‘A little restraint would not be a bad thing in my friends I’m thinking.’
Augustus John to Michel Salaman (n.d. [1905])
‘My baby is getting so heavy I do not know how I shall bear him (or them) by October,’ Ida had written to Alice Rothenstein (August 1904). ‘The two outside are splendid and well,’ she added, but ‘I am such a size I think I am going to have a litter instead of the usual.’
The usual (‘much to our bewilderment’), another boy of heroic proportions – he weighed 9 pounds at birth – eventually called Robin (or Robyn) or even for a short time ‘Paganini, the great future musician’, was born at Elm House on 23 October. He was so punctual that everyone was taken by surprise. ‘I had to race across the green for the wise woman,’ Augustus told Margaret Sampson. ‘The doctor, with truly professional promptitude, arrived in his express 16 horse motor car immediately after the event was successfully accomplished.’ Despite these emergencies ‘there was less fuss than usually accompanies the advent of an ordinary hen’s egg,’ he assured the Rani. ‘…Of course it’s staggering to be confronted with a boy after all our prayers for a girl. Ida started the life of Frederick the Great last night which I think must have determined the sex of the infant. It was very rash… Ida has just remarked “Tell her she can have it if she likes.”’
The unconventionality of her married life distanced Ida from her family and cut her off from a number of her friends. She felt held down by her ‘blundering career’, like ‘a bird sitting on its eggs’.
‘I have arrived at the point of eating toasted cheese and stout for supper,’ she darkly confessed to the Rani. ‘It is a horrible thing to do, but shows to what a pitch animal spirits can arrive in this country.’ It was not especially for love, she explained, that ‘I am hungry and thirsty, but for ethics and life and rainbows and colours – butterflies and shimmering seas and human intercourse’. She prized her friends, even when they did not approve of her Matching Green ménage. ‘As you know,’ she wrote to Will Rothenstein, ‘the communicable part of my life is very narrow, and I have nothing to tell you about it. As to the other, you must understand that without telling or you would never count me one of your “dearest of friends” – a privilege of which I am only worthy in my most silent moments.’
Ida did take some pleasure in her children. Robin was ‘most beautiful [and] sleeps for hours’, she wrote to Winifred. ‘He is no trouble. If David had been like that how happy we should have been. But there, poor Davy was the first – & I did not know anything.’ Now that she knew more and had ‘such a good little nurse for them’, she could enjoy watching David and Caspar scrambling in and out of the pram ‘pretending to be bears or monkeys’. They were both ‘much entertained’ by the mysterious new baby. ‘I am nursing him & hope to keep on,’ Ida told Winifred. ‘He is thriving...’1
The new baby delighted them all. ‘He has Gus’s eyes,’ Ida reported, ‘…a large long nose turned down at the end… my mouth & upper lip [and] he is decidedly pretty.’ Whenever the nurse was away, Dorelia would come and help, shining the furniture with beeswax and turpentine, wheeling the boys out in their overcrowded pram, clearing the debris after a gas explosion. ‘Dorelia is here & so angelic,’ Ida wrote to Gwen in the first week of November, ‘…she does so much… It is a glorious day & the dogs are barking & the rooks cawing. I shall be getting up about Saturday I think. I feel very well… How domestic we all are, oh Lord.’2
All the domestic news she felt able to communicate to her family was packed into a letter Ida wrote in the spring of 1905 to her aunt, Margaret Hinton:
‘Robin is quite a man! He crawls about and eats bread and butter, and this evening he sat on the grass in the front garden and interviewed several boys who stopped on their way from school to talk to him. He makes so many noises, and laughs and wags his head about. You say you wonder what we do all day. About 6.30 Robin wakes and crawls about the floor, and grunts and says ah and eh and daddle and silly things like that. About 7 D[avid] and C[aspar] wake and say more silly things, and get dressed, and have a baked apple, or a pear or something, and play about with toys and run up and down. Breakfast about 8.30. Go out in the garden, Robin washed and put to bed about 9.30. D and C go out for a walk, or to the shop, and to post. Bring in letters at 11. We have dinner about 1, and they wake up about 2., have dinner, go out, and so on and so on till 7 when they’re all in bed, sometimes dancing about and shouting, sometimes going to sleep. Robin now joins in the fray and shouts too.’3
It was an Allen and Hanbury world. Ida’s letters reveal her increasing need to break free from this round of cooking-and-children and create a life with other adults, especially women. There must be ‘something that is behind the ordinary aspect of things’, she wrote. ‘I think it is reality.’ The trivialities she could document; the reality which lay barricaded behind them was receding. What worried her was the question of whether she could come to terms with the facts of her life as they now existed. ‘Some days the curtain seems to lift a little for me,’ she told her aunt, ‘and they are days of inspiration and clearer knowledge. Those days I seem to walk on a little way. The other days I simply fight to keep where I am… I can understand the saints and martyrs and great men suffering everything for their idea of truth. It is more difficult, once you have given it some life – to go back on your idea than to stick to it. It torments you and worries you and tears you to pieces if you do not live up to it… it must sound mad to you, especially talking of fighting. It’s wonderful what a different life one leads inside, to outside – at least how unknown the inside one is.’
It was impossible, in England in 1905, for people to understand, or to admit they understood, her inside life – as yet she hardly comprehended it herself. By admitting her husband’s mistress into the home had she made the supreme sacrifice for love, or acted with inexcusable weakness? On the whole, in England in 1905, people would believe the latter, and blame the women. Even in Paris, men and women were hardly so brazen! Her unknown life, therefore, had to stay unknown – especially to the Nettleships. In defiance of the social conventions, Ida believed – was determined to believe – that she lived a natural life: natural for her. But, as her reference to saints and martyrs implies, it was not easy and she embraced with some readiness the notion of self-sacrifice. Unfortunately, triviality filled up each day. She rushed from crises over the children’s tadpoles to crises about the canaries’ eggs. ‘What with babies, toothache and a visitation of fleas (where from we do not know) I am fast losing my reason,’ she exclaimed to Alice.
Alice had grown curious again, but was dismayed when Ida in a dignified, faintly exasperated letter, went some way to satisfying her curiosity. ‘Gus and Dorelia are up in town,’ she wrote this winter, ‘from which you may draw your own conclusions, and not bother me any more to know “where Dorelia sleeps” – You know we are not a conventional family, you have heard Dorelia is beautiful and most charming, and you must learn that my only happiness is for him to be happy and complete, and that far from diminishing our love it appears to augment it. I have my bad times it is only honest to admit. She is so remarkably charming. But those times are the devil and not the truth of light. You are large minded enough to conceive the amazement [? arrangement] as beautiful and possible – and would not think more of it than you would of any other madness which is really sanity. You will not gossip I know as that implies something brought to light which one wants hidden. All this we do not wish to hide, though there is no need to publish it, as after all it is a private matter. This letter is intended to be most discreet. It really expresses the actual state of affairs and you need not consider there is any bitterness or heartache behind, as, though there is occasionally, it is a weakness not to be tolerated and which is gradually growing less and will cease when my understanding is quite cleared of its many weeds...’
The response from Alice was an unprecedented silence. ‘Alice Rothenstein has at last shut up,’ Ida reported triumphantly to Augustus. To Alice herself she wrote: ‘You and Will both ignore my letter but I suppose you don’t know what to say – and really there is nothing. I hope you showed it to Will… Write again and tell me about someone – anyone – and all the horrid gossip you can think of.’
But the only gossip Alice could think of was Ida’s. She could think of nothing else. What Ida really needed from her friends were stories about their own lives, or other people’s, so irresistible that they would draw her out of the shell of her own existence. She wanted her friends’ letters to be like chapters from a serialized novel, so absorbing, so full of detail and suspense, that they supplied a complete new fabric in which to wrap herself. What she got from the red-haired Rani was only a sweet exuberant amusement, eccentrically mistyped (‘diving room’ for dining-room), proclaiming Ida’s situation as far too interesting to leave for a second. This was some comfort – ‘only one is apt to drown the interest in tears’, Ida confided to her – ‘how natural and how foolish this is you will know’. The Rani’s letters from Liverpool read as if the two of them were spectators at a Matching Green theatre. But Ida could not see it that way. If only she could be a spectator instead of taking everything with such ‘pudding-like gravity’. Yet the Rani was the best of her friends: ‘Your letters make green places in my life,’ she told her. It was only in moments of crisis that she fell beyond their reach ‘like a stone falling down a well’.
From Alice she received advice: cautionary advice, reproachful advice, advice that ran contrary to everything she had already done. All Alice’s advice was seasoned with a flavour of inquisitiveness. ‘She [Alice] is so – oh I don’t know – she wants to know why and how – as if Chinese Ladies had answers to their riddles,’ Ida complained to the Rani. ‘The only nuisance about a riddle is its answer. Riddles are most fascinating by themselves.’ Yet although she was always unsettled by Alice – as Alice was by her – somehow they maintained a ‘tremendous admiration of each other’ so that, worse than all Alice’s reproaches, were no letters. Alice’s silence seemed to deafen Ida with her own doings. ‘Your silence is chilling,’ she wrote to her. ‘I do not think, if it is caused by displeasure, that it is fair… Please to write at once, and tell me you adore me and everything I do is right… Oh Alice Alice Alice why don’t you write and tell me all your Nurse’s faults and all about Johnnie – and how you hope I am well and are longing to see me – Darling don’t be cross – I can’t help it. My heart is a well of deep happiness and this makes me malicious.’ Did she mean ‘unhappiness’? Here was another riddle.
What bewildered Alice was Ida’s attitude. Otherwise everything was melodramatically clear. Ida was the victim, noble but misguided; Dorelia the culprit who, if she had any decency, would take herself off; and Augustus was the man, a stereotypical artist whom Ida must control as Alice controlled poor Will. She knew the cast well enough. Will, however, disagreed and blamed Augustus. ‘Ida is simply an angel,’ he wrote to Alice (19 October 1905), ‘ – I think you are most unjust to Dorelia, who is looking after the children all the time and helping everything on, – Heaven knows she gets little for doing so.’
The friendship between the Johns and the Rothensteins was by the beginning of 1905 developing symptoms of burlesque. Ida, being especially fond of Will, was besieged by Alice; Augustus, attracted to the ‘mortal pretty’ Alice, was fêted by Will. It was as if each Rothenstein sought to protect the other from these explosive Johns. Ida’s correspondence to ‘darling Will’ contains what are almost love letters and these would be dutifully answered – by Alice. But when Alice sat to Augustus, Will objected to her expression – the head flung back, the eyes closed – and would turn up at Augustus’s studio to escort his wife home so punctually that sometimes Alice had not yet arrived there.
‘You are a dear good friend to Gus,’ Ida had written to Will. But Augustus, though he could not disagree, sometimes wished it were otherwise. He could not feel what he knew he was expected to feel. He could not pretend. He knew very well that he should feel grateful – Will needed to be kept well oiled with gratitude – but so often it was irritation that swarmed through him. His fate was to be helped, with extreme magnanimity, at many twists and crises of his career, by someone whose personality he increasingly disliked. Wherever he turned he seemed unable to avoid the rigours of Rothenstein’s generosity, and his reaction, as he was well aware, appeared mean. A number of times he tried to end their relationship. ‘I have broken with Rothenstein by the bye which of course is base ingratitude,’ he later told Lady Ottoline Morrell (8 February 1909), ‘ – in extenuation I must say the sensation so far has been quite tolerable’. But breaking with Rothenstein was no easy matter. He was like a boxer for ever turning the other cheek to his assailant, yet never to be knocked out: a nightmare figure.
‘It is more difficult to receive than to give,’ Augustus wrote.4 This was the lesson many of Rothenstein’s beneficiaries had to learn. Epstein, for example, who once assured him: ‘Your help so freely given me has been of the greatest service to me,’ was also to write (20 June 1911):
‘Dear Rothenstein –
I want no more of your damned insincere invitations.
This pretence of friendship has gone on far enough.
Yours etc Jacob Epstein.
It is the comic element in your attitude that has prevented me writing the above before this. I did not believe till now you could have gone on with it.’
Augustus’s reaction was similar to Epstein’s. ‘How I wish someone would record the diverting history of Rothenstein’s career – it would be the most ludicrous, abject and scurrilous psychological document ever penned,’ Augustus assured Ottoline Morrell (23 March 1909). ‘He is I think… Le Sale Juif par excellence de notre siècle. There is I think one man only who could write adequately about him and that’s [Wyndham] Lewis...’
According to his son, John Rothenstein, ‘no-one among his contemporaries had shown such perceptive generosity towards his brother artists of succeeding generations from Augustus John and Epstein to Henry Moore and Ceri Richards’. This is true, yet in the opinion of Max Beerbohm he had no friends at all.*1 What, then, was the secret of this gift for unpopularity? He was a figure somewhat similar to that, in the literary world, of Hugh Walpole, increasingly the patron rather than the creative artist, fixing his personal ambitions on the performance of his protégés. It was as if he sought to ride to immortality on their backs. Will Rothenstein’s two prize rebellious steeds were Augustus John and Stanley Spencer, whom he entered against the rival stables of Roger Fry. But of all his string, Augustus was the greatest disappointment to him, winning in brilliant fashion so many of the minor races, running under false colours, starting favourite for the classics but seldom running to form.
During 1905, disillusionment had begun to set in. ‘I am sorry John has no success,’ Will wrote to Alice (19 October 1905). ‘I slid some advice in on the subject before the Puvis [de Chavannes] decoration at the Sorbonne, and I still think he may do great work – at any rate he feels it, and can do it.’
Will’s advice, like Alice’s, was a formidable commodity. A Max Beerbohm multiple caricature shows him advising poets how to write poetry, playwrights how to stage their plays, painters how to paint, and himself (looking into a mirror) on modesty. Augustus, unfortunately, was not susceptible to advice. He preferred to use Rothenstein for money. ‘I had a letter from John – not one I cared for much, for there was a hint of further pecuniary needs,’ Will complained to his brother Albert (10 September 1908). What Will traded in, what he purchased, was gratitude. But this was not a quality with which Augustus was richly endowed. ‘I have not found him [Augustus] the most grateful of men in the days of his splendour,’ Will sorrowfully confided to the Rani years later (19 August 1933). But then, who was properly grateful? Gwen John, he thought, was the exception. ‘No shadow, I thank Heaven, has ever come between us,’ he wrote to her in 1926. ‘The years have gone by, but our hearts remain the same, and people like you, in whom no mean thought can ever find a resting place, become ever more precious.’5 In fact it was people like the Rothensteins who made Gwen feel happy she had left England. She had ‘a contempt’, she told Augustus, for Will’s brother Albert; and as for Alice Rothenstein, ‘I hope she is not coming over here or if she does, I shall not have to see her.’6
Rothenstein was always being short-changed because, he felt, he lacked the mysterious spirit of charm. ‘The Gods who made me energetic & gave me a little passion & a little faith did me an ill turn when they made me ugly & charmless,’ he confessed (28 July 1915) to Rabindranath Tagore.7 The gratitude he squeezed out of people was a substitute for the love he felt he could never attract. He had been brought up in the Whistlerian tradition where the slightest whisper of criticism was intolerable. To this sensitivity was added an exceptional sanctimoniousness. He seemed to view everything through a mist of high-mindedness. In the racialist climate of Edwardian England, though he was not a practising Jew, he started off with disadvantages, and built them into a positive handicap.
For Augustus there was also the embarrassing problem of Rothenstein’s praise. He needed praise. But he was not so susceptible as to think more highly of those who provided it. He imbibed Rothenstein’s praise for a time: then suddenly it sickened him.8
It was partly because Will had made such an aesthetic investment in Augustus’s future that he welcomed the presence of Dorelia. The inspiration which Augustus originally found in Ida had begun to fail; but, in ‘the matchless Dorelia’, Rothenstein later rhapsodized, ‘in her dazzling beauty, now lyrical, now dramatic, John found constant inspiration. Who, indeed, could approach John in the interpretation of a woman’s sensuous charm? No wonder fair ladies besieged his studio, and his person, too; for John had other magic than that of his brush; no one so irresistible as he, or with such looks, such brains, such romantic and reckless daring and indifference to public opinion.’9
The Winter Show of the New English Art Club at the end of 1904 included two paintings of Dorelia. ‘This year for the first time Mr John gives promise of becoming a painter,’ Roger Fry wrote in the Athenaeum. ‘…At last he has seen where the logic of his views as a draughtsman should lead him… he has already arrived at a control of his medium which astonishes one by comparison with the work of a year or two back… One must go back to Alfred Stevens or Etty or the youthful Watts to find its like… People will no doubt… complain of his love of low life, just as they complain of Rubens’s fat blondes; but in the one case as in the other they will have to bow to the mastery of power… In modern life a thousand accidents may intervene to defraud an artist’s talents of fruition, but if only fate and his temperament are not adverse, we hardly dare confess how high are the hopes of Mr John’s future which his paintings this year have led us to form...’10
With supporters like Fry and Sickert, ‘an amusing and curious character’,11 who came down to Matching Green to look at his drawings; with his small additional income from the Chelsea Art School and from exhibitions at the Carfax Gallery, he could surely afford to dispense with Rothenstein’s favours. He had further strengthened his position when, late in 1904, he was elected as one of the original members of the Society of Twelve, a group of British draughtsmen, etchers, wood-engravers and lithographers. The secretary of this group was Muirhead Bone, who organized its exhibitions at Obachs in New Bond Street. For Augustus this was another valuable outlet for his work; for Rothenstein, who was also an original member, it was a new arena in which to display, like an inverted Iago, his apparently motiveless generosity. His methods of alienating everyone were particularly adroit. To the Society of Twelve he proposed electing a thirteenth member, Lucien Pissarro, who, not being British, was ineligible for membership. It was a master-stroke. Inevitably, when Pissarro failed to gain the necessary vote, Will resigned. Augustus, who hated being dragged into these affairs, was persuaded to use his influence to bring him back, and this, somewhat improbably, he achieved. But no sooner was Will re-elected than he was at it again, returning undaunted and unavailing for three years in succession to the same charge, resigning again, and throwing the whole group into confusion. ‘I was tenacious,’ he later owned, ‘and many letters passed between Bone and myself, until Pissarro was admitted.’ By which time the society was so shaken with squabbles it did not long survive Will’s quixotic triumph.
Five years after Rothenstein died, Augustus wrote an appreciation of him in the Catalogue to the Tate Gallery Memorial Exhibition.12 In this he paid tribute to him as a man ‘always intransigent and sometimes truculent’, subject to a rare disease, ‘madness of self-sacrifice’, and bound therefore to make enemies. He also described him as ‘a generous, candid and perspicacious soul’. While walking round the exhibition the day before it opened, his eyes filled with tears and he admitted that he had sometimes been unjust to his old friend. Yet if Will had come tripping through the door just then, Augustus would soon have struggled out, infuriated by his admirer. For one of the persistent features of Augustus’s character, arising from his difficulties with Edwin John, was a dislike of anyone who assumed the role of father-figure. Rothenstein, who came from an authoritarian family, was enraptured with the father-figure, feeling a need both to promote others in that part, and to assume it himself. Augustus would neither play the parent, nor swallow the well-meaning reprimands. They were incompatible; and yet each felt he needed the other.
A new strain had been placed on Augustus’s financial resources by the birth of Robin that autumn. By the New Year, despite his success in the galleries, he was even more dependent on Rothenstein for help. For Dorelia was now pregnant.
‘It is more difficult at first to be wise, but it is infinitely harder afterwards not to be.’
Ida John to Margaret Sampson (May 1905)
The baby must have been conceived in early August 1904, when Dorelia and Gus left Bruges – and for almost five months Dorelia seems to have kept her pregnancy a secret. ‘I did not know you are making un petit, how could I?’ Gwen wrote to her early in 1905. ‘Are you glad?… When we continue our walk to Rome we will carry it by turns on our backs in a shawl… ’13
Though she may have been glad for herself, Dorelia was apprehensive over the complications it might stir up, and the effect it could have on Ida. Already, by the end of 1904, violent scenes had broken out between them. Shortly after Robin’s birth, Ida had made one of her ‘little journeys’ up to London for a few days, avoiding her friends, feeling strangely hysterical. ‘I simply drifted – from one omnibus to another – without aim or intention,’ she admitted to Alice (December 1904). Yet the sudden flow of freedom, the release from duty, appeared to have ‘done me worlds of good’. She returned to Matching Green shortly before Christmas, to find that a double portrait Augustus was painting of her and Dorelia had gone wrong. In her absence, Augustus had altered the design and there was no room on the canvas for Ida at all. Instantly, and beyond anything this incident seemed to warrant, she was plunged into misery and anger. She had a demonic temper; she could not contain it and ‘there was a black storm’. After the storm was over and, rather to their surprise, they were still all afloat, Ida felt easier and ‘there was a fair amount of sunlight’. But over the rest of this winter quarrels erupted. One morning Augustus and Ida would take sides against Dorelia, and Augustus would volunteer that she could leave whenever she liked; but the following morning it was Ida who was invited to leave – ‘pack up your luggage and take your brats with you!’ Next day Augustus would suddenly announce that he was leaving for ‘the Blue Danube’; after which it was once more the turn of Ida (who threatened to leave for Amsterdam); then again Dorelia. Finally: ‘We are all thinking of going to the tropics.’
But no one left. Augustus went roaring from room to room driving the children before him, like cattle. ‘Never had so wretched a time, even over the festive season,’ he notified Sampson, ‘ – now its over & all right again.’14
But for Ida it was not all right. She was in a dilemma. She had invited Dorelia to Matching Green, because the two of them had a better hold on Augustus than Ida by herself would have had. But then she was consumed by jealousy. For Augustus made no attempt to conceal his infatuation for Dorelia; while to Ida he seemed for long periods blind. ‘Have I lost my beauty altogether?’ she asked Dorelia. Sometimes she appeared ill with depression, going down with a succession of minor ailments that conspired to make her feel more ugly still. ‘I have an eye,’ she wrote to the Rani. ‘Dr says due to general weakness! It has a white sort of spot in it and runs green matter in the evening – which during the night effectually gums down the eyelids so that they have to be melted open! Isn’t it too loathesome?’ The eye was followed by a throat – ‘dear me what next? Varicose veins probably.’
Jealousy infected everything. Since Dorelia had come Maggie, who had helped with the cooking and children, took herself off, disapproving of their immoral ways. It was natural that, to some extent, Dorelia should take her place. But Ida could not let her do too much in the house, partly, it seems, because Augustus thought she was treating Dorelia like a servant. Nor could she bring herself to speak about Dorelia’s unborn baby; and she began to hate herself for this meanness of spirit. Obscure moods of attraction and revulsion mingled with her envy of Dorelia. Doubt and self-hatred, frustration and exhaustion so assailed her during these dark months that she emerged from the winter a changed person, her love for Augustus impaired, her attitude to herself and to Dorelia transformed.
It was to the Rani she confessed most. ‘I feel simply desperate,’ one of her letters begins; and another: ‘My depression is so great as to be almost exhilaration.’ As the days went by this depression deepened. ‘I feel utterly – like this □ – square as a box and mad as a lemon squeezer. What is the remedy?’ she asked her friend. ‘…Do you know what it is to sit down and be bounced up again by what you sat on, and for that to happen continuously so that you can’t sit anywhere? Of course you do – I am now taking phenacetin to keep the furniture still.’ Up till then she had used humour to preserve her detachment and energy. But the effect of her phenacetin tablets appears to have reduced this detachment. For the first time she contemplated suicide. The Rani sometimes knew more of what was happening than Augustus and Dorelia, from whom Ida camouflaged her emotions. She did not complain, but told the Rani: ‘I live the life of a lady slavey. But I wouldn’t change – because of Augustus – c’est un homme pour qui mourir – and literally sometimes I am inclined to kill myself – I don’t seem exactly necessary.’ She still admired him – but was no longer so intimate with him. Also he was ‘impossible’, and so life itself had become impossible. ‘I long for an understanding face,’ she wrote to the Rani. ‘I am surrounded by cows and vulgarity here. Isn’t it awful when even the desire to live forsakes one? I cannot just now, see any reason why I should. Yet I feel if I tide over this bad time, I shall be glad later on. What do you think?’
Believing that Ida must not be left alone, the Rani wired Augustus, who was then in London with Dorelia, to return home at once. She also wrote to Ida urging her to shake off ill thoughts of death. ‘As to suicide,’ Ida replied,
‘why not? What a fuss about one life which is really not valuable!… Am I not a fool to make such a fuss about a thing I accepted, nay invited, but I have lost all my sense of reason or right. All that seems far over the sea and I can only hear sounds which don’t seem to matter. It’s so funny not to want to be good. I never remember to have felt it before. It is such a nice free feeling – animals must be like that.’
Augustus rushed back, the crisis lifted, and Ida confessed to the Rani:
‘You know I was very near the laudanum bottle – somehow it seemed the next thing. Like when you’re tired you see an armchair and sit down in it. Now you “know all” I feel a sort of support – it is funny. Others know, but no one has given me support in the right place as you have. One held up an arm, another a leg, one told me I wasn’t tired and there was nothing the matter… With you I have something to sit on!’
Dorelia too was not happy. She felt responsible for the bickering, the guilt, the dissatisfaction that pervaded the house. There were times, she knew, when Ida must have wished her at the bottom of the sea. She began to think it had been a mistake leaving Bruges, coming to Matching Green. Then, early in 1905, while Gus was painting her portrait, she told him categorically that once this picture was finished she must leave. There was nothing to stop her; she had no wish to stay.
Augustus could hardly believe it. Their life together, of which he had had such splendid dreams, was failing. It should have been so natural. He felt wretched.
Shortly before Dorelia’s baby was due, Ida went to stay with the Salamans at Oxford. But her imagination still stalked the rooms of Elm House, remembering so many sights and sounds she had never wanted to witness, imprisoning the details in her mind. No matter what her intelligence told her, she seemed affected biologically. In a remarkable letter she now sent privately to Dorelia, very long, but written hurriedly in pencil, she set down her conclusions.
‘…I tried not to be horrid – I know I am – I never hardly feel generous now like I did at first – I suppose you feel this through everything – I tried to be jolly – it is easy to be superficially jolly – I hate to think I made you miserable but I know I have – Gus blames me entirely for everything now – I daresay he’s right – but when I think of some things I feel I suffered too much – it was like physical suffering it was so intense – like being burnt or something – I can’t feel I am entirely responsible for this horrid ending – it was nature that was the enemy to our scheme. I have often wondered you have not gone away before – it has always been open to you to go, and if you have been as unhappy as Gus says you should have told me. I do not think it likely Gus and I can live together after this – I want to separate – I feel sick at heart. At present I hate you generally but I don’t know if I really do. It is all impossible now and we are simply living in a convention you know – a way of talking to each other which has no depth or heart. I should like to know if it gives you a feeling of relief and flying away to freedom to think of going… I don’t care what Gus thinks of me now, of course he’d be wild at this letter. He seems centuries away. He puts himself away. I think he’s a mean and childish creature besides being the fine old chap he is.
I came here in order to have the rest cure, and I am, but it makes things seem worse than if one is occupied – but of course it will all come all right in the end. I know you and Gus think I ought to think of you as the sufferer, but I can’t. You are free – the man you love at present, loves you – you don’t care for convention or what people think – of course your future is perilous, but you love it. You are a wanderer – you would hate safety and cages – why are you to be pitied? It is only the ones who are bound who are to be pitied – the slaves. It seems to me utterly misjudging the case to pity you. You are living your life – you chose it – you did it because you wanted to – didn’t you? Do you regret it? I thought you were a wild free bird who loved life in its glorious hardships. If I am to think of you as a sad female who needs protection I must indeed change my ideas… It was for your freedom and all you represented I envied you so. Because you meant to Gus all that lay outside the dull home, the unspeakable fireside, the gruesome dinner table – that I became so hopeless – I was the chain – you were the key to unlock it. This is what I have been made to feel ever since you came. Gus will deny it but he denies many facts which are daily occurrences – apparently denies them because they are true and he wants to pretend they aren’t. One feels what is, doesn’t one? Nothing can change this fact – that you are the one outside who calls a man to apparent freedom and wild rocks and wind and air – and I am the one inside who says come to dinner, and who to live with is apparent slavery. Neither Gus nor I are strong enough to find freedom in domesticity – though I know it is there.
You are the wild bird – fly away – as Gus says our life does not suit you. He will follow, never fear. There was never a poet could stay at home. Do not think myself to be pitied either. I shudder when I think of those times, simply because it was pain… It has robbed me of the tenderness I felt for you – but you can do without that – and I would do anything for you if you would ever ask me to – you still seem to belong to us. I.’15
What Ida overlooked was that, during the first few months of 1905, Augustus had grown rather less attentive towards Dorelia, as if the wild bird being caged was no longer capable of extraordinary flight. It was true that he could not find freedom, or poetry, or love in domesticity. Not for long. Love was like fire to Augustus. Confined within the grate of marriage, it smouldered drearily, collapsing into ashes. Its smoke choked him and its dying coals were cheerless. He wanted to spread it around, let it take light where it would, to make a splendid conflagration – rather than sit fixed by its embers. And now Dorelia, whom he had once likened to a flame, was sinking into this domestic apathy. His poems dried up, his gaze fell vacant. What he needed from Dorelia, and also from Ida, was positively less of them. He needed distance and elusiveness to get his romantic view in focus. He was not really a demonstrative man and became impatient over homely displays of affection. Confused by this sudden heating and cooling of emotion, Dorelia grew defensive. Ida had hardened towards her; Augustus, at moments, appeared indifferent; neither of them mentioned her unborn baby, and, from Augustus, this hurt her. She confessed as much to Ida who, contradicting her avowed loss of tenderness, wrote back to reassure her:
‘My dear, men always seem indifferent about babies – that is, men of our sort. You must not think Gus is more so over yours than he was over mine. He never said anything about David except ‘don’t spill it’. They take us and leave us you know – it is nature. I thought he was rather solicitous about yours considering. Don’t you believe he came over to Belgium because he was sorry for you. He is a mean skunk to let you imagine such a thing. If ever a man was in love, he was – and is now, only of course it’s sunk down to the bottom again – a man doesn’t keep stirred up for long – and because we can’t see it we’re afraid it’s not there – but never you fear.’16
This consolation, which was also needed by Ida herself, was to flower after the birth of Dorelia’s baby, leading to a special affection between the two women. But, for the time being, it was another confusing factor. Like a lake, swollen by the rivers of their mixed feelings, their bewilderment rose. At times, it was the only thing the three of them shared. Augustus’s pronouncements certainly sounded unmixed, but then they were so quick, and so quickly succeeded by other pronouncements equally strong and utterly different. Ida, for all her disenchantment, still harboured a deep affection for him – ‘he’s a mean and childish creature besides being the fine old chap he is’ – as Dorelia was to do. Admiration and anger, jealousy and tenderness for Dorelia spun within her. Amid all this eddying of emotion, it was up to Dorelia to steer a firm course. But for her pregnancy, it seems likely that she would have slipped away without a word. Words were not her métier – words, explanations, all this indulgence, were not in her line. She was, so she always insisted, ‘a very ordinary person’, blessed with an extraordinary vicarious gift. She had little talent for making independent decisions: she excelled at making the best of other people’s, and when, as now, no one made any decisions, she drifted without a compass. Hoping that Ida might decide for her – for the two of them had never been so intimate as by post – she wrote expressing her confusion. But when Ida replied, she saw her confusion faithfully reflected:
‘About your going or not you must decide – I should not have suggested it, but I believe you’d be happier to go… Yes, to stay together seems impossible, only we know it isn’t – I don’t know what to say. Only I feel so sure you’d be happier away… I know I should be jolly glad now if we all lived apart – or anyway if I did with the children. Don’t you think we might as well? – if it can be arranged.
I don’t feel the same confidence in Gus I did, nor in myself.
Yes I know I always asked you to stay on, but still I don’t see why you should have – you knew it was pride made me ask you, and because I wouldn’t be instrumental in your going, having invited you – also because I didn’t see how I could live with Gus alone again. All, all selfish reasons.
…I have often felt a pig not to talk to you more about the*2 baby, but I couldn’t manage it. Also I always feel you are not like ordinary people and don’t care for the things other people do. Gus says what I think of you is vulgar and insensible – I don’t know – I know I’m always fighting for you to people outside, but probably what I tell them is quite untrue – and vulgar. I know I admire you immensely as I do a great river or a sunny day – or anything else great and natural and inevitable. But perhaps this is not you. I don’t feel friendly or tender to you because you seem aloof and like some calm independent animal – you don’t seem to need anything from me, or from any woman – and it seems unnatural and a condescension for you to do things for me. Added to all this is my jealousy. This is a true statement of why I am like I am to you...
As to Gus he’s a poet, and knows no more about actual life than a poet does. This is sometimes everything, when he’s struck a spark to illumine the darkness, and sometimes nothing when he’s looking at the moon. As to me, we all know I’m nothing but a rubbish heap with a few buried treasures which will all be tarnished by the time they come to light.
This mistake I make is considering Gus as a man instead of an artist-creature. I am so sorry for you, poor little thing, bottling yourself up about the baby. Shall we laugh at all this when we’re 50? Maybe – but at 50 the passions are burnt low. It makes no difference to now does it?… I do want to be there for your baby. I do want to be good, but I know I shant manage it.’17
But so much of Ida’s analysis, it seemed to Dorelia, made ‘no difference to now’. Dorelia needed to simplify things in order to act, not to investigate them more minutely. So far as action was concerned, there was only one new simplifying factor in Ida’s letter: she was no longer asking Dorelia to stay. Dorelia wrote back briefly and cryptically, stating that she would ‘treat it as an everyday occurrence’ and, she implied, wander off. But Ida, fearing that Dorelia would vanish before she got back, answered urgently:
‘Do not go until we all go, it would be so horrid… I want to go out from Matching Green all together and part at a cross roads – don’t you go before I get back unless you want to… We shall have dinner all together – no slipping away. My admiration of you does not prevent my hating you as one woman hates another. Gus doesn’t seem able to understand this – & it is so simple.’
As an inducement for Dorelia to remain until she arrived back, Ida promised ‘a bottle of olives… 2 natural coloured ostrich feathers and some lace!’18
So Dorelia was persuaded to wait. Augustus had by this time gone up to yet another new studio*3 in London, and the two women joined him there in the last week of March. This was to be the crossroads, the parting of the ways. He did not know that they had been corresponding, and seems to have believed that the crisis of Dorelia’s departure had passed: after all, no one had said anything. What then happened surprised everyone. ‘We had a terrific flare up,’ Ida afterwards (27 March 1905) told Alice Rothenstein.
‘…and the ménage was on the point of being broken up, as D[orelia] said she would not come back, because the only sane and sensible thing for us to do was to live apart. But I persuaded her to, for many reasons – and we settled solemnly to keep up the game till summer. Lord, it was a murky time – most sulphurous – it gave me a queer sort of impersonal enjoyment. After it we all three dined in a restaurant (which is now a rare joy) and drank wine, and then rode miles on the top of a bus, very gay and light hearted. Gus has been a sweet mild creature since.’
The ‘many reasons’ for Ida’s change of attitude are nowhere specified. Certainly this change puzzled Dorelia and also, it appears, was not really understood by Ida herself. The ‘queer sort of impersonal enjoyment’ she felt may have been the exercise of power. Where Ida led, Gus and Dorelia followed, and the knowledge of this may have given her satisfaction.
But one of the ‘many reasons’ was Ida’s dread of living alone with Augustus. If she remained with him, as she might have to do, then he would take other mistresses, and none of them was likely to match Dorelia. It had been Ida’s love for Gus that had drawn all three of them under the same roof; but it was her feeling for Dorelia that now held them together.
Augustus saw things somewhat differently. This last year, he reflected, they had been living rather too conventionally. ‘I get to think of London as Hell sometimes,’19 he told Michel Salaman. Matching Green was better, but even there they were confined with ten perpetually growling cats, squeaking canaries, games of cricket and flocks of chickens outside, tadpoles within, and of course the children like acrobats forever falling into the coal scuttle. Perhaps it was the parrot that he had taught to swear in Romany that gave him the solution. ‘I want to buy a van or two next year… I expect I’ll take my family somewhere, Dorelia included,’20 he had written to Sampson at the end of 1904. It would be just the thing for serious gypsy spotting, for hunting up bits and pieces of their vocabulary.
It was his old Slade friend Michel Salaman who came to the rescue. He had started out on his honeymoon in a smart new caravan, but for some reason decided a few miles into his marriage to sell it. Augustus bought it in the spring of 1905 for the handsome sum of thirty pounds, paid scrupulously over the next thirty years. But what was a caravan without a horse? Here too Salaman was able to help. ‘I might well use your horse,’ Augustus conceded. ‘…Before I take possession of it please give me some notion of his tastes & habits – I should not like to upset him by wrong treatment, and I know nothing of horses’ ways.’21
By April all stood ready and the future shone bright. ‘I look forward to being out with a van or two,’ he wrote to Salaman, ‘our… multitude of boys are an amusing lot.’ The horse and van had halted near the centre of Dartmoor, a fine challenging place, if they could find it. ‘Probably I shall have a Gipsy to help in these matters,’ Augustus had speculated.
But for the time being horse and van were to have a more discreet role as Dorelia’s shelter for the birth of her first child. Ida, who had gone to stay with the Dowdalls in Liverpool, wrote to ask whether Dorelia ‘would like me to help you over the baby’s birth or if you’d rather I kept out of the way’, adding: ‘I’d like to and I’d hate to. I would rather come, probably only because I don’t like to be away from things.’
In the event Ida was not with Dorelia when the baby was born, and nor was anyone else. ‘I was surprised to hear you had your baby so soon,’ Gwen wrote from Paris. ‘I’m so glad everything has gone well, & it is such a charming one, it seems to be a real gipsy. I should like to come over, but I don’t suppose I shall… Goodbye & love to you.’22
It was a boy, born in circumstances deliberately made obscure so as to conceal his illegitimacy. For the occasion Dorelia assumed the name of ‘Mrs Archibald McNeill’, wife of a naval officer long at sea, while Augustus on his arrival posed as her solicitous brother. Later on their identities changed. ‘I’m quite certain there is no penalty attached to having a bastard in the family,’ Augustus reassured her from a Liverpool pub called The Duke. ‘So better register him as my son – provided of course it isn’t published next morning in the Daily Mail or Express – as your family and my father no doubt take in one of those journals and such advertisement would be very disturbing. Have you stuck to that list of names? A sensation takes possession of me that Pyramus may be omitted or Alastir… The parish of Lydford wasn’t it?’23
Pyramus was born at Postbridge on Dartmoor in late April or early May. Though Dorelia was alone (except for a large herd of cows), she was not far from an inn owned by a friendly landlord and his wife, Mr and Mrs Hext, who saw to it that a doctor and nurse visited her. Both Augustus and Ida had planned to be there, but Augustus ‘wearing my new suit so of course I cannot think very composedly’ was fastened in Liverpool where Charles Reilly ‘keeps at me about his scheme of a school of 10 picked pupils and walls and ceilings to decorate – and £500 a year’. Ida, meanwhile, was held at Matching Green in polite talk with her mother, who had determined to stay with her over Whitsun. In their absence Augustus and Ida both sent money, advice on diet (‘don’t live on potatoes’), and plenty of unanswered inquiries.
As soon as the telegram – in almost impenetrable Romany – arrived at Elm House saying Dorelia’s baby was born, Ida abandoned her mother and with mixed feelings churning within her hurried down, travelling through the night by train and arriving by eleven next morning. She found Dorelia lying along the caravan shelf which served for a bed, with her infant – ‘a boy of course’ – beside her. Augustus, ‘suave and innocent as ever’, turned up the following day ‘to kiss the little woman who is giving up much for love of him’, Ida wrote to the Rani. ‘The babe is fine, a tawny colour – very contented on the whole – we have to use a breast pump thing as her nipples are flat on the breast.’
A few days later the other children flocked down, shepherded by Maggie who had returned for the emergency, and they all settled down to graze upon the moor for two months, Augustus coming and going at intervals. ‘It is adorable and terrible here,’ Ida wrote. ‘We work and work from 6 or 7 till 9 and then are so tired we cannot keep awake – at least I can’t. Dorelia is more lively – owing perhaps to an empty belly.’ All day they were out of doors, wearing the same clothes, going about barefoot, growing wonderfully sunburnt – ‘at least the women and children are – the Solitary Stag does not show it much’ – and eating double quantities of everything.
Ida seemed transformed in this new climate. They were in a wide valley, with dramatic distant hills and never-ending skies. It was not simply the open-air life that transformed her, but a change in Augustus’s attitude in the open air. ‘Gus is a horrid beast,’ she eulogized in another letter to the Rani, ‘and a lazy wretch and a sky blue angel and an eagle of the ranges. He is (or acts) in love with me for a change, it is so delightful – only he is lazy seemingly, and when not painting lies reading or playing with a toy boat. Then I think well how could he paint if he has to be on duty in between – duty is so wearing and tearing and wasting and consuming – only somehow it seems to build something up as well which is so clever.’ Ida hardly knew how to interpret this change. At the very moment one might have expected him to give his fullest attention to Dorelia, he had turned to Ida herself. She had lost confidence in herself to such an extent that she could not believe he loved her. But then what was Gus’s love? What was anyone’s love? ‘We had one flare up – nearly 2,’ she confided to the Rani,
‘…owing to Gus’s strange lack of susceptibility – or possibly by some human working, his being too susceptible. It is a difficult position for him. He is so afraid of making me jealous I believe – and he was not wildly in love with her – nor with me, only quite mildly. With the result that he appeared indifferent to her, while really feeling quite nice and tender, had I not been there. But Lord – it is impossible but interesting and truth-excavating.’
Despite the difficulties, and odd flare-ups, this was a marvellous summer for Ida. She adored living in the van. All their worries seemed to lose themselves among the rocks and heather of this open country, to float away with the procession of clouds across the great sky. Yet Ida knew they would have to work out something more permanent than this.
For Augustus too it was a happy summer. He was free to work, and work went well. ‘I have made a step forwards but what infinite worlds before me!’24 he had written to Sampson. And to Michel Salaman also he wrote that summer: ‘I know now infallibly what is good painting, good imagination & good art.’25 He was doing many etchings – romantic pieces entitled ‘Out on the Moor’ and ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ and a good study of Dartmoor ponies. Close by their camp was a spring for washing and drinking, which the women and children used; while in the evenings Augustus would stride off out of sight to the Hexts, sit in their plain flagged kitchen and warm himself before the peat fire. Back at the camp he erected a tent of poles and blankets after the gypsy fashion and, like the Hexts, lit peat fires – but they were ‘usually all smoke’. At night they would retreat into the tent to sleep ‘and you can hear the stream always and always’.
The rest of this summer Ida and Dorelia passed together at Matching Green, while Augustus roamed the country between his school in London and his prospective school in Liverpool. In his absence the two women grew extraordinarily close. The whole basis of their friendship was shifting. They managed the house, looked after the children, made each other clothes and in the evening played long games of chess which Ida always won – ‘except once’, Dorelia remembered. Towards Augustus, it appeared, they now occupied very similar positions. ‘A woman is either a wife or a mistress,’ Ida had written to Dorelia.
‘If a wife, she has (that is, her position implies) perfect confidence in her husband and peace of mind – not being concerned about any other woman in relation to her husband. But she has ties and responsibilities and is, more or less, a fixture – and not free. If a mistress she has no right to expect faithfulness, and must allow a man to come and go as he will without question – and must in consequence, if she loves him jealously, suffer doubt and not have peace of mind – but she has her own freedom too. Well here are you and I – we have neither the peace of mind of the wife nor the freedom (at least I haven’t) of the mistress. We have the evils of both states for the one good, which belongs to both – a man’s company. Is it worth it? Isn’t it paying twice over for our boon?
Our only remedy is to both become mistresses, and so at any rate have the privileges of the mistress.
Of course I have the children and perhaps, being able to avail myself of the name of wife, I ought to do so, and live with G[us]. But I shall never consider myself as a wife – it is a mockery.’26
The need to free herself from being Augustus’s wife ran very strong in Ida. She relinquished for a time the name Ida, calling herself Anne (or Ann), the third of her Christian names; and then, to escape further from her past self, signed some letters Susan.27 Her mounting attraction to Dorelia in a curious way drew her closer to Augustus again. Like Gwen (whom she had also wanted to call Anne), she grew fascinated by Dorelia. ‘I know it makes you mad to hear me rave on about her,’ she teased Alice Rothenstein. ‘Dear old darling pure English Alice – I can’t help loving these fantastics however abnormally their bosoms stick out… as Gus says, she has the gift of beauty.’
Alone with Dorelia, Ida was as happy as she had been for a long time. Envy and jealousy melted into love: she disliked their being apart even for a few days. ‘Darling D,’ she wrote while on a short visit to her mother, ‘Love from Anna to the prettiest little bitch in the world… I was bitter cold last night without your burning hot, not to say scalding, body next me – …Yours jealously enviously and adoringly Ida Margaret Ann JOHN.’
To establish their new regime Ida now came out with the proposal that she and Dorelia, the two mistresses, should leave England and, with their children, live together in Paris. The lease of Elm House was up that autumn so that in any case they must move from Matching Green. She had loved Paris while living there with the two Gwens, and the Parisian atmosphere, she felt convinced, was capable of sustaining their ménage better than anywhere in England. What a brave new start it would be! They would find an inexpensive studio for Augustus who could make little journeys between London and Paris. They would all continue seeing one another – preferably not too much of one another. Money would certainly be a difficulty, but Ida would practise the severest economies and earn money from modelling again. She was determined to take Dorelia with her and had already written a letter to Gus, telling him she wanted to live apart – not because she didn’t love him but because living together on a day-after-day basis was impossible. And he, still ‘a sweet mild creature’, who would bring her anything she asked for – ‘a dictionary, an atlas and a toothpick’ – had not sought to excuse himself, but blamed his ‘nervous aberrations’ for their troubles. For although he did not say so, he wanted much the same as she did. ‘Dearest of Gs,’ she had replied to him:
‘With people one loves one does not suffer from “nervous aberrations”. And peace with Dorelia would never bring stagnation, as you know well. For a time that spiritual fountain, at which I have drunk and which has kept me hopeful and faithful so many years, seems dried up – I think lately I have taxed it. I think it would be a good thing, when it can be arranged, for us all to live quite apart, anyway for a time. You will not mind that – you know we never did intend to live together. I shall have to sit – there’s no other means of making money – mais tout cela s’arrangera.
Yes, there is in those letters [to Dorelia] something you never did and never will write for me – I think it is because I love you that I see it. And I think if I had known it before I should not have wanted us all to live together. It has been a straining of the materials for you and I ever to live together – it is nature for you and her.
I am quite sure you will visit me and I will receive you, oh my love… By rights Dorelia is the wife and I the mistress. Is it not so? Arranged thus there would be no distress… Tu me comprends comme toujours parce que tu es bon et doux. Aurevoir – we will see later on what can be arranged –
Ever yours Sue.’28
What Ida now arranged was a variation of this ‘two mistresses’ scheme. They would not calculate things precisely, but simply find out how the details best sorted themselves out. ‘Dodo says we can’t trouble about “turns”,’ she told Augustus. Also: ‘you know you will be happy alone.’ The nucleus of this French plan was Ida and Dorelia’s closeness. ‘I do not know rightly whether Ardor [Dorelia] and I love one another,’ Ida explained to Augustus. ‘We seem to be bound together by sterner bonds than those of love. I do not understand our relationship, but I feel it is necessary for us to live [together].’29 Whether or not they loved each other, they both, in their fashion, loved Gus who, at one time or another, sincerely loved one of them or the other. With so much love surging between the three of them surely it must be possible, if only accidentally, to hit upon some way of life that satisfied everyone? ‘We must go,’ Ida announced. And as always her decision, plunging through the ocean of indecision, was conclusive.
As always, too, they began by trying to make the best of anything new. Dorelia’s silence was enthusiastic; while from the north of England Augustus exuded amiability. Unless some ungovernable mood was on him, he felt nervous of opposing Ida. He had been shocked by her contemplated suicide, and all the more alarmed at having to be told this by the Rani. The news sobered him. ‘My imagination is getting more reasonable and joyous now,’ he wrote, ‘I wish to God it would be one thing or the other and stay! I have longings to sculpt – it’s been coming on for years. Paris!!!… I hope to paint two orange girls if I can get them. Before actual life at any rate moods and vapours vanish. Suppose I came back to the Green soon… I look to you, Ardor, to restrain Ann’s economical fury.’
But Ida would not allow him back just then. His moods were so strong, so unintentionally destructive, so – as he admitted – unreasonable that the best-laid schemes might be finished off by them. She wanted to fix everything unalterably before accepting such risks. She wrote off to hostels, made travel arrangements, gave the servants notice, contracted to sell all the furniture they could not take with them, and booked two taxis. She also told the Rothensteins. ‘I expect you’ll think we’re mad,’ she invited Alice (July 1905).
‘We are going to live all together for a time again – it is pleasanter really and much more economical. We shall only need one servant. We shall do the kids ourselves – meaning Dorelia and me. Her baby is weakly, but a dear little thing – not much trouble. Gus of course will live mostly in London… I feel this living [in] Paris is inevitable, and though there are 10000 reasons in its favour I will not trouble you with them. The reason really is that we’re going.’
Alice’s reaction, predictably, was one of extreme horror. She wondered whether Ida had taken leave of her senses. Paris! So it had come to that. She knew what Ida should do. Her duty was to return at once to London and take a ‘cheap flat’ there. Anything else would be unfair to Augustus. ‘Alice Rothenstein is simply indescribable,’ Ida wrote to the Rani. ‘…She and I always feel quite opposite things. Lord!… I can’t think of the tight, smiling life which London means to me now. Were I alone it would be different.’
Will appears to have agreed with Alice. Indeed it may have been his opposition to the Paris scheme that helped to reconcile Augustus to it. ‘It is mostly on your account that they [Will and Alice] are so against Paris,’ Ida told Augustus. ‘Alice says “you do not quite realise what it means to a man!” Does she mean in the nights? Anyway I cannot, dare not, allow her ideas of comfort etc to influence me at all… if anything would keep me it would be Mother.’
She was still encumbered by her family. ‘It is selfish,’ she admitted to the Rani, ‘because of my Mother – but I can’t help it.’ Mrs Nettleship’s strong sensible middle-class standards were like chains upon Ida’s freedom, and she had resolved to cut them. For, since they had settled to ‘keep up the game’, nothing could be concealed from Mrs Nettleship any longer – even that Dorelia had a baby of her own. Their departure called for drastic explanations, and as soon as everything was irreversibly arranged Ida broke the news. ‘I have taken rooms at a little hotel where they make it cheaper as we travel with children,’ she wrote. ‘Aren’t they mad?’30
The attitudes of Alice Rothenstein and Mrs Nettleship, representing those of society and the family, were very similar. It was Ida, they thought, who was mad. But to all Mrs Nettleship’s objections Ida returned one answer: that it was unreasonable to blame her for not placing her mother’s welfare above that of her husband, or, for that matter, above her own. Since her daughter’s marriage Mrs Nettleship had, despite herself, begun rather to like Augustus. He was not so absolutely awful as she had once feared. He amused her, even charmed her. ‘They get on quite well in a queer way,’ Ida had noted with surprise. ‘…What an instinct many – I suppose most – people have for keeping “on good terms”. It necessitates such careful walking – and fighting would be so much more amusing – or perhaps not.’ Now Ida had a real fight on her hands. Mrs Nettleship blamed Augustus. She had always known what he was like, behind the charm and amusement. But she also blamed Ida for giving into him. Then there was the blameworthy figure of Dorelia. In the end she blamed all of them for exposing this wretched state of affairs to the public gaze. Why couldn’t Dorelia live a little way off, if such things must be? Why make themselves a subject for squalid gossip – had Ida given no thought as to how it would affect her sisters? To which Ida replied that this was one of the reasons they were leaving the country. Exasperated, Mrs Nettleship declared that it was against the law to have two wives, and warned her daughter that she intended to institute legal proceedings. But no one took this seriously, and for Augustus (‘my only husband’ as Ida ironically called him) it completed the romantic comedy.
The Nettleship campaign continued to the end of the year. Mrs Nettleship called on her other two daughters, Ethel and Ursula, who now joined in with their own appeals to Ida. To them Ida was obliged to justify herself all over again. Her letters, injected with small shots of scepticism, are extraordinary for their forbearance. ‘Dearest angel,’ she wrote to Ursula:
‘It is quite unnecessary for you to feel miserable about us unless of course your sense of morality is such that this ménage really shocks you. But as you say you know nothing of actual right and wrong in such a case I suppose you feel bad because you think I am unhappy or that Gus does not love me. I think I’ve got over the jealousy from which I suffered at first, and I now take the situation more as it should be taken… I don’t know how they told you, but I suppose from your letter they made it pretty awful. As a matter of fact it is not awful – simply living a little more genuinely than would otherwise be possible – that is to say accepting and trying to digest a fact instead of hiding it away and always having the horrid consciousness of its being there hidden… I know in the end what we are doing will prove to be the best thing to have done. It is not always wisest to see most. Do you understand. Oh do you understand? I think really if you were left to yourself you would understand better than almost anyone – instinctively. If you were to begin to think of the reasons against our arrangement I should be afraid… It is a beautiful life we live now, and I never have been so happy – but that does not prove it is right. It seems right for us – but is it for the outside world? doesn’t charity begin at home? and at most we only make people uncomfortable… do believe I no longer grudge Gus his love for Dorelia – I never did, but he was so much “in love” that no interested woman could have remained calm beholding them. But now that is over, and though he loves her and always must it is different – and we live in common charity, accepting the facts of the case – and she, mind you, is a very wonderful person – a child of nature – calm and beautiful and patient – no littleness – an animal if you will, but as wholesome as one – a lovely forest animal. It is a queer world.’31
These patient understanding letters called forth no answering sympathy from her sisters, both of whom were under their mother’s control. If their ménage persisted, Ursula wrote, then she would never be able to see Ida again or give herself in marriage. Ida’s immorality was like a blight, she declared, withering her own chances of fruitfulness – and those of Ethel.
Ida was stunned by this accusation. She could not believe it, did not know even whether Ursula herself believed it. In the past Dorelia had always left the house when any of Ida’s family came to stay, but if they would not continue to come then Ida would simply have to go and visit them. ‘As you can’t accept her [Dorelia], I suppose it would be better,’ she wrote. ‘It is a queer world… As to your prospects of marriage – that is the one unsurmountable and unmeltable object – till you are both happily married! Do write again after thinking about it a bit – I mean the whole affair.’
Ursula needed no prompting. She wrote again the same week stating that, since Ida was unrepentant, she, Ursula, renounced marriage and resolved to live a spinster all her life.*4 Ida’s reply, the final letter in this exchange, blended irony with tenderness but contained none of the guilt that the Nettleships had sought to implant within her.
‘Darling Urla,
I was very glad to have your letter – I do think it was a little heroic. You have no business to feel so heroic as to be willing to give up marriage or to say “what would it matter”. Of course it might not matter – but dearest I understand you when you say that – it is like my painting – there are some things that seem so important which really don’t matter in the least. It has cost me much pain to give it up – but it doesn’t matter! It is part of the artist’s life to do away with things that don’t matter but, as you say, it is unlikely you would love a man who couldn’t at any rate be made to bear with our ménage. He needn’t know us. You do astonish me with your idea of uncleanliness – I can’t appreciate that – I am differently constructed. It seems to me so natural – and therefore not unclean… To me your thinking it so appears absurd and almost incredible – as if you’ll grow out of it. A bit too “heroic”. As to “doing away with the whole thing” you might as well say you’d like to do away with the sea because of wrecks and drowning.’
The long struggle seemed almost at an end. But throughout Ida’s difficulties in carrying off Dorelia, persuading Augustus and resisting the Nettleships, there had been one factor which helped to blunt all opposition, and gave impetus to the setting up of a new ménage: she was again pregnant.
‘I marshalled my tribe over here [Paris] without mishap beyond a little inconsequent puking in mid-Channel.’
Augustus John to John Sampson (September 1905)
‘Don’t you too sometimes have glimpses so large and beautiful that life becomes immediately a jewel to prize instead of a burden to be borne or got rid of?’ Ida had once asked the Rani. Regularly the darkness was shot through by these lyrical searchlights. Painting had been one source of happiness; marriage, initially, another. ‘What great work is accomplished without a hundred sordid details?’ she asked shortly after David’s birth. ‘To have a large family is now one of my ambitions.’ But by the time Caspar was born, her ambition, still heroically proclaimed, sounded more hesitant. ‘I should say more than I meant if I launched into explanations of why I want a large family,’ she wrote again to the Rani. ‘I know I do, but it may only be because there’s nothing else to do, now that painting is not practicable – and I must create something.’
Babies, as a substitute for art, had failed even before Robin’s birth. ‘As soon as I am up,’ she wrote to Margaret Sampson, ‘I am going to climb an apple tree – and never have another baby.’ For a time, cooking, gardening, even hens had become surrogates. Yet still the babies kept on coming and her disenchantment deepened: ‘We are all such impostors!’ she exclaimed. Then, in a letter from Paris in April 1906 Ida revealed to the Rani that she had made ‘violent efforts’ to dislodge her fourth child during early pregnancy. Her ambition to have a large family had died and was being replaced by something else.
They did not have, she and Gus, any skill or habit of contraception. Nor did most people. Almost half a century after his marriage, Augustus was to make a quick sketch of the birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes, whom he portrayed as a beneficent ‘witch’. But before the social revolution in family planning which Marie Stopes began in the 1920s, contraception was not easy for men and almost impossible for women. Neither men nor women were given any sex education and ignorance was equated with innocence. So they relied on the rumours of folklore, odd pieces of sponge and rubber, on periodic infertility and the split-second practice of coitus interruptus. Augustus was no good at this French-farce timing. There was only one time for him: the present. So he was seldom prepared. Condoms were in any case not openly for sale in pharmacies, and for someone prudish over such matters it was devilish awkward ordering these almost unmentionable provisions in a public place. Besides all these difficulties, he and Ida and Dorelia never knew when sexual intercourse would overtake them. They were all young, potent, fertile and, in their inevitable rebellion against the late-nineteenth-century culture of suppression, driven to act spontaneously.
Even before Dorelia had arrived at Matching Green, Ida had written to the Rani: ‘It suddenly strikes me how perfectly divine it would be if you and I were living in Paris together. I can imagine going to the Louvre and then back to a small room over a restaurant or something… think of all the salads, and the sun, and blue dresses, and waiters. And the smell of butter and cheese in the small streets.’ Conceived as fantasy, her romance was coming to life in fact. It represented for Ida a new attitude to the world and her place in it. ‘I should like to live on a mountainside and never speak to anybody – or in a copse with one companion,’ she wrote. ‘I think to live with a girl friend and have lovers would be almost perfect. Whatever are we all training for that we have to shape ourselves and compromise with things all our lives? It’s eternally fitting a square peg into a round hole and squeezing up one’s eyes to make it look a better fit.’32
The girlfriend was different, but the philosophy was the same. In her experience, men were of two conditions: the artists and poets, who were beyond good or evil, and with whom one fell in love; and the others who mostly bored her. Both were impractical as husbands. With girls, however, she could develop an enduring intimacy. ‘I wish I’d been a man,’ she confessed to the Rani. ‘I should then have felt at home in this infinitely simple world.’ To some extent, it was the man’s part she intended to play in Paris.
*
Augustus, Ida and Dorelia, with David and Caspar, Robin and Pyramus and Bobster their dog, set sail for France at the end of September 1905. The sea was rough, the boat rolled and Caspar (who was violently sick) declared in some alarm: ‘We’d better go back.’ Ida had taken two rooms for them all at the Hôtel St-Pierre in the rue de l’Ecole-de-Médecine. ‘The hotel people are very kind and the food lovely,’ she assured her mother. ‘Children perfectly well and Tony [David] especially cheerful… [he] asked last evening if all the people in Paris talked nonsense.’ Robin, however, seemed to pick up the new language astonishingly fast, and very soon was calling everyone fou, sot and nigaud in the most threatening manner.
From the hotel Ida sent Gus out to find a good cheap apartment for them all. ‘I really feel more disposed to sit down comfortably & await the miracle rather than go through the faithless formality of climbing several thousand stairs a day, and arousing a thousand suspicions, a thousand vain hopes,’ he wrote to Sampson. ‘…Ida has forbad me the Louvre till I bring home glad tidings. I admit I called on [Louis] Anquetin to-day… I went and had an ostentatious drink at the nearest café… and then bought a brown plush hat with a feather in it which must be very irritating seen from a bird’s eye point of view.’33
These tactics were surprisingly successful and he soon came across what they wanted, near the Luxembourg Gardens. By the middle of October they had moved into 63, rue Monsieur-le-Prince, and engaged a young girl called Clara to look after them while they looked after the children. ‘She [Clara] cleans a room thoroughly in the twinkling of an eye,’ Ida informed Alice, ‘cooks exquisitely, is clean to a fault, and can remember the exact mixture and amount and time of food for 3 babies under 1 year.’ She was, moreover, not physically beautiful and seemed ideally suited to them.
Ida’s fourth child, confidently referred to as Suzannah since its conception, was born on 27 November. It was ‘another beastly boy – a great coarse looking bull necked unpoetical unmusical commercial snoring blockhead’, she told Margaret Sampson. Yet he was the weakest of all her children and for over a year lived on bread, milk and grapes. ‘He is called Quart Pot – as being a beery fourth,’ Ida wrote to the Rani. ‘…After my experience I have quite given up the belief in a good god who gives us what we want. To think I must make trousers to the end of my days instead of the dainty skirt I long to sew… he is a difficult child like David was… Poor little unwelcome man.’ Later called Jim, he finally settled, after gigantic difficulties in registering his birth, into the name of Edwin.
The world was fuller than ever of babies. But in these new surroundings, and fortified by her new outlook on life, Ida did not feel submerged. ‘I almost think it worth while to live in this little world of children,’ she confessed to the Rani. ‘We are sometimes convulsed with laughter.’ Laughter was the new ingredient in her life. ‘Things mostly get worse in this world,’ she had written to Margaret Sampson from Matching Green. Now, from Paris, she wrote to her: ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that laughter is the chief reason for living… One is not bound to be too serious.’ This was her new discovery, and with it rose ‘those bubbles inside’ that made her feel ‘like a champagne bottle that wants to be opened’.
Dorelia was the centre of this happiness. While Augustus came and went, appearing over the horizon of London and Paris, she looked after Ida during her confinement and after Edwin’s birth; she coped with the crises ranging from burst hot-water bottles to outbreaks of measles. Difficulties dwindled in her presence like weeds starved of nourishment: it seemed ridiculous to get worked up over such trivial affairs. ‘My dear, you have no idea of the merits of Dorelia,’ Ida confided to the Rani. ‘Imagine me in bed, and she looking after the 4 others – good as gold – cheerful – patient – beautiful to look upon – ready to laugh at everything and nothing. She wheels out 2 in the pram, David and Caspar walking, daily, morning and evening – baths and dresses them – feeds them – smacks them.’
A few years back, Ida remembered, she had thought the Dowdalls very rich because they drank wine with their dinner. The food in Paris was so delicious and the wine so cheap that they ate and drank whatever they wanted, thanks to Gus’s industry. ‘I think we must be rich,’ she wrote to Margaret Sampson, ‘because though there is such a lot of us, we live very comfortably and are out of debt.’34
Their new life contained many aspects of the old, but the two mothers were better able to deal with it. Ida, in particular, regained her self-confidence. ‘This place is divine,’ she wrote to Margaret Sampson, ‘and one can do everything – one feels so strong.’ Outside the flat, their routine was of an almost bourgeois respectability. ‘Time was spent taking the children out in a pram to the Luxembourg Gardens and in the evenings sitting in cafés or sometimes going to concerts, art shows, museums,’ Dorelia remembered. ‘How attractive Paris was in those days, separate tables outside the cafés and discreet lighting.’35 On the surface, their days were ‘fairly ordinary’. But those who called upon these bourgeois-bohemians at rue Monsieur-le-Prince saw something extraordinary. They had almost no furniture and only one bed between the lot of them – the children sleeping in boxes on rollers, the babies in baskets. ‘Here is a picture of our life in one of its rarely peaceful moments,’ Ida wrote to Alice early in 1906.
‘Imagine a long room with bare boards – one long window looking on to a large courtyard and through an opening in the houses round to the sky and a distant white house, very lovely and glowing in the sun, and trees. In the room an alcove with a big wooden bed in it. At a writing table David doing “lessons” – on the floor two baskets – Pyramus intent on a small piece of biscuit in one – Edwin intent on his own hands in another. Robin in a baby chair with some odd toy – Caspar on the ground with another. The quiet lasts about ten minutes at the outside. Unless they are asleep or out there is nearly always a howling or a grumbling from one or more – unless a romp is going on when the row is terrific.’
Will Rothenstein, who looked in at their flat on his way to Venice shortly after they moved in, was deeply shocked by what he witnessed. The Johns seemed like a slum family with Augustus, on one of his visits, one of his bad days, a fearful figure, stamping around the bare boards. ‘He is very impatient with his children and they are terribly afraid of him – the whole picture is rather a dark one,’ Will reported to Alice (19 October 1905). ‘…I felt terribly sad when I saw how the kiddies were brought up, though anyone may be considered richly endowed who has such a mother as Ida. Ours seem so clean and bright compared with them just now.’
But in Augustus’s eyes it was the children who terrorized him. They needed money, prevented work, wanted to be entertained, got on his nerves. One day, amid the uproar, losing his temper with David and Robin, he slapped both their faces: and then smarted with remorse. ‘They will never really forget my having clouted them in the face like that,’ he told Dorelia. ‘I have never forgotten my father (whom I would give you for 2d) kicking me upstairs once – when I was almost Tony’s [David’s] age. Tell Tony I want him to enjoy himself – but to be somewhat useful and intelligent at the same time.’ It was impossible to work in such an atmosphere and he returned after a fortnight to England.
Ida was now free to construct the life of which she had dreamed. Liberated from the man-dominated world, she struggled to escape the domination of children. In addition to the quick and intelligent Clara, she employed another servant, ‘an old sheep’ – ‘which is why we can saunter out, and spend money to an outrageous extent… and we come in again, after an absence of 4 hours and find absolute tranquillity – babies everywhere asleep in cots (literally 3) and 2 virtuous little boys looking out of [the] windows at the rain from a house built of chairs – too sweet for words. Life is pleasant and exciting.’36
At last Ida seemed to have won that great luxury, time: time in which to read Balzac, Dostoevsky, Emerson and the Daily Mail; time to buy straw hats and cashmere shawls, to make clothes in which to sit for pictures which Gus might some day paint; time for music – Beethoven and Chopin; time to fill with talk and laughter and fantasy and sensuous laziness. They were not gregarious, the two of them: it was a secret life they led. ‘It is, for 2 or 3 reasons, impossible to know people well here – so I keep out of it altogether,’ Ida explained to the Rani. ‘…And it is just as nice in many ways not knowing people.’ Not knowing people was part of Ida’s detachment, her strength and freedom. ‘How delightful not to care what the neighbours think!’ she had sighed to Margaret Sampson at Matching Green. ‘My utmost is to tell myself and others that I do not care – I do all the time.’ In Paris she no longer cared so much. She had escaped from her family and the neighbours. She could be as free as Dorelia now: she felt sure she could.
Almost the only person they saw regularly was Gwen John – ‘always the same strange reserved creature’, as Ida described her.37 Dorelia offered to sit again for Gwen and made a black velvet jacket for her. But this phase of Gwen’s life was over – she was far from reserved with Rodin. Yet she was also strangely secretive. ‘Gwen persists in Paris,’ Augustus reported to Michel Salaman. ‘I suppose she prefers penurious liberty to social dependence. She has several pictures which she never shows to anyone.’ Gwen told Rodin nothing of the arrival of Ida, Dorelia and Gus in Paris (the new velvet jacket, she said, was made by a dressmaker), but wrote to him of her dreams and nightmares. Nevertheless, she would invite them over to her pretty new apartment at 7 rue St-Placide, a wide sunlit street of little shops on the northern boundary of Montparnasse. In the evenings they would dine with her on eggs and spinach and charcuterie in the room where she lived with her ‘horrid’ cat and where they would meet Miss Hart, an ex-pupil of Augustus’s at Liverpool ‘who has attached herself uncomfortably to Gwen’.38 Gwen gave them three beautiful pictures for their bare flat: also, Ida wrote to Augustus, ‘there was a head of Gwen by Rodin in the Salon’.
To be as irresponsible as she could allow herself, ‘as gay as possible under the circumstances’ – this was Ida’s ambition. Dorelia took to wearing bright jerseys and short velvet skirts; Ida cut her hair short but did not look very ‘new womanish, because it curls rather’. But who were the new women if not Ida and Dorelia and Gwen? Then David, presumably pursuing this fashion, cut off all his own and all Caspar’s hair so that they were almost unrecognizable when Ida and Dorelia returned home. Released from the awful presence of their father – the eyes that stared, the voice that roared – the children had never been more boisterous. David, very light and springy, imitated bears and baboons; Caspar, very fat and solid in a sealskin cap, turned somersaults, and boasted that he was a king; Robin, who climbed and jumped a lot, was constantly teased by David and Caspar, constantly teasing the beautiful Pyramus; while Edwin, a long thin cross creature, howled independently in toothless rage. But though the ‘acrobats’, as Ida called them, had never been more lawless, yet ‘I lose my temper less than of yore – Dorelia never did lose hers. We take it in turns to take them out.’
Other people’s tempers were less shock-proof. After three months, the neighbours, unable to endure the reverberating wet tumult any longer, demanded their eviction. ‘We shall probably take a small house,’ Ida wrote (12 January 1906) to Alice who, in the confusion of breeding, had sent a bonnet for Pyramus, mistaking him for Ida’s baby. Not living on a mountainside or in a copse, it seemed impossible to avoid compromise. In January they began house-hunting in the quarter beyond rue de la Gaieté. After exploring ‘millions of studios’ and a number of houses, they provisionally decided on 77 rue Dareau, where Augustus had already booked a studio for the spring. ‘The concierge of your studio showed us his rez de chaussée [ground floor],’ Ida wrote to Gus (January 1906). ‘Do you think it would do?’ There were many advantages: a garden, and the studio to sit in during the evenings, besides three living-rooms, a kitchen and scullery; the rent was low, they could take it on a quarterly basis, and they would still be near the Luxembourg Gardens. Best of all ‘your concierge says there can be no objection to the kids – he says he understands “qu’ils crient – qu’ils ne chantent pas!” He was incredulous when I said the neighbours would object – and if they do they can go and we’ll take their places.’ Both Ida and Dorelia were convinced they would not ‘find anything so good in every way as the R de C’. Their only doubt was Gus’s attitude. ‘If you dread having the kids and all at your place – if you think it will interfere with your work – we will find something else.’ Ida’s letter reached Augustus (who had just sold several pictures) in a jovial mood and he urged them to take the rez-de-chaussée at once. The clamour of the children seemed no great impediment now he could no longer hear it. ‘I trust the family is well to the last unit,’ he replied, enclosing a bundle of pound notes (February 1906). ‘I hope to get everything done in a week and then back again my hearties!… Feed up well… and circulate the money.’
The new apartment would not be ready till April. Meanwhile Ida proposed taking the three eldest children to the South of France. Mrs Nettleship had not been well and was planning to go to Menton for three weeks’ recuperation. To accompany her she invited her daughter Ursula together with Ida and the children. ‘I cannot refuse can I?’ Ida asked Augustus.
They set off early in March and spent the rest of the month at ‘a highly respectable hotel’ crowded with British gentlewomen of ‘comfortable means’ attended by their very correct daughters – prim little moppets in muslin. But the beauty of the country was heart-lifting. ‘Shall I tell you of the mountains?’ Ida inquired in a letter to the Rani (29 March 1906),
‘ – their grand grey forms right upon the clouds, the lower parts covered with trees – fir trees – and the lowest with Olive trees – and up at the top streaks of snow in the cracks (as seen from here) in reality masses of snow in the ravines and crevasses. And the town of Mentone all built up in piles against the hill and the sea – good old sea, ordinary old sea – spreading out at the bottom, with the steam yachts of the rich and the fishing boats of the poor and the eternal waves – so stupid and so graceful. And the mongrel population – selling in silly sounding French. They’re all Italian or half Italian.’
In the sunlight of the hotel garden among the tulips and the wallflowers, the pansies, stocks and daffodils, Ida sat reflecting on how strange everything was and how happy she ought to have been, yet wasn’t. Instead she fretted impatiently, filled with that familiar sense of exclusion that had devoured her at Matching Green. Gus had returned to Paris not long after she left for Menton. What was happening there? She longed yet dreaded to be back. These cushioned hotel days were a terrible waste of time. She felt like some general witnessing a battle swinging away from him, powerless to do anything about it. Good manners and an English sense of duty – all she had endeavoured to escape by coming to France – held her in check. If only she had been a different kind of person! ‘I crave to go to school,’ she told the Rani.
‘Not quite literally, but to set about learning from the beginning – Lord, how I long to. The 3 kids are here, and very brave and jolly. Edwin is left in the care of the loveliest girl in the world God damn her. And I believe Gus has gone back to Paris to-day; so they’ll all have a good time together, especially as his Poet Friend [Wyndham] Lewis is there, and great friends with Dorelia… I am here biting my nails with rage and jealousy and impotence. Because if I were there it would spoil the fun don’t you see? Oh why was I not born otherwise?’
This was Ida’s first setback since coming to France. Early in April she returned to Paris, and then she, Dorelia and their string of children moved into the rue Dareau.39 The two women re-papered the walls of their new home, covering them with sketches, pictures, photographs. It was another fresh start, and hope rose again in Ida. Augustus came and went; the children (‘it makes them all look very interesting’) all caught colds; and Dorelia (‘it’s her turn’) ‘is decidedly enceinte’, Ida informed Augustus.
‘I think I shall be a supernaturalist in Paris, and in London a naturalist.’
Augustus John to Alick Schepeler (1906)
‘About to embark shortly for England,’ Augustus had written to Wyndham Lewis. ‘I would be encouraged to the adventure by a word from you as to your welfare and whereabouts.’ No sooner had he settled on a studio for his work in Paris than the work began to flow in – but from London. He hurried back. ‘We had £255 [equivalent to £13,600 in 1996] in about ten days ago, to my amazement,’ Ida wrote to him from Paris. ‘You do make a lot.’
Augustus had hoped by this time to sell the Chelsea Art School to a Mrs Flower, ‘a remarkable woman’ and a cousin of Ida’s, so that he could spend more time in Paris. ‘The school has been very successful so far – I mean the first year was remarkably so – we have almost paid off our debts,’ he wrote invitingly to Michel Salaman. ‘No doubt there is a veritable goldmine in it, but the process of digging is long & tedious. Having prospected so successfully both Orpen & I would be happy to retire with all the glory & leave the yellow dirt for others to grab. We have the school with its lavish appurtenances, its golden prospects and a nucleus of brilliant pupils complete for sale & for a mere song.’40
Augustus hoped that Michel Salaman might hurry along the negotiations, but it was not until the summer of 1907 that they completed the sale. The delay did not please Orpen and irritated Augustus, who continued to be bound to the school, though ‘only morally bound’, he explained. In fact he was wonderfully neglectful after the first year. ‘I hope the school will go on merrily,’ he wrote cheerfully to Orpen in 1906. ‘I thought it had stopped long ago.’41 But Orpen too had been away, in Dublin. He did not like to be connected with something that might turn out to be a failure. Their gold-mine was tiresome for both of them. ‘I am sick of the school and tired of Orpen,’ Augustus wrote to Dorelia (1906). ‘…I think of chucking it – even if I have to pay off debts.’
That he did continue teaching at Rossetti Studios was partly due to an exciting new development early that winter. This was the acquisition of a gallery next to Chelsea Town Hall in the King’s Road. Orpen, who largely financed it at the start, persuaded Knewstub to open the Chenil Gallery, as it was called – a small town house ideally suited, Knewstub saw, for accommodating his cultural dreams. Downstairs were two small rooms: one he converted into a ‘shop’ selling canvases, paints and all manner of artist’s equipment; the other he established as an etching-press room for artists wishing to print from or prove their own plates. Upstairs there were two exhibition rooms, one of which held a permanent collection of work by the regular platoon of Chenil painters: Ambrose and Mary McEvoy, David Muirhead, William Nicholson, James Pryde, Orpen and Augustus himself. At the back was a large studio which Augustus was often to use in the years to come.
The first one-man show at the new gallery, in May 1906, was of etchings by Augustus, and this stimulated continuous work over the early months of this year. ‘I have to spend days seeing to my etchings,’ he explained to the pregnant Dorelia as the weeks passed and still he did not return to Paris, ‘ – a man has ordered a complete set. I find to my astonishment I have done about 100.’ This man was the art historian Campbell Dodgson who, on 20 February 1906, had written to Will Rothenstein asking him to approach Augustus and find out whether he would let the British Museum (for which Dodgson worked) have a selection of his etchings and drawings. Rothenstein put Dodgson directly in touch with Augustus and a week later they met. ‘I went to see John yesterday and looked through his etchings which interest me very much,’ Dodgson reported to Rothenstein (28 February 1906). ‘He is quite willing to give me specimens of his drawings hesitating only on the grounds that he hopes to do better, and would not like us to have things that he hopes to tear up some years hence; but there is not much fear of such a fate befalling certain things that I saw yesterday and would like to secure. But [Sidney] Colvin will go himself in a few days and settle the matter.’42
Once his initial interest in the plates had passed, Augustus was often careless about their preservation, allowing them to be scratched, battered and corroded by verdigris. So when Knewstub stepped forward to rescue these plates from further harm, and superintend their printing and publication in the catalogue of the coming exhibition, he found himself confronted by a vast salvage operation. He cleaned, he scraped, he searched, and as many plates as he could find (whether in sufficiently good condition to yield editions, or so badly treated that they had to be destroyed) he took over and numbered, together with all such early proofs as he could discover in Augustus’s studio.
The Chenil exhibition ‘far exceeded what I expected’, Augustus told Charles Rutherston.43 He would continue his experiments with needle and copper for another three years, though on a gradually diminishing scale. After 1910 he produced only half a dozen or so more etchings – a small group of portrait studies of a girl’s head; a head of John Hope-Johnstone recovering from measles; and two self-portraits. His later work shows an advance from the sometimes rather laboured earlier efforts, with their ample use of dry-point, to the pure etched line of his most successful plates. But the medium was too slow, too small. The paraphernalia of needles and plates, of nitric and sulphuric acid, which had captured his interest at first, eventually fatigued him. He wanted to try something new.
*
Augustus’s treatment of his copperplates was similar to the way he treated his friendships. He liked to keep an army of acquaintances in reserve, upon any number of which he could call when the mood was on him. He wanted fair-weather friends; he wanted them to be, like some fire brigade, in permanent readiness for his calls; and he enjoyed summoning them fitfully. Among the etchings at the Chenil Gallery were several portraits of friends who had already sped out of his life: Benjamin Evans, who had shot down the drain;44 Ursula Tyrwhitt and Esther Cerutti, who had been outshone by later models. There were others, too, of whom he saw only little these days. Michel Salaman, who had graduated from art student into fox-hunting squire; ‘little Albert’ Rutherston, already partially eclipsed by little Will Rothenstein; the monkey-like Orpen, who had grown curiously attached to a gorilla in the Dublin zoo – ‘perhaps the only serious love affair in his life’;45 and Conder, who in June 1906 had become so ill he was forced to relinquish painting.
There were two motives behind all Augustus’s friendships: inspiration and entertainment. Either they stimulated him when at work, or they induced self-forgetfulness in the intervals between working. But none of them could live up to his veering needs. He knew this and mocked himself for it. ‘I am in love with a new man,’ he told Dorelia on 16 March 1906, ‘Egmont Hake – a bright gem!’ Such mysterious gems – and there were many of them – would glitter for a day and then be lost for ever. His most consistent relationships were those which were held together by humour or, more simply, renewed by imaginative periods of absence. He welcomed the retreating back, the cheerful goodbye, the disappearing companion whose tactful vanishing trick saved in the nick of time their comradeship from the terrible contempt that grew with familiarity. He relished people such as John Sampson, whom he could abandon ‘in the Euston Road while he was immobilized under the hands of a shoe-black’, and then meet again, their feelings charged with nostalgia; and of course Gwen, for whom, though she could not work under her brother’s shadow, he continued to feel admiration shot through with exasperated concern.
What Gwen had known about Gus, others, such as Wyndham Lewis, were beginning to discover for themselves. ‘I want also to do some painting very badly, and can’t do so near John,’ Lewis complained to his mother (1906). ‘…Near John I can never paint, since his artistic personality is just too strong, and he [is] much more developed, naturally, and this frustrates any effort.’46 Partly because of this frustration, Lewis turned to his writing, being known by Augustus as ‘the Poet’ because he had produced, in next to no time, ‘thirty sonnettes’, some of them as good as Baudelaire’s. Now that Augustus was jostling between Paris and London, he was able to see far more of Lewis, then on the move between England, France and Germany while brewing up his Dostoevskyan cocktail of a novel, Tarr. They would go off to nightclubs together, or sit drinking and talking at the Brasserie Dumesnil in the rue Dareau, recommended by Sickert for its excellent sauerkraut. ‘Not that I find him absolutely indispensable,’ Augustus conceded, ‘but at times I love to talk with him about Shelley or somebody.’47 Lewis himself preferred to talk about Apaches and ‘to frighten young people’ with tales of these Parisian gangsters. But what chiefly amused Augustus were Lewis’s ‘matrimonial projects’ which formed part of his material for Tarr. If the artist, Lewis seems to argue, finds much in his work that other men seek in women, then it follows that he must be particularly discriminating in his love affairs, and scrupulously avoid sentimentality and all other false trails that lead him away from reality. It was a theme nicely attuned to Augustus’s own predicament. ‘I am like a noble, untaught and untainted savage who, embracing with fearful enthusiasm the newly arrived Bottle, Bible and Whore of civilization, contracts at once with horrible violence their apoplectic corollary, the Paralysis, the Hypocrisy and the Pox,’ he wrote. ‘…So far I have been marvellously immune.’
Lewis’s immunity appeared even stronger. Prudence, suspicion and an aggressive shyness ringed him about like some fortress from which he seldom escaped. ‘Lewis announced last night that he was loved!’ Augustus reported to one of their model-friends, Alick Schepeler.
‘At last! It seems he had observed a demoiselle in a restaurant who whenever he regarded her sucked her cheeks in slightly and looked embarrassed. The glorious fact was patent then – l’amour! He means to follow this up like a bloodhound. In the meanwhile however he has gone to Rouen for a week to see his mother, which in my opinion is not good generalship. He has a delightful notion – I am to get a set of young ladies during the summer as pupils and of course he will figure in the company and possibly be able to make love to one of them.’
But when not in the vein to be amused by Lewis’s eccentricities, Augustus would quickly get needled. It was almost as if his own easy romanticism was being caricatured. ‘The poet irritates me,’ he admitted, ‘he is always asking for petits suisses which are unheard of in this country and his prudence is boundless.’ The conclusion was obvious. ‘What a mistake it is to have a friend – or, having one, ever to see him.’
The trouble was that Augustus could not be alone for long. Without an audience he disappeared. The dark interiors of the pubs and cafés were like wombs from which he could be reborn. He would saunter in as if on the spur of the moment, choose his companion for an hour or two, a Juliet for a night: then it was over and he could be someone else. Such encounters, with no hangover of duty, were marvellously invigorating. If friends were God’s apology for families, it surely followed they should be as unlike one’s own family as possible. But perfection could not be found in any single man, for perfection must suit all weathers. ‘I cannot find my man,’ he told Alick Schepeler, ‘ – hence I have to piece him together out of half a dozen – as best I can.’
Upon the construction of this composite friend Augustus spent much haphazard energy. A little less McEvoy, for example, was quickly balanced by more Epstein and the introduction of a new artist into his life, Henry Lamb. In his correspondence, Augustus sometimes has fun with Epstein. ‘Epstein called yesterday and I went back with him to see his figure which is nearly done,’ he wrote to Dorelia in 1907. ‘It is a monstrous thing – but of course it has its merits – he has now a baby to do. The scotch girl [Margaret Dunlop] was here – she is the one who poses for the mother – he might at least have got a real mother for his “Maternity”. He is going about borrowing babies. He suggested sending the group to the N.E.A.C.!! Imagine Tonks’ horror and Steer’s stupefaction!’
Augustus did some good etchings of Epstein. Most striking of all is a red-pencil drawing which Epstein himself much liked. By using the point of a very hard pencil Augustus gives this portrait a taut quality, a tightness of face and mouth indicating both intellect and temperamental force. The rhetorical pose of the head bends a little to the romantic conception of genius, but the drawing48 also emphasizes the ‘closed to criticism’ nature of Epstein’s personality.
He had much criticism to close his mind to. The ‘monstrous thing’ Epstein was working on in his studio in Cheyne Walk early in 1907 was almost certainly one of the eighteen figures, representing man and woman in their various stages between birth and death, that were to embellish the new British Medical Association building in the Strand. These figures, mostly nudes, caused much outrage when, in the spring of 1908, they were first thrust upon the public gaze. ‘They are a form of statuary which no careful father would wish his daughter, or no discriminating young man, his fiancée, to see,’ one newspaper informed its readers.49 Other experts, including clergymen, policemen, dustmen and the Secretary of the Vigilance Society, were soon adding their voices to this vituperative hymn. The statues were ‘rude’; they exerted a ‘demoralizing tendency’ and constituted ‘a gross offence’. In short, they would ‘convert London into a Fiji Island’. Who could doubt that these objects must become a focus for unwholesome talk, a meeting place for all the unchaste in the land?
Many artists defended Epstein. But Augustus, who privately did much to help him,50 saw clearly that artistic support was irrelevant to moral indignation and would never impress the public. ‘Epstein’s work must be defended by recognised moral experts,’ he wrote to the art critic Robert Ross. ‘The Art question is not raised. Of course they would stand the moral test as triumphantly as the artistic, or even more if possible. Do you know of an intelligent Bishop for example? To-morrow there is a meeting to decide whether the figures are to be destroyed or not. Much the best figures are behind the hoarding which they refuse to take down. Meanwhile Epstein is in debt and unable to pay the workmen.’
Augustus’s advice was quickly taken up, and the Bishop of Stepney, Cosmo Gordon Lang, later Archbishop of Canterbury, was persuaded to mount the ladders to the scaffolding, from where he inspected the figures intimately and, on descending, declared himself unshocked. His imperturbability did much to reassure the British public and soothe the Council of the British Medical Association, which instructed work to proceed.
Though Augustus admired Epstein’s sculpture, he was impatient with some aspects of his personality and shocked to discover that this milk-drinker from America excelled in blowing his own trumpet.51 ‘I hope Epstein will find his wife a powerful reinforcement in his studio,’ Augustus wrote to Will Rothenstein (19 September 1906) on learning of the sculptor’s engagement to Margaret Dunlop. ‘Perhaps she will coax him out of some of his unduly democratic habits.’ As proud and touchy as Augustus was truculent, Epstein appeared determined to attract hostility. Augustus was able to oblige him here, and their friendship was often blown on the rocks.
But in these early days they got on well enough. Augustus’s extravagance in the middle of so much polite good taste was refreshing to Epstein, and he admired Augustus’s skill. Besides, Epstein needed encouragement and Augustus could afford to give it. Often they would be joined by McEvoy in whose gentle company neither felt disposed to quarrel. Epstein also dropped round at the Chelsea Art School where he posed as a model for a shilling an hour, and afterwards there would be black periods of silence as he and Augustus leant against one of its walls: then a remark from Epstein – ‘At least you will admit that Wagner was a heaven-storming genius.’ Finally from Augustus an ambivalent grunt.
A witness to these exchanges, and much impressed by them, was Henry Lamb. Lamb had recently thrown up his medical studies in Manchester and, in a desperate bid to become an artist, turned up in London with an alluring wild girl called Nina Forrest whom, after Mantegna’s Saint, he rechristened ‘Euphemia’. While Lamb trained himself as an artist, Euphemia became an artist’s model and was soon posing for Epstein. She had a natural sense of theatre, and drama perpetually hovered in the air around her. She was also ‘a great romancer’ and would grow famous for her amorous anecdotes. How interesting ‘impure women are to the pure’, Virginia Woolf later meditated over her. ‘I see her as someone in mid-ocean, struggling, diving, while I pace my bank.’52 Early in 1906 Euphemia discovered she was pregnant and, on 10 May, Henry and she were married at the Chelsea Register Office with Augustus as one of their two witnesses – shortly after which she appears to have had a miscarriage.
For the time being Augustus was no more than a witness to Euphemia’s romances, but he involved himself quite seriously in Henry’s career. While Euphemia somehow seemed ‘always well supplied with money’, Henry was impecunious. Arriving in London with a modest stipend and working intermittently as an illustrator for the Manchester Guardian, he enrolled at the Chelsea Art School at the beginning of 1906 and would sometimes sleep there on the model’s throne. On coming in at night he would find a fresh cartoon done by Augustus during the evening – large works of many almost life-size figures that dazzled him. Occasionally Augustus, in his rumbling voice, would brood on these compositions: ‘I think of taking out that figure and introducing a waterfall.’ Lamb, wide-eyed, felt himself to be in the incalculable presence of genius.
Bernard Leach, the potter, remembered Lamb’s first day at the Chelsea Art School. ‘Augustus came in late straight from some party looking well groomed and remarkably handsome, picked up a drawing board, and instead of using it sat behind this new student and watched him for half an hour. They talked and Augustus invited Henry to his home.’53
Augustus had a powerful impact on Lamb, giving his draughtsmanship a technical fluency and professionalism, warming his rather clinical line, enriching it with new vitality. What Lamb lacked was confidence. ‘The sight of my recent products fills me with dejection,’ he wrote; ‘my pictures… deject me beyond sufferance.’ In Augustus’s company this dejection lifted. He appeared ‘a heaven-sent star destined to light the way for a beginner’, wrote Lamb’s biographer Keith Clements.
It was a matter of style and also of lifestyle. Another art student, Nina Hamnett, saw Augustus as ‘a tall man with a reddish beard, in a velvet coat and brown trousers, striding along… a splendid-looking fellow and I followed him down the King’s Road.’54 Lamb too followed Augustus, modelling himself on his manner, his looks, his life. It was as if, for a time, Augustus imprinted his personality on him. ‘I should have been Augustus John,’ Bernard Leach recalled Lamb saying. Inevitably, Augustus was flattered by this talented follower. What could be more proper than a young man wishing to act apprentice to him? It was a concept he had always understood and needed to benefit from himself. He responded generously. ‘I hope you are doing designs lightheartedly,’ he wrote (24 October 1906). ‘ – What is so becoming as cheerfulness and a light heart? I think the old masters are apt to presume upon our reverence sometimes – one is always at a disadvantage in the society of the illustrious dead – perhaps it would be high time to bid them a reverent but cheerful adieu! since we have invented umbrellas let us use them – as ornaments at least.’
Lamb was not slow to respond to this message. He elected Augustus as a new master among the illustrious living. Confidence swelled within Augustus – confidence, but not conceit. If people believed in him, he believed in himself. He needed other people’s faith to fortify his own will. ‘Your letter thrills me somewhat,’ he replied to Lamb (5 November 1906). ‘I am not quite a Master – yet. I keep forgetting myself often. But I am learning loyalty. We must have no rivals – and no fickleness. I feel ashamed to go to sleep sometimes. I am learning to value my own loves and fancies and thought above all others. But Life has an infernal narcotic side to it – and one is caught napping and philandering – – – alas! alas! if one had some demon to whip one! I hardly believe you had faith in my possibilities – in my will. I am so glad.’
No friendship yet had begun in such promising style – none would lead to such complications or remain so long an embarrassment to both artists.
In London Augustus had found work and a few people to inspire him; in Paris entertainment and the promise of inspiration to come. Something of the awe and wonder that possessed him when he first went to the Slade now re-entered his life. Paris was ‘a queen of cities’ and ‘so beautiful – London can’t possibly be so nice’.55 No atmosphere, surely, was ever more favourable to the artist. On the terraces of the Nouvelle Athènes or the Rat Mort it was not difficult to conjure up the spectres of Manet, Camille Pissarro, Renoir, Cézanne, Degas – figures from the last enchanted epoch, laughing and arguing across the marble tables. But the real heart of Paris lay further back; it belonged to the Middle Ages. Malodorous, loud with bells, its architecture full of passion, of the cruelty and splendour of ancient superstition, Paris seemed more dangerous than London. It was closer to Nature, to the earth itself, to man and woman’s strange evolution from that earth. The murmur of the boulevards, deep and vibrant; the view of the city seen at dusk from Sacré-Coeur as the light receded to a pinpoint between the smoking of a thousand chimneys; the landscape of the Île de France with its opulent green as if depicted through medieval windows: such beauty seized him with a kind of anguish, confronted him with unanswerable questions: ‘What will become of us? What could all this mean?’
For hours he would sit in the rue de la Gaieté, watching, talking, drinking, listening to the infernal din of a mechanical orchestra, and never wishing to go home – never going home. There was more dreaming of painting than pictures painted.
‘They are playing in this café just now – so I expect I shall get rhetorical presently,’ he wrote to Alick Schepeler. ‘Yes, I shall paint yet: it is more like fighting than anything else for me now – it will be triumphant though… Civilization getting in my way and making a dreary hash of things – and wasting time. I’d like to be kept by a prince. It’s not safe to let me loose about the place in this way – and then send me bills to pay.’
The cosmopolitan world of Montparnasse was a literary world. The talk was of Flaubert and Baudelaire, of Turgenev and Nietzsche, the excellent heathen entertainment of Huysmans and the newest Dostoevsky in French. Almost the only painter, living or dead, who is mentioned in his correspondence is Puvis de Chavannes. Augustus’s Parisian friends were mostly writers, in particular the circle that gathered round the monocled, top-hatted figure of Jean Moréas at the Closerie des Lilas and which included Guillaume Apollinaire, Colette, Paul Fort, the wandering poet who, with his brother Robert, ran the journal Vers et Prose, and André Salmon, the literary spokesman of ‘Les Jeunes’.
Of all this group his most valued friend was Maurice Cremnitz. Late at night, after the group had dispersed from the Closerie des Lilas, Cremnitz would lead Augustus off to louche areas of Paris and leave him with a Swedish lady famous for her exercises. At other times they would explore the old quarters of the city, ‘visiting the wine shops where the vin blanc was good – and cheap’;56 and they would go to the little Place du Tertre, to the Moulin de la Galette and the Bal Tabarin, where such delightful songs as ‘Petite Miette’ and ‘Viens pou-poule’ were all the rage and where Cremnitz would sing, in amazing cockney English, ‘Last Night Down our Alley Came a Toff’ ‘I observed the true gaieté française last night,’ Augustus wrote after their first expedition, ‘a little femme de mauvaise vie had a new song she kept singing and teaching everybody else – no one could have been more innocently happy – and the song – !!’57
Innocent, too, at least in name, was an obscure subterranean bouge, the Caveau des Innocents, near les Halles, into which they descended one night, ‘and, I must admit, drank great quantities of white wine. A drunken poet joined us there and declaimed Verlaine and his own verses at great length. As he had the impudence to take exception to my style of Beauty I said “Voulez vous venez battre avec moi, Monsieur l’Antichrist?” He got up and, having put himself into a pugnacious attitude, sat down again. Afterwards he was very affectionate, informing me that he and I had fought side by side in the Crimea – frères d’armes!’ This robust shadow-boxing was marvellously congenial to Augustus. Paris seemed to unite those two aspects of his personality that could, in his work and friendships, so easily diminish each other: romanticism and wry humour.
So, for a season, Paris diverted him. ‘I’ve been damnably lazy this summer,’ he admitted to Will Rothenstein (19 September 1906), ‘but am happily unrepentant. I fancy idleness ends by bearing [more] rare fruit than industry. I started by being industrious and lost all self-respect – but by now have recovered some dignity and comfort by dint of listening to the most private intimations of the Soul and contemning all busy-body thoughts that come buzzing and fussing and messing in one’s brain.’
*
All his life Augustus lived under the influence of an impossible ideal. What he sought in men – inspiration and entertainment – he also looked for in women, though in a different form. Many of his finest male portraits are of writers and artists: Thomas Hardy, Wyndham Lewis, William Nicholson, Bernard Shaw, Matthew Smith, Dylan Thomas, Joseph Hone, W. B. Yeats. Other men – Trelawney Dayrell Reed, John Hope-Johnstone, Chaloner Dowdall – brought him alive by virtue of their eccentricities. The inspiration of women sprang from his belief that they were closer to Nature and to the mystery of birth: and this he celebrated most lyrically in small glowing panels showing young mothers and children as part of a natural landscape. But women also entertained him simply and obviously by their sexuality; for sex, which had so worried him while he was an adolescent, had become ‘the greatest joke in the world’:58 and Augustus loved a joke.
As symbols of the miracle of life, women must guard their secret well. Yet the miracle of life, of which they were the custodians, depended upon the joke of sex. Inspiration and entertainment were therefore oddly harnessed, sometimes pulling in divergent ways.
No one, perhaps, catches this oddity and divergence so well as a woman he had recently come across in London. Her name was Alick Schepeler and, next to Dorelia herself, she became for a few years his supreme model. She was almost a parody of Augustus’s romantic ideal. No one, it seemed, knew who she was. ‘Are you a Pole?’ he demanded – but in reply she would only smile. In Chiaroscuro he refers to her – ‘Alick Schepeler, to whose strange charm I had bowed’ – only once, and declares her to have been ‘of Slavonic origin’, adding that she ‘illustrated in herself the paradox of Polish pride united to Russian abandon’. By naturalization she was in fact British, her mother, Sarah Briggs, being Irish and her father, John Daniel Schepeler, German. The facts of her life were unusual, though not extraordinary. Her real name was Alexandra, she was an only child and had been born on 10 March 1882 at Skrygalof, near Minsk in Russia, where John Schepeler worked as an industrialist. Her father died when she was five and she was taken by her mother to live in Poland. Here Sarah Schepeler found employment with a Polish family as ‘English’ governess, while Alexandra was boarded near by with a Mrs Bloch and her daughter Frieda. Some ten years later Sarah Schepeler died, and not long afterwards Alexandra, who had by now become part of the Bloch family, travelled to London with Frieda. The two girls, who were about the same age and had become great friends, lived together at 29 Stanley Gardens in Chelsea. Frieda went to the Slade but Alexandra, who appeared to have no special talent, took a course in typing and went to work as a secretary for the Illustrated London News. In her letters to Augustus she hints at leaving this paper and taking on grander work. In fact she never left. Her unsettled upbringing seemed to have implanted within her a fear of change, even change for the better. She lived in Chelsea and typed at the Illustrated London News for more than fifty years.
In the extent of her ordinariness lay her single extraordinary quality. She had nothing to hide, but from the presence of this nothing arose a mystery none could solve. Her talk was of her cat, her clothes, her office. She was unbelievably uninteresting – and no man could quite believe it. Augustus, in his pure wish to avoid intellectual passion, could not have chosen anyone better.
Yet she lived for passion. Love – physical and romantic love – was her escape from dullness. She had avoided the hockey-and-inhibition of a British education, and unlike many young girls in Edwardian London she was eager for love affairs. So her life became a fairy-tale. By night she was a coquette, abandoning herself anxiously to party-going pleasures. Day came, and she was translated once more into a pale contented secretary.
It is easy to understand why Augustus found her so interesting. Five feet five inches tall, she had sumptuous brown hair and pensive blue eyes. She was highly strung, easily pleased, equally easily offended. But her most bewitching quality was her gurgling voice, rich and soupy and full of flattering inflections.
It was through Frieda Bloch and her Slade friends that Alick, as everyone called her, got to know Augustus and subsequently many other writers and artists, from Wyndham Lewis to W. B. Yeats. Some of them treated her unkindly, though she never complained, never explained. When questioned about Yeats, she simply gurgled, her voice like hot air bubbling through lemonade: ‘Ah Yeats – he was a won-derful man!’ And Lewis? ‘Yes – won-derful!’ As for Augustus, he was ‘won-derful!’
For such artists and poets her admiration was unfettered. While Ida and Dorelia were tucked up together in Paris, Augustus and Alick began to see a good deal of each other in London. Augustus was most surely himself when his hesitations were swept aside by a new passion. There was no hesitation over Alick Schepeler.
‘You are one of the people who inhabit my world,’ he wrote to her, ‘ – a denizen of my country, a daughter of my tribe – one of those on whom I must depend – for life and beyond life. I am subjected to you – be loyal to your subject.’ Since Augustus had to spend much of his time in Paris, his infatuation for this ‘jeune fille mystérieuse et gaie’ intensified. Their relationship developed through a correspondence that was voluminous, purple, and of astonishing tedium. Augustus owned that he had to have a supply of brandy in order ‘to continue this correspondence which bores me so much’. Boredom was an essential part of their intimacy. They were experts in the subject, connoisseurs; indeed they were competitors. In almost every letter he asks her urgently: ‘Let me know if you are badly bored?’ And in almost every answer she is able to boast of some new territory conquered by ennui. This ennui was an object of fascination to Augustus, who measures it wonderingly against his own until, reaching pathos, it becomes the essence of their love affair. ‘Do you know I long to see you again,’ he writes from France. ‘You are such a love – your smile is so wonderful and nobody cries so beautifully as you. How bored are you Alick? I get quite desperate at times – really yesterday I caught myself in the act of beating my brow! All alone and quite theatrically – I tell you I was angry!’ To paper up these areas of boredom, he begs her to ‘cover six sheets with an embroidery of pretty thoughts and interesting information’, and send them to him at once. ‘Wrap yourself in the sheets, so to say, and leave the imprint of your adorable self behind for me.’ But such an accomplishment is beyond Alick; she has nothing to say. He calls her ‘Undine’, after the female water-sprites or elemental spirits of the water in Paracelsus’s system. To help him escape from himself, and assume another role in the theatre of their romance, he begs her: ‘Do re-christen me!’ But this feat too is beyond her; she can think of no names, her head is empty – and so, to his disappointment, Augustus remains inescapably Augustus. Nevertheless, by a fraction, she was more bored than he, if only because he wrote more letters than she did. ‘Ah, Alick – writing so often as I do how can one avoid being a bore?’ he demanded.
‘I know what risks I run but still persist – it means talking to you vaguely, unsatisfactorily and blindly, but still some attenuated converse with you. I can’t see the expression on your face nor hear the sound of your voice – it is worse than the telephone – and more open to misunderstandings. It is a kind of muffled dumbshow with hands tied.
How is it you mean so much to me – you are like a woman found on an island by one happily shipwrecked, who shows him the cave where she sleeps and the berries she eats and the pool in which she bathes herself – and in kissing her his soul flies to the moon henceforth his God as it is hers.’
Boredom was only to be outwitted by the most extreme romantics. As hypochondriacs of the soul, they searched for a magic paradox, the profundity of the superficial, adding from time to time some nouveau frisson to their medicine chest. ‘I can tell you how to procure a new sensation,’ Augustus prescribed in one of his letters. ‘First of all get hot – undo your waistband – indeed it is better to remove your outer dress, then, seated on your bed, pour white wine very slowly down your neck, breathing regularly the while. But you must be at the proper temperature to commence with. If this doesn’t please you I will tell you another method.’
Alick’s letters almost always disappointed Augustus; but the posts that brought no letters from her stirred him marvellously. ‘Alick – why don’t I hear from you – won’t you write even if you don’t love me? Do not wait till you love me – it might take days to come on. What else can I say – nothing till I hear from you, my moon, my tender dove, rose of my soul. – John.’
Their correspondence was secret, and this secrecy gave excitement to the masquerade. Augustus never kept letters, he merely failed to lose them. Alick, who sensed this, is always rousing him to the point of destruction. ‘Yes I burn your letters,’ he prevaricated. ‘Even the last, than which nothing less compromising could have been written, I took away to a lonely spot and consumed. I hope you dispose of mine with equal thoroughness. In case you are still without a cigarette I send you one – to be smoked with this letter.’ But still Alick was not satisfied. She seemed to detect a bantering tone in this assurance, and on at least one occasion asked him to return her letters through the post.
‘Here are your letters – you see I have destroyed many. My habit (an evil one of course) is to put them in my pocket where they remain safely till it gets too crowded – when I weed out a few… There is nobody here who would read your letters or understand them… Yes – you may trust to my honour to burn all letters I get from you in future instantly and if you like I will eat all the ashes as a further precaution. You don’t realise what depths of discretion I am capable of, and I am improving in this respect – under your tuition.’
Alick distrusted flippancy. If Augustus had a fault, it was this disconcerting humour of his. She wished he were more straightforward, like herself. She told him plainly that she put every item of his correspondence to the flames. They may now be read in the Department of Manuscripts at the Huntington, California.
In his strangely muted world, isolated, swept by melancholia, Augustus welcomed Alick Schepeler as a fellow creature. His instinct was not wrong. She lessened his loneliness by being so inexplicably lonely herself. They were, he told her, both ‘Keltic’. They seemed cut off from their childhoods, still curiously shy on occasions, reading widely as a refuge from solitude, taking their mental colouring from their friends. They shared an obsession with clothes. When Alick commanded Augustus to write and tell her all he was doing in France, he replied: ‘I would rather talk about you and your beautiful underclothing.’ At other times he would question her: ‘Tell me, Undine, how are your shoes wearing? It seems so fitting, that you – a soulless, naked, immortal creature, come straight out of the water, should take to shoes with such passion!’ She would fill the page with descriptions of her dresses, and he would ponder over which had demoralized him the most, the blue, the pink or the black-and-white.
There was something other than sexual excitement in these exchanges. ‘I have bought a new hat and an alpaca coat,’ Augustus announced, ‘to give me confidence.’ His clothes were like those in an actor’s wardrobe. It was said that he modelled his appearance on Courbet, but in fact he had no single model in mind, for many transitory moods and influences claimed him. Parental disapproval was always a strong recommendation. One morning about this time old Edwin John read in a newspaper a description of his son’s appearance as being ‘not at all that of a Welshman, but rather a Hungarian or a Gypsy’, and at once sent a letter of reproof which Augustus had no difficulty in treating as Alick Schepeler was always imploring him to treat hers. But the reproof did not go unheeded and, to caricature his father’s wishes, he secured a complete Welsh outfit with which to flabbergast Montparnasse. Edwin John’s wish was for gentlemanly inconspicuousness, and this perhaps was the starting point for his son’s dramatic regalia. In these early days, Augustus’s clothes, like his handwriting and the style of his pictures, were always changing as if in search of self-knowledge, or the avoidance of it. ‘I am so mercurial,’ he confessed. ‘Really I must cultivate a pose. It is so necessary so often.’ It was necessary for self-protection, and perhaps for finding direction in his rudderless progress.
‘Méfiez-vous des hommes pittoresques,’ warned Nietzsche. Augustus quotes this in Chiaroscuro, but adds that, though weary of his extreme visibility, he was unable to achieve unobtrusiveness. Sometimes he despised himself for this failure. ‘I have half a mind to get shaved and assume a bowler,’ he told Alick. ‘My life seems more amazing everyday.’ So he trimmed his beard and for a short time did wear a bowler – with the result that he grew more noticeable than ever: a victim of his own appearance, as Princess Bibesco later described him.
The man who sent Alick Schepeler so many letters during 1906 is a costume actor – but something kept pulling the masks a little from his face. ‘The thought haunts me that in a gross state of satisfaction I have allowed myself to utter the most abominable sincerity,’ he tells her. ‘I ask you in your turn to make allowances.’ But these letters are not insincere; they are elaborately undeceiving. They expose, perhaps more clearly than anything else he wrote, the fluidity of his character, with its hectic crosscurrents of whim and temper. They show the urge to cover up his uncertainty with the hats and coats and hand-made shoes of the confident outer man. But what he intended as a means of self-confidence often made for agonized self-consciousness.59 He was sometimes embarrassed by his sentimentality. In such a mood he later destroyed many of his letters to Ida, telling the Rani that ‘they made me almost wither up in disgust’.
Augustus’s infatuation with Alick Schepeler had at its source the knowledge that, for whatever reason, her face and figure could summon from him good work. For this paragon of boredom was forever Lady Enigma to him. In the years 1906 and 1907 he drew and painted her numerous times, the drawings displaying more than any other group the use of oblique-stroke shading, moving downward from right to left, reminiscent of Leonardo’s silverpoints. His finest portrait of her in oils, entitled ‘Seraphita’, he accidentally set alight in the 1930s during one of his cigarette fires. But there are more than half a dozen remarkable drawings in galleries and private collections.60 Alick Schepeler herself is said to have remarked that she had never noticed she was beautiful until Augustus drew her. Yet the drawings are in no way prettified. They show a haunting face which, though it may have some characteristic John features – a slight slanting of the eyes or high prominence of the cheekbones – is individual. The eyes drill through the spectator with peculiar insistence; the hair, like great flying fingers, is wild; the expression varies between animation, mischief and secrecy. Always enormous strength is conveyed – a reflection of the force of Augustus’s feelings – without the cosiness occasionally present in his portraits of Ida and even Dorelia. Sometimes, as in a drawing entitled ‘Study of an Undine’, there is a hint of insanity. The face emerges out of soft contours and shadow, with its wispy strands of hair, like the head of Medusa. She is a cross between a witch and a nymph.
The letters he wrote to Alick Schepeler form a good commentary on these portraits. In the spring of 1906 he writes from Paris: ‘Am I painting? – why yes – and I have burst certain bonds too that bound my brain with iron and now my bewildered eye mixes dream with reality...’
To mix dream with reality was his ambition. He saw in Alick a perfect focus for this ambition since she lived most intensely in his imagination. He observed her and painted her in England; but it was in France that his portraits were conceived.
‘I see you standing on the summit of a sea-hill and, turning towards the sea with a gesture divinely nonchalant, project me a surreptitious yawn which, carried by the waves is at length deposited moistly yet merrily on my shore,’ he wrote to her from across the Channel. ‘I picture you extended, partly in and partly out of the water like an Undine hesitating between immortality and love, or like some sweet reptile of old discovering the first dry land or like some formerly aquatic species at the moment of differentiation. And how brown you are – O pray – retain the bloom till I come. Do not wash till I see you.’
On land he saw her, thought of her, as a witch:
‘It is regrettable that I have not persevered with my occult studies,’ he wrote in the summer of 1906. ‘I used to wonder whether you were a young witch… given to broom-stick riding and Sabbats of a Saturday. Perhaps if I surprised you astrally at this moment I should detect you in the act of performing some diabolical incantation or brewing a hellish potion or suchlike. Sweet one! More probably I should find you sleeping soundly and I would be able to see how many kisses one required to wake you up.’
Dream and reality, the very mainspring of his art, seemed by June 1906 to have moved to the Sleeping Beauty of Stanhope Gardens. Paris, which was to have given him the impetus for so much new work, was already beginning to lose its glow.
‘We have a source in us that can only produce its own fruits. Instinct is our genius.’
Gwen John
‘A sojourn at Ste Honorine-sur-Mer, near Bayeux, was memorable for little save the birth of my son Romilly,’ Augustus recorded over thirty-five years later.61 In his correspondence at the time, and in that of Ida, there is much that is memorable, though no mention of Romilly’s birth which, like that of Dorelia’s first son Pyramus, was never registered.
Within two months of moving to the rue Dareau, though living there only intermittently, Augustus was grumbling to Alick Schepeler (June 1906): ‘So far rather gloomy here – I am decidedly sleepy and feel the dullest of all devils.’ He resolved to reconnoitre a long holiday by the sea for himself and for what Wyndham Lewis had called ‘a numerous retinue, or a formidable staff – or a not inconsiderable suite, – or any polite phrase that occurs to you62 that might include his patriarchical ménage.’ ‘I am off to-night,’ Augustus signalled Alick one June evening, ‘to find a place by the sea, somewhere in Normandy I think. First of all I mean to go to Caen. The poet [Wyndham Lewis] is coming with me… I shall be moving about… Cher ange – why don’t you come over too, as you thought of doing? I will find a place. I will arrange everything...’
He roved the Normandy coast until he came to Ste-Honorine-des-Perthes and fell in with a band of Piedmontese gypsies – about a hundred vans packed with grand men and women with some sparkling children. He took out his charcoal, began drawing,63 and his spirits immediately veered upwards. ‘They spoke very good Romany,’ he reported to Alick, ‘and played very badly, alas. At Port-en-Bessin, near Ste-Honorine, there are wonderful sea-women who collect shellfish – they are very tall and quite pre-historic – just the sort you’d hate. I suppose I want to do a painting of them all the same.’ His mind was now made up. He would lead his families to Ste-Honorine, and station Alick Schepeler off the coast on Jersey. She could wear a beret and her splendid new pink dress – and for good measure she could bring her friend Frieda Bloch too. It would be a terrific summer. A ‘glorious bathe in the sea’ at Ste-Honorine confirmed that this was the correct decision, and he hurried back to Paris to fetch everyone.
‘Gus has just come back from finding a little house by the sea for all of us to go to,’ Ida informed Margaret Sampson. ‘The kids ought to enjoy it.’ Her implication seemed to be that the adults might not enjoy it. From July to the end of September they lived ‘chez Madame Beck’ at Ste-Honorine. ‘It is a tiny village,’ Ida told Alice Rothenstein. ‘…We are between Cherbourg and Caen. Bayeux is the nearest town, and we only get there by cart and steam tram.’
Here Ida had time to brood over the ‘patriarchical ménage’. As Dorelia had looked after her during Edwin’s birth, so now she looked after Dorelia. But the children, with whom Dorelia had dealt so calmly, rasped on Ida’s nerves and the demon of discontent rose in her. Only four years ago, after David’s birth, she had written to her sister Ursula: ‘I cannot realize I have a little boy yet – I cannot believe I am his mother.’ Now she had four boys and could hardly remember what it had been like without them. ‘I don’t care for them much,’64 she admitted. David, who was ‘very silly and not very interesting’, seemed in the last year not to have advanced beyond making cheeky jokes or noises like an engine. Caspar spent his time dashing idiotically in and out of the water – up to his ankles; Robin still did little but climb and jump; Edwin, who now looked like a huge swollen doll – ‘very ugly with tiny blue eyes’ – had developed so red a face that ‘we bathe him in sea weed’;65 Pyramus appeared more Wordsworthian than ever and, as ever, did nothing.
As at Matching Green, Ida’s ‘formidable staff comprised two girls – Clara, who had joined them when they originally came to Paris, and Félice, a very ladylike woman who made disagreeable noises in her nose and suffered from palpitations. She screamed at mice, had fearful starts when failing to spot people approaching her, and yawned all day – huge, lionlike yawns. Yet she worked very well, though no one liked her, least of all Clara. The two of them were seldom on speaking terms – either it was ear-splitting peals of abuse rivalling the children’s, or a disdainful silence. Their bad humour contributed to the tenseness of this holiday.
The confidence, the strength, even the humour of their life in Paris were ebbing. ‘We are in a village miles from the railway and by the sea,’ Ida wrote to the Rani that August. ‘It is very relaxing and we all, except the children, feel awful.’ What had gone wrong? At first it had promised so well. The sun shone gloriously and Augustus would lead off his sprightly troop on bathing parties, on long walks to pick blackberries for jam and ‘English puddings’, and to picnics along the sandy beaches or on the clifftops – ‘there is a lovely place on the cliffs where we slide down. Gus goes head first.’ These cliffs were ‘full of arches & covered with pale green seaweed,’ Dorelia wrote invitingly to Gwen as she waited for her baby to be born. ‘We’ve got a tame rabbit – we were going to have it for dinner but it looked so pretty we kept it instead – it races madly about the field.’66 They encountered several battalions of gypsies – ‘glorious chaps’ – and Augustus bought Ida a guitar which she promised she would ‘learn to play well’. The poet Wyndham Lewis arrived – ‘a nice beautiful young man’, Ida called him – and stayed five weeks, grew a beard, let off cheap fireworks and made everyone cry with laughter67 over his plans. He was ‘a refreshment in the desert’ for Ida. ‘…I love him as a brother.’
Gwen John also joined them with her cat, Edgar Quinet, otherwise known as Tiger, and bathed each day at Port-en-Bessin. She came, she said, for the sake of Tiger who had jumped out of a train and been lost for eleven days while Gwen, desperate and dishevelled and ‘living like Robinson Crusoe’ under a tree among nettles and rubbish, mice and owls, camped out on a piece of waste ground near St-Cloud. Still thin and nervous, Tiger needed a holiday: so Gwen allowed herself five days by the sea with the John tribe. She told Gus with justifiable pride that Rodin had declared her to be ‘belle artiste’. But actually Rodin had been angry with her over this matter of the cat. ‘All is finished for me,’ she told him before Tiger returned to her. ‘I would like to live longer but I will not be pretty and happy for you without my cat.’68
Rodin did not understand that this cat was a love-object whose loss symbolized a loveless world in which she did not wish to live. ‘Nobody suffered from frustrated love as she did,’ Augustus wrote. She would send Rodin three letters a day, almost two thousand letters over two years, as she waited for his weekly visits to her room. Rodin had ‘got in the habit of sleeping with her when the posing sessions were over’, his biographer Frederick V. Grunfeld writes, and sometimes Hilda Flodin, a sculptress who had introduced them, ‘would join in their lovemaking’. When the posing came to an end Gwen became his ‘cinq-à-sept, the lover one sees from five to seven, after work and before going home. In her case the caresses lasted barely an hour: he would make love to her, give her an orgasm, and then go instantly off.’69
She felt stupid in comparison to him, knowing so much less than he did – rather as she had felt with Gus in the days of their adolescence. He explained to her that ‘a man could love many things in many women,’70 her biographer Susan Chitty writes. But sometimes, like Ida, she was filled with ‘a mad rage mounting from the heart to the brain’ and would wonder if ‘this monster [was] in all women’s hearts to devour them and tear them to pieces?’ At such times she felt like accusing Rodin of ‘criminal cruelty and thoughtlessness’,71 as Gus still stood accused in her dreams. Then she would revert again to being Rodin’s ‘obedient model’, the perpetually waiting woman who believed, as she told Ursula Tyrwhitt, ‘one can be more free & independent in the mind & heart sometimes when one is tied practically.’72
Augustus, who was a prey to ‘unreasonable desires’ similar to Gwen’s, could not master that paradox. Whenever he felt tied, panic would run through him, and he made another bolt for this elusive independence. He was sure he had cornered it against the sea at Ste-Honorine-des-Perthes. But then, abruptly, the sun went in; the gypsies vanished; Gwen left; Wyndham Lewis, after sitting for his portrait, failed to amuse any longer; and Augustus was ‘plunged into gloom by a thousand tragedies’.73 Instead of turning up in Jersey, Alick Schepeler had drifted north to, of all places, Cumberland, taking with her Frieda Bloch. Augustus shut himself away, refused to paint out of doors, refused even to bathe except after dark. ‘I have had most horrible spells of ennui,’ he admitted. ‘I sat in a garden the other day and wondered what there was in the world at all tolerable. I examined a tree attentively to discover any beauty in it – without success. The sky seemed an awful bore and I wondered why it should be blue. If it had been dark indigo and the trees gold perhaps I should have been rather pleased.’ He could not paint, could not ‘get’ the colour of trees and sky, could not stop trying to paint. He could not rest, he had no energy. His melancholia was not just the absence of high spirits: it was a disease that consumed his very talent. The one cure was a stimulus for his work, and the one stimulus just then was Alick Schepeler. Now that she was further off than ever, she began to obsess him.
‘I have awful fits of boredom – awful… I dreamt such a dream of you last night’, he confided to her,
‘ – and you had at last actually consented to take off your clothes – at any rate you were quite naked and quite beautiful… I would love to lie about with you – no, I mean walk long walks with you – and perhaps have a bathe now and then. The people I see on the beach don’t please me… I am horribly restless – I wonder why the devil I came here now. I curse myself – and calculate the maximum of years I have to live… Kiss me Alick – if you love me still a bit – darling you strange one. It is time I went on with that portrait. I believe I shall do nothing before – almost. I am expecting a letter from you – Alick – I kiss your knees and eyes and mouth.’
He lived for her disappointing letters, wrote to her almost nightly, and composed sonnets to her in which he discovered (with apologies) her Christian name rhymed with ‘phallic’.
Maddened by frustration – and insect bites – he could not wait to be out of ‘this sea-side hole’ and begin to paint ‘Whitmanic’ pictures. ‘Just write, beloved,’ he urged Alick, ‘and keep my spirits up. I foresee dismal things if you don’t. The sea is beautiful all the same – I would like to lie in the sun with you and let the water dry on us.’
The other side of these generous letters was a lack of generosity to those around him. He could not help himself. For day after day Ida, Dorelia and the children were subjected to his devouring apathy. Deprivation – if only as conjecture – restored the prevailing condition of his childhood: deprivation of a mother; deprivation of love. He reacted like a difficult adolescent, grew surly, then aggressive. After many dangerous days of simmering, he could hold himself back no longer. ‘I have been dissecting myself assiduously here,’ he informed Alick, ‘and as a consequence have thrown overboard all self-respect and feel infinitely more comfortable and free and on excellent terms with the Devil.’
This allusiveness concealed a crisis that split apart the arrangements that Ida, with Dorelia’s collaboration, had so carefully prepared. Augustus had no wish to hurt either of them, but misfortune moved in his blood like a poison, and he had to expel it or die. ‘How I hate causing worry!’ he exclaimed. And how much he caused! For he hated being ‘unnatural’, and he hated secrets, which were claustrophobia to him. But his awful melancholy made him ‘careless of other people’s feelings’. What he now did was to blurt out the truth to Ida and Dorelia – the unstable truth of the moment. He told them that domestic life, even the ramshackle variety with which they had experimented, smothered him; he told them of his liberating passion for Alick, how his painting could not advance without her. People said you could not have your cake and eat it: but what was the point of having a cake and not eating it? There was no personal criticism in all this – it was simply that he could not be restricted; he would explode. Boredom, guilt, frustration, sterility: to such morbid sensations had their ménage led him. ‘I think I have about done with family life or perhaps I should say it has done for me,’ he wrote to Alick, ‘ – so there is nothing to prevent us getting married now.’
Marriage to Alick was only another fantasy he sported because ‘I wish to remain as respectable as possible in your eyes.’ What in fact he proposed was something less original: to duplicate the arrangement he had with Ida and Dorelia in Paris, with a similar arrangement with Alick and Frieda Bloch. He was full of plans for them to join him. ‘If I had a wish for the fairies to fulfil it would be that you would come to Paris with Miss Bloch before long and collaborate with me,’ he tells Alick; and then: ‘I begin to see very plainly that Miss Blocky will never get on unless she comes to Paris and brings you with her. I will find her a studio – and I will show her things I’m pretty sure she never suspected.’
Only now, for the first time, did Ida and Dorelia acknowledge that they could not contain Augustus. He was not proposing to leave them, simply to add to their number. He made no secret of it. ‘John is taking a studio in Montmartre, where he thinks of installing two women he has found in England,’ Wyndham Lewis confided to his mother; ‘and I think John will end by building a city, and being worshipped as sole man therein, – the deity of Masculinity.’74
It was Dorelia who resolved that she wanted no place in this city. Once Romilly was three or four months old, she would ‘buzz off’.75 Ida too would have liked to leave. Her predicament is set out poignantly in a letter she wrote from Ste-Honorine to the Rani:
‘Dearest, daily and many times a day I think I must leave Augustus. Isn’t it awful? I feel so stifled and oppressed. If I had the money I think I really should do it – but I can’t leave him and take his money – and I can’t keep the kids on what I have – and if I left the kids I should not find peace – you must not mind these confidences, angel. It is nothing much – I haven’t the money so I must stay, as many another woman does. It isn’t that Aug is different or unkind. He is the same as ever and rather more considerate in many ways. It’s the mental state – I don’t understand it and probably I should be equally slavish – No – I know I am freer alone. However one has lucid moments anywhere. Don’t think me miserable. All this is a sign of health. But it’s a pity one’s got to live with a man. I shall have to get back home sooner or later – not meaning 28 Wigmore Street and it doesn’t matter as long as I don’t arrive a lunatic. It’s awful to be lodged in a place where one can’t understand the language and where the jokes aren’t funny. Why did I ever go there? Because I did – because there lives a King I had to meet and love. And now I am bound hand and foot darling how will it end? By death or escape? And wouldn’t escape be as bad a bondage? Would one find one’s way… ’
At the end of September they all left Ste-Honorine and returned to the rue Dareau where the flowerbeds in their little garden had now been dug into mud-holes by the children. ‘I get fits of depression about every two hours – alternately intervals of malign joy,’ Augustus confessed to Alick. ‘Paris is a queen of cities but I think Smyrna would suit me better.’ Next moment he hankered after Italy – the Italians were surely the finest people in the world, and besides, he would be able to see in Italy ‘my darling Piero della Francesca’. Genoa might suit him, of course, or ‘Shall we go to Padua?’ he asked Alick. But even before his invitation had arrived, several new brainwaves were upon him: ‘I am inclined to take refuge in Bucharest at the nearest, to seek serenity in some Balkan insurrection, or danger in a Gypsy tent, or inevitable activity in Turkistan… I am horribly aware of the power of Fate to-night.’ This self-destructive urge quickly passed and, in a more hibernating mood, he suddenly inquired: ‘Perhaps I may depend on you for warmth this winter… I feel that once back in London I shall never leave it.’ By now Alick was thoroughly confused. What really was happening? Augustus was astonished at her question. Surely everything was perfectly clear. ‘As to my coming to London, is it not already definitely arranged?’ he demanded. ‘Haven’t I said jusqu’à l’automne a dozen times? And is not my word unimpeachable – am I not integrity itself?’
He did return to London that October, while Dorelia prepared to move off the following month. Only Ida was to stay on at the rue Dareau – with her pack of boys, and two quarrelling servants. Her bondage there was now tighter than ever for, to add to the complications, Clara had become pregnant.
And, since it was her turn, Ida herself was again pregnant.
‘It was more circumstances than anyone’s fault.’
Ida John to Alice Rothenstein (August 1905)
For the next six months, between October 1906 and the spring of the following year, Augustus, Ida and Dorelia tried for the last time to find a scheme of separate co-existing ways of life.
For Augustus the first taste of this new regime was indeed sweet. His depression lifted like clouds at evening, and exhilaration blazed through. The world was a grand mixed metaphor and he stood, in superb uncertainty, an extended simile at its centre. ‘I feel recurrent as the ocean waves,’ he noticed on arriving in London, ‘blue as the sky, ceaseless as the winds, multitudinous as a bee-hive, ardent as flames, cold as an exquisite hollow cave, generous and as pliant as a tree, aloof and pensive as an angel, tumultuous as the obscenest of demons...’76
But how long would this combination of feelings persist? Augustus himself was as confident as a boy. ‘I no longer suffer from the blues,’ he told Alick, ‘and my soul seems to have returned to its habitation. I think you are more adorable than ever.’ Though painting some of the ‘prehistoric sea-women’ that summer, he had been damnably lazy but, as he explained, ‘it is when I am not at work enough that I get bored’. The will to work throbbed through him. Seldom had he felt so vigorous.
But first there were some small practical matters to attend to. For while his soul had found its habitation, there was still no place to house his body. He required a new studio in London – a fine new studio to match his mood – and, while he was about it, should he not take another new studio in Paris? Then he would be free at last to paint. He wanted some place in Paris, ‘remote and alone – in some teeming street – where I can pounce on people as they pass, hob-nob with Apaches [gangsters] and maquereaux [pimps] and paint as I can. Then of course the studio in London – the new one – in your [Alick Schepeler’s] neighbourhood.’77 He had found nothing in Paris before leaving. He now took up the search in London trusting to ‘the Gods’ to guide him to ‘a studio I can live in and where you can come and sit without being spied on’. But the Gods, and estate agents, led him a complicated dance – to Paddington, Bermondsey and the East End: all without success. For the time being he still used his studio in the Chenil Gallery, which Knewstub offered to lease to him for a further year. But independence meant freedom from the Knewstubs, Orpens and Rothensteins, and so he refused it – while continuing to use it faute de mieux. For a short period he rented another studio in Manresa Road from the Australian painter George Coates. It seemed a splendid place – Holman Hunt had painted there – but Augustus did not stay long. Dora Coates noted that he had ‘a compelling stare when he looked at a woman that I much resented’. She also resented his treatment of the studio – soiled socks and odd clothes lay thick upon the floor amid the dust of weeks, and by the time he left it was as ‘dirty as a rag and bone shop’ and had to be scrubbed with carbolic soap. He found no other place so good as this, and by February 1907 was reduced to a ‘beastly lodging’ at 55 Paultons Square, owned by Madame Herminie Considerant, corset-maker.
The only virtue of such a place was that, being in Chelsea, it was near Alick. They saw a lot of each other that winter. Often their meetings ended rowdily. She is always striking him in the face with her ‘formidable fist’, he apologizing too late for being ‘so damnably careless’. Sitting to him, she discovered, like almost everything else, bored her excessively. Yet he had to paint her. His seriousness surprised her. ‘You have not come to-day – but, dear, come to-morrow – You know I am not stable – my moods follow, but they repeat themselves – alas – sometimes – I must paint you dear – to-day – probably you don’t quite like me – but do come to-morrow. Who knows? – You may find me less intolerable to-morrow… à demain, n’est-ce-pas chère, petite Ondine souriante. Soyons intimes – franches – connaissants – alors amants.’ By the end of the year, feeling ‘I want to wash myself in the Ocean’, Augustus returned to Paris.
It was desperate work this seeking for studios. Gwen was also looking for a new place – her flowers at the rue St-Placide were dying for lack of light. Besides, her room there was too square, and Tiger had taken against it. Like Gus she found the seeing of ‘horrible rooms’ very depressing. ‘Either the concierges were rude or their husbands lewd or there were single men among the locataires,’ wrote her biographer Susan Chitty. Towards the end of the winter she found what she wanted, ‘the prettiest ever room’ on the fourth floor at 87 rue du Cherche-Midi, a wider street round the corner of rue St-Placide. Tiger was happy, sharpening her claws on the wicker chair, and so was Gwen. After almost three years, Rodin had asked her to model nude for him again.
At about the same time as Gwen was moving round on a horse and cart, Gus also struck lucky, finding a vast room off the boulevard St-Germain, in an old hôtel (town house) belonging to the famous Rohan family. ‘I have taken a studio – with a noble address. Cour de Rohan [3], Rue du Jardinet,’ he told Alick. By February 1907 the workmen were busy converting it – ‘my studio commences to be magnificent’ – and by March he had moved in – ‘I will be about doing things in it soon.’ But by March it was too late.
*
As soon as Augustus had returned to London, Dorelia made her move. Ida sublet the studio at rue Dareau, and the two women set off to find a logement for Dorelia. By the beginning of November they had found what she wanted at 48 rue du Château. ‘It has 2 rooms and a kitchen and an alcove – one of the rooms is a good size,’ Ida told Gus.
‘It is in a lovely disreputable looking building – very light and airy, the view is a few lilac trees, some washing hanging up and a railway – very pleasant – and to our taste… The logement is 300frs a year. It is rather dear in comparison with ours, but we couldn’t find anything better or cheaper, and there will be room to store all your things in it… Dodo and I had an amusing interview with the landlord and his wife of the logement last night at 9. We had to go down to his apartment near the Madeleine – a real French drawing-room with real French people – Very suspicious and anxious about their rent and Dodo’s future behaviour – D. was mute and smiling. I did my best to reassure them that she was très sage and her man (they asked me at once if she was married or not and didn’t mind a bit her not being) was “solvent”. We said she was a model (she’s going to sit again) and the wife wanted to know if the artists came to her or she went to the artists! The husband kept squashing the wife all the time though he called her in for her opinion of us. He was small and concise and sensible, and she was big and sweet and stupid.’78
Dorelia moved in with Pyramus and Romilly immediately. But Augustus was not wholly pleased. It had all happened so fast and while he was away. He signed the agreement, since women were not allowed to make agreements for such large sums, but he did not want Dorelia disappearing. She had started modelling again – though there was no mention of Leonard since her return to Paris. She also had a woman to mind the children during the afternoons. ‘I think she is enjoying herself a bit in leaving the babies,’ Ida told Gus. He did not know what to think. After all, it was not impossible that he had exaggerated Alick Schepeler’s importance. There was certainly nothing exclusive about it. Besides, it was easy to exaggerate the significance of what he called his ‘physical limitations’. At Matching Green when Ida had been suicidal over Dorelia, Augustus had explained his behaviour in a letter to the Rani – and in essence nothing had changed now that Dorelia was angry over Alick.
‘One [i.e. Ida] must grow accustomed to the recurrence of these perhaps congenital weaknesses – which you must remember have not appeared with Dorelia’s arrival only but date in my experience from the first moment of meeting Ida – which are indeed included in her system as a mark of mortality in one otherwise divinely rational. Don’t please ever think of me as a playful eccentric who thinks it necessary to épater les bourgeois; things take place quite naturally and inevitably – one cannot however arrest the invisible hand – with all the best intentions – to attempt that is pure folly.’
But Dorelia was less tractable than Ida – and she had entered less deeply into the web. She saw no folly in his attempting to ‘arrest the invisible hand’ – everyone had to do that. She doubted his best intentions; she doubted his motives in writing to her now. Augustus was quick to protest. ‘My beloved Relia, I don’t write to you without loving you or wanting to write. Believe this and don’t suspect me of constant humbuggery. Who the Devil do you think I’m in love with? If you think I’m a mere liar, out goes the sun. I’ve been thinking strongly sometimes of clearing back over the Channel to get at you, you won’t believe how strongly or how often.’
And it was true: she didn’t. But at Christmas he arrived and Ida gave a great party in the rue Dareau, ‘immodestly’ hanging up a big bunch of mistletoe in the middle of the room. Gwen John turned up and Wyndham Lewis and Dorelia with her children, and Ida’s boys wrote a Christmas letter to Grandpa John in Tenby. They ate ‘dinde aux marrons’, plum pudding and ‘wonderful little cakes’; and they drank quantities of ‘punch au kirsch’. For the six children, instead of a plodding white-bearded Father Christmas, they had ‘le petit noël’ who, though he descended the chimney, had ‘a delicacy of his own entirely French’.79 It was a happy time. ‘The shops are full of dolls dolls dolls – it is so French and ridiculous and painted, and yet it doesn’t lie heavy on the chest like English “good cheer”,’ Ida wrote to the Rani (December 1906). ‘One can look at it through the window quite pleasantly instead of having to mix in or be a misanthrope as at home. Perhaps because one is foreign. It is delightful to be foreign – unless one is in the country of one’s birth – when it becomes gênant [inconvenient].’
The holiday was delightful, but it solved no problems: it was simply a holiday. After all was over, Augustus returned to finish his portrait of Alick Schepeler; and Dorelia went back to her logement. Gradually she was growing more independent. Her sister Jessie came for a few weeks to help with the children; she began dressmaking; got one of Tiger’s kittens from Gwen John; went on modelling. ‘Dodo has just been to déjeuner, washed herself (1st time in 3 days) and gone off to sit at “Trinity Lodge”,’ Ida wrote to Gus. ‘I’m afraid she’s forgotten to take her prayer book. She says for her last pose she didn’t have to wash – it was such a comfort. But for Trinity Lodge the outside of the platter must be clean.’ Soon Dorelia had established her own routine of life. ‘Dodo has only been once to déjeuner since she left,’ Ida sadly observed. ‘She is quite 20 minutes away.’
By March 1907 it seemed as if Dorelia had achieved her independence.
*
‘I am alone again – and alone – and alone.’ From Augustus, with his agreement, Ida was content to live apart – ‘it is so easy to love at a distance,’ she reminded him. And from a distance she still worshipped him. ‘I say Mackay is 2nd rate,’ she had written to the Rani in Liverpool.
‘…I have always known it, but the other day it flashed on me. So is Sampson. There is no harm in being 2nd rate any more than being a postman. It is just a creation… Augustus has not that quality – he is essentially 1st rate… As to a woman, I know only one first and that is Gwen John. You and I, dear, are puddings – with plums in perhaps – and good suet – but puddings. Well perhaps you are a butterfly or an ice cream – yes, that is more suitable – but we are scarcely human… This sounds tragic, but I have been living with exhausting emotions lately and am – queer – Yours in a garden Ida.’
In all aspects of her life, it seemed to her, she had failed. She had failed as an artist – even as a musician; she had failed as a friend – she seldom saw her friends now; that she had failed with Gus was obvious; and, what was perhaps as painful, her relationship with Dorelia had failed – they were still friendly, but that sweet intimacy had gone. She had failed too – was in the very process of failing – as a mother. Her sister Ethel came to stay and they ‘did nothing but alternately scratch out each others eyes and “die of laughing”’. She was reading Balzac’s Splendeurs et misères des courtisanes and told Gus she would love to have a book about the Empress of China ‘or, above all, a biography’. He was still her ‘Darling G’ or ‘Dear Oggie’, and she felt a sudden pang over him: ‘Oh dear, do take care of yourself, cheer up...’
If Augustus that winter stood at the top of a great mixed metaphor, Ida seemed to be sinking into a huge bowl of cough mixture, dill water, cod-liver oil, milk of magnesia. The eldest children were getting to an age when they wanted more attention but she had no more to give them. Their future seemed bleak with such a mother. David, she told Margaret Sampson, was ‘such a queer twisted many-sided kid. Horrid an[d] lovely – plucky and cowardly – cruel and kind – thoughtful and stupid, many times a day. He needs a firm wise hand to guide him, instead of a bad tempered lump like me.’ She had begun to arrange their education, sending David and Caspar to the École Maternelle of the Communal School – ‘there are about 300 all under 6’, she told Gus, ‘and they do nothing but shriek little ditties with their earless voices, and march about in double file’. But both boys were so unhappy there she had to remove them: another failure.
She was imprisoned during the children’s pleasure, for so long as the mind could tell, the eye could see. ‘Life here is so curious – not interesting as you might imagine,’ she wrote to the Rani.
‘I crave for a time when the children are grown up and I can ride about on the tops of omnibuses as of yore in a luxury of vague observation. Never now do I have time for any luxury, and at times I feel a stubborn head on me – wooden – resentful – slowly being petrified. And another extraordinary thing that has happened to me is that my spirit – my lady, my light and help – has gone – not tragically – just in the order of things – and now I am not sure if I am making an entrance into the world – or an exit from it!… As a matter of plain fact I believe my raison d’être has ended, and I am no more the inspired one I was. It seems so strange to write all this quite calmly. Tell me what you can make of it when you have time. My life has been so mysterious. I long for someone to talk to. I can’t write now – another strange symptom!’
It was a sickness of living from which she suffered – quite different from the suicidal troughs of Matching Green. Then there had been rising waves of jealousy; now, though she often dreamed of Augustus and Alick Schepeler, they were absurd dreams, never tortured. ‘Last night you were teaching her [Alick] french in the little dining-room here while I kept passing through to David who had toothache and putting stuff on his tooth.’ It was as if she was too tired to feel anything more. On hearing that Augustus was coming over at Christmas, she had remarked to the Rani: ‘Funny – I haven’t been alone with him for 2½ years – wonder what it will be like – boring probably.’ Yet she had not been bored at all. She had been happy.
In Ida’s letters, especially to the Rani, there is a fatalistic flirting with death: ‘Oh Rani – Are you in a state when the future seems hopeless? I suppose things are never hopeless really are they? There is always death isn’t there?’ Except for death, there seemed no new thing under the sun. She lived in a pale stupor. ‘The only way to be happy is to be ignorant and lie under the trees in the evening,’ she had told the Rani. But she could not regain such green ignorance.
She had not counted on Augustus. Now that he had finished his portrait of Alick, now that Dorelia had inexplicably melted away, he suddenly proposed returning to live with Ida. Why not? They had come through so much. What else was there for them? Ida was dismayed. She hardly knew what to answer. Even if he was temporarily feeling dissatisfied with the present arrangement, surely he would not regret it later on. Had he considered the implications of living with her? What about the children – ‘Can you really want to see them again?’ she asked. ‘You know they worry you to death.’ But Augustus had no home. He could find nowhere to live in London, and he could not work. Was his request really so unsatisfactory? After all, they still loved each other in their fashion; why should they not settle down in London and be happy? Besides, he had given her scheme a long trial. What he said, and the troubled way he said it, did not sound unreasonable. She told him he would be happier alone, but some men were helpless when left to themselves. ‘It may be I should come back to London,’ Ida reluctantly agreed. ‘You must tell me. I will come – only we get on so much better apart. But I understand you need a home. Dis moi et j’y cours. As to the love old chap we all have our hearts full of love for someone at sometime or other and if it isn’t this one it’s the other one over there.’
Her real feeling at the prospect of returning comes out in a letter she sent the Rani: ‘Gus seems to hanker after a home in London, and I feel duties beating little hammers about me, and probably shall find myself padding about London in another ½ year – Damn it all.’
One factor that tied her to Augustus, as she had explained at Ste-Honorine-des-Perthes, was financial dependence. Throughout the autumn and winter she had saved exorbitantly. To Augustus she represented such thrift as an art, parodying his own: ‘Am still trying to take care of the pence with great pleasure in the feeling of beauty it gives – like simplifying an already beautiful, but careless and clumsy, work of art.’ The impetus behind this economic activity was her desire to build some independence in the future. But the little hammers of duty were destroying this last dream. She had complained in the past of her own selfishness, but she was not selfish enough.
In a letter to Alice Rothenstein, Ida wrote: ‘It chills my marrow to think of living back in England.’ The Rothensteins were growing increasingly worried about her life with and without Augustus, and wrote to inquire, complain, praise and comfort her.
‘My only treasure is myself,’ she insisted to Will, ‘and that I give you, as I give it to all men who need it… as to Gussie, he is our great child artist: let him snap his jaws. What does he matter? It is you who matters, and you dare not be frightened except at your own self. I am glad to have your letter: it is such a comfort to hear a voice. Life is a bit solemn and silent in the forest where I live, and the world outside a bit grotesque and difficult. Certainly there are always the gay ribbons you talk of but they are only sewn on and are there to break the intolerable monotony, for which purpose, darling Will, they are quite inadequate...’
Such gloomy letters worried the Rothensteins, who blamed Augustus. But this was too simple, and Ida would not allow it. Gus never treated women as if they were children or inferior to men. He treated them as adults, fully capable of looking after themselves in a difficult world. Nor did he lie to them or seriously mislead them. He was transparent. The advantages and disadvantages he offered were immediately obvious. ‘I must write to say it is not so,’ she firmly answered Will. The devil, she explained, was in herself – ‘and as soon as you wound it, it heals up and you have to keep on always trying to find its heart.’ This devil had so many names: it was jealousy (which had driven Dorelia away); a vanity which masqueraded as duty; finally sloth. Would she ever kill it? ‘When one fights a devil does one not fight it for the whole world? It is the most enchanting creature, it is everywhere. God, it seems to spread itself out every minute. Sometimes I do find its miserable fat heart and I give it a good stab. But it is chained to me. I cannot run away.’
*
All of them were in Paris during February: Augustus moving into his new studio, and Gwen in hers; Dorelia in her logement; Ida still at the rue Dareau. ‘Let’s go up the Volga in the sun,’ Augustus entreated Alick. But it was no more than a gesture: he could not run away now from Ida. At moments he might have liked to. Paris that winter seemed crowded with the bourgeoisie, and he blamed them for his ill thoughts. ‘I am much depressed to-day by the aspect of civilization – never was human society so foully ugly, so abysmally ignoble – and I have also had a cold which doesn’t improve matters.’ He revisited all the places which had so delighted him less than a year ago – the Louvre, the Luxembourg Gardens, the Panthéon (‘to encourage myself with a view of Puvis’s decorations’) – but everywhere seethed with masses of people which ‘brought my nausea to a climax’. The whole French nation oppressed him. ‘I went into the morgue and saw 4 dead men,’ he told Alick; ‘they looked awfully well really – the only thing impressive I found today… These four unknown dead men, all different, seemed enlarged by death to monumental size, and lacking life seemed divested only of its trivialities.’
To be reborn was what he longed for – not through death, but in the birth of Ida’s fifth child. ‘Oh for a girl!’ she had written to him, yet he knew that ‘I always have boys’. She referred to the unborn baby as Susannah, but noticed that she was ‘pushing about in a fearfully strong masculine way’. The contemplation of another boy, which still had the power to excite Augustus, only caused her heartache. ‘In 3 weeks – si on peut juger – a new face will be amongst us – a new pilgrim. God help it,’ she wrote to the Rani. ‘What right have we, knowing the difficulties of the way, to start any other along it? The baby seems so strong and large I am dreading its birth. How pleasant it seems that it would be to die.’
Wyndham Lewis – whom Augustus was now accusing of ‘the worst taste’, but whom Ida still liked – had spent much of his time recently at the rue Dareau. ‘Mrs John and the bonne [Clara] will have their babies about the same time I expect,’ he wrote to his mother, ‘ – I suppose beneath John’s roof is the highest average of procreation in France.’
As it turned out neither of these babies – nor yet a third one that Wyndham Lewis had so far failed to spot – were born under Augustus’s many roofs. After some hesitation Ida decided to have her child in hospital. ‘It is much simpler and I don’t pay anything,’ she explained to her mother. ‘I just go when it comes on without anything but what I’m wearing!’
Clara and Félice had by now both left,80 and Ida engaged a new nanny called Delphine for the children. ‘Gawd knows if she’s the right sort,’ she reported to Augustus, ‘ – one can but try. She’s fairly handsome 22 years old.’ Under these circumstances Ida was obliged to send word to Dorelia asking whether she would return to the rue Dareau while she was in hospital; and Dorelia, in agreeing, walked back into the web.
‘Augustus is well in his studio now and a beauty it is – and he has plenty of models just at present… Dorelia – and all the kids – to say nothing of me in spreading poses,’ Ida wrote to the Rani late that February. Although the writing of letters made her feel ‘pale green’, she continued her correspondence right up to the time of her confinement. To lighten the black humour of some of these letters, she had told the Rothensteins: ‘we shall come up again next spring you know’. After which, she promised, all their worries ‘would melt away like the mist when the sun comes out’. But to the Rani, with whom she felt less need to dissemble, she confessed that it was not to the spring she was looking forward, but ‘to the winter for some inexplicable reason’. She was suffering from an ‘egg-shape[d] pessimism’ and ‘I am dreadfully off babies just now… in a fortnight or so the silent weight I now carry will be yelling its head off out in the cold.’
There was one further item of recurring news in the new year that seemed to promise, for all their heroic efforts over the last months, an indefinite spinning out of the complex network of their lives. Dorelia was again pregnant.
*
In the first week of March 1907, Ida walked round to the room she had engaged at the Hôpital de la Maternité, ten minutes away in the boulevard du Port-Royal. Nothing, as she had predicted, could have been simpler. The baby was born in the early morning of 9 March: it was a boy.
The complications began immediately afterwards. Mrs Nettleship, who had gone over to Paris partly for business and partly to see Ida, bringing with her on Ida’s instructions parcels of magnesia and dill water, special soaps and strong building bricks (‘by strong I mean unbreakable’), explained to her daughters Ethel and Ursula what was happening:
‘My dears, Ida is to have a slight operation. It is serious but not very dangerous. In 48 hrs she will be quite out of danger. It will be to-night – I can’t come home for a few days… They think a little abscess has formed somewhere and causes the pain and the fever. She has to go to a Maison de Santé [private nursing home] and one of the best men in Paris will do it. I am glad I was here as I could help… I have been running about all day after doctors and people.’81
Augustus seemed paralysed by these events. The waiting, the suspense, above all the stupefying sense of powerlessness unmanned him. It was a nightmare, and he like someone half-asleep within its circumference. ‘Apart from my natural anxieties,’ he wrote, ‘I was oppressed by the futility of my visits, by my impotence, and insignificance.’82 Every decision was taken by Mrs Nettleship from her headquarters at the Hôtel Regina. It was she who chose a specialist and arranged to pay him sixty pounds – ‘I would have paid him £6oo if he had asked it’; it was she who organized Ida’s move to the new hospital and paid sixteen shillings a day for her room there (each sum scrupulously noted); it was she who wrote each day to family and friends keeping them informed of developments. She was particularly reassured that the specialist, besides being the best in Paris, was well connected (his wife was a niece, she ascertained, of a baronet) and had attended several diplomats at the British Embassy. When not busy at the hospital she would inspect the children at the rue Dareau, interview Delphine and even Dorelia, replant the entire garden there filling up the children’s mud-holes, and conduct David to his new school. ‘He talks about “the boys in my school” just like an Eton boy might,’ she noted with approval. Between times she managed to keep her business affairs going, sending off satisfactory messages to various titled clients. Her energy was prodigious, and in complete contrast to Augustus’s stupor. ‘Gus looks quite done up,’ she confided to Ursula. ‘He has the grippe and he is terribly upset about Ida. He does everything I suggest about Doctors and things, but has not much initiative – he has no experience.’
The maison de santé to which Ida had been removed was a light spacious building in the boulevard Arago. Somehow the atmosphere here engendered optimism. ‘The place is the very best in Paris,’ Mrs Nettleship reported. ‘…The nuns who nurse her are the most experienced and so quiet and pleasant. If it is possible for her to recover she will do it here.’
The crisis, which so galvanized Mrs Nettleship and demoralized Augustus, was seen by them at each stage differently. Where she is hopeful, he is pessimistic. ‘Ida has got over her operation better than we expected,’ she writes to her daughters, while Augustus the same day tells John Sampson that Ida ‘is most seriously ill after an operation’. While Mrs Nettleship busied herself with complicated plans for Ida’s recovery, Augustus would scribble out wan messages to the Rani: ‘She is a little worse to-day’
But on one subject they were agreed: the baby. Augustus indeed was the more enthusiastic: ‘The new baby is most flourishing so far. I really admire him,’ he told Margaret Sampson. ‘…He has a distinct profile. We called him Henry as it was the wish of Mother Nettleship to memorialize thus her great friendship with [Sir Henry] Irving.’ But on Dorelia and on Mrs Nettleship Henry imposed an additional strain. ‘He sleeps all day and cries all night,’ Mrs Nettleship wrote to Ursula. ‘Someone has to be awake with him every night.’ He was, she added, ‘a great beauty’; but ‘I hope he will turn out worth all this trouble and anxiety.’ This pious hope was to echo, like a curse, down his life.
Ida was suffering not from ‘a little abscess’ but puerperal fever and peritonitis. ‘It all depends on her not giving way,’ Mrs Nettleship explained. ‘She is no worse to-night than she was this morning and every hour counts to the good – but she might suddenly get worse any minute.’ The main hope of her pulling through lay with what Mrs Nettleship called her ‘natural vitality’, but this had been worn away through the years to a degree that her mother did not know, and it was Augustus who saw what was happening more clearly. To Mrs Nettleship her daughter’s recovery was, once the doctors had done their best, a matter of simple determination. It did not occur to her that Ida might not want to live, that she could consent to die.
She was in pain and fever much of the time. Except while under the anaesthetic, she did not sleep night or day following Henry’s birth. Mrs Nettleship maintained a whirl of cheerfulness revolving round her bedside, almost a party, so that Ida should not realize the gravity of her illness. But Augustus had little heart for this charade. ‘I do everything that is possible,’ Mrs Nettleship assured Ursula. ‘She is very unreasonable as usual and wants all sorts of things that are not good for her. I have to keep away a good deal as she always begs me to give her something she must not have and I can’t be always refusing.’ Augustus could refuse her nothing. She made him ransack Paris for a particular beef lozenge; she demanded violets; asked for a bottle of peppermint, a flask of eau de mélisse: he got them all. She seemed to understand that any definite activity came as a relief to him, and when she could invent nothing else for him to be doing she made him go and have a bath. To Mrs Nettleship it sometimes appeared as if he were acting quite irresponsibly, but she made no move to stop him. Perhaps Ida sensed some friction between them. ‘Either you’re all mad or I am,’ she told them.
But on the morning of 13 March she demanded something that even Augustus could not do for her. Sitting up in bed, she declared her determination to leave the hospital and go to Dorelia in the rue du Château. There she would cure herself, she said, ‘with a bottle of tonic wine, Condy’s, and an enema’. Augustus, in a panic, ‘got the doctor up in his motor car’ and at last he managed to dissuade her. But this was a bad day for Ida, and having relinquished the hope of joining Dorelia, her spirit seemed to give up the struggle.
‘I adore stormy weather,’ she had once written to the Rani. On the night of 13 March there was a violent storm, with thunder and lightning, lasting into the early morning. Lying in her hospital bed, Ida longed to be in the middle of it, somehow imagining that she was. ‘She wanted to be a bit of the wind,’ Augustus wrote to the Rani. ‘She saw a star out of the window, and she said “advertissement of humility”. As I seemed puzzled she said after a bit “Joke”.’
The hospital staff tried to remove him, but Augustus stayed with her that night. Sometimes she was highly feverish, ‘her spirit making preparatory flights into delectable regions’,83 but there were periods of contact between them. He rubbed her neck with Elliman’s Embrocation and, when she asked him, tickled her feet. She pulled his beard about. To the sisters she remarked: ‘C’est drôle, mais je vais perdre mon sommeil encore une nuit, voyez-vous.’ In a delirium she spoke of a land of miraculous caves, then, with some impatience, demanded that Augustus hand over his new suit to Henry Lamb, who had recently turned up in Paris. Despite the fever, the pain had vanished and she felt euphoric. ‘How can I speak of her glittering smiles and moving hands?’ Augustus afterwards told the Rani. And to Margaret Sampson he wrote of that night: ‘Ida felt lovely – she was so gay and spiritual. She had such charming visions and made such amazing jokes.’
In the morning, after the storm was over, she roused herself and gave Augustus a toast: ‘Here’s to Love!’ And they both drank to it in Vichy water. It was a fitting salute to a life that had steered such a brave course between irony and romance. Mrs Nettleship came in shortly afterwards with Ethel her daughter, who had arrived from England. ‘We are just waiting for the end,’ Ethel wrote to her sister Ursula. ‘Ida is not really conscious, but she talks in snatches – quite disconnected sentences. Mother just sits by her side and sometimes holds her hand – she has some violets on her bed. I am just going to take the children for a walk – they are not going to see her as they would not understand, and she cannot recognize them.’
She died, without regaining consciousness, at half-past three that afternoon. ‘Ah well, she has gone very far away now, I think,’ Augustus wrote to Margaret Sampson. ‘She has rejoined that spiritual lover who was my most serious rival in the old days. Or perhaps she is having a good rest before resuming her activities.’
*
The relief was extraordinary. As he ran out of the hospital on to the boulevard Arago, Augustus was seized with uncontrollable elation. ‘I could have embraced any passer-by,’ he confessed.84 He had had enough of despair. It was a beautiful spring day, the sun was shining, the Seine looking ‘unbelievable – fantastic – like a Chinese painting’.85 He wanted to strip off the immediate past, wash away the domination of death; he wanted to paint again, but first he wanted to get drunk. ‘Strange after leaving her poor body dead and beaten I had nothing but a kind of bank holiday feeling and had to hold myself in,’ he told the Rani.
Many of his friends were mystified and shocked. ‘John has been drunk for the last three days, so I can’t tell you if he’s glad or sorry,’ Wyndham Lewis reported to his mother. ‘I think he’s sorry, though.’86 Not everyone was so charitable. They blamed Ida’s death on Augustus, hinted at suicide, and attributed his ‘Roman programme’ to justifiable guilt. Guilt there must often be with death – guilt, grief and aggression. Augustus’s drinking was a desperate bid to recover optimism. When his friend, John Fothergill, wrote to express sympathy, adding that one had only to scratch life and underneath there was sorrow, Augustus replied: ‘Just one correction – it is Beauty that is underneath – not misery, which is only circumstantial.’ This he had to believe; it was his lifebelt. What confused him about Ida’s death, adding to his natural grief, was that it had come through childbirth, and that his children had been deprived of a mother as he had been. It seemed, then, that he was no better than his own father. He struggled against the tide of melancholia. But as the days passed he drank more.
Ida was cremated87 on the Saturday following her death, 16 March 1907, at the crematorium of Père Lachaise. Almost no one was there – certainly not Augustus. A number of people had written from England offering to come, but Augustus, who disliked formal exhibitions of sentiment, refused them all. ‘People keep sending me silly sentimental lamentations,’ he complained to the Rani. ‘I really begin to long to outrage everybody.’ The worst offender was poor Will Rothenstein who ‘never forgave’88 himself for not having gone out to Paris, and wrote long ‘Uriah Heep-like’ letters which Augustus found ‘unintelligible’.89
One man defied Augustus’s instructions and arrived in Paris on the morning of the cremation. This was Ambrose McEvoy, who ‘had the delicacy to keep drunk all the time and was perfectly charming’.90 He had come for the day, intending to go back to London the same night, but became incapable of going anywhere for a week. ‘He will lose his return ticket if he doesn’t pull himself up within a day or so,’ Wyndham Lewis predicted.91
Henry Lamb, who had taken Ida to a music hall the night before she entered hospital, did go to the cremation. When the coffin and the body were consumed, and the skeleton drawn out on a slab through the open doors of the furnace, Lamb and McEvoy were still able to recognize the strong bone structure of the girl they had known. An attendant tapped the slab with a crowbar, and the skeleton crumbled into ashes. The ashes were then placed in a box and taken round to Augustus. Later an informal memorial was held in Lamb’s rooms.92
One of the few people who understood Gus’s feelings after Ida’s death was Gwen. Like him, she had no time for the mere politeness of things, and wrote to Rodin telling him not to bother with condolences to her brother but remember to save himself for their next lovemaking. Then she went round to look after Gus for a few days at his new studio in the cour de Rohan. ‘She was one of those who knew Ida,’ Augustus explained to Margaret Sampson; one who knew that ‘Ida was the most utterly truthful soul in the world.’
Gwen also knew that Ida never had serious regrets, even if, as she had once admitted: ‘Our marriage was, on the whole, not a success.’93
*1 One of the guests at a dinner in honour of Will Rothenstein remarked: ‘We ought really to have been at a dinner composed of his enemies.’ To which his companion replied: ‘They’d be precisely the same people.’
*2 Ida crossed out the word ‘your’ and substituted ‘the’.
*3 He moved from No. 4 to No. 9 Garden Studios in Manresa Road, Chelsea, during the spring of 1905.
*4 She did, and so did Ethel.