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Authors: Michael Holroyd

Augustus John

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Augustus John

About Michael Holroyd

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Biographies by Michael Holroyd

Michael Holroyd’s Memoirs

Table of Contents

    
    

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CONTENTS

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’

PREFACE

‘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.

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