Augustus John (84 page)

‘She utterly neglects herself,’ Gus had complained to Dorelia, whom he asked to send Gwen photographs of the children ‘and perhaps a Jaeger blanket as she admits the cold keeps her awake at night. The Lord only knows how she passes her days.’
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He had promised to come back and see her again soon, but after his stand-up fight with Captain Wright and the threat of a court martial, he was not allowed into France for the duration of the war. He seems to have been too embarrassed to tell Gwen the facts. ‘My authorities wouldn’t send me back to France as I expected & wanted,’ he wrote. ‘They preferred to keep me at work here [Mallord Street] which was very silly… I will try to get to Paris early next year [1919]… One will be able to fly over in 2 or 3 hours! I cannot come before.’
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In the last months of the war, as Paris came under bombardment from German and American troops, Gwen had abandoned her room in the rue de l’Ouest and, under ‘balls of fire’ from the planes and the awful ‘Gottas [i.e. Gotha heavy bombers] with torpillos’, she travelled back and forwards on the train moving her possessions to Meudon. Gus had renewed his invitation to Alderney. Dorelia, he said, ‘would love to see you again’. But if he could not lure her into England, he did at least persuade her to go off a few times to Brittany.

During 1918 she found rooms in the Château de Vauxclair, an empty, silent, sixteenth-century house behind tall iron gates, with a neglected garden, near a ‘wild lonely bay’ at Pléneuf. ‘I think I shall be alone there,’ she wrote to Ursula Tyrwhitt. ‘I could work.’
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But in the spring of 1919 the house was bought by speculators. Gwen stayed on as a squatter, hoping that Gus might buy it. He tried, but at fifty thousand francs it became too expensive for him. ‘Just at present debts & responsibilities are rather
overwhelming,’ he apologized to her that summer.’ ‘…As you say it takes a lot of money to keep my family going.’
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She also appealed to Quinn, but he complicated everything with his businesslike questionnaires and plans to move in Arthur Symons as caretaker. Men always became entangled in money like this.

Before the end of 1919 Gwen returned to Meudon. At last it was business as usual. Winifred had given birth to a second child in the United States. Thornton, after a short stay in Tenby, was mining oil shale at Deer Park in Newfoundland. ‘I suppose later he will live in his boat and catch fish,’
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Gus accurately predicted in a letter to Gwen. He himself was also planning to spend a week or two round Tenby. ‘I wish you were coming too.’
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This concern for her, tinged obscurely with guilt, agitated Gwen. Gus had written to Quinn saying that she ‘wasn’t looking at all fit’. But he wanted things for her that she didn’t want herself, or at least not often, not much. So she made an effort to reassure him, explaining the nature of her independence. ‘When illness or death do not intervene, I am [happy],’ she wrote. ‘Not many people can say as much.

‘I do not lead a subterranean life… Even in respect to numbers I know and see more people than I have ever. (Some of my friendships are nothing to be proud of by-the-bye.) It was in London I saw nobody. If in a café I gave you the impression that I am too much alone, it was an accident. I was thinking of you and your friends and that I should like to go to spectacles and cafés with you often. If to “return to life” is to live as I did in London, merci Monsieur! There are people like plants who cannot flourish in the cold, and I want to flourish.’
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Admiration, exasperation, attraction, temptation confused their feelings. If they could have shuffled the cards, dealt new ones from the pack they both held, then they might truly have helped each other. As it was they could do very little, though that little was sometimes useful. In their separate ways, now that the war was over, Gus wrote to Gwen, ‘one will work better I hope.’
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*

On Armistice Day, 11 November 1918, John made his appearance at a party in the Adelphi ‘amid cheers, in his British
[sic]
officer’s uniform, accompanied by some land-girls in leggings and breeches who brought a fresh feeling of the country into the overheated room’.
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He seemed to be enjoying himself, and communicating enjoyment, more than anyone. The following month he wrote to Quinn: ‘London went fairly mad for a
week but thank the Lord that’s over and we have to face the perils of Peace now.’

He had, he reminded Dorelia, ‘an odd nervous system’. His ‘bad period’, that had begun in France, persisted. ‘Rather dreadful that feeling of wanting to go somewhere and not knowing where,’ he noted. ‘I spend hours of anguish trying to make a move – in some direction.’
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In this sinking uncertainty he grew more dependent on other people. One was Lady Cynthia Asquith. ‘Of you alone I can think with longing and admiration,’ he declared. ‘You have all the effect of a Divine Being whose smile and touch can heal, redeem and renew.’ For Cynthia Asquith, herself close to a nervous breakdown, admiration was a medicine to be swallowed as ‘dewdrops’ – though when it took the form of ‘an advance – clutching me very roughly and disagreeably by the shoulders – I shook myself free and there was no recurrence’.
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What John responded to was the unhappiness below her giddy exterior. He understood her need for such an exterior and found he could talk with her. ‘I bucked up somewhat,’ he told her. ‘Such is the benefit we get from confessing to one another.’

The war was over, but the trappings of war remained. In the spring of 1919 he was invited to attend the Peace Conference in Paris. Lloyd George proclaimed that the conference should not be allowed to pass ‘without some suitable and permanent memento being made of these gatherings’. The British Government had therefore decided to ‘approach two of the most famous British artists and ask them to undertake the representation of the Conference’. The two selected were John and Orpen, and both accepted. They were to get a subsistence allowance of three pounds (equivalent to £62 in 1996) a day, expenses, an option whereby the Government could purchase each of their pictures for three thousand pounds, and a five-hundred-pound option price for the portraits of visiting celebrities. Many of these celebrities, the Government was assured by Sir George Riddell, Chairman of the
News of the World,
who was acting as liaison officer between the British delegation and the press, ‘are most anxious to be painted’. In John’s case there was an immediate obstacle. Unaccountably he was still in the Canadian Army, and special arrangements were rushed through enabling him officially to be ‘loaned to the War Office’.

He dreamed of being flown to France but, after three days of waiting in foggy weather, went by train. ‘I am over here to paint something to commemorate the Conference. No small job!’ he wrote to Sampson. ‘…This is my first day in Paris and a full one its been… There seem to be ructions brewing in the Conference.’
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He found himself in ‘a delightful apartment’, ‘almost too dream-like’ on the third floor of 60 avenue Montaigne. Here, as the guest of Don José-Antonio de Gandarillas,
a charming opium-eater with dyed hair who was attached to the Chilean Legation, he stayed during February and March. The conference hall was just across the river and he went over in search of profitable celebrities. Though he ‘managed to collar a Belgian representative’, he was worried over how he was to get hold of the statesmen for sittings. ‘A certain delay at the start is to be expected no doubt,’ he hazarded in a letter to Frances Stevenson,
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with whom he was angling for a weekly allowance. It was Gandarillas who speeded things up. He knew everyone, and invited everyone to his flat. The parties they gave in the avenue Montaigne were soon the talk of Paris. ‘My host Gandarillas leads a lurid and fashionable life,’ John admitted.
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An orchestra played ceaselessly all night and the spacious apartment was thronged with the
beau monde.
Rather nervously John began to infiltrate these parties, entering for the first time ‘as dream-like a world as any I had been deprived of’.
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He had not thought of promoting himself – certainly he had no wish to dance: he had come prepared to ‘stand apart in a corner and watch the scene’. What happened astonished him. He talked, he laughed, he danced: he was an extraordinary success. Paris this spring was the vortex of the social and political world; and at its centre this son of a Pembrokeshire solicitor stood out as ‘easily the most picturesque personality’, Frances Stevenson recorded. ‘He held court in Paris.’

All red carpets led to him. The Prime Ministers of Australia, France, Canada and New Zealand submitted to his brush; kings and maharajas, dukes and generals, lords of finance and of law froze before him; the Emir Faisal posed; Lawrence of Arabia took his place humbly in the queue – and Dorelia wrote to inquire whether he had yet been knighted. More wonderful still were the princesses, infantas, duchesses, marchesas who lionized him. His awkwardness departed, and a sudden confidence surged through him. They were, he discovered, these grandiloquent ladies, all too human: they ‘loved a bit of fun’. Under a smart corsage beat, as like as not, ‘a warm, tender even fragile heart’. It was a revelation.

He was born quite suddenly into a new world, but it did not take full possession of him. Even now, at the height of this triumph, his ‘criminal instincts’ reasserted themselves, and he hurried away to ‘my old and squalid but ever glorious quarter… and sat for a while in the company of young and sinister looking men with obvious cubistic tendencies’.
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A few old friends still roamed Montparnasse, but something had been extinguished, something was vanishing for ever. Jean Moréas was dead; Modigliani, addicted to drink and drugs, would die within a year; Paul Fort had become respectable and the
cercle
of the closerie des Lilas was disbanded. Maurice Cremnitz was there, only slightly damaged by the war; but he, who had once likened Augustus to Robinson Crusoe, now
gazed at Major John with suspicion. ‘I was conscious of causing my friends embarrassment,’ John admitted. A doubt sailed briefly across his mind. Was he too becoming respectable?

He was doubtful also about his painting. He had begun the Peace portraits grudgingly, but his accelerated technique worked well. ‘I think I have acquired more common skill,’ he wrote to Cynthia Asquith on 24 July 1919, ‘ – or is it that I have learnt to limit my horizons merely?’ In the immense conference hall he had found a room with a high window niche, and from here he made sketches of the delegates. It was a curious assignment. ‘All goes well,’ he reassured Dorelia, ‘ – except for the poor old Conference.’ Sometimes he felt like throwing a bomb into the chamber. Amid the ghastly talk of reparations and indemnities, the British contingent showed signs of despair, ‘all except L[loyd] G[eorge] who looks bursting with satisfaction’. He and President Woodrow Wilson ‘apparently boss the whole show’. General Smuts from South Africa appeared overcome with misgivings; William Massey, Prime Minister of New Zealand, described the proceedings as farcical; Balfour slumbered; the Prime Minister of Australia, William Hughes, looking like a jugged hare, was learning French. Speech followed speech in a multiplicity of languages: the assembly wilted in boredom. For John, who had arrived with ‘my eyes open and brain busy’, these interminable rows of seated figures offered no pictorial possibilities. But he badly needed the three thousand pounds and decided to attempt a more fanciful interpretation of what he saw. ‘I do not propose to paint a literal representation of the Conference Chamber,’ he promised the Ministry of Information, ‘but a group which will have a more symbolic character, bring in motifs which will suggest the conditions which gave rise to the Conference and the various interests involved in it.’ It did not augur well.

In April he moved from Gandarillas’s apartment to a private house at 3 quai Malaquais belonging to the Duchess of Gramont, whose portrait he was painting. By May he had resolved to quit Paris. ‘I was pretty busy in Paris,’ he told Gwen, ‘& had a queer time.’ He had been spoilt, pampered, dazzled. But now he had had enough: strangers would make better company, or perhaps solitude itself might be best. ‘Life in Paris was too surprising,’ he afterwards confided to Cynthia Asquith. ‘I long for some far island, sun and salt water.’ He had had too much work of the wrong sort. ‘I am very helpless and desolate,’ he confessed.
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He was still in khaki. Until the autumn of 1919, and to everyone’s consternation, he continued to receive pay and allowances from the Canadians, and also for almost seven months from the British War Office. ‘I must drop this commission and get into walking clothes again,’ he told Dorelia. Everyone agreed. ‘Would it not be more satisfactory for you to
be demobilized?’ the authorities tactfully persisted. But each time he prepared to return to civilian life a curious reluctance, not wholly financial, overcame him.
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Had he not been ‘going for a soldier’ even before deciding on the Slade? The uniform, which had caused such embarrassment in Montparnasse, had given him confidence in the Champs-Élysées, and he enjoyed the pantomime. Besides, he had two medals.

But his inability to finish either the big Canadian war or Paris Peace Conference pictures made him ‘very unstable’. He tried several methods of restoring this stability. To reimburse the British Government for the expenses it had paid him, he gave the Imperial War Museum eight drawings relating to the war, and allowed the museum to buy at an almost nominal price, one hundred and forty pounds (equivalent to £2,900 in 1996), his painting ‘Fraternity’. He felt better too once he began travelling again. In September 1919, he turned up at the Villa La Chaumière at Deauville as the guest of Lloyd George.

‘What a monde he lives in!’ he exclaimed in a letter to Cynthia Asquith. ‘…My fortnight here has been fantastic… It’s a place I should normally avoid. I have been horribly parasitical. I began a portrait of a lady here which promised well – till I gathered from her that if I made her
beautiful,
it might turn out to be the first step in a really brilliant career.’
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