Wild Man

By ROBERT HUGHES

AUGUSTUS JOHN

by MICHAEL HOLROYD

676 pages. Holt, Rinehart & Winston.

$17.95.

"Augustus Caesar," so the poet said.

"Shall be regarded as a present god

By Britain, made to kiss the Roman's rod."

Augustus Caesar long ago is dead,

But still the good work's being carried on:

We lick the brushes of Augustus John.

With this unusual mordancy, Punch in 1929 summed up the reputation of the most famous artist in England. John was then 51, and he had been a public figure since the turn of the century; he would continue to be one, through progressive embalmings as a Grand Old Man, for another 30 years. Nearly 6 ft. tall, bearded like the pard, and booming like a bittern, much given to fancy dress--cloaks, Carlyle-size black hats, gold earrings--he boozed and philandered his way through every level of English society. He was a licensed vertical invader, conspicuous even in the notable roster of Edwardian eccentrics that stretched from the Cafe Royal to Bloomsbury. There had of course been English bohemians before, but none had seemed so obstreperously life-enhancing as Augustus John. As Michael Holroyd observes in this superb biography, "In the public imagination he was to represent the Great Artist, the Great Lover, the Great Bohemian Enjoyer of Life. It was a cruelly ironic comment on his actual career, one which he did not accept himself but never effectively contradicted."

Sense of Balance. Eight years ago, with an imposing biography of Lytton Strachey, Holroyd (now 41) became one of our best guides to the cultural life of England in the early 20th century. No one of his generation has done more to clarify the achievements and emotional imbrications of the Bloomsbury group, or to deflate its more self-enchanted pieties. A great deal of the truth about a society lies in the lives of its minor artists. To write about them without falling into postures of condescension, gossip or overpraise is one of the toughest of all biographical feats. It requires a lack of sentiment, a close eye for social nuance and a sense of balance which not many biographers possess. Holroyd has it all, and Augustus John is his ideal quarry.

By today's standards of taste, John was certainly a minor artist. He sinned by missing the historical bus. The peculiar complexities, doubts and unfamiliarities of living in the 20th century had radically altered the historical sense of a whole generation of artists. Pound and Joyce no less than Picasso, Stravinsky or Andre Breton. John, however, continued to paint like a swashbuckling hedonist. His drawings of the figure had dash and virtuosity, even in his student years at the Slade School. He was, in the view of friends like Sir William Orpen, the inordinately successful painter, the best draftsman to work in England since Van Dyck. The last modern painter to affect John's work was Paul Gauguin, whose flat, hieratic patterning was echoed in decorative figure compositions. John's favorite subjects remained the two main women in his life, Ida the wife and Dorelia the patient mistress, posing among their hordes of children in long columnar skirts and peasant shawls beside Romany caravans. But the 20th century was for John merely the unfortunate bracket of time in which he happened to live. He shared neither its energies nor its Angst. He saw modernity as a threat, an encroachment of "terrible simplifiers" on the sturdy, randy freedom of the gypsy artist. "I feel myself personally outraged and assailed by a horrible and inhuman monster," he bombinated in 1908, "a monster begotten by brute Stupidity upon terrified Ignorance, weaned in the lap of Hypocritical Conceit and sponsored by Vulgarity Triumphant--in other words the hideous Dragon of Democratic, Altruistic, Authoritative, Purblind, Pragmatical, Grandmotherly Legislative Force."

Of course, the English bourgeoisie loved him for that, and he went on to become the most successful portraitist in the nation, setting down the faces of his friends--poets from Yeats to Dylan Thomas, writers like Shaw, collectors like the flustered and bigoted American John Quinn--with a picaresque dash which, in the celebrity portraiture of his later years, turned into a routine of dispiriting feebleness. Like John at his zenith, Holroyd creates a suite of sardonic and sympathetic verbal portraits. Between the figures flow the ingredients of that most difficult of works--the biography of a grandiose failure.

One could not ask for a better account of the mechanism whereby an artist who was not "modern" became the most publicized and controversial English painter of the years between 1900 and 1930. When such canonization by mass taste occurs (as it did, in a different way, to Picasso), one may be sure that some compensation is afoot. So it was with John. He was called into fame by England's own erosion. The imperturbable confidence of the English middle classes had been wrecked by the Great War; the edges of the Empire were flaking, and the bureaucrats closing in. A fantasy figure was needed. If John had been a homosexual like Wilde or Strachey, an intellectual like Roger Fry or a committed modernist like Wyndham Lewis, the public and the press would not have cleaved to him. But he was none of these things. He was a tumultuous and lovable Wild Man, who reminded the upper classes of their formerly unquestioned freedoms and gave the lower a fund of scandal. English prurience would destroy John Profumo's career, but it made Augustus John's: small wonder that he ended up as Bacchus in the popular pantheon whose Apollo was Rupert Brooke.

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