Augustus John by Michael Holroyd

Author:Michael Holroyd [Holroyd, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781784971397
Publisher: Head of Zeus

4

CHRONIC POTENTIAL

‘People were getting too silly’.

Augustus John to Gwen John (24 October 1914)

‘All are well at home,’ John reported philosophically, ‘ – the baby-girl a god-send. My missus keeps fit. We have disturbances of the atmosphere occasionally but have so far managed to recover every time.’68 He seldom remained long at Alderney, preferring to visit rather than to stay there. ‘It is pleasant enough down here,’ he remarked to Ottoline Morrell (25 July 1913), ‘but a little uninspiring.’

Inspiration lay further off, waiting to be taken unawares. In the summer of 1912 he had set off with his family to Wales – then, abandoning them in the desolate valley round Nant-ddu, hurried on to Ireland. ‘Like a lion’ he entered Dublin, remembered Oliver St John Gogarty;69 ‘or some sea king’...

‘Or a Viking who has steered,

All blue eyes and yellow beard.’70

This was John’s first meeting with stately, plump buck Gogarty, the quickwitted and long-talking professional Irishman of many parts – poet and busybody, surgeon, litigant and aviator, wearer of a primrose waistcoat and owner of the first butter-coloured Rolls-Royce. John had sought him out in the Bailey Restaurant, Dublin’s equivalent of the Café Royal, on the advice of Orpen and, despite Gogarty’s ‘ceaseless outpour of wit and wisdom’, confessed to being ‘immensely entertained’.71 ‘All agog with good humour’, Gogarty fell headlong under John’s spell, describing him as ‘a man of deep shadows and dazzling light… I noticed that he had a magnificent body… He was tall, broad-shouldered and narrow-hipped. His limbs were not heavy, his hands and feet were long.’72 ‘The aura of the man! The mental amplitude!’ Even so, Gogarty could not fail to notice that he was ‘a moody man’. There was always the problem of what to do with him.

An ear-nose-and-throat specialist, Gogarty examined John’s ears and pronounced them to be the very Seat of his Melancholy: in which case, John felt, he had much to answer for. Gogarty was a hectic monopolizer of all conversation. If he did not have enough words of his own, he borrowed other people’s, and so was never at a loss. Only once did John arrest him – by ‘flinging in his face a bowl of nuts’.73 He ‘is a brick but such a mad hatter’, John confided to Dorelia. He was also ‘rather awful sometimes’, and ‘dreams of the days when gentlemen addressed their wives as “Madam” and all was dignity and calm’. Not surprisingly it was difficult to make such a man ‘see one’s problems’.74 But often his problems sailed out of sight as he accepted Gogarty’s invitation to ‘float his intellect’ while in Dublin, and drink huge tumblers of whisky until the chatter retreated to a distant murmur. Bottles of John Jameson were what Gogarty was ‘inspired to give’ with almost sinister generosity. ‘It was very pleasant, this bathing in the glory of Augustus,’ Gogarty remembered75 – adding, to John’s chagrin: ‘I felt myself growing so witty that I was able to laugh at my own jokes.’

But still there was the problem of what to do with John.

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