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.

Other books

Viriconium by Michael John Harrison

Got Cake? by R.L. Stine

The Lethal Encounter by Amy Alexander

Veil of Night by Linda Howard

Curve Contract (Big Girls Next Door Erotica) by Christa Wick

Line of Fire by Franklin W. Dixon

Earthly Vows by Patricia Hickman

The Day Our Teacher Went Mad and Other Naughty Stories for Good Boys and Girls by Christopher Milne

A Fighting Man by Sandrine Gasq-Dion

Baldur's Gate II Shadows of Amn by Athans, Philip