining things. This made use of a ring and a piece of cotton – equipment that never failed her. She would tie the cotton to the ring, suspend it between two fingers, and examine the direction in which the ring floated. Since she said little to me that day, I had no doubt that my fate depended upon the behaviour of this pendulum. I felt we had got on well, and my hope was that, below the ritual of these magic operations, lay a subconscious willpower that would direct the movements of the ring.
At any rate I could do no more. We went out into the garden to find out how Romilly was getting on. Dorelia was at home in that garden. Though smaller than I had imagined, and white-haired, she looked more like the mythical Dorelia of Augustus John’s pictures than I had thought possible – perhaps she had grown to look like this. We followed a path that ended in nettles and a rubbish dump where we found Romilly. He sprang up as we approached and walked back eagerly with us for tea. Dorelia, like a good general, never wasted words. A few syllables, and I was put to work cutting the bread. But when I showed her the slices, immaculate to my eye, she raised her hands to her face and hooted with laughter. We ate what she called my ‘doorsteps’, while the cats weaved in and out among the plates and cups, and outside the light began to fade.
Before I left, Romilly took me to one side. Should I in the heat and struggle of my researches, he asked, stumble across the date of his birth, would I let him have it? They both came out to hear me race the engine and waved as I started back to London. It had been a strange day, a journey into a world very different from my own, which is one of the fascinations of writing biography.
After this there was a Dorelian silence. Then in June a letter arrived. ‘I am very sorry to be so long answering… But I am advised not to give you permission to write a book about A.J.’ the first paragraph began. In despair I read on: ‘…until I have an agreement that it will not be published unless approved of by me or my executors Sir Caspar and Romilly.’ My spirits rose. At the end of this formal note, Dorelia had added a conspiratorial postscript. ‘I hope you don’t mind. I will help you in any way I can.’
So I began my research. There were periods in Somerset House, the Public Record Office, in the storage rooms of museums and galleries, the cellars of solicitors’ offices, the reference sections of libraries, or simply at home writing questionnaire letters, when this research seemed particularly dusty and unrewarding. But then came moments of discovery, like delayed dividends from an arduous investment of time.
From my accumulating knowledge I mapped out a number of research trips into Wales, to the United States and through Europe. Augustus John was to be my road book, my sea-and-air book. It began with a wonderful summer in Tenby and Haverfordwest, and became, despite the inevitable anxieties, the most purely enjoyable of my books to write.
In the United States, lecturing as I went to help pay for my travels, I took my first tentative steps into some of the famous manuscript libraries: the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin, the Widener and Houghton Libraries at Harvard, Cornell University Library, Yale University and the Paul Mellon Center for British Art at Yale, and the ‘Morgue’ at Life magazine in New York. I had been used to working in the casual surroundings of people’s houses, and I found it somewhat intimidating to be searched for concealed guns or photographed for police records before I entered these halls of scholarship. Such precautions, I reflected, support the illusion that the written word is greatly in demand. Once inside, I might have any sharp object confiscated together with part of my clothing, and be required to sign forms that were linguistically more interesting than the documents I wanted to consult. I found it sometimes difficult to account for myself in a convincing style on these forms or as I sat in windowless cells scribbling against time with borrowed pencils on pencil-coloured paper. But I was a hardened scholar by the end.
After reading through the Augustus John–John Quinn correspondence at the Berg Collection in the New York Public Library, looked down on by John’s intimidating portrait of Quinn, I took a train to Schenectady and spent a few hours with the poet Jeanne Foster, who had been Quinn’s mistress. In the 1920s she had met Gwen John in Paris and also Augustus John in New York, and though she was now in her early eighties and I in my early thirties, we seemed to hit it off very well. Afterwards we wrote one or two letters to each other, but I did not see her again. A few years later I received a letter from an American lawyer, and an explanatory note from Quinn’s biographer B. L. Reid, to say that Jeanne Foster was dead and that she had added a codicil to her will leaving me her Gwen John papers and pictures. The pictures arrived in their original 1920s frames as I was finishing my biography. I was infinitely touched by this gift from beyond the grave in memory of our day together, which now appeared like an augury for the book itself.
I had always been taught with some pride that the English are the most insular race in the world. But in matters of art and literature, I discovered, the French are much superior. The indifference with which the English treat all artists, the French reserve for foreign artists alone. There is a special blank look, a specially emphatic shake of the head they use when you mention an artist who is not French. They love to smile incredulously when they hear of such phenomena, and lingeringly mispronounce the names. It was not even possible for them to confuse Augustus John with Jasper Johns: they knew of neither. They knew nothing too of Gwen John, who had spent most of her painting life in Paris – nothing beyond the fact that she was one of Rodin’s models catalogued under the more easily pronounceable name Mary Jones.
Before I set off for France I had armed myself with bilingual letters of introduction and permission statements from various keepers, curators and copyright holders. These gained me a number of appointments, in particular with one conservatrice who, it was said, saw no one. As I entered her office, she rose from her chair to tell me she was off that very hour for Venezuela. I sat down as if for life; she reluctantly subsided and continued talking French. But I was equal to this. My French, in which I never make a mistake, is completely silent (the result of having been taught it as a dead language for ten years at privileged preparatory and public schools). She, equally well-educated, spoke no English. We had therefore equipped ourselves with seconds: she with a teddy bear of an old gentleman twice the age of anyone and deaf; I with a girl, indispensable I hoped to the pursuit of John scholarship, who was afflicted in several languages with an ingenious grasp of malapropism (‘masturbate’ for ‘masticate’ was one I remember with affection). The contest between the four of us was fantastic, but finally the girl’s misnomers won over the teddy bear’s mishearings, and I triumphantly entered the archive.
Further south I was met by the drastic improvements inflicted by the French on the fishing villages Augustus John had sought out as refuges from twentieth-century commercialism. Aerodromes, huge glue factories, bauxite hills, red, barren and misshapen, had obliterated much that he had loved and painted in Provence. But it had not been possible to erase everything, and I saw a little of what he had tried to celebrate: the curious blue light over the inland sea at Martigues; and the Alpilles, spotted with green aromatic scrub and the spiky plumes of the cypress trees above St-Rémy.
Over several years I was to be paid advances on royalties of £4,000 from Heinemann in Britain and $40,000 from Holt, Rinehart in the United States. A good part of this money was not due until completion and delivery of the book, but I was also given several hundred pounds as the recipient of a Winston Churchill Fellowship. With some of this money I extended my travels into Italy, where I saw the pictures that had inspired some of Augustus John’s most ambitious work, and to Spain where I made a short attempt to live a simple mountain life as the guest of some quite genuine demi-Johns. I was not very good at this. To earn goodwill I took on the duties of gardener, a job that needed the skills of an alpinist. I could spy the sea, glimmering with the prospect of escape. But among outdoor people there appears to be a rule of timelessness any interruption of which is judged to be bad manners. As I scaled the rocks with my watering-can, I plotted an acceptable escape. A telegram to my mother requesting her to send an urgent SOS mentioning illness seemed, at that height, the most sensible arrangement. I sent it from a village near by, but it arrived in England reading as if I were gravely ill and requesting her presence at my deathbed. She set out and, miraculously, she found me. She had expected a vigil beside some hospital bed. I was delighted to see, in the face of such a dismal prospect, she had not omitted to pack bathing suits and evening dresses.
One of the privileges of writing biographies is that you meet, often on friendly terms, some extraordinary people. In Liverpool I came across the legendary ‘Romani Rawnie’ Dora Yates, incredibly old but still very game, who introduced me to that sane centre of nomad studies, the Gypsy Lore Society. Later on there was the fine sight of Anthony Powell dancing over a Somerset lawn wearing a striped apron, a Burmese cat on his shoulders, in his hand a wooden spoon, asking me whether I liked curry. Rather different was an afternoon on the floor of David Jones’s room trying to coax tea out of some primitive machinery. Then there were some rain-swept Welsh days with the novelist Richard Hughes and his wife Frances, a painter of bonfires and waterfalls. We passed much of the time reconstructing a farcical drama, complete with doors, windows and haunted shrubbery, that Augustus John and Dylan Thomas had waged at their home nearly forty years earlier. The bearded Hughes was excellent in the role of Caitlin Thomas.
Finally there was the voluminous John family. Dorelia sent word to them all and they collaborated with varying degrees of enthusiasm. ‘What shall I tell him?’ cried her daughter Poppet. ‘Tell him,’ Dorelia replied, ‘that Augustus was a monster!’ The implication was that they could tell me whatever they wanted, and though Poppet and her sister Vivien awaited me with alarm, they both talked and wrote freely once we had got to know one another. There were also their half-sisters, children ‘not of the whole blood’, for whom I posed more of a problem.
And there were the sons. The eldest, David John, I used to visit near the river in Chelsea. He had begun his career as an architect, dreaming of the grand lunatic asylum he would one day build for his family. But instead he had taken to music, then become a postman, and after narrowly missing an opening as lavatory attendant, so he told me, gone into retirement, though occasionally moving furniture and giving parties. I caught up with Robin John on his silent wanderings at a pub in Piccadilly. From Paris came his brother Edwin John, once a prizefighter, later a watercolourist, who was Gwen John’s executor. After an initial meeting in a pub, Edwin’s daughter, the dashing Sara John, gave a supper party for her father and myself, together with Mary Taubman, the leading authority on Gwen John. We all brought bottles of wine and I have little memory of how the evening went, except that it signalled the beginning of a very happy working relationship.
Mary Taubman was herself a painter and had written a thesis on Gwen John at Edinburgh University. In 1953, her final year as a student, she had gone out to see Edwin John in France. ‘He was installed in the little pavilion which Gwen John had built among the tall trees of her garden-plot at Meudon and where she had spent the last years of a reclusive life,’ she remembered. ‘As the heir to Gwen John’s estate, Edwin, more than any other person, could help or hinder my researches. That our meeting should happen in this place was an unlooked-for bonus and, I felt, an auspicious one.
‘He was waiting on the platform of Meudon’s small station when I arrived. It was characteristic of him to have come in person to escort me to his door and a sort of old-world courtesy was a facet of the kindness he showed throughout our meeting… I was relieved to notice that not only my training in drawing and painting but also my rural upbringing seemed to be counting in my favour and I sensed that, among the jokey references to bagpipes, Calvinism and haggis, my Scottishness was being marked up as a plus, even if only because it reinforced the likelihood of independence from what he called “the London world”.
It strikes me now that each aspect of his personality remembered from that first meeting was, in its own way, to impinge on the course of all my future Gwen John studies. Alongside the generosity and the teasing sense of humour (I hadn’t yet heard of his fame as a practical joker) there was his self-deprecating manner and his scorn for pretentiousness. This in turn was linked to an impassioned integrity in his approach to his role as custodian of Gwen John’s oeuvre and reputation. It was his most impressive, if at times disquieting, characteristic and the one which, in the end, and in spite of difficulties it raised, I valued most.
As we looked out over Gwen John’s garden, drinking tea from her teacups, we discussed the enigma of her last decade. Edwin… was unwilling to make a pronouncement, far less a guess, as to why she had virtually given up painting towards the end of her life. I asked about the surviving pictures and learned that they were now dispersed, some in London, some in Cornwall, some still in Meudon, though these were not at present accessible. However there were more gouaches and drawings we could look at. I was impressed by his discerning appreciation of these pictures as we went through them one by one...
One of my objectives in coming to Meudon was to see a collection of Gwen John’s letters and notes already glimpsed in some tantalising extracts published by Augustus John and, more recently, elaborated upon by Sir John Rothenstein… Edwin supplied the additional fact that the suitcase containing these papers was at present in the care of Sir Caspar John and was no doubt lodged somewhere in the corridors of the Admiralty in London… Before I left, he asked me to choose a little picture from a group of her gouaches and presented it to me in a cardboard portfolio she herself had made and decorated. My request to be allowed to study the papers in Sir Caspar’s charge was something he felt unable to agree to.
Back in Edinburgh I was met by a letter from Edwin enclosing Sir Caspar’s address and giving me permission to make use of the Gwen John documents. That letter and the papers it gave access to were to be the key to all my future research.’2
I was meeting Edwin John and Mary Taubman fifteen years later. There had been several interruptions to Mary’s work on Gwen John. She had intended to go back to her own painting, she told me, and had also taught at the Cardiff College of Art. But while she was living in France she had come across a privately owned cache of Gwen John’s pictures, and felt there was no escape. In one sense, it seemed to me, Edwin was her jailer, and the key he provided all those years ago sometimes liberated her, sometimes locked her away. Not all Gwen John papers were ‘in the corridors of the Admiralty’. From time to time Edwin alluded to other material. Like a character in a fairy story, Edwin would release these papers and pictures to Mary by instalments, as if frightened that she might vanish once she had seen everything and published her book. I remember her telling me that after more than a dozen years, he had casually mentioned a most important batch of letters while they were riding on the top of a bus. Partly because of this complex style of collaboration, and partly because of her own perfectionism, Mary’s progress on her Gwen John book was slow. The six or seven years I spent on Augustus John did not particularly impress her.
Each of us worked as the other’s part-time research assistant. I came back from France and the United States with Gwen John material; she managed to get Edwin John’s general agreement to help me, and would let me have copies of items she thought might be useful. It was a rare sympathetic arrangement, with much unspoken, and no sense of rivalry, that did nothing to prepare me for the rigours of academic competitiveness that surrounded Bernard Shaw. I found it encouraging to have someone like this working in tandem and I remember our time together as being full of discovery, excitement and laughter. Were we being affected in any way, we wondered, by our subjects? People said that Mary had begun to look like a Gwen John model, perhaps look like Gwen John – she said it wryly herself, challenging some response. I could point to my clean-shaven chin as a sign of my immaculate independence, a sign that was to become even more remarkable after a third bearded subject. But I could remember that, when I was deep in Lytton Strachey’s early ‘black period’, with all its detail of late-Victorian neurasthenia, I had begun to feel infected with several long out-of-date diseases. The fact is that no writer knows how he or she is being invaded by the subject of a book – at least not at the time of writing it.
Another invaluable colleague was Malcolm Easton, author of an extraordinary book on Aubrey Beardsley. He was twenty-five years older than I was, had scraped a living as an artist in Soho in the 1930s, gone under the sea to serve in submarines during the war, and then emerged as an art historian at the University of Hull. His exhibition there in 1970 entitled ‘Augustus John: Portraits of the Artist’s Family’ was an eye-opener for me, showing a selection of John’s best pictures that no one of my generation had had an opportunity of seeing. A lonely, difficult, admirable man, with a tendency to misunderstand or mishear things to his own disadvantage, and no element of self-seeking in his nature, Malcolm preferred to write to people rather than see them – he had beautiful handwriting and designed his own writing-paper. When we met, it was at the Charing Cross Hotel, and from those meetings and our letters came a book on John’s work, and a couple of exhibitions: ‘Augustus John: Early Drawings and Etchings’ at Colnaghi’s in 1974; and a large two-part show the following year at the National Portrait Gallery.
From my adventures I would return from time to time to Fryern Court. ‘Still more letters have turned up,’ Dorelia would write, and I would go down and load them into the car. On these occasions, followed by the curious gaze of the family, Dorelia would take me into a small room behind the kitchen where she was popularly supposed to be spilling the beans. In fact she was neither eloquent nor exact. Some of her answers were masterpieces of brevity. Her best comments would come in response to stories I told her of people I had met whom she had not seen for many years. She liked travelling back into the past, having grown frailer and feeling sometimes irritated by the limitations of old age. I remember driving away one evening in July 1969. She was sitting in a chair in front of the house in the sunlight, smiling her self-contained smile. A fortnight later she was dead. She died as she had lived, without fuss. On the evening of 23 July, Romilly had found her on the dining-room floor, and he put her to bed. That night she died in her sleep. When Romilly told me, I felt the shock as if I had known her a long time.
She had not expected to live to read my biography, she once told me, and the arrangement we had made concerning her executors now came into force. From Fryern, Romilly reported that he had ‘a pillowcase full of letters’ for me. Over the next year, a number of these pillowcases would bloom from time to time. The other executor, Admiral of the Fleet Sir Caspar John, lived in London. Our first encounter had been an abrupt affair, but I knew enough of Augustus by then to realize that I must not submit, and at the end of our meeting the Admiral generously conceded: ‘I always say if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em: so I join you.’ At various stages of the book’s progress he would get through to me on ‘the blower’ and I would sail over. There might be red wine or beer, an exchange of questions and answers, occasionally a broadside. After an hour or two of these engagements, I would stagger out and navigate my way back as best I might.
As I worked away I accumulated many scholarly encumbrances. Huge filing cabinets appeared; concertina files and coloured pens lay on every surface. It was impossible to open any drawer or cupboard without an avalanche of old photographs and microfilms spilling out. The whole place was cluttered with good intentions unfulfilled – they spread over the desk and chairs and floor, and began growing up the walls.
There is a paradox about research: the more you do, the more you appear to give yourself to do. I have met scholars who pass their lives in research without ever reaching the writing stage. What carries me from one stage to the next is anxiety. There are many strains to the anxiety virus. I remember how, one blustery day in France, my pleasure at watching some beautifully coloured butterflies moving between the trees turned to horror on realizing that they were specimens of French currency that had blown out of my pocket. Other forms of anxiety strike even deeper than the financial one. All length is torture, and the biographer tunnels on so long that, like Macbeth, returning is as tedious as to go on. There is no sighting the end, no remembering the beginning, and he is alone. Not quite alone, of course: he has the dead for company, and his work is to resurrect the dead.
After my travels, I reverted to old habits and wrote in bed. It was the only place where I could resolve my natural laziness with an obstinate streak of conscientiousness. But it was surprising how this sensible arrangement provoked people. It infuriated my father who was determined, as it were, to catch me napping, though no one was ‘at his desk’ earlier than I was.
A morning bedful of two or three hundred words was by the end no longer a disgraceful total, followed by afternoons among the files. There is nothing like the preparation of a chronology or the copying down of passages from letters for teaching me about my subject. Life itself slipped past as I bent over these mechanical exercises that alone enabled me to spot unexpected connections and give the work tension and design.
The transference of a book from private to public property can be alarming, but I was fortunate in that, despite many difficulties, the John family had really ‘joined me’ and weathered the ordeal so well.
*
Augustus John was published in Britain and the United States in 1974–5. Shortly afterwards Caspar John commissioned a friend, Ronald Hamand, to make a catalogue of the John family papers. This job took some three years, and when it was completed, Caspar delivered the catalogue,3 together with all the papers themselves, to his co-executor and half-brother Romilly John, leaving him to sort out what should be done with them. What Romilly did was to appeal somewhat desperately (‘I have a problem… they’re often so illegible’) to the National Museum of Wales at Cardiff.
The National Museum of Wales was then in the process of rediscovering and establishing both Augustus John’s and Gwen John’s identities as native-born Welsh artists. Early in 1976, the centenary of Gwen’s birth, the museum had acquired from Edwin John more than a thousand of her drawings, together with sketchbooks and several oil paintings – this being material found in her Paris studio after her death in 1939. Before this acquisition, Cardiff held only a small representation of her pictures. But ‘the huge collection the Museum now houses is by far the greatest number of her works anywhere,’ wrote the Assistant Keeper of Art, A. D. Fraser Jenkins, in a booklet accompanying the Gwen John centenary exhibition.
Two years later, during the centenary year of Augustus’s birth, the National Museum of Wales put on ‘Augustus John: Studies for Composition’, an exhibition that was also shown in England and at the Yale Center for British Art in the United States. To pay off death duties, there had been two Augustus John studio sales at Christie’s in 1962 and 1963. One hundred and thirteen paintings and two hundred and eighteen drawings were auctioned for a total, in those pre-VAT days, of almost £135,000 (equivalent to £1½ million in 1996). One of the best paintings, ‘Dorelia in the Garden at Alderney Manor’, was bought by the National Museum of Wales which, in 1972, also acquired from the executors of Dorelia’s estate the remainder of what was left in Augustus’s studio at Fryern Court – over a thousand drawings, one hundred and ten paintings, and three bronzes. The oil paintings in this collection ‘were nearly all unfinished or rejected portraits, mostly later than 1920’, wrote A. D. Fraser Jenkins in his introduction to the catalogue. Among the drawings he found ‘a quantity of slight sketches or first ideas for paintings, many of them stained, dusty or torn’. While sorting through this part of the collection, Fraser Jenkins formed a plan for comparing a number of John’s initial ideas with the completed paintings (sometimes shown as photographs) and charting the progress of these compositions in a way that had not previously been examined.
The block purchase of Augustus John’s studio contents had established the National Museum of Wales as what Mark L. Evans, one of the future Assistant Keepers in the Department of Art, described as ‘the principal repository of [Augustus] John’s work and the main centre for research on his art’.4 It had already become such a repository and centre for the art of Gwen John.
But the group of papers in Romilly John’s keeping was not chiefly associated with the art of Augustus John. It did contain a few sketchbooks and some correspondence from painters (including Carrington, Epstein, J. D. Innes, Wyndham Lewis, William Rothenstein and Matthew Smith), but most of the fifteen hundred letters written by John or addressed to him involved writers (James Joyce, T. E. Lawrence, Sean O’Casey, John Cowper Powys, Bernard Shaw, the Sitwells, Lytton Strachey, Dylan Thomas), members of the Gypsy Lore Society (Scott Macfie, John Sampson, Dora Yates) and his family (Ida John, Gwen John and Dorelia McNeill). As he went through this archive, Romilly John began to think that ‘perhaps the National Library of Wales would be the right depository’.5
It was expected that the National Library of Wales at Aberystwyth would purchase these papers when they came up for auction at Sotheby’s on 17 December 1979. But the library was outbid, and the archive went for £52,000 ($127,600) to an anonymous bidder from the United States who employed the booksellers Bernard Quaritch Ltd to act as his agent. The papers then mysteriously went missing. Several national newspapers attempted to follow the trail, but got no further than discovering that the material had been taken to Ireland from where it was illegally exported to the United States. The matter was reported to the Reviewing Committee on the Export of Works of Art, but since no special licence for export had been applied for, and since Quaritch could not professionally reveal the identity of the collector for whom they had acted (the ethics of manuscript dealers being similar to those of journalists and unlike those of biographers and historians, who must constantly refer to their sources), there seemed nothing that could be done.
But something, drop by drop like a Chinese torture, was to be done over the next few years. The newspaper speculation persisted. There were plans for a film by Robert Bolt, a play by Peter Terson, and continual inquiries from scholars and writers who wanted to edit a selection of Augustus John’s correspondence, or publish a biography of Ida John, or write books about John’s contemporaries. Such people were told that the owner of the archive ‘wishes to retain his anonymity’ and ‘is unwilling to share any of that material’. Fortunately there was one important exception to this dull rule of non-cooperation. This was Cecily Langdale, whose scholarly and substantial Gwen John, which included a valuable catalogue raisonné of the paintings and a selection of the drawings, was published in 1987. ‘The A[ugustus] J[ohn] papers are in storage,’ she wrote to me from New York that year, ‘and the owner, I fear, really doesn’t want to be bothered with requests for information.’ But, she added, ‘he has been extremely nice to me and has helped me in every possible way.’
A fortnight after getting this letter, I received a telephone call from the recently retired Chairman of the Board of Customs and Excise, Sir Angus Fraser, soon to be appointed Adviser to the Prime Minister on Efficiency and Effectiveness in Government. Was I, he wanted to know, Augustus John’s biographer? He had used that invaluable reference work, the telephone directory, and having assured himself that I was the right chap, he wrote me a letter asking whether I knew of any British institution that might be interested in purchasing the Augustus John archive. ‘I happen to know that the American purchaser of 1979 is divesting himself of a number of his collections and would be willing to part with this one too,’ he explained. He had sent this purchaser an article I had written in the Sunday Times6 mentioning the disappearance of the John papers.
‘The trouble is likely to be the dollar price expected, given the way the dollar/sterling exchange rate has moved since 1979. As I understand it, the present owner wants to recover his original payment plus an allowance for notional interest over the intervening years. When he bought the John material, the dollar stood at well over $2 to £1. Allowing for eight years’ interest, the selling price he is looking for is in the range of $200,000–250,000, i.e. about £123,000–154,000 at today’s exchange rates. It is going to be very difficult to identify a British institution which can afford that kind of money… I have absolutely no financial interest in this matter; it is simply that, having becoming aware of the opening for a sale, I would be glad to see the papers come back to the U.K.’
Apart from the Tate Gallery, I thought there were two places where these papers would find a good home: the British Library, and the National Library of Wales, which had been the underbidder at Sotheby’s. Unknown to me at that time, the National Library of Wales had started building a Gwen John archive. It rivalled in interest the New York Public Library’s holding of her correspondence with the American patron John Quinn, and her letters to Rodin at the Musée Rodin in Meudon. Edwin John had died in 1978, and half a dozen years later his son and daughter completed the sale of the correspondence, notes and other personal papers that Mary Taubman had been working on, and that had been in Gwen John’s studio along with the pictures bought in 1976 by the National Museum of Wales.
Having made my suggestions I heard nothing more for the rest of the year, and began ruminating on the curiosities of the international manuscript market and the peculiar motives of private collectors.
I remembered that one cold January day in the early 1970s as I was working on Augustus John, I had received a letter from an Australian university saying that I might like to know that while I was enduring the snows and winds of an English winter, the manuscript, galleys and page proofs of my Lytton Strachey ‘sit comfortably at a constant temperature in our Rare Book Room’. It had the advantage of me. I would never have thought such a thing possible when I started writing. I believed then that I could steer clear of most libraries except my own, assembled over the years from secondhand bookshops. Almost all Strachey’s letters had been in private hands and, once I had prised them out of attics, cellars and studios, I was often permitted to cart them back to my room. But those amateur days, with their privileged access, were coming to an end. Augustus John’s papers were divided between private houses and public institutions, and continually on the move from the former to the latter where they would be more professionally managed.
Manuscript libraries are somewhat like laboratories where, with thousands of fragments, you experiment in the hope of a resurrection miracle. But such sombre places of scholarship often rely on contemporary business of one sort or another for their derivative funds. Business and scholarship are not always easy companions. I first became aware of the difficulties that may arise from these partnerships while tracking down some of Augustus John’s correspondence to a library that informed me I could not examine it because everything was embargoed. I happened to know the original seller of this material. When I asked her about the embargo she was unable to explain it. After further investigations I found out that the dealers themselves had imposed the embargo either because they were shocked by the illustrated contents or more probably because by ‘hotting up’ the material they also hotted up the price. In this case I was able to break the embargo but, having had no description of the material, was disappointed after all my stubborn detective work to discover that the letters were of no real use – until perhaps now – though the temptation to force some of them into my book after such a struggle was strong.
Once a manuscript is sold at auction to a dealer there is no certain way of tracing its destination. The mail is crammed with blind letters of inquiry, and there are many culs-de-sac. I remember sending one of these letters myself and, receiving no answer, following it up after an interval with a second inquiry. This time the answer was swift and helpful. The librarian stated that he had one unspecified item that might be useful. I offered to pay the fee and was eventually rewarded with a luxurious folder complete with a covering letter explaining that, since there was only a single uncatalogued item involved, the library had waived its fee. Full of gratitude I opened the folder and found inside, beautifully copied and presented, my own original unanswered letter stamped with a warning that I did not have copyright permission to quote it.
About the motives of private collectors I find it difficult to speculate. No person who buys the correspondence of the dead can be prevented from doing what he likes with it, except of course publish it: that is the prerogative of the copyright holder. But since holographs lose some of their financial value when published, a period of hibernation may very well suit someone who buys for capital appreciation. Though he may not legally quote anything much without copyright permission, an owner may, without breaking any law I know, burn or otherwise destroy his papers, thereby robbing himself. Or he may lock everything away in a bank vault. That is the law of property some call theft.
Original manuscripts never lose their power of attracting textual critics, biographers and historians because handling such material is usually the nearest that they come to their subjects. They are almost literally in touch with them. Manuscript research, as Philip Larkin pointed out, can reveal the genesis and evolution of a work of literature and provide us with an archive of the writer’s life as the background of his works. ‘All literary manuscripts’, Larkin argued, ‘have two kinds of value.’7 He called them the magical and meaningful values. The first, which is older and universal, kindles research with a peculiar excitement and intimacy; the second, which is more technical and modern, contributes to our understanding of a writer’s intentions. Together they may enlarge our knowledge of the creative process, while contributing to the recreative process of non-fiction literature.
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